The Attorney General Is An Idiot May 5
If you are watching me through my computer camera, Mr. AG, I am available for deportation. I will read this aloud for benefit of the listening devices at 1B Arawak Tower.
His daughter fired a special forces automatic rifle when she was 14. We know this because she posed with the assault weapon at the base, the photos of which she still proudly displays for classmates. “Her defense training,“ Faris Al-Rawi calls it, three years later, and he is the Attorney General of TT, so he is the decider in this matter. According to what he told me in January, the police do not accept this—they believe it to be a dangerous stunt, an abuse of privilege, and they torment his family for it, following them, entrapping them into traffic violations, etc. He is “persecuted“ for his beliefs, the prosecutor argues, but others think his beef is with the corrupt police union. I think he talks to mirrors and sycophants too much.
He looks so sharp and fit these days, even younger. He used to have thin hair—stringy, like a mangy spider monkey—with greying sides. But he has replaced the old photos that make the TT Guardian and Newsday front pages. Now he looks more like a vain and well-dressed baboon, pursing a protruding jaw to emphasize prowess and to empty the room of oxygen.
“The man is an idiot,“ says Antony, the preeminent immigrant critic. “He’s trying to change his past. He wants people to think he is descended from Muhammad, when he is really just an Indian boy from Caroni.“ Antony is right. We are idiots if we try to change our past.
In truth, Faris Al-Rawi freely describes his mixed heritage to everyone, including his daughter’s teacher, proclaiming himself “the son of an Iraqi Muslim man and a Trinidadian Presbyterian woman and a Hindu grandfather.“ A new man for the times, he says, just before he sucks the air.
“My daughter is innocent, period.“
Today he is part of the lead story: “AG’s Office Fed Info in Ramlogan, Ramdeen Case.“ Anand Ramlogan is the former AG—a real gangster, says the immigrant critic—a political foe from the Indian UNC opposition. Chiefly, AG Ramlogan made a habit during his tenure of humiliating Al-Rawi, the more public the better. Now Ramlogan and UNC Senator Gerald Ramdeen stand accused of financial corruption. The AG denies revenge as a motive for the indictments. Then he makes the face of steel resolve for the camera.
Ramlogan and Ramdeen are undoubtedly guilty. So are they all. A culture of grift thrives here, and it permeates the highest levels of government. Many say it hardened and metastasized after the 1990 coup, but lawlessness has a long tradition on this remote outpost, as Carnival colorfully reminds us. It was because of the renegade sailors and fugitives, not the capitans or Su Majestad, that they called this place the Port of the Spaniards.
Take a deep breath.
Across the Gulf of Paria, it gets worse. More than a thousand refugees on boats have been blocked from leaving port at Guiria, Venezuela, by TT Coast Guard this week, as molotov cocktails confront kalashnikovs on the streets of Caracas. My Veni friends here have not heard from family back home. They talk about sending money, they talk about sleepless nights, they talk about rescue.
This is the third time since January that Guaido has tried to take power and failed, making it more likely he will never become interim president. Maduro must inevitably fall, but the military junta controls the country and always has—the oil, the drugs, the weapons, the money—and they are only further emboldened by weak civil leadership. Meanwhile, Trumpty Dump accuses the Cubans, Putin plays therapist to Maduro, and Guaido pleads for 6.2 million dollars. This will not be enough for the Generalisimos. Not nearly enough.