18 July 1998, 950 words
Few people in Trinidad truly understand Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, and people everywhere else don't understand him at all. This is the real reason he was booed at the welcoming function for Ghanian President Jerry Rawlings two weeks ago. What people fail to realize is how extensive Mr Panday's gifts truly are. We already know that he is a brilliant orator, a successful lawyer, a leading trade unionist, a wonderful thespian, and a clever politician who can bench press Lada motor cars - one in each hand. At least, this is the impression one gets from a cursory reading of Express columnist and UNC hack Anil Mahabir. (I usually read Anil in this way but, occasionally, I don't swear at all.) But, as I pointed out some weeks ago, Mr Panday is also a brilliant mathematician. Remember when he demanded proof that Agriculture Minister Reeza Mohammed had interfered with the selection process for an IADB contract? Given Opposition MP Keith Rowley's clear evidence that Mohammed had misled Parliament, I said that Mr Panday must have been demanding mathematical proof. Well, it was the same thing two weeks ago when he talked about people causing division in the society. At least, this is the only way I can think of to defend Mr Panday's statement which, as a person of East Indian heritage, I am told I have to do. But I really wish the Prime Minister wouldn't make my ethnic duty so difficult.
I mean, at first I tried to look at the thing logically. But, in formal logic, division is defined as "a logical fallacy where one assumes that various parts have a property because the whole has the property." Man, I dropped that encyclopaedia like a hot potato, except that an encyclopaedia weighs about five pounds and nearly broke my big toe. After all, Mr Panday did seem to assume that the partisan crowd at that Emancipation event would have the same views as the other partisan crowds he normally addresses in Hindu temples. But, nowadays, I don't think he resents people who have property, since he can force the parasitic oligarchy to bend over forward in order not to antagonize the government (according to the official editorial policy of the ANSA-McCal-owned Trinidad Guardian.) And even as I was thinking that Mr Panday had forgotten basic logic, I read that he said the reason he was booed is because Trinidadians are "not normal." Oh dear, I said to myself. (All right, I really said, "Oh hell.") I mean, I knew he was referring only to those who booed him, but it sounded like he meant the entire population of TT. How could I explain this?But then, remembering my first-year sociology from UWI, I realized that Panday may have been speaking from his usual lofty intellectual position. I mean, nobody can deny the existence of social norms. So I thought I could argue that all that Mr Panday was saying was that those who booed him had broken the norms. Senator Diana Mahabir-Wyatt would agree, and I notice that she has never commented on Mr Panday breaking norms like threatening newspaper editors, calling teachers criminals, dismissing a police-confirmed hit on Ken Gordon, and appointing the Police Commissioner for one year at a time through an Act of Parliament. A sociological interpretation of Mr Panday confirms that Weber and Durkheim were both intellectual wimps next to him. The functionalist school of sociology holds that norms reflect consensus and develop in order to meet certain assumed needs of the social system. Such norms, say functionalists, are maintained through rewards for conformity. Now hasn't Mr Panday fought all his political life for consensus, and kicked out Hulsie for not being consensual enough? Hasn't he rewarded party supporters with State Board jobs, Senatorial appointments and Government contracts? But Mr Panday even caters for the conflict school of sociology, which may explain why Sat and Anil haven't gotten cushy positions in State companies. The conflict school holds that norms are a mechanism for dealing with recurring social problems. Racism is a norm, especially if you think - I use the word loosely - like Kamal Persad or Kumar Mahabir. And Marx held that norms originate as means by which one caste or class dominates another. Mr Panday, as a trade unionist and a Hindu, would undoubtedly agree. In the conflict school's view, coercion and sanctions maintain the rules, hence the reason teachers and journalists and doctors have all been threatened with legal action by the Panday administration. Interestingly, though, neither school can explain the differences between and within societies, and I say this is interesting because neither can Mr Panday.
In desperation, therefore, I turned to mathematics, where I discovered that a norm is "any non-negative real-valued function on a real or complex vector space. "This didn't help much, since I'm not sure functions honoring military presidents have any real value, and Mr Panday seems to have become very negative since entering that complex space called governance.
The mathematical definition of "normal" was equally unhelpful. At first, I considered the two-dimensional definition, since Mr Panday's thinking seems to be the same. In two dimensions, normal is "the line perpendicular to the tangent to a plane curve passing through a point. "But Mr Panday, though he always has good lines, rarely has a point. So that was useless. In three dimensions, though, I read that "the principal normal at a point on a skew curve is the direction on the osculatory tangent plane that is perpendicular to the direction of the tangent line, the direction of the rotation being right." And so I discovered the true reason Mr Panday was booed. It was simply because of the mathematical illiteracy of his predominantly black audience. (What a pity Morgan Job wasn't there to explain it to them - but, then again, I'm not sure Morgan is so good at arithmetic or else he might have been able to calculate the amount of money he owed the Government for his student loan.) I can assure you that Mr Panday's statements about division and normalcy didn't reflect a skewed mentality or his slanted perspective or his right-wing politics. No, no, no! You see, the word "osculatory" in mathematics refers to a curve or surface meeting at three or more coincident points; but it also refers to kissing. So Mr Panday was just trying to reach out. Either that or it has just become impossible to defend our Prime Minister without going to absurd lengths.
Copyright ©1998 Kevin Baldeosingh