Imagine nation

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

THE INTERNET went dead in the southern Caribbean on Monday morning. From 8.30 am to 10.30 am, or so, WhatsApps didn’t send, e-mails didn’t arrive. CNN, YouTube, Netflix, newsday.co.tt and observer.guardian.co.uk all disappeared. Even local free-to-air CBC TV8 blanked out of the Bajan countryside.

My wife was out for the morning, the dogs were out cold in the warmth of the sun on the lawn.

It was so quiet.

I unplugged the cable box, plugged it back in. The screen said this channel was unavailable now.

So I unplugged myself.

I lay down on the gallery couch and picked up 1984, George Orwell’s timeless work that is now savagely timely. I’d saved the reread for until Trump had been voted out because the irony of reading it and living it would have been too great even for a man like me, who collects exquisite ironies like fine single malts.

On every page there is something you could post on Facebook and get 1K likes.

I opened the book at random and read an entry in Winston Smith’s diary: “Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere. Audience much amused…”

Another page: “Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday,” said Syme. “I was working,” said Winston, indifferently. “I shall see it on the flicks.” “A very inadequate substitute,” said Syme.”

My bookmarked page. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I thought of an American friend, a Trump supporter who posted, on Facebook, the outline of the Trump plan to steal the election through corrupt state legislatures, rogue electors and a fake election emergency to be resolved in Trump’s favour. I messaged him: you’re handing over to the FBI the evidence of a treason charge. He was angry with me, not with the man trying his incompetent best to subvert American democracy.

It was their final, most essential command.

It wasn’t so much a case of Big Brother watching him as him watching the Celebrity White House Apprentice.

Across the gully, the sugar cane arrows swayed in the fields, but the breeze brought not one sound to my ears.

A song crept through my mind.

Hello, Darkness, my old friend.

Behind me, in the living room, the TV came back on.

The Beeb, with a message for BC.

Something about John Lennon.

I turned to the screen.

The candlelight vigil after he’d been murdered outside the Dakota.

Forty years!

I was here, in Barbados, in Christ Church, booking a flight to Trinidad for the Christmas, when my friend Dave rang my landline from Cave Hill to tell me.

No internet then.

I opened Ecosia on my phone.

“John Lennon was murdered 40 years ago,” read the first item that came up. “Here are 14 fun facts you didn’t know about him!”

I thought of Wayne Brown, the father of the literary newspaper column in the West Indies, and of a line he used in a fine column about his near death and his final reconciliation with Trinidad, the best thing he ever wrote, for me. On his hospital bed in Cuba, after open heart surgery, coming out of the anaesthetic, he saw an English lesson for Cubans on the TV in his hospital room, the teacher using the lyrics of Lennon’s song, Imagine, for instruction. “You may say I’m a dreamer,” wrote Wayne, “Baddam nat the only one.”

If you want an exquisite irony, consider the murder, by a lunatic, of the man who wrote the words:

“Imagine there’re no nations/It’s not too hard to do/Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion, too.”

In America, one joker upended his meaning by changing, in a live performance, the last words to “and all religion is true.”

Is there nothing, you wonder, that cannot fly over their heads? How low do you have to bring it for them to see?

The bar is so low, it’s limboing in Hell.

You can count on two hands the congressional Republicans who have admitted that Trump lost the election.

You count Trump supporters by the multiples of millions; what percentage has fully rejected the evidence of their own eyes and ears and swallows the lies of Big Daddy Celebrity Apprentice?

I plugged in my earbuds, to search my iPod for Imagine, to listen, in his honour.

Pressed “play” accidentally.

“It’s a hard,” sang Bob Dylan, “It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.”

BC Pires is listening to Mercy Mercy Me. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com