From the sights and wonders at the PP's third-anniversary bash, unless Keith "Mitt" Rowley can make those e-mails into something they seem to have no hope of being, the PP is a shoo-in for a second term. This could change, with the shadow of the spurned Jack Warner looming, but even with the prodigious number of PP own-goals, their supporters are not impressed by the commentariat and NGO sector's hysteria about "E-mailgate."
Apropos, and it being so close to Arrival Day, it's a good time for a closer look at the PP. Three years in office, they've morphed into an Indian PNM–the big, in-your-face (alleged) corruption, the contract and state-board bonanzas for friends and family, and the monumental egotism and contempt for public and private citizen alike.Two things might be of interest to the general public: one, how they got that way; and two, whither their second term.
The public face of the PP/UNC resembles the PNM's because it was created by the PNM. The political war post-independence was just that–a war to be Creole and not-Indian, fought through culture, the media, government institutions, schools, and even church. Selwyn Ryan's Race and Nationalism, Ivar Oxaal's Black Intellectuals Come to Power, and Vera Rubin's ethnography in the 1960s all speak to this. (Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for recent scholarly work, assuming you could find it.)
We all know the result: In 2013 the face and voice of the nation are determinedly PNM/Afrocentric. A state-sponsored Afrocentric cultural apparatus was invented between 1960 and 1980 (Carnival and Black Power) and vested with a genealogy and authority. It has come to define contemporary T&T, erasing other (Indo, Euro) strands of history and culture. The nation suffers terribly socially and politically, and cannot progress because of it. But again, we know this.
But what is not known, and has never been asked, is how the Indians came to accept this. And how (relatedly) did the UNC become the PNM?The phenomenon was described decades ago by theorists like Paolo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Jean Baudrillard (Plastic Surgery for the Other) and Wilson Harris (Creoleness), and others.
Briefly, when cultures compete violently, various forms of anomalous interaction and association result. Each picks up traits from the other, largely unconsciously. The dominant culture simultaneously attempts to erase and re-make the subaltern culture in its own image (eg, you're a "real" Trini if you like Carnival, so some Indos re-make themselves in the Carnival image). And third–mainly via control of the mass media–memories are created and "forced forgetting" of history and whatnot, instituted.
Freire captures it well: in this situation, the oppressed, in a sense, has no choice but to become the oppressor because institutions teach, the media show, and seemingly from the very atmosphere he/she is guided to become the oppressor. (Alternatives are possible through art, which in T&T is castrated by Carnival.)
Naturally, subaltern culture and memories cannot be erased, merely restrained and/or repressed. The containment generates a powerful in-group alter-culture, which, if not understood or defined, causes incomprehensible rebellion and self-defeat, even at the moment of victory. When the oppressed comes to power, trapped in this ontology, he/she becomes afflicted with a "fear of freedom," a fear of dismantling the system, and perpetuates it.
This describes the colonial transfer of power from colonial administrations to black nationalist parties in the Caribbean, and the transfer from black to Indo-based parties in T&T and Guyana.
That said, what happens during the PP's second term? More violence, more discord, more toxic stress and strife. The PNM will go the way of Guyana's PNC: retreat further into its ethnic base, and the "national-party" fiction will further crumble. Its surrogates on talk radio and in the "culture" industry will continue to promote the violence they're doing now. The clerisy, or what passes for it, will remain impotent, wailing, wining and sipping cocktails.
And what will happen to the PP supporters? Nothing different from what's happening now. The PP has, in the last three years, failed on the most basic issues: transport, health, crime, education, infrastructure, the environment. The quality of national life is in a death-spiral–resentment, hardship and animus are rife. Violence increases every day. The State is indifferent to the public's trauma.
This is because the PP has perpetuated the PNM dependency syndrome of CEPEP, Gate, "culture" and so on. They've ripped (rich and poor) PNM trough-feeders away and replaced them with UNC trough-feeders. But they haven't introduced sustainability and self-reliance. The public service, police, and other civil and state institutions remain balkanised micro-republics, unified only to rebel against authority and resist change.
Nowhere is there a sign of an entente where government, opposition, civil and protective services, and public co-exist. The PNM's advantage is that the society became resigned to such a degenerate state of existence because it had lived it for so long. With the PP (in its present mode of governance) entente is unlikely because of the constant PNM/media imprecations of illegitimacy and racism, aimed at enraging its supporters. With great success.
A few possibilities persist: the PP could kick out the brigands (the "cabal" et al), and begin work on the economy and social and mental infrastructure. Or the PNM could confess its sins and try to be a national political party. That said, it looks like a PP second term, which I'd bet will be worse than the first.