{"id":55987,"date":"2024-03-18T18:17:23","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T22:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55987"},"modified":"2024-03-18T18:17:23","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T22:17:23","slug":"dr-rowleys-public-vulgarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=55987","title":{"rendered":"Dr Rowley\u2019s public vulgarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe
\nMarch 18, 2024<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago was at his most vulgar on Thursday, March 9, when he sought to scandalise my name at a public meeting at Enterprise, Chaguanas. However, his public performance revealed more about his moral blindness, his public vulgarity, his intellectual narrowness and aggressive narcissism. No one who read my 28-page, carefully footnoted lecture could have arrived at his conclusion.
\n
\nIn his \u201csharp words for columnist Selwyn Cudjoe\u201d (reporter Ria Taitt\u2019s description), the prime minister stated: \u201cThe main point that Cudjoe produced on the platform of the crime talks was that people must examine the wealth of the Prime Minister to correlate the growth of his wealth with the growth of crime.<\/p>\n

\u201cTonight, I want to tell Selwyn Cudjoe: you just haul…,\u201d which, according to Taitt, \u201cleft the rest of the sentence to the imagination of his laughing audience\u201d (Express, March 9).<\/p>\n

I began my lecture, \u201cA Quest for Truth\u201d, by quoting the grandson of a slave who declared in 1899 that \u201csecurity of person and property are the first condition of social progress\u201d. I followed that up with Eric Williams\u2019 declaration that \u201cwe must devise a system which gives a central place to the ideal of the sovereignty of people\u201d and the need for civil discourse. I also cited the need to revive Williams\u2019 \u201cMeet the People Tour\u201d that he initiated in 1963.<\/p>\n

I also drew on Esdras, an apocryphal text of the Bible, and a Latin aphorism to locate the source of Williams\u2019 rallying cry, \u201cGreat is the PNM; and It shall prevail.\u201d Then I quoted Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and ended by paraphrasing Brutus\u2019s words at the funeral scene of William Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar.<\/p>\n

Brutus said: \u201cIf there be any \/ in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar\u2019s, \/ to him I say that Brutus\u2019 love to Caesar was \/ no less than his. If then that friend demand \/why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: \/ Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome [Trinidad & Tobago] more. Had you rather Caesar \/ were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen? (Act III, Scene II.)<\/p>\n

Maybe this is the real question: should we opt for the truth, no matter how painful, or continue to live a lie that would lead to our mutual destruction?<\/p>\n

The 16th point of my lecture with which our prime minister took such umbrage read: \u201cIn seeking to discover the truth about the escalation of crime, we should ask all of our office holders, particularly the prime minister and members of his Cabinet to declare what the wealth of they and their immediate family was in 2015 and what it is now. In that way we can see if crime is a paying concern for them or not; that is, whether their increased wealth resulted from the escalation of crime (causal) or whether their increased wealth, if there was any, just happened at the same rate at which crime increased (correlational)?\u201d<\/p>\n

This was a question rather than a statement.<\/p>\n

In May 2023, the Board of Trustees of Howard University, one of the most prestigious universities in the US, awarded our prime minister an honorary Doctor of Letters. I celebrated that achievement. Then-Howard president Dr Wayne Frederick remarked: \u201cTruth and service have been major elements of their lives [the awardees] both personally and professionally.\u201d He described Rowley \u201cas a renowned social and political leader, pioneering statesman and scholar\u201d. (Express, July 6, 2023.)<\/p>\n

An honorary Doctor of Letters is usually awarded to luminaries \u201cwho have enriched the humanities in particular, or humanity at large\u201d; someone whose public behaviour is beyond reproach. I wonder how Howard University\u2019s Board of Trustees would respond to our prime minister\u2019s public vulgarity and intellectual dishonesty.<\/p>\n

The Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists took place in Paris in September 1956. It was attended by luminaries such as Richard Wright who dedicated his book, White Man, Listen!, to Williams; Alioune Diop, editor of Presence Africaine; Leopold Senghor, father of the Negritude movement and later president of Senegal; Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, author of Return to My Native Land and Williams\u2019 friend; and Jean Price-Mars, author of Ainsi parla l\u2019Oncle.<\/p>\n

Presence Africaine invited Williams to participate in its Second Congress that was held in Rome in 1959 to continue the discussion of the writers\u2019 responsibility in the decolonisation process. Williams\u2019 lecture, \u201cThe Political Leader Considered as a Man of Culture\u201d, drew on the ancient Greeks to demonstrate his point: \u201cThe symbol of that highly civilised democracy was recognition of the political leader as a man of culture\u2014the culture of an entire people, of an entire city-state whose representative he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams, a fierce political fighter, understood that intellectual debates and the promotion of different approaches to political questions are vital to sustaining a democracy. He expected his successors to act with grace and panache. He would never advise a fellow citizen to \u201cHaul your…\u201d<\/p>\n

In the face of such vulgarity he was more likely to say \u201clet the jackass bray\u201d, sentiments I warmly extend to my prime minister.<\/p>\n

Verbal violence and public vulgarity contribute as much to a climate of violence as a young man who picks up a gun to express his violent rage.<\/p>\n

A conscientious prime minister needs to know and value this truism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Selwyn R. Cudjoe March 18, 2024 The Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago was at his most vulgar on Thursday, March 9, when he sought to scandalise my name at a public meeting at Enterprise, Chaguanas. However, his public performance revealed more about his moral blindness, his public vulgarity, his intellectual narrowness and … Continue reading Dr Rowley\u2019s public vulgarity<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,30,7],"tags":[60,171,49],"class_list":["post-55987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","category-pnm","category-politics","tag-keith-rowley","tag-selwyn-r-cudjoe","tag-tt-govt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55987"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55988,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55987\/revisions\/55988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}