Independently speaking

Independence is a state of mind, not a state of State. It is because people confuse the latter with the former that nearly everyone thinks the arrest of Bounty Killer for using obscene language was A Good Thing. In fact, that incident revealed all our societal limitations, especially our inability to think for ourselves: which is, in my view, A Bad Thing. Asked for their opinion about Bounty Killer’s arrest, the people-in-the-street without exception gave various versions of this answer: “He broke the law so he had to be charged.” The irony of such an attitude among people whose main artform is calypso and Carnival reveals a superficiality, not merely of intellect, but of spirit. And it is not that the people were being dishonest — they genuinely consider the law sacrosanct: except, of course, when it is convenient for them to break it.

Commentators were similarly short-sighted. Paul Richards on Gayelle’s Paul and Nikki Show said the fact that the crowd protested against Bounty Killer’s arrest revealed their lack of respect for the law. But the bottle-pelting had nothing to do with disrespecting the law: nobody at that concert was capable of so profound a reaction. The concert-goers were objecting to the fete being stopped and nothing else. As the Point Fortin feters who a week later partied around Don King’s dead body proved, the police could shoot a man in the back once they doh stop de party. And American-gone-native columnist Debbie Jacob wrote, “Thanks to Bounty Killer, I have changed my opinion about the obscenity laws of TT… I’m sure that Bounty Killer knew the law and its consequences, and that meant breaking the law was possibly nothing more than a cheap gimmick to elevate himself to some imaginary level of toughness…” I wonder what she would have written if she’d been around when the police arrested Lenny Bruce, the founding father of American comedians from George Carlin to Richard Pryor to Eddie Murphy?

Nobody opined that it is the law against obscene language which is wrong. But no truly independent society would allow such a law on its books. Philosophically, a legal constraint on the use of certain words is a constraint on freedom of expression. To argue, as Jacob does, that “freedom of expression is something I hold sacred (but) I have no tolerance of cursing just for the sake of cursing or as a cheap means of expressing public anger or frustration” is absolute b.s. And does the fact that I use that abbreviation instead of the actual word mean you don’t know what I mean?

Once you agree that freedom of expression is A Good Thing, then it means that you have to accept the negative consequences of upholding such a principle: which includes people cussing just for cussing sake. In my view, people should have the right to use the f-word, the c-word, or any other word without fear of being arrested for obscene language. If they use those words — or any others — very loudly in the middle of the street, then they can be arrested for disturbing the peace.

Which brings me to the purely pragmatic benefit of removing the obscenity laws: it would prevent the police from arresting people for that particular offence, which is often trumped-up in the sense that the police frequently get cussed only after they cuss the citizen. Indeed, if we didn’t have such laws, there would be two schoolchildren who wouldn’t have gone to court for using obscene language, after Education Minister Hazel Manning had the bright idea of putting police officers in schools. And if you think that the youngsters being arrested was A Good Thing, then you also think that dictatorship is A Very Good Thing: because a dictatorship depends on punishments being disproportionate to offences. This is why freedom of expression is crucial to democracy. Or, to argue the point empirically, history shows that every oppressive regime, from Catholic Church-controlled Europe to Nazi Germany to Stalinist Russia to Communist Cuba to Islamic Iran, bans free speech. The reasons such regimes use to justify their ban is no different from the reasons offered by persons who support the law against obscene language: for the benefit of public morality. And, although everybody would say that democracy is A Good Thing, the fact is that our elites generally prefer dictatorship.

If this weren’t so, there wouldn’t be so much support among influential persons for a limited state of emergency. In this context, “limited” becomes a truly obscene word: it means that only the rights of poor people will be taken away. Generally speaking, our prominent persons seem incapable of truly independent thought. This is probably why most of them can’t speak good dialect: indeed, the only exception I can think of is attorney Martin Daly who, not coincidentally, is also one of the top five prose stylists among our columnists. A recent newspaper commentary by Hindu activist Ravi-ji perfectly exemplifies the relationship between a dependent psychological state and language, when he claimed “Sanskrit is a scientific and systematic language. Its grammar is perfect…”

But the only scientific language is mathematics, all languages are systematic, and to describe a grammar as “perfect” is meaningless. Ravi-ji, however, is not interested in truth but in promoting ethnic pride: and his harking back to an imaginary Indian heritage is symptomatic of a mind unable to think for itself. In similar fashion, Devant Parsuram Maharaj misuses the word “Indian” as synonymous with “Hindu” and attaches himself to  a foreign organisation which styles itself as “Global”, although its local chapter has less than ten members. This is the neurosis of a psyche unable to accept a Trinidadian identity. The truly independent mind, however, is one whose only constraints are logic and empiricism: not law, tradition, and ethnicity. A truly independent society is open to all influences, screening what is good and bad, useful and useless, through principled and pragmatic judgments. By these criteria, it is fair to say that, 42 years after the official fact, we still aren’t anywhere near independence.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website:www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh