trinicenter.com - Surface Tension

Surface Tension
January 15, 2003
By Denis Solomon

With the arrival of an illusory political stability following the 2002 elections, public debate on fundamental issues seems to be in abeyance. Preoccupation with irrelevancies and superficialities has once more come to the fore.

In response to one of these non-issues, Martin Daly has had to put his considerable talent as a columnist to no more basic a use than clarifying the procedure for appointing a President of the Republic. Who the President of the Republic is, and when he or she takes office, is of no consequence as long as we realise that the whole concept of the office is flawed.

It cannot be pleasant to be called incompetent by Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj. But that is hardly a reason for the Attorney General to take a double-page spread in the newspapers to insist that hanging people has got more difficult.

And the greatest superficiality of all, calypso, has moved Raoul Pantin to decry, not the overwhelming insecurity and divisiveness that impels sects to protest at every “Bottom in the Road” or “Confirmed Catholic”, but the banality of the double entendre of modern calypsos compared with longtime ones.

Martin Daly’s article last Sunday, besides simply informing people of the rules as they exist, was presumably also intended to scotch the theories of a deal between the current President and the Government to ensure a Head of State favourable to the PNM.

The article explains that the Constitution is not being breached by the extension of Mr Robinson’s term. But that is of little consequence. The Constitution has already been breached, at least in spirit, by the President himself, when he took the foolish decision to appoint a Prime Minister without a majority, instead of knocking Panday and Manning’s heads together and sending them back to work out a valid power-sharing arrangement. And the idea of a President perceived as favourable to one party or the other is relevant only because recent history has shown conclusively that executive powers split between President and Prime Minister will sooner or later result in that perception. So the long-term choice can only be between a President who is a complete figurehead, and therefore redundant and a waste of public funds, or a combined Head of State and government, appropriately and effectively controlled by the legislative arm.

Instead of worrying whether the next President will support the PNM or protect them against it, the population should be waking up to the fact that the idea of a father-figure above the political fray can never be a valid proposition.

But people are still worrying about who the next President will be. They do not seem to realise that in the present state of things any willing candidates for the office must be as superficial-minded as the population. An office that condemns its holder to a life of empty pomp seasoned with either submissiveness or revolt would not confer dignity on its holder. It would in fact detract from whatever dignity he or she had won in a meaningful previous career.

For anybody confused about the election of a President, I recommend a simple exercise: don’t bother about how or when the election takes place, but simply ask yourself “Would I take the job if it were offered to me, and if so, why?”

In her attempt to show that she knows as much about the jurisprudence of hanging as Ramesh Maharaj, Attorney General Glenda Morean also shows that she is just as anxious as Ramesh to pander to the irrationality of the public. The stated motivation of her two-page spread is the public’s “renewed interest” in hanging arising out of the increase in the murder rate. But the document is not the opening of a national debate on the validity of such an interest, or its morality (i.e. whether or not hanging reduces the murder rate and whether we should apply it even if it does). Its effect is simply to show that the government’s own irrationality is constrained by factors outside its control. It also takes a swipe at Ramesh and the UNC by claiming that the withdrawal from the Human Rights treaties sullied the international reputation of Trinidad and Tobago, while failing to speed up executions. There is not a word, of course, of the international opprobrium incurred by the PNM’s hanging of Glenn Ashby, while the treaties were still in effect, for murders he did not commit.

At no point in the history of this country has there been any dispassionate debate on the effectiveness of the death penalty, far less on its desirability. Instead of trying to explain why she can’t be as effective an executioner as Ramesh, Glenda might have used her press release to launch such a debate. As a trigger, she might have used not the supposed anxiety of the country about crime, but the recent repeal of all Illinois death sentences by the Governor of that state.

You couldn’t find a more Catholic country than Italy. Yet a regular sight at the Venetian carnival is big hairy men dressed as nuns. Any bishop, priest or parishioner protesting at this “insult” would be ridiculed for over-sensitivity.

The question yet to be addressed in this country is not whether a calypso insults a religious group, but what is wrong with insulting religious groups? The right to insult is part of freedom of expression, and should be subject to no constraints. Not even to good taste; for, as Raoul Pantin indeed points out, good taste and calypso, or even satire in general, are incompatible. An understanding of this would have prevented the passage of the nefarious Equal Opportunity Act, which was designed not to “protect” religion but to exploit political insecurity for electoral purposes.

Besides, how can you insult a religion? Religion is supposed to strengthen people in their self-esteem, not turn them into hedgehogs.

Raoul Pantin makes the point that while the double entendre in “confirm” is only clumsy smut, Catholics could have had little to say if the song had dealt with priestly paedophilia. A valid point; but I think that it is more important to ridicule religion for itself than simply for the weaknesses of its practitioners. The first is an exercise of intellectual freedom; the second is just shooting fish in a barrel.

The State must be the protector not of religions but of religious freedom, which is not the same thing. As soon as it begins to listen to the whining of sectarian interests about “insults” to their faith it is tacitly accepting religion as a necessary rather than an optional component of society, and religious belief as a motive for political action. This is a dangerous proposition even when there is an official state religion, for even there different interpretations of dogma conflict. In a multi-religious society it is a recipe for disaster. Only when the State keeps its hands clean by denying political validity to religious beliefs can it deal successfully with terrorists, intellectual and military, who use religion as a political lever.

And the final question that fails to be raised in this stupid controversy is: why should anybody take calypso, or calypsonians, seriously?

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