Kevin Baldeosingh
I suppose I should be pleased that the new People's National Movement administration has put a Value Added Tax on books, since this will add 12.5 per cent to my income as an author, or about $3 a month. More importantly, ensuring that fewer people buy books will make me and Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley seem smarter, if only because the average Trinbagonian will get dumber.
This, rather than raising my income, is probably the real reason the PNM put VAT on books. After all, just five months after winning office, Dr Rowley is already under constant pressure, and this can only get worse over the next four years and seven months if the PNM doesn't try to discourage reading and coffee.
For example, in their first budget, the Government gave the lion's allocation to crime and relegated education to second place. The PNM was criticised for that but, in a book-reading society, some economist who doesn't like women with weave might have referenced Freedom Rising by Christian Welzel, who notes that "With the exception of Trinidad & Tobago and South Africa, all democracies are knowledge economies."
Or some political scientist who doesn't care about black boys might also have cited Governance, Corruption, and Economic Performance, by Sanjeev Gupta and George T Abed, who say: "Corruption is negatively associated with government expenditure on education...It leads to allocations in favour of less-productive investment projects and against nonwage operations and maintenance expenditures, such as books and medicines, which reduce the quality and productivity of existing infrastructure."
Indeed, on the campaign trail Dr Rowley had outlined innovative education policies, such as stopping pregnant unmarried teachers from teaching. Such a statement might have led a criminologist who is having sex outside marriage to quote Marcus K Felson and Mary A Eckert from Crime and Everyday Life, who point out: "Many people believe that declining morality is the cause of crime...Researchers have repeatedly proven this morality argument to be wrong...research on cognitive dissonance repeatedly finds that moral attitudes do not simply produce moral behaviour."
This in turn could easily have led some pedagogue with only book sense to cite education consultant Vivien Stewart's argument in A World-Class Education that "Getting education right gives a country a powerful platform on which to build a healthy economy and a healthy society. Getting it wrong can hold back a country for years to come."
This may be one reason Dr Rowley has promised to "make the necessary reviews to the national curriculum for our schools that from primary school, our children will be taught the history of Trinidad and Tobago."
On the other hand, readers who don't understand black man have it hard might challenge Dr Rowley with the following statement from historian KO Laurence: "It is obviously desirable that books which will dictate the view of their own history which the people of the Caribbean will possess for the next generation should be written as histories, not as nationalist manifestos. Otherwise it will be necessary for later generations to unlearn much of the 'history' which the first generation learned."
Laurence, who wrote this in a review of Dr Eric Williams's History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, was quoted by Gordon Rohlehr in his book My Strangled City and other Essays. In a 1970 article where he himself reviews From Columbus to Castro, Professor Rohlehr asserted that "These days it is difficult to view without scepticism anything Dr Williams has to say either as politician or historian."
But presumably the historian who will be commissioned by the Government to write a new history of T&T will historically prove that Dr Williams's history books are the only ones worth reading.
However, if Dr Rowley really wants to avoid professional writers who don't believe in God using facts and figures to make the PNM look stupid, he may need to go further and ban books outright. And he needn't worry about any public backlash, since most people in this place don't read books and such a policy will be supported by UWI lecturers like Dylan Kerrigan who has used ethnographic data and hairpins to prove that the T&T Guardian should not publish any opinions he disagrees with.
And, once books are banned so the IQs of people with CXC passes drops to the same level as socialist anthropologists', Dr Rowley can rest assured that he will be Prime Minister for life or at least until he forgets how to peel cassava.
Email: kevin.baldeosingh@zoho.com
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a Caribbean history textbook.