THE REAL JOHNNY WALKERS: MORE FANTASY CABINET MEMBERS

 UNUSUAL SUSPECTS

They’re talking the talk but they’re not walking the walk. In fact, more and more, it seems they’re not even talking the talk. Flambeau and Labour are having a conversation that is completely divorced from the solutions St Lucians need.

When John Compton died, it seems he sucked all the goodness out of St Lucian politics. Ironic. John Compton was one of Nietzsche’s supermen – he made his own morality, for better or worse. But when he died, we learnt that he made even Kenny Anthony a better person just by being alive.  With Compton and Odlum both gone to where old politicians go, with Hunter Francois and Neville Cenac both not playing again, St Lucian politics not longer has Men, much less lion kings.

St Lucia politics is a party for rats. Big rats. Of all colors, genders, races and ideological persuasions. The rat party reached its height in 2011 when the big rats (Flambeau) committed political suicide, just for the lulz.

Then came Labour, promising to end the party and get to work cleaning up the crack-infested squalor. Two and a half years later, the mice of St Lucia are finding out that while they are suffering increased taxation, decreased salaries and benefits, a derth of job opportunities and a tough prospects for any private initiative, the big rats of Labour are still having a party.

In the foreign affairs ministry. In the St Lucia Tourist Board. In SLASPA. Anywhere that Leo Clarke and Peter Foster show their face…party time.

But mice are not invited.

Well, my friends, Lucians, mousey men, I say we should look to each other for leadership. Let them have their parties. We just want our country.

In the continuing effort to liberate St Lucia from the political monopoly of the usual suspects in the FLAY-BOUR Party, the FLOGG presents some more  unusual suspects for national leadership.

THE REAL JOHNNY WALKERS

MARIO MICHEL, Good Boy, Badass, Chief Justice of Something or The Other: 

Just because he never admitted to smoking weed and he looks down his nose at us even though he’s a short ass bastard doesn’t mean Mario Michel is ‘one of them.’

Michel is one of the very few politicians who prefers to be right than popular, who will stick to his guns when the whole wrong world is against him, who will listen to good advise, change his mind when he is wrong and who has flawless, I mean, completely and perfectly impeccable taste in women.

If he was American, he would be set. But he’s St Lucian, so he’s screwed.

LESMOND MAGLOIRE, Scientist, Occupational Safety Consultant:

As China teaches the world that human rights abuse and hazardous working conditions are just factors of production in the success of true capitalism, St Lucia needs Lesmond Magloire more than ever.

As one of the senior members of St Lucia’s de facto science think tank, Magloire has spent his life waging a silent war not against the upper classes or the pinljo communists, but against unseen things that slowly, stealthily damage, cripple and kill people. His work has identified a litany of poisons, toxins, hazardous chemicals all buried or stashed or forgotten in fields, in garages, in abandoned houses and factories. B

ecause he’s such a scientist and not in love with playing the political game, his name gets overlooked a lot. But try this. Go around your neighborhood looking for signs of hazardous chemical threats. If you find a legitimate one, post it to one of St Lucia’s group pages. I guarantee you that if you don’t hear from Lesmond Magloire you will hear from someone he influenced.

He’s like that superhero that no one knows he even exists except the weird kid who runs that crazy blog. Conclusion: This guy has been saving our lives from things we didn’t even know about, for decades.

FATHER LINUS CLOVIS, Personal Mathematician to God:

How is it possible to have a Nobel Prize Winner for Literature in a nation of sub-literates? The same way it’s possible to have a Linus Clovis in a nation of people who can’t do math unless money is involved.

Father Linus Clovis, like the ten million coconuts and mangos that rot every year, is one of St Lucia’s most tragically under exploited resources. There is no factual way to tell you how great a mind you’re dealing with here. Only schizophrenic allegory can begin to describe the genius that many rightly think is the single greatest thinker alive in St Lucia today. And so:

When Jesus was having trouble with CXC Math during the Lost Years, God created Father Linus Clovis for the sole purpose of getting the best assistance for His Boy. It was such a good plan that it worked too well and Jesus accidentally invented the internet using some pai, a frog and a goat skin drum.

You can imagine the consternation that caused in the space-time continuum where it is a well established fact that the internet was invented by the American military in the late 20^th century for making people sign up to get spied on.

Luckily, God found out before the first email was ever sent and had a little pep talk with The Boy about how less is more. Jesus became so advanced that God decided he couldn’t just leave a thing like Linus Clovis lying around in the ancient Roman Empire.

That would be against Star Fleet Federation rules.

And so, God gave Father Clovis a ticket to the 20^th/21^st century…where they are still not ready for him and his very presence continues to disturb the status quo, if not the space-time continuum.

And what’s better than a priest who likes people but pisses bishops off.

Don’t dig nothing, Father, there are some of us who are ready for you. Some of us have always been on the Latin Mass, Advanced Calculus, higher civilization trip. The Lord has a great work for you in this nation. Well, greater than the stuff you do, almost on a daily basis.

SPOILER ALERT: As for Jesus, he dropped out of college, invented the phrase ‘taking one for the team’ and the rest was legend.

KENDEL HIPPOLYTE, Poet, Teacher, Lucian Shaolin Neg Temple Flame Keeper:

If one person is the keeper of the soul flame of St Lucia, it is my teacher and yours, Kendal Hippolyte. He’s like what would happen if Che Guevara played a flute instead of  a trigger.

