The politics of power
WHATEVER the moral high ground I don’t expect the PNM to budge an inch on the Gypsy/Chaitan matters or matter come to think of it, they both being about the same thing and how both of them could have been so blindly careless on such a matter I still don’t know.I heard UNC people on Sunday getting on as if they had done nothing at best wrong and at worst stupid, the speakers making out as if the PNM should have just shrugged their shoulders, their not having done so meaning that they were capable of the worst kind of behaviour or so the UNC seemingly would have us believe.
Conventional politicians, even those new to the job are something else, yes. Whatever is right is whatever suits them at the time so you could bet your life that if the shoe had been on the other foot and it was two PNM candidates who had made the false declaration, the UNC would not be giving an inch either.
Indeed, Mr Panday’s comparison to the “magnanimity” shown by the “leadership of the UNC” (code for me and “Robbie”) when Mr Manning was left to keep his PNM seat that he might conceivably have lost to Merle Stephens in a recount is typical sleight of mouth of which Mr Panday must be the past master.
Ah mean, man, when Mr Manning was “allowed” to keep San Fernando East, the NAR had won 33 seats to the PNM’s three so the NAR could afford to seem to be magnanimous even if it turned out that one of the things that destroyed “One Love” in the end was the inability of the party’s leaders, including the Maximum Leader, to show any magnanimity to each other, to have the slightest willingness to see things through the others’ eyes and bow or bend accordingly, not two but a number of man rats in one hole and no referee say, in the sense of some court of policy, to share out the cheese.
Nor is politics thus only here. I remain fascinated by the way how both the Democrats and the Republicans now legally battling it out in the United States take the moral high ground with every new twist and turn brought about by a court decision. Their positions either have to do with the will of the people or the law of the State or with democratic choice or with preventing the erosion of confidence in the Republic.
Oh, these lofty words when the name of the game is really power and don’t believe that I am here taking the moral high ground myself by wishing it were different because I know it cannot be any different, men, least of all conventional politicians, being not saints (in which case the last thing they would be in would be politics, given the compromises that have to be made) but sanguine in their servicing of sectoral interests revolving, of course, around themselves.
So Mr Manning will not budge. Indeed, although I have written in this space advising that he should, I don’t see how he can, the PNM not going to forgive him if he “threw away” the chance of getting two seats in the bag and, then, lost the election by one seat. Man, the vituperation he received for calling the last election early would be amorous murmurings compared to the vocal vengeance his supporters would vent, not only on him, but his wife, children and, for all I now, their children in the years to come.
Such, we are seeing, is the nature of power, the UNC just as self-serving as anybody else because the aim of their lofty words is to turn the Gypsy/Chaitan thing to their advantage and, you know something, I am beginning to be convinced by the very intensity of their holy insistence that they believe this is a case, or cases for that matter, that they can lose and what happens if Chaitan and Peters win and the PNM having tied in Trinidad or lost by one seat decides to go to court is going to make very interesting seeing because how then, while the case is being heard and deliberated, is the President going, so to speak, to call the new Parliament into order.
Of course it won’t much matter if both Chaitan and Peters lose or if they both win and the PNM still has a majority of, say, 12 but all the pollsters so far have been saying that this race is too close to call, so any scenario such as the one I have just outlined could only be conjured by someone who, tired of the babel from the hustings, wants an easy life, or at least ear, on the morning of December 12.
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