Three Sundays ago, in BC on TV, the film feature I write for the T&T Guardian's Sunday Arts supplement, I astounded my editor by naming the Mariah Carey 2001 bomb, Glitter, one of the three top films of the week, until she read my mini-review: The only reason you couldn't say Mariah Carey's big screen self-indulgence isn't the Worst Film of the Century is that there are still 80-something years of the century left... It's so spectacularly bad, it becomes good again–as accidental comedy.
Mariah Carey's Glitter comes to mind because of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissesar's own political Glitter, the Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2014, with which almost the entire country, apart from those feeding from the UNC-dispensed state gravy train, has problems, though not all of us have the same problems. (If I had to bet my money on the outcome of a constitutional challenge, I'd put it all on the space marked, "The most dunce judge of the Supreme Court will chuck it out.")
The forces of political opposition–which include what I notice is now being called, "the Keith Rowley PNM," the radio morons and everyone in the Congress of the People, apart from its political leader–have condemned the Constitution Amendment Act 2014 as "draconian" and "nefarious" but, as Raymond Ramcharitar pointed out last week, it ain't necessarily so.
Everything turns, for everyone, on section eight, which, as everyone from Keith Rowley to Kevin Baldeosingh has observed, is clearly intended to benefit the UNC in the next general election (even if Kevin doesn't think it might actually help) by creating a kind of UNC version of proportional representation, in which the only proportion of any constituency that would be represented would be, ideally, the UNC one.
The Bill introduction states section eight purports to amend section 73 of the constitution "by preventing a candidate...from being elected...unless he obtains more than 50 per cent of the votes cast," with that minimum being ensured, if no one candidate wins half the votes the first time, by a "supplementary poll between those candidates that earned the highest and second highest number of votes." The noble and unassailable ideal of ensuring a candidate has at least half the votes in every constituency is thus achieved by the coldblooded and ignoble throwing away of all the votes neither of the two main parties got–or, put simply, by functionally disenfranchising anyone trying not to vote on the basis of race.
It's perhaps the cleverest electoral ploy by a political minority conscious of its numerical disadvantage since apartheid. (Amazingly, the leader of the Congress of the People, the current incarnation of the third party the nation seems to want, actually supported the Bill that provides for his own castration, making him the most visible turkey so far to vote for Christmas.)
It seems not to have occurred to the UNC–or the radio morons, most of whom declare up front that they have not read the Bill–that, when the COP or NJAC or Justice for Natural Motions or whatever votes are discarded, the people who didn't vote for the UNC the first time might continue not voting for the UNC in the runoff ballot–which is precisely the result anyone with any sense should hand to the people who insulted their intelligence by bringing such a piece of tata in the first place.
The real problem with the Bill, for anyone unbound by unquestioning political association, is that it is so naked an attempt to fiddle the election in the ruling party's favour. People are being taken for fools in being asked to believe section eight is a grand gesture of altruistic statesmanship when it is really a petty, selfish gerrymander. The only way these little rocks will ever progress from competing tribes into a real nation–that of the West Indian people–is precisely by encouraging the independent thinking that section eight seeks to neutralise.
But my own interest this morning comes from a Mariah Carey Glitter perspective: there is a way of making what really is very bad so very much worse that it might actually become good again. Here, for adoption by the UNC, is my version of section eight, rewritten along Glitter lines: it is so very honest, it might just fool people into thinking it's not, and people may begin to support the thing that destroys them, just like the COP leader. My changes are in italics; I've added in five subsections I suspect the UNC would really like to see there, but just haven't the cojones–or the Glitter–to come with it.
8. Section 73 of the Constitution is amended by...the following subsections...
(3) A candidate shall not be elected...as the member of the House of Representatives unless he obtains more than 50 per cent of his racial background from Indian people, and his hair good, too besides. (4) Where a poll is held and no candidate is elected (with 50 per cent of the votes), a supplementary poll (shall be held) between those candidates who are Indian or who at least prefer chutney soca to real soca. (5) No candidate shall be elected if he is Jack Warner or any other Creole neemakaraam. (6) If any non-Indian is elected, supplementary polls will be held every 15 days until an Indian is elected. (7) The national instrument is now the dholak. (8) Every single person in Trinidad can be elected to the House of Representatives if he is Indian.
BC Pires is a hanging chard.
E-mail your subsections to him at bc@winetonline.com.