He is the only person on the list of tomorrow’s leaders who is already doing exactly what he needs to do and should not be disturbed for any reason other than to provide financial assistance to what he’s doing now and what he’s doing next.

He is also the only St Lucian writer of note to have stepped completely out of the shadow of Derek Walcott. Hippolyte was the shortest ‘Straw’ of the classical generation of Lucian thespians, of whom the Walcott brothers were the best known exponents. Somewhere along the road to his personal, regional and international achievement, Hippolyte decided to spend a few years raising a new generation of thespians. The generation he raised is now training another generation.

Without people like him, theater, like dance and music, would have devolved into a tourism shelf mess. But because of him, everyone still looks at St Lucia as though theater is no joke here, no comedic pappyshow like in J’a and T’T, but a high art like ballet and classical music and the motherfucking blues.

More than Derek or even Roddy Walcott, this one man has become the artistic heartbeat of the nation, pumping life giving artistic empowerment into people who have no idea that the humble ‘bab sal’ man who is helping them is larger, grander and more godlike than anything they ever met in their life before.

BONUS NON-FACTUAL LEGEND: Hippolyte also has a cult of worshippers whose temple he must destroy every couple of weeks in order to avoid becoming a god. He also has a team of hackers who take down sites that cyber-venerate him a la St John Coltrane, and a crew of bad boy Baptists, criminal Catholics, ignorant Islamists and asshole atheists who are assigned ‘persuade’ persistent Kendal worshippers that anyone – and I mean, anyone – except Hippolyte, is God. Though this could not be confirmed at press time, the multi-demoninational bad boys are said to work on commission, (that is they get paid more every time they get someone to worship something else besides God…I mean, Hippolyte!…oh snap! Here they come to get me…)

VINCENT MCDOOM, International Celebrity:

Say one, say two, if we give Vincent something to do, it’s going to get done and well done too, with global press coverage coming out your butt instead of doo doo.

Say two, say three, if you give him something to achieve, he won’t give the world a chance to breathe. You’ll be reaping meg-media because you believe that until he proves his worth, he ain't taking no leave.

(That last line was not meant as pawol jettay for Louis Lewis, who coincidentally went on leave during the week that the Royal Shakespeare Theater Company performed the historic SHAKESPEARE IN THE RAINFOREST at Fond D’or. Any incidental truth told was entirely incidental.)

HENRY CHARLES, Trade Unionist, International Consultant:

You mean to tell me that after all the bobol that has gone on in both Labour and Flambeau, people still believe that Henry Charles did anything wrong or illegal in the so-called NCA Scandal?

Really?

Charlo is one of the few true believers of the St Lucia Labour Party, one of the few who understand and identify with the ghetto youth, who can comprehend the Gordian knot of poverty, illiteracy and historic conspiracy that contrive to keep the high risk youth in the position they’re in.

Charlo had a feasible plan to turn short term employment projects in job training and entrepreneurship when Labour threw him under the bus in a callous act of political expediency. Both Labour and Flambeau have half-heartedly continued Charlo’s plan but with much less success, because THEY JUST DON’T GET IT. They have neither the vision nor the background to expedite the transformation of the marginalized urban youth and underexploited rural human resource.

Charlo does.

It is, in the final analysis, THE ONLY THING he really wants out of life. Let him do the damned thing so we can un-garrison the city of Castries and find a profitable reversal to our urban drift.

PHILIP JULES, former Chief Economist:

The old man sits on the sidewalk in Gros Islet. “I heard they’re going to get their cut paying some foreign firm millions to dredge the dam,” he said, sipping a rum and coke with the appreciation that only a retiree could. “I could dredge that dam faster for less without bringing in any equipment.”

The old man is an engineer. He was also chief economist of St Lucia before his minister tried to bribe an investor. The next day, said minister got a dressing down and a resignation letter. It is said that on his death bed, George Odlum summoned Jules and passed the mantle on to him.

“Fuck the mantle,” Jules says of politics in general. “Where’s the progress? Where are the ideas? Where’s the growth? A little island of less than a quarter million people and you have an unemployment problem? Something’s not wrong with the country. Something’s wrong with the leaders and the people who put them there.”

Castor oil, Commonwealth scholarships, cheaper new vehicles, renewable energy… Jules has an idea for just about every ministerial portfolio that could revolutionize St Lucia. The withering old bastard has all our tomorrows perfectly planned in his head.

But I must stop, because writing about Philip Jules is its own article. Article? Hell, Philip Jules is a whole manifesto and blue print for the future.

PETER LANSIQUOT, Ambassador, Healer of the Blind:

Yeah, I said it. 

I can’t help but notice that while Pel was Ambassador to Cuba, the blind were being healed left, right and center as though Christ had turned miracle healing into a national health care program.

I can’t help but notice that Pel is no longer Ambassador to Cuba and the blind can see for themselves. He is also one of Labour’s last remaining bona fide Neg Marron.

There’s a lot more to that story, but I’m not promoting Pel any more because when I’m trying to get the low down dirt on the secret meetings of Labour, he is of no use to me whatsoever. He takes pride in defending the bastards, even though I know full well that inside the secret meetings, he is on their case saying exactly the same thing I’m saying and sometimes even worse.

Just like Pip.

Good Labourites are such strange creatures. Exotic, in a headachy kind of a way.