Eric Williams really dead

March 26, 2001

Sometimes one is left to despair. Is this a country? Who are we? What is this, a nation? How come so many and so much of the rest of the world are made of sterner stuff? Have the guts and the balls of people here been reduced and turned into marshmallow?

Is this the kind of stock from which we have emanated? Is this what our history says? No way! We of the Caribbean have been nurtured, over centuries, by a militant proletarian consciousness which has in fact defined and demarcated this landscape.

It is true, though, that with the modernisation and opening up of the "Caribbean economies", particularly after the 1970s, Caribbean people have found themselves being drawn rapidly into the process of the internationalisation of the middle-class and middle-class values, expressed by some as the internationalisation of Americanism and American commercialisation.

It is the "globalisation" that is geared to reduce everyone to a common denominator, to a sickening sameness culturally, politically and economically. It is a process that is, at the same time, both objective and subjective. T&T, being by far the most robust and diverse of the "Caribbean economies," has gone the farthest along the path of middle-classification.

Of all the Caribbean people we are the ones who seem to have been reduced the most to psychological "pap", we are the ones furthest removed from our militant proletarian tradition.

We are the ones, of all the Caribbean, who seem the most willing to give up sovereignty as exemplified by the Shiprider debacle. We are the ones quickest to lose our natural accent and adopt Yankee accents; popular American fashion has reduced our children the most to clones.

In T&T today, we are virtually raising American children. And if we are the ones best poised to exploit Caricom economically, we are, nevertheless, the very ones most ready to debunk the regional arrangements as hindrances.

Just as, ironically, the very wielders of international capital and administrators of the multilateral finance institutions who spout a lot about the necessities of the global economy, the need for international tendering, and the need for the removal of all national barriers are the most belligerent national chauvinists when it involves matters that concern their fatherlands.

In the meantime we remain a whole lot of fat, nice, pap in their hands whenever these close encounters come. And racially divided "pap", at that.

In the realm of sport where psychologically substitute wars are fought on a regular basis, the point is well made. Are we surprised that Marlon Black of T&T does not know who or what he is? In true Trini language, "maybe he mix".

That this huge, six-foot Afro-Trinidadian male could interpret his misfortune in Australia as a case of being mistaken for an "African" and could run, yes, "run", from three drunk white Australian youths, has to be a case for grave concern.

How could he ever hope to become a great, aggressive fast bowler in the modern game? Could he ever stand to match McGrath in his persistent, aggressive body-line bowling to Brian Lara?

None of the great West Indian fast bowlers of yesteryear would have run from such a situation. In fact, no fast bowler from anywhere in the world, would have done so. It would not be in character. Marlon Black is "pap" and his career may very well be over.

In football, likewise, we exhibit the same "pap". The Jamaican supporter told a reporter from T&T that "anybody could come a Trini yard and do anything". The gospel truth! But not so in Jamaica.

Before the start of the recent World Cup qualifier between JA and T&T, they kept announcing the advice to the Jamaican public to leave their guns at home. It was about psychological warfare to drive fear into the T&T players.

And which foreign referee would ever contemplate giving a penalty against Jamaica after hearing such announcements? The point is that every possible advantage is exploited on one's home turf. Not so with T&T.

At the just-concluded Under-20s qualifiers, the American team flew in here and immediately commanded the best spot on the opening schedule despite all our claim to having big FIFA football officials in our camp. It does not mean that we would have qualified if things were different.

We were out of our depth and the coach didn't have a clue. The point is that foreign players coming here are made to feel extremely comfortable, in fact, too comfortable. And foreign referees come here and put off T&T players as they please.

After the qualifier between Mexico and T&T at the stadium last year, one of the Mexican stars was so distraught at their losing to us that on his way through the tunnel he began to "kick up" everybody he encountered there. Nothing came out of that.

But Ansil Elcock was even being hounded and terrorised by phone at his home in Chaguanas after the injury to Blanco in the return game in Mexico. "Nice" does not win anything.

On March 28 in Costa Rica our team will be made to feel too scared even to leave the hotel - of this we can be quite certain. Deceased Lancelot Layne was the only person with the "guts" to return home and tell that to us back in the 1989-1990 campaign. If we do not qualify for the coming World Cup, it will not be a result of lack of talent, it will be because we are a nation of wimps.

And if we are wimps, are we surprised that on the religious turf, the Vatican has chosen to send an American Archbishop to commandeer the local RC faithful? In 1968 such a move was deemed politically inappropriate. Apparently it is now. What has happened to us?

Someone e-mailed and surmised after hearing the Vatican decision that he "now knew for sure that Eric Williams dead".