A distaste of Carnival

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

IT WAS exceedingly difficult to tell the difference between National Carnival Commission chairman Winston “Gypsy” Peters’s media conference launching today’s “Taste of Carnival” and that video of the British Airways jet aborting its landing in disastrously high winds at Heathrow Airport; but the jet pilot probably managed to stick a better landing than Gypsy (although the old calypsonian/newish NCC chair just might have taken the crown if he’d spun around, thrown the mic from hand to hand, struck a kaiso pose and belted out a couple of verses, extempore).

A Taste of Carnival, for the uninformed (which, on the day, included chairman Gypsy, who wasn’t sure whether the budget for the event he was launching was $25 million or $30 million) is not going to be a normal Carnival but what the TT PM labelled “a Carnival microcosmic mosaic with a difference.”

Whatever the firetruck that is.

The main difference would seem to be that Carnival generates a huge amount of rubbish and a taste of it is itself a small pile of rubbish.

Most people have seen A Taste of Carnival’s defining image: the paved portion of the Savannah covered with scores of miniature boxing rings, all open to the sky (to allow Tasters of Carnival to bake or soak at nature’s whim).

If you’ve seen every Carnival image, from Minshall through moko jumbie to man-sleeping-off-a-drunk-in-the-middle-of-a-car-park-on-Ash-Wednesday, you’d still not file the NCC’s rows of tiny boxing rings under “Carnival;” except as a Taste of Bizzarro-World Carnival.

You just couldn’t imagine drunken Trinis holding on to the fences around their “cluster group” boxing rings, à la big truck, to bus’ a wine. Gypsy declared there would be ’nuff security to ensure people who left their pods to go to the toilet politely maintained proper covid19 distance from all other pods.

On social media Trinidadians have already filled the pods with children looking for “a taste of school” or goats and sheep expecting a taste of currying.

The MC at the end of the media launch bent over backwards and limboed to stress the pods had nothing to do with him at-all-at all-at-all but were the brainchild (presumably recognised as stillborn) of the chairman. On hearing the pods being attributed to him, Gypsy sprinted back from off-camera quick-quick to reopen the launch to underline that the pods weren’t his idea either, but one he stole from Canada.

And you know how wild those Canucks get.

Normally, when you can’t see the point of a Trinidadian government policy, and you see its representatives distancing themselves from it, the oldest rule applies: follow the money; and one suspects (and so do I) that this isolated Carnival pod idea’s main purpose is to isolate some Treasury funds in someone’s bank account pod.

Even for an imagination that only needs to mention Selma Hayek and a bottle of baby oil to get going, it’s difficult to see why Trinis would leave their own galleries at home, which have roofs, and inside toilets, to go the Carnival City isolation-in-public pods; and what they would do when they got there, beyond bake in the sun and wish they were allowed to party in public.

The icing on a cake already deeply layered in irony is that all Carnival City events are theoretically paid ones, raising the distinct possibility that there will be more workers than patrons at every event.

Reading stiltedly from a speech written by a public service speech-writer II (which he clearly had not seen until it was handed to him on his way to the mic), Gypsy said A Taste of Carnival was an “unprecedented attempt at creating history” that would demonstrate we could “be trusted to…enjoy ourselves responsibly.”

If a single Trinidadian was ever seen to have enjoyed himself responsibly in any way, you can be sure of one of two things: 1. He is really a Bajan; or 2. He is not really having a good time.

Indeed, Gypsy may well have been better advised to abort his landing on this Taste of Carnival airstrip. The best hope of A Taste of Carnival is that it repeats on everyone who samples it as a burp.

And not from the opposite end of the digestive tract.

BC Pires has a distaste for firetruckery. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com