There is a Woody Allen film, Carnage, that I return to time and time again. It's about two couples thrown together when the teenage son of one hits the son of the other in the face with a hockey stick, causing him to lose some teeth. Not pretty.However, the opening scene shows the couples, determined to maintain a "sense of decency" and "community," collaborating on a legal statement on the incident. The feigned decency keeps forcing them into each other's company.
The couple who are at the home of the other, upon completion of the agreed statement, are hard-pressed to leave.On every attempt at escaping the uncomfortable arrangement–try as they might at being civil, the naturally adversarial nature of the circumstances which brought them together cannot be ignored–they are lured back into the house with polite overtures, and adherence to social convention renders them powerless to resist lest they appear uncivil.
The film and all its absurdities returned to me upon hearing the statement made by the president of the Media Association of T&T (MATT), Suzanne Sheppard, on the treatment meted out to the local press by the visiting Chinese press corps. I do not know the details–I hear there was a slap and some name-calling–but the locals must have been on the receiving end of the hostilities, since Sheppard praised them for maintaining their composure and for not behaving like their foreign counterparts.
I have no reason to doubt any of the accounts, ie that the Chinese threw their first-world US$3 billion-weight around, that the locals absorbed the abuse like a battered mistress and that the association that represents media workers in this country thinks that that was not a bad thing. Having worked in the national security sector, I had the experience of working media security at the Fifth Summit of the Americas.
At the Prime Minster's residence, after consultation with the local media houses, the unit had decided on a plan for the media. They were to be kept in a certain area, all photographs were to be taken outside, and no one was to enter the Diplomatic Centre.Then arrived Hugo Chavez, with the largest press corps of any of the visiting dignitaries. He drove up, followed by his entourage of media workers.
Chavez came out of his vehicle, heedless of his security detail, and ran into the building–and so too did over 20 writers and photographers. The options: let it be; or turn heavily-armed officers on a group of men and women coming out of Latin America, to whom such an encounter was probably par for the course–and then be accused of assault or trying to stop the foreign press, with the encounter broadcast internationally.
A lose-lose.One officer, turning to me, asked: "Ma'am, why dey must behave so?'Because they are bigger and more powerful–translate better–than us and they know they can without repercussion, I thought, but what I said was, "It is their way."
Indeed, it is natural for states larger than us, whose journalists would have had the kind of exposure that ours could only dream of, and with their leaders throwing dough at us, to behave as if they own the town. Forget decency, forget community. Ms Sheppard, political correctness and maintaining composure mean nothing. It is a Woody Allen farce.
In the movie, the veneer of civility and "sense of community" were eventually flushed away in favour of loyalty and love of the couples' respective sons. Maybe one day, local sons and daughters, not fearing chastisement and recrimination, will dispense with their third-world passivity and in the face of big bullies will respond in kind.
Ucill Cambridge