THE EDITOR: The TV remote, inanimate as it is, can be a gracious thing. It can contribute to your peace of mind by taking you to “faraway places with strange sounding names,” make you gasp at how awesome the forces of nature can be, enlighten you with knowledge of things unknown or seemingly non-existent.
But it does so, also, in a way you never thought possible by sparing you the mental turmoil of having to digest the perennial contradictions that are often the hallmark of the behaviour of politicians.
Like having to watch the chief honcho in this country, arrogant and not having to account, ready to contest the findings of the investigation instead of trying to find answers, when so many babies would have died needlessly and young mothers continue to cry, or denying the existence of a dengue outbreak even as cases, even deaths, are rising to an alarming level.
And yet another, always "so full of sound and fury” but "signifying nothing” (Macbeth, Act 5, Sc 5, 26-27), and with the same sense of immunity from not having to account, refusing to acknowledge that the buck stops with him, as runaway crime becomes “high culture.”
As you sit and watch and apply the standards of ethical and professional conduct related to such contradictions, you are driven to a kind of hysteria realising that no one is listening and no one really cares. But thankfully, the TV remote comes to your rescue and with the touch of a button you are transported to greener pastures where the air is fresh and clean.
And next door to us in the US, often dubbed the "greatest democracy” in the world, the viewer is befuddled by the stark, diametrically opposed views on the same subject involving mainstream media such as CNN and MSNBC et al on one end, and Fox et al on the other, the one propagating the enduring legacy of the incumbent president and the other portraying him as senile, incapable of governing, victim of a palace coup within his own party.
And following up, with the first virtually crowning of the now prospective nominee in the current VP as a miraculous find, and the other portraying her as the epitome of all that is non-presidential, her claim to such status hanging loose about her, "like a giant’s robe on a dwarfish thief" (Macbeth, Act 5, Sc 2, 21-22).
For the viewer, “Confusion has made his master piece”( Macbeth, Act 2, Sc 3, 66-67) in terms of what we believe and what to think, but once again the TV remote comes to the rescue by supplanting that state of bewilderment with the serenity it offers elsewhere on the tube with the press of a button.
So, as Orsino would say in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Act 1, Sc 1, 1-2), “If music be the food of love, play on/Give me excess of it...”
So will I say to my gracious remote: "Spare me the horrors of human inconsistency in the politics/And take me to a place where dreams are made of and I can find rest and peace.”
Dr ERROL NARINE BENJAMIN
via e-mail
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