Spike Lee, well known African American movie director, is a supporter of the New York Knicks in NBA basketball.
If memory serves me right, he once dashed onto the court to get into the face of the Indiana Pacers’ Reggie Miller, who is as tall as Joel Garner. Now, Rihanna without heels can probably drink soup off Lee’s head so he did not did not so much get into Miller’s face as into his waistband. No ordinary supporter.
One year, after many miserable performances, his team still had a sniff at making the play-offs and a broadcaster asked him if he would like them to achieve that goal. Blunt response: “No – for them to go and further embarrass themselves and us?” Or something like that.
Dissatisfaction
It seems that even Lee understood that being a supporter didn’t mean that you take your side’s every performance without howls of dissatisfaction, without criticism, without robust demands.
Which society can abandon the constant call, expectation, urging, insistence on, critiquing towards excellence in any of its enterprises and still come out with good success?
Yet, for a time a cricket rallying call bewitched us. Hardly now.
But there are still two areas in which we are expected to be that unrealistic. One is cultural products, especially music. It seems that many feel that criticism is a no-no, and that we should be nothing but cheerleaders and willing soakers up of not only the good, but also the bad and the ugly. While nobody should engage in cavalier, contemptuous put-downs of artistes (or anybody else, for that matter), we must know that genuine critiquing is fair – and necessary.
Increasingly these days, though – nowhere as strident as the call to rally round the West Indies – comes the back side of another rallying call: recently those who dare to point out our shortcomings (especially in governance) have been tongue-lashed as “pulling down Barbados”.Â
Belittling
Time was when the average Barbadian had an earnest candour about his home country that had no equal elsewhere in the region – and nobody would think that he was belittling Barbados. (In this matter I am excluding calypsonians, whose offerings often have so much to do with seasonality, fitting in with genre notions, focusing on winning, pursuing a penchant for punning and picong and whose non-social commentary products often have such an amoral – if not outright slack – character that you really can’t be sure theirs isn’t a mock-seriousness.)
Anyway, our open, genuine frankness about our warts probably helped us to face up to problems with more diligence than many others. This talk about pulling down the country has had this strange addendum: “It will scare away investors”. Government politicians, mostly, spew this.
Now, you think that people who looking for investment opportunities are checking the NATION, call-in programmes, blogs and so on to follow Barbadians’ criticisms of the management of their affairs? Lemme tell you what they are most likely checking: the state of the economy, the preparedness of the workforce, the level of security and safety, how long it takes to get things done – things like that. These are things that, by and large, Government is responsible for. So if these areas are weak, it en ordinary people who pulling down the country – it is Government politicians, who so often like to accuse John Public and opposition politicians of disparaging the country.
The truth is, though, that when in opposition many of our politicians speak of problems in ways that tempt you to think that they are relishing our failures – yet when many of these same people become the government, they turn around and accuse manifestly concerned critics of mekking the country look bad. Look, we can usually tell a puller-down from a concerned citizen. Gratuitousness drips from their mouths like runaway saliva and there is more than a hint of glee, and often ill will, in their voices. In some respects, it must be said, we are a pull-down people. Listen to our conversations – so full of unedifying talk about this person or that one. Duh botsy jiggling. Duh clothes out o’ style. They t’ief to get what duh got. He en come from nuhway. She play she great. He is a freak.
A man says he had “some good” sex last night and his colleagues are more than likely to say something like, “You mean that two minutes?” If you yourself value “some good” sex, why the put-down? Even in schools it is rampant. A teacher praises a student’s work, and several classmates throw out remarks such as “Dah is a fluke”, “She copy dat from somebody” or “She only get them good marks because de teacher like she”. Even if these things are said in jest (as clearly they sometimes are), it cannot escape notice that our conversations about others are seriously, overwhelmingly, small-mindedly negative! That is real pulling down, and of the kind that we should be desperately concerned about and urgently attending to. But Barbadians do not treat Barbados the same way. The kind of criticism that most Barbadians express about their country is, in the main, clearly intended to lift it up. Get real!
Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com
