A modest Vene pickney proposal

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

WHEN UNPATRIOTIC newspapers like Newsday splash pictures of tiny, rain-soaked children crying in their mothers’ arms across page one, it can only lead to misunderstanding of the Government’s decision to send women and children back to Venezuela in open pirogues.

Such emotive images obscure the hard truths with which our own government is so admirably grappling.

First, TT is virtually at war, not just with covid19, but with a possibly terrorist group with the sinister title of “the Organisation of American States.” As the Prime Minister pointed out in a very carefully-worded official statement, “the OAS under its misguided President Almagro has been almost singlehandedly responsible for triggering and fuelling the Venezuelan situation and...have virtually declared war on (TT for not joining) President Trump in forcing violent regime change in Venezuela.”

Rowley also revealed that “nameless faceless people armed with innocent children” were trying to force this “little island nation of 1.3 million people…(with) a next door neighbour of 34 million people” to “prise open our borders to every economic migrant, gun runner, drug dealer, human trafficker and South American gang leader/members.”

Rowley’s statement was as defensible as any statement made by Donald Trump regarding Mexican rapists, caravans of criminals from South America and all Muslims, everywhere. But the international politics do not change the reality that this local situation requires a bold solution.

Luckily, a historical precedent applies squarely.

During the 1792 famine in Catholic Ireland, Jonathan Swift made his famous Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen on Their Parents or Country and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

The poor, Swift argued, could simply sell their over-numerous babies to wealthier people.

To eat.

“I believe no gentleman would repine,” Swift wrote, “to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good fat child…” A 24lb baby could “make four dishes of excellent, nutritive meat,” “two dishes at an entertainment for friends” and the “fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish and, seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day.”

Our government of an “island nation of 1.3 million people” clearly cannot allow in 34 million “gang leader/members;” but, equally clearly, we lack the resources to repatriate them safely.

And PM Rowley has admitted that the Venes in Trinidad are here to stay.

Now, obviously, we could not, today, suggest that Venezuelan babies be sold as food. Even arepas.

Times have changed.

But not so much as to deny my own Modest Proposal for Preventing the Teenage Children of Venezuelan Refugees from Being a Burthen on Their Parents or This Small Island TT Country of 1.3 million.

All Vene parents have to do is sell their teenage children to wealthier Trinidadians – and every Trinidadian, even our sufferers, is, relatively, far wealthier than any Vene – to be used as sex slaves.

We know that “it have nothing” any Trini man will pay a higher price for than a “clear-skin ho.”

We know both boys and girls would sell. Fast.

And we know that a society that is untroubled by babies being sent to sea in open boats could not care less about adolescents being pimped out.

Ex-specially if them wearing G-string.

We would have a minor historical challenge to overcome in that we are still ourselves traumatised by our own 187-year-old memories of African slavery, which dehumanised every one of us, regardless of which end of the whip we were on (and though, clearly, there was a better end).

But, luckily, Trinidadians, especially, will throw out any moral principle if bum-bum involved.

And we dismiss outright, unconsidered and unhesitatingly any argument against the sexualisation of children, whether expressed in the Hindu or Muslim Marriage Acts or in the aphorism that, “after 12 is lunch!”

I end as Swift did, professing “no other motive than the publick good of my country, by relieving the poor and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being (20) years old, and my wife past child-bearing.”

BC Pires esta muy enojado con este mierda. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com