The Stage March for 2015, for there is no longer a Road March, should be Richard Drue's Vagabond! or Ah Hooligan!The melody, lyrics and performance by the artiste perfectly encapsulates the permissiveness, indifference and incompetence of Trinidadian society (Tobago might be different) at all levels.
The COED defines vagabond as a vagrant or someone with no settled home and I feel this perfectly describes many Trinidadians who are either living in Miami, Brooklyn, Toronto or Goodwood Park, Barataria and Chaguanas or seemingly prefer to live in their car aimlessly driving around looking for something.
I once heard a well-known media personality recount how he and his lady went "for a drive" to Cedros one Sunday afternoon.They lived in Petit Valley. Left at 4, got back just before midnight. I thought taking a Sunday drive meant going down Chag or around the Savannah, maybe Piarco if you ambitious.
Hooligan is defined as a "violent young troublemaker" so in theory I cannot apply this to the entire country. In practice so many people seem to have stopped their brain from developing at SEA level, that it does fit.
How else can you describe the repeated description of wining, from opposition leaders to psychiatrists to reporters to 80-year-old PNMites, as "we kultyar? Ira Mathur got it right in the Sunday Guardian when she wrote "we have a tapestry of history, writers, calypsonians, mas makers, artists, that is culture... (wining) is exhibitionist, but not culture. It's a human attribute like lust, hunger, anger but not culture ... it's freeing-up but not challenging intellects and bodies to be all we can be."
There has always been "wining" is the Carnival. Not too long ago it consisted of a very pleasant swaying of the hips and buttocks from side to side with an occasional pelvic thrust.Some women and a few men seemed to have a natural "wine" to their movements that became exaggerated when a calypso was played. You can still see it on the streets as a sort of natural "bumsie bounce and flounce."
The flag woman for Desperados in the 80s symbolised all that was natural and pleasing to the eye without it degenerating into what now passes for "wining." That kind of wining was always present but used to be called "dry firetrucking" by young men. It's now considered "culture."
We are a hooligan society, a violent society of immature self-righteous punks, whether it be the official business organisations, intent on getting the right contract from their contacts inside government and paying lip service to society with their hypocritical media releases calling on the youth to behave properly or the entitled youth driving around in their small cars breaking traffic lights and driving on the shoulder.
How else can you define our society but as a wajang society when in the latest ANSA McAL poll, only one per cent of Trinidadians say they have a problem with the "lack of morality?" Everyone seems to have work because only three per cent say unemployment is a problem. So much for unemployment as a cause of crime. As expected of a people who cannot think farther than the next fete, three per cent are concerned about oil prices.
Well, everybody has a green card or a family in New York to run to so when the oil and gas done they gone. Despite the increased complaints in the media about health care, barely four per cent seem to be concerned about "poor health care."
In the face of all the goings-on in the street (sexy tights and wining on large children) and Parliament (the firing and the "mistakes" of Speakers) and the Cabinet (more firing and warahoon behaviour), only six per cent of the population is concerned about "poor leadership." Only one in five Trinidadians has a problem with "corruption" which everyone agrees is a major problem, suggesting to me that most people are involved in some form of corruption. That reminds me of a former Archbishop's aphorism that "drugs come like cancer in T&T. It in everything." So does corruption.
A whopping 56 per cent think crime is the major issue facing the country, so why do we still have an acting Commissioner of Police after four years? How can the police fight crime when their boss is not sure he will be re-appointed after a six months?
Sounds like somebody want control? Good luck to the new Minister of National Security who says that nobody can explain to him what the process of appointing a Police Commissioner is and that nobody in the Regiment has ever acted for more than one month. Better talk to Ken Lalla about the "politicised police service," Minister.
A hooligan society known up and down the islands as "Trickidadians," where retired people are threatened in their home by neighbourhood bullies; where steelbands are forced out of their traditional panyards; where young men are threatened in the street by young men who have just broken a red light; where air-conditioned police cars drive aimlessly up and down highways and the sight of someone coming out of a fete being breath-analysed is cause for self congratulation by Ministers; this is what we have become. This is our "kultuar!" Roll over Walcott. Roll over Minshall. Roll over Naipaul. Roll over Sybil Atteck. Roll over Kitch, etc, etc.