Games People Play

“Oh the games people play now

Every night and every day now

Never meaning what they say now

Never saying what they mean.”

Lyrics by Joe South

As a child my uncle would sit all his nieces and nephews in a golden circle flickering with only the glow of an experienced kerosene lamp.  Moving hypnotically and speaking in the entrancing whisper of a character from some ladybird book, he would awe our childish stares with magical card tricks.  Even now as I think back, the elaborate Celtic patterns on the red underside of the stiff deck of cards would add to the entertaining deception and sleight of hand which would distract us from the fact that our parents were miles away.

But as the shadows bent and contorted on the exposed wooden studs and we became older, each of the card tricks was exposed. It was almost as if the attention starved crickets busy in the cilantro patch  spitefully celebrated that their encoded chirpings had finally been ciphered, tell-a-tale bastards!!.

But it did become old. As each summer passed, we became more fascinated with the uneven black soot on the rim of the glass chimney of the lamp and the final glimpses of odd shadows it would cast before we fell asleep on our sponges than the tricks.

The last card trick was one where he would shuffle the deck of cards poorly then give one of us the deck of cards to shuffle. This task was done with frantic thoroughness confident that it would disrupt the trickery which was lurking impishly somewhere in the mystical techniques.  Next he would invite another child to pick a card from somewhere in the middle, while convincingly arguing that the end cards were too easy to track.

He would then ask my cousin to replace the card on one of the half decks he held in each hand, sternly warning not to let him see what it was and turning his head while admonishing him to look at his card carefully and protect it.  The card once replaced and confidently tagged in the memory on my cousin would be shuffled by my uncle, after which he would flip over the cards until he miraculously pointed out the very same card my cousin had drawn earlier.

See what it was, was a simple game of misdirection, he knew we desperately wanted the thrill of being tricked and he knew we could be baited into a fixation on protecting the card he instructed us to guard. But that was not his focus, the key in the trick was not the card we had but really it was the card before it, the “duppy card”, which he controlled and which he took note of while he was pressuring us to not be fooled or distracted from the security of the target card.  He would identify the target card easily by singling out the card immediately following the duppy card improperly shuffled before it.

Beautiful misdirection it was, because it sold the trick so well, we were engaged in the process so it had to be foolproof. Yes, subliminally we knew it was a trick and entertainment wise we almost wanted to be tricked but it had to be good somehow.  We needed it to be or boredom would kill us.

But, boss, misdirection and tricks are not games to be played when we have the Medusa of crime tapping our children on the shoulder. Di man di play games. If not cards, then his giveaway references to the newest puppet in the person of Bernard Quinton Augustus Pitts as a “backstop”, means that he di play baseball. You only have backstappa/katcha inna baseball, boss. My question then is, who di pitch?

Man, this whole thing is just bogus. This joker of a Prime Minister, after taking off the Alice in Wonderland panty hose of the Queen of Hearts, where he was saying “off with her head” to Zenaida, tried on the Emperor’s new clothes of a harebrained Cabinet Shuffle and Operation Restore.

I know I had asked for the UDP to wheel and come back with better names for their operations but I did not mean to spend all your time coming up with the balderdash acronym and no time on the substance of the thirteen page document which is the largest pile of juvenilia ever. Stop play boss!

Even Irice Reyes, who was the winner of the ISCR research competition which focused on finding solutions to the crime situation in Belize had a more comprehensive and credible submission. I swear, we need to track down Irice of Ecumenical Junior College because someone plagiarized or freeloaded off her paper and watered it down to that environmental waste of fourteen sheets of paper. Right, Mr. Encalada?

Back to the Barrow card shuffle. What kind of funny business is this to put Doug Singh as Minister of National Security and Pitts as his catcher in an AG costume? No tell me bout how he is just Minister of Police and Public Security, because the BDF only have bout three hundred man and half a dat di hunt jaguars in Belize City. Perdomo perdido everything, and was told that he like it!!

Crime is no carnival you know and Dough is sure to be a pansy on crime.

Deano is just playing games. He is not serious. Look pan di maths. In our constitutional democracy, ideally and as a rule of thumb, elected officials from the House make up the Cabinet. In fact, from my ruffling through the constitution only one ministerial post is specifically named for someone outside the elected members, and that is a qualified lawyer to temporarily fill the post of AG under certain conditions. In all other cases then where the appointment is via the Senate, that appointee must have some exceptional and specialized skill to justify short-circuiting the electoral process to bask on the beach enjoying Ministerial tanning.

Beg you a question boss…what credentials does Dougie have to justify his holding the hot potato portfolio of Police? Is he a known criminologist? A renowned social scientist? Retired Police Commissioner/Commandant? Nope. None of the above. He is just a UDP insider and Barrow “yes sah man”.

Where in his resume did it say ‘suitable to head police force?’ At least Carlito had been the ex-UDP CEO in that ministry and the qualified virtue of being an elected member of the House, he failed; now what does Dougie bring? This is a joke. What we have gotten is the superlative of bad!

But while we are unamused at Deano’s game of fifty-two card pick up, we realize that something is fishy. Why have a big ceremony to take the AG ministry from Sedi? After all the new AG is his roommate!  Come to think of it, really, is it not the case that Sedi ballsed up Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade more so than he did AG? Remember the Compromis, the Artificial border and the sleepovers with Israelis. What did he do in AG wrong?

Now if Deano mi serious, di bally mi wah appoint a well qualified foreign affairs specialist like  Ambassador Alfredo Martinez or the current advisor to the Ministry of  Foreign Affairs, Ambassador David Gibson to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Tek your pick, bald eagle!  Had he done so he could have left Sedi, who, is only for argument and comparative purposes better suited for the AG portfolio. Nope not Deano.

Look yah! Straight out of extreme left field, or rather from the pits comes a verbose geriatric to be AG.  Why? Why? Why? I read the transcript of the evening news over and over and then it hit me like the final scene of the 1995 blockbuster thriller “The Usual Suspects”.

This is what Deano says of BBQ: ”I think he will drive the process that will see us end up with a dedicated court for dealing with the violent crimes. I think he will drive the process that will see us get a more effective prosecution. I think he will drive …the judiciary about sentencing policies, I think he will drive the process… that will produce the legislative reform that is necessary to back stop what we want to do with the police department in particular.”

But what is more important, like the old card game trick is what he did not say. Now we all know that old boy Pitts is no legal luminary. Truth is no one has ever seen him go to the Court of Appeal or the Privy Council in all his donkey years as a lawyer. Come to think of it his appearances in the Supreme Court are as frequent as Citco fixing the streets.  One reporter noted that the last time this man did a civil case, his daughter could not even lift an egg to throw it.

Eureka. This is all about a woman. Do the maths… if you get an attorney who is virtually clueless in civil litigation and who is primarily a criminal attorney then you still have full control and full  justification to continue to leach off to Lice, fat government retainers.  The Pits is just the duppy card. The target card is Lice, by appointing the Pitts, Deano can continue to skim off million dollar cases to his ex-wife.

Put dat in your pipe and smoke it Belize!!!!  As Deano spoke I remembered a monologue of Alice as she gazed through the looking glass:  “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”

We might simple but wi no fool.

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