EDITORIAL: Talking politics
Former Barbados Labour Party candidate, past parliamentarian and sometime Minister, Mr. DeLisle Bradshaw, has been rightly and sharply hauled over the coals for his recent witless and derisory utterance that “any idiot can play cricket”, clearly used in reference to the fitness of Mr. Floyd Reifer, the Democratic Labour Party candidate for the upcoming by-election in St. George North, effectively to represent the interests of that constituency in the Lower House of Parliament. Mr. Reifer is better known as a former West Indies captain and, more recently, coach of the team.
We suppose that as far as invective from the partisan political platform goes, this was on the rather mild side, but while it proved immediately hilarious for the captive partisan audience, it appeared to have rubbed raw a nerve of some who perceived it as an unjustified attack on the intellect of those who play and have played the game at whatever level.
Which is odd, since those of us of a certain age will recall that the malapropisms, misstatements and grammatical lapses of one cricketer, now elevated to our highest status, provided much mirth for many back then.
Not that we are willing to excuse Mr. Bradshaw’s crass descent into absurdity, but his observation tallies with the local penchant to regard certain occupations, sports and entertainment among them, no matter how well rewarded, as being reserved for those who are not intellectually gifted.
Of course, this view does not accord with the historical reality, certainly neither here or in the UK, where places in the county cricket championship and our local Division One competition respectively are or were reserved for the students of the two top universities, Oxford and Cambridge in England and for those of Harrison College, Lodge and Combermere, then regarded as the leading boys’ schools in Barbados. At one stage therefore, it would seem, we were of the view that only the brightest and the best youths among us could play cricket at the top level.
The Bradshaw denigration is thus founded in a more recent time, one when the game is now played mainly by those “from we gap”, those that are expected to achieve little, and, if they do succeed, we choose to attribute it by some illogic to a quirk of fate or to even more mysterious circumstances.
One writer we do not now recall has captured it well – One individual says to the other, “You hear that X write a book?” Comes the local reply, “X write a book? X can’t write no book. He use to live in we gap.”
So, Mr. Bradshaw is hopelessly wrong. It is not true that any idiot can play cricket nor, equally, is his implied slight that once you play cricket, you are an idiot. Indeed, if in our society, success is to be measured by the accumulation of substantial cash reserves, and it is accepted that the achievement of success is the smart option, then the region’s T20 international cricketing mercenaries may be the smartest of us all, through using their talents to such a degree (no pun). Now, as for being a politician…
On a related issue, other than it being a mimicry of one aspect of the current US presidential campaign, we are not certain of the electoral value of nationally broadcast debates in a parochial by-election. Far more useful in our view would be constituency fora, at which local issues would be discussed by the residents. What can any of these candidates achieve on their own? And how are their views on the incidence of youth unemployment in Flat Rock, for example, relevant to the given television viewer in Belleplaine?