My series of Carnival articles in the run-up got all the predictable responses via comments on the Guardian's Web site ("go back in your temple," "self-hatred/black people hatred" and my favourite, "your pen drips with slime"). But my hopes to, uhm, precipitate some "official" response from the Carnival posse were dashed.
Maybe my arguments were so astute, Carnivalists were stunned silent. Or maybe my attempts didn't even merit an annoyance fart. Maybe the picture of the PM cozying up with Machel in a pair of funky Vuitton boots (far from the tall boots she donned to visit flood victims after her inauguration) on the Express front page last week was enough to reassure all that my hating on de cultyere was jes hating.
But also in the news in these last weeks were a few interesting stories that were ignored in the mad rush to wine dong low. The first was Education Minister Tim Gopeesingh saying (Newsday Feb 5) that more than 100 schools had a majority of students who couldn't get more than 50 per cent in the SEA. (Hmm, 100 schools failing. Could something be, uhm, <I>fatally wrong<I> with the education system? Arkse de Soca Monarch.)
Also, and relatedly, in the news was the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence. Many people know little about the awards. Every year since 2006, three Caribbean people have been recognised and rewarded for achievements in science, the arts, and public works. So far the 16 laureates have included a Barbadian solar energy entrepreneur, a Grenadian anatomical pathologist, and a Guyanese activist who developed a form of tourism where money goes to residents, rather than resorts, and which preserves the environment.
This year, the laureates are a Vincentian plant pathologist whose work is crucial to the region's food security; a Guyanese archaeologist whose discoveries might cause a century's worth of history textbooks about the Americas to be rewritten; and a Trinidadian who realised half of Trinidad was illiterate, and instead of telling them reading was a tool of the foreign oppressor, began teaching thousands to read. (See www.ansacaribbeanawards.com.)
Many Trinis might miss/bypass this out of sheer shock. It's inconceivable that a rich person (Dr Anthony N Sabga, the Chairman Emeritus of ANSA McAL, which owns this newspaper) would actually give away money, and spend a substantial amount besides the half-million dollar prizes to get no return except encouraging art, science and civic works for the public good. It boggles in a country where half the population is illiterate, crime is the national pastime, and Carnival singers get $1 million for a crappy song nobody's going to remember ten minutes later.
But there it is-literally the first award of its kind to actually invest private money (not government or foreign "grants") in the (till now) bankrupt notion of "Caribbean unity." Most countries in the English-speaking Caribbean are covered by the ANSA Awards. And prominent, accomplished people from the region (not just Trinidad) select the laureates.
Let me disclose that I work for the ANSA Caribbean Awards. Before I worked for them, I was cynical about the enterprise. Giving money away for no reason but the public good is a characteristic of real countries. It reflexively made me suspicious in the country that had a gas-oil bonanza which passed about $300 billion through it, and left a $100-million performing arts centre, but no performing arts. New universities, but an anti-intellectual, illiterate population. Million-dollar prizes for semi-literate calypsonians and chutney singers, but no national arts prize.
Comparing the State's notions of value, in the millions spent on Carnival and the death of art, science and culture in state policy, and the Sabga Awards, the question arises: Why do perceptions of what is of value to our society vary so radically? The value of science and art are clearly not inconceivable here. A Trinidadian conceived it, and, it cannot be emphasised enough, <I>spent his own money to promote those values<I>. Why has no one else done it? Why has this PP Government murdered the ideals it rode to get into power, and so eagerly embraced the lowbrow ignorance of PNM "culture?"
Why have, in other words, government and society chosen to <I>not know<I> what so many knew when they were in opposition? This isn't rhetorical, there's an answer. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the NY Times on Dec 31, 2011, described the current attitude of Western society as "a world in denial of what it knows."
Briefly, wrote Wheatcroft in reference to the greatest economic disaster in history (of 2008), it was not that the Western economies did not know their profligate policies were going to lead to disaster. It was that they <I>chose to not know<I> what they could not have avoided knowing. The haters who reminded them what they wanted to "not know" had careers ruined. Like Harry Markopolos who warned the US SEC that Bernie Madoff was a fraud, economists who said the euro currency was unworkable, those who said the US derivatives market was an economic WMD.
The choice "not to know" is not instinctive, it's acquired, and the tools and narrative are supplied by the "establishment." We're fine, we're rich, successful, we're lucky, we deserve instant gratification, there are no consequences. Who say otherwise are haters. The catch is that those who promote the message are rich and lucky and don't face consequences. The rest of us are suckers who pay the bill, and who apparently like it so.
This describes Trinidad between 2002 and 2010, and today. The northern societies were built on strong institutions, designed to nurture rational dissent to counter the dangers of establishment corruption, so they might survive the "not knowing" virus. We've got the decadence, but no institutions to protest giving morons a million dollars for one dotish song while ignoring 100 disintegrating schools, where students beat teachers, teachers stay home and bawl, or the PM and her Cabinet wine dong to de grong, as the tourists go wild.
