Opposition’s impossible demands mask desperate agendas

by: Camillo M. Gonsalves 16.MAR.07

It is often said that “politics is the art of the possible.” If so, the opposition’s recent fanciful demands for the government to resign and call fresh elections cannot seriously be called politics. ‘Lest we forget, the opposition is calling for fresh elections a scant 15 months after their second successive 12-3 drubbing at the polls. In making such an inconceivably ridiculous demand, the NDP may have ceased to be a serious political entity, and instead become a band of desperados, living in its own world, and working fitfully towards an unattainable goal.

The Prime Minister has dismissed the demands of these desperados as “crazy,” but the Honourable Doctor has misdiagnosed the patient. “Crazy” implies an unavoidably altered state, disconnected from reality, or a psychosis where one doesn’t know better and can’t do better. The malaise affecting the desperados is far more sinister. The 2-man Green Party may be “crazy,” and harmlessly so, but the new desperados are coldly calculating in their desperation. There is method in their apparent madness.{{more}} Their stated goals are impossible, and they know it, but their true motives are to mount a rearguard action against their obsolescence and irrelevance; a pitched battle for their own survival as a viable political entity.

The intentional disconnect between stated goals and actual intent has become the tactic du jour, ever since Arnhim Eustace assembled his supporters last year – ostensibly for a march against poverty that he later admitted was a contrived ploy to demonstrate his continued relevance to the visiting Taiwanese. As that ignoble march revealed, the first casualties in the desperados’ battle for survival were truth and responsibility, which have been gleefully sacrificed on the altar of desperate political expediency.

Truth dies a thousand daily deaths at the hands of the opposition’s hired hacks and radio reprobates, with only a steady stream of defamation lawsuits bearing witness to the carnage. But if vicious lies uttered in the echo chamber of NDP-FM were enough to bring down a government, the ULP would have fallen years ago. Instead, the objective of the misinformation station is not regime change, but an attempt to shore up a dwindling, if vocal, support base.

The full measure of the desperados’ shrinking base was on display during their recent midday jaunt through town. Buoyed by an interminable publicity effort that promised the fall of the ULP, a motley crew of deluded die-hards was misled through the streets of Kingstown by the desperados’ cynical hierarchy. There was no single issue that united the crowd, but the placards they carried spoke eloquently to the lies of the opposition and the private grudges of their leadership. The march’s cheerleaders – from the personally aggrieved, to the grizzled veterans, to those still wet of ear and nostril – spoke enough malicious falsehoods to clog the courts for years to come. Almost every pronouncement from the desperados brought Shakespeare to mind: “it is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

While the daily hijacking and lynching of the truth has been handled primarily by unsavoury underlings and the criminally dishonest, the opposition leader has been at the forefront of the assault on responsibility. To wit, he attacks the economy, ignoring objective data on its robust growth. He bemoans bad governance, while neutral international bodies praise it. He irresponsibly boycotts parliament – a body he is paid to attend – whenever the mood suits him. And he cavalierly plays politics with national security, pillorying the government with charges that are more properly directed at his own followers.

The opposition apparently views political irrelevance as a fate worse than death, and is willing to do anything to avoid it. In the face of an increasingly successful and popular government, whose triumphs draw their own practical and philosophical deficiencies into sharp focus, the opposition has predictably attempted to turn up the sound and fury of its propaganda machine. However, the opposition’s propaganda is devoid of honesty, substance or merit, and its scattershot rabble rousing lacks the quixotic romance of the Green Party’s attacks. Instead, the propaganda carries the unmistakable scent of desperation. As intelligent supporters become disenchanted and disassociate themselves from the desperados’ unprincipled behaviour, the fear is that an increasingly desperate opposition will do increasingly desperate things.