4 February 2000, 945 words
I would like to apologize to Prime Minister Basdeo Panday for any role I may have played in shrinking his amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ located deep inside the brain (or, for you pedants, within the anterior portion of the medial temporal lobe) which can be shrunk by stress. When this happens, it causes loss of short-term memory. This has obviously happened to Mr. Panday and, while I doubt he reads this column, I cannot overlook my role as a member of the media in causing him real stress.
That Mr. Panday has been suffering from short-term memory loss has been obvious for some time now. The first incident had to do with the death threat made against Ken Gordon after he lambasted the Government's Green Paper for Media Reform. Mr. Panday denied ever receiving any such report, although National Security Minister Joseph Theodore said he had given it to the Prime Minister. Many people, including myself, thought at the time that Mr. Panday was lying. In retrospect, it is now obvious that he simply forgot.
You see, the amygdala does not merely play a role in memory. Being a constituent of the limbic system, it is also used for threat assessment as well as emotional learning. Since becoming Prime Minister, Mr. Panday has come to see everyone as a threat: the Opposition, the media, teachers, the judiciary, the Independent Senators, trade unions, even his own party executive. In fact, about the only group he doesn't seem to see as a threat is the Jamaat-al-Muslimeen, but maybe his amygdala just needs to shrink some more. Yet, if that happens, will Mr. Panday even remember his own name?
I mean, the list of things he has already forgotten is quite extensive. Remember the incident with Barbadian Prime Minister Owen Arthur? Mr. Panday, by his own testimony, spent over 18 hours in close proximity with Mr. Arthur. He stated categorically that the expulsion of journalist Julian Rogers never came up. Yet, as soon as Mr. Panday said this, Mr. Arthur contradicted him, saying that he had in fact talked with Mr. Panday about the issue. But this had clearly slipped the latter's mind.
Now, recent events show Mr. Panday's mind to be even more slippery than anyone had suspected. In technical terms, Mr. Panday's frontal cortex is failing to exert effective governance over the amygdala. That is the fundamental reason for the present constitutional crisis, for a man who cannot govern his amygdala can hardly be expected to govern a country.
Look at the Hansraj Sumairsingh letter, which Mr. Panday bravely (and I commend him for this) admitted that he could not remember receiving. You and I may find it amazing that a person could read such a letter and pass it on to the police and forget having done so, but you and I have normal-sized amygdalas.
And, if there were any lingering doubts about Mr. Panday's loss of short-term memory, the dispute between him and Mr. Robinson quashed them in short order. First, there was the meeting to discuss the removal of the two Tobago senators. Mr. Panday said that that issue had been resolved. It turned out that he had merely seen Mr. Robinson, snarled at him, and left. Having done so, Mr. Panday obviously immediately forgot what had transpired, for what else could have possessed him to claim everything was all right?
Worse yet was Mr. Panday's letter in which he claimed Mr. Robinson was the one who wished to limit their weekly meetings because of the latter's ill-health. This is especially worrying, because it implies that not only Mr. Panday's amygdala, but his hippocampus has been affected. The hippocampus, you see, is a part of the brain that provides information on past experience and present context. Clearly, if Mr. Panday's hippocampus had been functioning properly, he'd have remembered that Mr. Robinson is chief of Tobago, remembered the fallout between himself and Mr. Robinson in 1987, and remembered that Mr. Robinson is now President.
Had he remembered all these things, he'd have realized that claiming that Mr. Robinson stopped their meetings because of ill-health, if untrue, could only make him, Panday, look like a damn ass. And Mr. Robinson, having the record of his international schedule and doctors' files, duly obliged.
Where I fault Mr. Robinson is in claiming that Mr. Panday has displayed a pattern of falsehood. It is true that politicians lie but, I mean, really, could anyone be so dotish as to lie so blatantly about so many facts so easily refuted? I think not! Indeed, when we consider other aspects of Mr. Panday's behaviour, it becomes obvious that not only his short-term, but his long-term memory has also suffered. After all, this was a man who, when in Opposition, blamed the PNM for all the country's woes; who made speeches in Parliament giving all the arguments against capital punishment; who tried to pilot a Freedom of Information Bill; who marched in defence of democracy; and who railed continually against the parasitic oligarchy.
Now, in Government, he has overseen the hanging of ten men, has tried passing laws to muzzle the media, has passed laws making it more difficult to have public demonstrations, has appointed long-time PNM-ites to key posts in his administration, and has become best friends with the parasitic oligarchy. For a man to turn around so completely means that he is either the most two-faced, lying, deceitful, mamaguygous hypocrite in Trinidad and Tobago, or that he is really, really, really forgetful.
Which would you prefer to believe?
Copyright©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh