B.C. Pires
January 28, 2000:
"And sometimes it does make me sick/ My people like they only on gimmick/ And sometimes it does make me grin/ This country I living in Gary Hector, Jointpop lead singer, from the song "Bashment to Halloween"
ONCE you understand that the latest crisis facing Trinidad and Tobago (or, to put it accurately, the latest manifestation of the crisis Trinidad and Tobago has been failing to face since Independence) is not constitutional but political, the solution is obvious: Robbie and Bas should duke it out in person. Whoever wins gets to rule the country like a proper king, with everyone else either becoming or remaining loyal subjects.
The crisis did not begin this week and won't be solved before the next sitting of the Senate. The problem is structural and political, not cosmetic or constitutional, and will not be affected by the appointment of a new pair of Senators from Tobago or any number of commissions of enquiry into any aspect of the judiciary, the airport or the dog rice. It is not about personalities, though the present players don't make the situation easier.
Not even Ramesh, who can somehow square the hanging of nine men in a single weekend with a lifelong abhorrence of the death penalty, can forge (by which I mean devise) a superficial legal solution to the fundamental problem of illegitimacy.
Ramesh may rant and rave about un-presidential behaviour as much as anyone else may fulminate about un-AG-like or un-PM-like behaviour. It don't mean squat. We're all stuck with one another unless and until a volcano or a madman erupts.
What we need is to re-fight the 17th century Great Rebellion (the English Civil War) and hope that the Cavaliers beat the Roundheads this time. (In our case, though, the sides would be the Contumelious and the Dunderheads.) Let's face it: Trinidad and Tobago is no republic; it was never even republican with a small "r" p; though no one could deny the surfeit of big arses in the so-called Republic.
We love our monarchy so much that we will bow to a calypso king if that is all we can get. True-true peasants need royalty like salt and we could get hypertension from ours: one each of calypso, soca, chutney and ragga soca monarchs, plus a young king and queen and a secondary and primary school calypso monarch; beauty queens by the score, including a brand new, shiny white one; and the Prince of Port of Spain. We can't even elect a prime minister who doesn't assume the divine right of kings.
So we should cut the pretence and return to monarchy. We have always loved being ruled from above by a strong being, so much so that we refuse our freedom no matter how many times it is put in front of us for the taking by insurrectionists or infidels. We need a supreme being and a maximum leader. It saves thinking: anyone who disagrees is automatically guilty of either blasphemy or treason and liable to a slow burn in hell or a swift drop from the gallows.
Ideally we would have a kindly king/ master/ God who would extract from us our best and give us double rations of sugar cake and a nine-band-jam every weekend; but we will take a bad ruler/overseer or angry God if that is all that will give us the protection we need from such terrifying phenomena as bad weather, personal responsibility and a Saturday night at home.
The only delicate question is how exactly Bas and Robbie should fight to settle the which-of-them-is-king thing. Boxing gloves in a ring? Too gentlemanly? Pistols at dawn? Too quick? Poniards and puncheon? Too close to home? Robbie must favour stick fighting because he has used a walking stick since 1990 and so has nearly a decade of experience but, in keeping with the medieval times to which we seem intent upon returning, I would like to recommend lances and horses, the best of three throws, and then broadswords until God proves whose side he's on by allowing the victory of the righteous.
And that is as good as any solution to our problem; and as likely to work as anything else we try.