By Dr Lester Simon
1. Something sinister is brewing in our Caribbean. This matter of the deportees is hanging around our neck like a millstone. The initial and subsequent national and regional response ran the full gamut from not one single deportee that’s not native, to trying to negotiate on an uneven playing field of one hundred and eighty degrees of separation.
2. Let’s think outside the Caribbean box for a moment. Anyone sending a concoction of deportees to us must either think we are drunk, or they know something we don’t know, something we cannot begin to fathom. Some of our politicians may not be all we want them to be, but they are not stupid. They know that big people wield a big stick. They know that the bigger you are, the more respect is demanded from the smaller ones. It’s the natural law of the sea, the air, the jungle, and the land.
3. So, what on earth is going on? Is there something our politicians are not telling us? Is there something they are not being told? We try to imagine their position, but regardless of how we analyze the deportee conundrum, it remains just that: a conundrum. In such a circumstance, logic dictates that we clear the deck and start thinking all over again. Let us temporarily put the causative factors on hold and look at the punishment, simply to see if the punishment fits any possible crime, including the most horrific crime we might have committed knowingly or unknowingly. Our history is replete with disproportionate punishment.
4. Have you ever tried to correct an error, any kind of error, and realized it’s easier to rewrite, redo, reject, replace, than to make changes? We know this. From writing a school composition, typing an essay, fixing a damaged vehicle, to building a new house from foundation rather than renovating an old, complex one. If our crime has gone too far for correction and remedial action, where are they taking us down this punishing, slippery deportee slope? Where is the commonsense in this apparent nonsense?
5. Enter the sinister dragon. What if the sending and accepting of the deportees is designed to fail? Designed to allow our little country, with all its current insoluble problems, to be choked to death in order to engineer a new one. A planned miscarriage. Assisted suicide. It’s not easy to come to this conclusion. Friends do not treat friends in certain ways, except when real or perceived survival of the fittest, or grandiose, pseudo-historical claims, force them to act in ways that seem unfriendly, illogical or mutually counterproductive at first.
6. We have to take the sinister view if the sinister view is the only view that makes sense. When Professor Robinson says that no one is coming to save us, I have to humbly disagree and posit that he is dead wrong, with emphasis on dead. What if the plan is for some of us to be functionally dead and then the sender of the deportees resurrects our country by riding in like Sir Galahad on a white horse with an army of creators and manufacturers in tow? What if? What if that’s the round table that is being authored with an Excalibur of deportees, and our politicians do not see it, or they see it clearly and are trying to avoid an apocalypse? Worse or worst.
7. Is this all about a weird, malevolent message to us modern-day Corinthians in which we now see through a glass darkly, and now are coming face to face with our comeuppance? With faith, hope, and charity gone, what is left? The cavalry rides again. It is said, by those who ought to know, that the Palestinians should not have to pay for the crimes of Nazi Germany. We should stand up and say amen to the chant that the Caribbean People should not have to pay for China’s success.
8. Remember those old movies we used to watch at Deluxe Cinema or when noisy movie projectors came to the countryside juke joints? The plots have not changed. Surround the enemy and cut off the supply of food and water, especially if they are not skilled in guerilla warfare and tactics to feed off the land. Another way to overcome the West “Injuns” is to foster and allow infighting within the enemy camp, with or without witting or unwitting imposters from outside. Deportee posse? Fly away Peter; fly away Paul.
9. Some are too big to fail. Others are too small to pass. We have seen this in our history. We have had to be twice as good, twice as smart, but not twice as bad. And yet we do not learn. We fight among ourselves for the simplest thing, including who comes first in stupidity. In such circumstances, some of us may even welcome our demise so that we can rise again in glorious, heavenly resurrection, basking in our new, free land and brave home.
10. Quo vadimus? Where are we going? When people call us names, we get upset. Are we upset with the messenger or with the message? We are cast away in a dystopian mindset and landscape, somewhere between a traumatic and harrowing colonial past that we have not adequately negotiated, and a quasi-sunny, colonial, tourism-dependent present in which the rabid need to generate money at any cost makes us sellers of our souls. The money changers have distorted our carnival into a slavish chain of endless fetes; going, going, going, gone, on a stock exchange of bewitching bodies in an inebriated marketplace. We do have a constitutive passion, probably a philosophical survival need, to recreate our history in a masquerade of the absurd.
11.The most insipid, unconscionable, and unpardonable act at carnival was this: To watch and sing calypso, a fundamental germ of emancipation, in one place, while on the same immutable night for Watchnight, we are in another, non-stereophonic place. The center becomes eccentric. Stevie Wonder said, “When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer.” We are indeed a very disoriented, uncultured people, dancing on our minds, living in dystopia.
12. Will we harken back to Jean and Dinah? Their coworkers, Rosetta and Clementina are already here, round the corner posing, selling their wares and lives and waiting to be caught broken by all, including the deportees, all washed down with rum and Coca-Cola and a thimble of dollars. The empire strikes back. We await the return of the Dread I.
13. Is it time to make a row? This time the invaders will not be gone. Sparrow can’t take over now. A bigger bird of prey, the bald eagle, will be here to stay.
Advertise with the mоѕt vіѕіtеd nеwѕ ѕіtе іn Antigua!
We offer fully customizable and flexible digital marketing packages.
Contact us at [email protected]
