A nothing burger

Maybe I had not been paying attention, but this expression—“a nothing burger” – was not something I had heard before it was raised in American politics recently. However, it so beautifully describes what life – social, professional and governance – has become: grand anticipations for revelations which turn out to be nothing of consequence. Nothing to bite into, nothing to taste, nothing to chew upon, just a phrase to capture the disappointment of grabbing and biting at nothing.

On first hearing it, relative to the secret, allegedly explosive “memos” Americans are sharing, I was reminded of an old dog we were keeping, while the owners were away. Our then young children were playing “keep-ups” with a balloon on the lawn. Bracken, a very large Golden Labrador, watched for a while, then joyfully leapt into the air and snatched the balloon. When he came down, he just sat on the lawn, a strand of burst balloon hanging from each side of his jaw, with an utterly forlorn and disappointed expression on his face. He had just bitten into a nothing burger. I just did not know how to describe the event. Now I do!

And “nothing burgers” come to mind as I try to decide what I should write about for this Dimanche Gras Sunday, this quiet, contemplative, hung-over eye-of-the-storm between Panorama and J’Ouvert. And this is not because of a lack of topics upon which to vent, for the floods of failures, scandals and blood continue all around us. But, today, who cares? You sipping coffee or orange juice, your head still ringing with the sounds of “iron” from the time you spent in some engine room on the drag last night, you have to recover and be in condition to smear yourself with blue grease to play J’Ouvert before dawn tomorrow, where you risk arrest if you do not get permission to wine on that.... well, you get the picture, I hope.

Under such conditions you do not need to open your Newsday this morning and try to wrap your head around the fact that our purportedly new Tobago ferry is due to set sail for TT on Ash Wednesday (not a good portent, I suggest), or that we will never have a new commissioner of police, or our soaring murder rate, or the highway controversies, or anything!

And these are, of course, all important topics worthy of discussion. Not only worthy, but meaty, juicy and spicy, like those great big, multi-layered burgers we see on television. And indeed easier to write about than trying to create a theme for your nothing burger this morning.

So I decided to lighten up this morning, and try to stay away from controversial or vexatious matters which might force you to think about our politics or our chronic failures, or anything except your recovery in order to be able to grease up, wine up and jump up tomorrow morning. Many of us used to go to the beach, to “take a soak in the salt” for recovery on this Sunday. But Maracas Bay is now a sewerage swamp, flooded all through the snack bars and toilets with filthy water, so we cannot go there today, nor on Ash Wednesday I suggest.

And do we need to mourn the fact that the once wondrous Dimanche Gras has also faded into a nothing burger? You will see hundreds of empty seats in the Grand and North Stands if you watch the event on television. Calypso has died, smothered by uninspired and uninspiring supercharged Soca.

There is neither wit nor meaningful social commentary, and audiences are probably happier with the contestants’ childish side show pantomimes than with the actual renditions. Costumes, formerly worn by contestants in the Kings and Queens categories are now structures set on wheels, pulled along by the mas’ players. I mean, an ass, a donkey, could be used to pull a wheeled “costume” across the stage? And all of this is underlined by the absent audiences, empty seats in the stands and no limers on the track.

Change must occur, but if the changes attract fewer patrons each year, then are these the changes that we need? I accept that the frenzied “road” music and the bare bikini mas’ are popular, if relatively boring innovations. The crowds are jumping! But can anyone jumping, or watching, describe any Band’s theme, far less costumes, from year to year? Or sing the Road March tunes?

Still, this is the beat, and those are the costumes which energize and free up more revellers in the streets than ever before. But to every mas’, Ash Wednesday must come. And our Prime Minister has summoned his (our?) cabinet to an Ash Wednesday meeting to decide what it is they are going to give us for Lent.

More nothing burgers?