ALLEN CHASTANET, THE MICHAEL JACKSON OF LUCIAN POLITICS

Except He Can’t Dance, I’ve Seen Him, He Can’t)

 

Allen Chastanet is everything that Michael Jackson wishes he was when he was born.

He’s black, at least partly so, but no one can tell and so he gets to live in the best of both worlds. He’s got that ‘good hair’ that pale skin that blushes in both heat and cold and he’s got that slightness of nose and lip that everyone secretly longs for – except for Mick Jagger, Steven Tyler and Natalie La Porte, whose very careers depend on their nasal and labial excesses.

Poor guy. If only he was Allen Chastanet instead....

 

Michael Jackson didn’t want to be an oreo – black on the outside and white on the inside. He wanted the exact opposite. He wanted to have the soul and substance of the black man, all nicely packaged in Allen Chastanet’s tall, Nordic genetically superior form. He wanted to look like Thor doing the moonwalk.

If Michael Jackson had been born looking like Allen Chastanet, he would be the absolute ruler of the world. All his insecurities would have disappeared in sheath of translucent skin that, to him, represented everything that was right with the world.

Allen Chastanet as a child. Not that we're saying he was over-privileged...

 

Allen Chastanet, meanwhile, has everything going for him that Michael Jackson didn’t. But our Golden Boy is scornful of his good fortune and deeply, deeply resentful of the proudest part of his heritage.  He is one of the few mixed breeds who could really have it both ways, not to mention THE ONLY ONE at present who NEEDS to have it both way. But deep down in his truest self, he can’t stomach the truth,(not even 25% of it) far less exploit it for necessary political gain.

Tell me it isn’t true, Gail. Deny that he hasn’t resisted bringing out his black grandmother, when everyone knows that she is his biggest unexploited political goldmine.  Tell me you’ve seen the heartical, black, rootscore 25% African chromosome that his grandmother from Bacara left to him for a great political inheritance. You can’t. Why? May I suggest the perhaps he just doesn’t want to be ALL the Allen Chastanet he can be.

Perhaps he only wants to be the lily white 75%. The rest of it offends his veined, blonde haired nostrils.

Perfect Example of 'White' St Lucian, Exhibit A

 

A Duboulay, a Devaux or a Peterkin running for office would not make this mistake. Of course, all these people already know how to speak like and be accepted as Lucians when it is appropriate and necessary. Even Fred Devaux is blacker than Allen Chastanet. (And while Fred Devaux has repeatedly asserted his St Lucian-ness, he has NEVER, EVER pretended to be black.)

Allen Chastanet doesn’t want to live in the best of both worlds. He never has. He never will. He never endeavored to be part of the real world of ordinary St Lucians outside of basketball and politics. He never learned how to speak English like a Lucian, much less Kweyol. He never even took a bus, so he could know firsthand what it’s really like for the average person from, for example, a place like Soufriere.

Chastanet is so deeply self-deceived, so totally overcome by the spirit of the self-hating Negro that he is,  in moments of candor, very plain and forthcoming about how  his self-hatred,  as a Negro, will result in disastrous policy. Even his vision of tourism and development, if such thing can be called vision, is not a balance of all good things, but a one track minded rejection of everything that is not big, Miami-style tourism and real estate development. He says over and over that St Lucia needs to make some choices about what it is and where it is heading, and his choice, over and over, is throw out the baby and the bathwater and sell the damned basin since there will be no need for bathing anyway.

Macro-economic self-loathing, so to speak.

With a $50,000 a month phone bill. Lol.

Don’t even ask for agricultural restoration. For Chastanet alone, ‘food security is bullshit.’ Building the agricultural basis of a nation is backward and wasteful, to him. What matters is….well, you know what he thinks matters. You know his history.  If you don’t, just ask Joe the water tours boat captain near Pigeon Island.  Joe Knows. Joe almost lost his little tour business with Sandals to Caribbean Sailing, a much bigger company that just happened to be owned by Allen’s dad.

And guess who happened to be tourism minister at the time.

But perhaps it is unfair to assign such deep psychological self-distortion to race alone. Both Michael and Allen show signs of insecurity that far outstrip any racial consciousness or self-loathing. Perhaps the issue with Allen is not that he can’t embrace his blackness, but that he does not, under any circumstances, choreographic, commercial or political, have the right moves.

He has already proven that he can’t run a small sub-regional airline, that he can’t get any of his former bosses to speak in glowing terms of his career achievements, that he can’t win an election against a man that many people make fun of because of his accent and that he can’t tell that you shouldn’t try to sell a beach before an election.

In short, that nigga just can’t dance.

As messed up as Michael  was at the end, as bleached out and carved up and drugged out as he was, at least he still had moves. At least he could dance. At least he still had soul.

Kenny, are ok? Are you ok, Kenny? You been hit by, you been struck by...."