| In true Olympic spirit |
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By Keith Smith
September 17, 2000
WELL, I don't know how the cable guys are going to respond when their subscribers don't easily get to see Ato run LIVE! I mean the country is not yet involved in the Olympics in that personal way but people are getting on as if only good breeding and good sense prevent them from going down and pelting stone at the cable guys' headquarters.
Man, people stopping me in streets and making conversation in the taxis, everybody blasted vex in the manner of the late "Doc", the tirades catching me by surprise because I didn't think their owners would, so early, want in on the Live! action, given the wrong-side Australian hours and the need for a man to ketch he rest in these relentlessly restless times.
But I saw all those neighbours' lights go on 'round the time of the opening of the Games and, man, had I known I would have had such company, I might have organised an early-breakfast lime, nothing too fancy or too heavy so early in the morning, perhaps a provision-less fish broth with chunks of seasoned king fish, dabs of golden ray and some swimming macaroni and we good to go, my immediate neighbours, fortunately for them, not hung up on cable because, come morning, they would have been ever so strung up.
As it was, though, it was only later, after everything, that I was able to see them in the flesh, outside to buy bread or the papers or waiting for transport to get to work, the conversations animated, memory replaying the ceremony, people asking in that rhetorical Trinidadian way if yuh see this and if yuh see that, the "rastas" on the block, I noted, singularly emphatising with the burning of the eucalyptus leaves, holy smoke being holy smoke, I guess.
Yuh boy, not for the first time, playing sage, making out to the eddying limes that having the Aborigine woman light the torch was a stroke of Olympian genius, Freeman freeing up the spirits of reconciliation to the point where I, for one, intend to pay attention to things Australian in a way I have never done before (outside, of course, of cricket), looking "down under" to see how this potent symbolism comes to affect the actual Australian world, whether, over the next months, is still Aborigine ketch-arse or whether the Freeman high stroke serves to energise a national movement away from prejudice and "advantage" in what, after all, is the people's land assuming, of course, that land belongs to any particular body in what, the environmentalists have taken to keep reminding us is after all, everybody's world.
High thoughts on one of those sweet Trinidadian mornings, soured subsequently by the cussing from the cable-tied and congenitally tool-challenged, their neighbours telling them how to disconnect the connection, "like all yuh ent looking at TV6! or what" as if, cable-tied they could, TV6, whatever the loss in lookers, rallying to steal the public relation's war, Ken Gordon's station standing up when you'd expect they'd be down, rapid response in a rage, the shots of earnest faces managing the hot-lines, the unfolding tableau sending not subliminal but in yuh face! messages to the "undecideds" already uneasy over this speech-freedom thing and now made "touchier" too by 102 and you wonder, in the maelstrom of the moment, how Gillette and company, top-rankers on the "new rich" business block could failed to see, short of unseeing arrogance, the hostile perceptions that their twin-moves would unleash, the two-time timing opening up a whole new front in the campaigning for the advancing election ball game.
And you think that everything so fluid here that they must know that you never know what will fuel an explosive change-of-heart or turn-of-mind and I, for one, can't imagine some of the incumbent's old campaigning hands not seeing the need to whisper into somebody's widening ear that razor-sharp as these new boys may be reputed to be, they may turn out, in the harsh light of the political sun, to be, in the sum, more liability than asset and what will history say of the UNC moment that was lost not by the loyal workers in the field but by moneyed Brahmins borrowed from the business house who used their monopolistic muscle to prevent people, who neither had access to tickets nor could have afforded the trip, from being present in the TV spirit of the times at the precise time when our hero begins our Olympic sprints for gold.
Powerless 102 FM
An Open Letter to Peter Gillette
A Racist Radio Station in Trinidad
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