BILL MAHER, probably America’s most famous atheist, must have mixed emotions today: on his first week of holiday from Real Time until next January’s new HBO television season, the world throws up – it is the apposite verb – a religious human interest story into which Bill Maher could have sank his secular figuaritve teeth: in deeply pious rural India, a teenaged girl died literally because she was a teenaged girl born into an Indian form of mumbo-jumbo.

A Coda to Ainsley & the Snails

Hard to say which was a more Trinidadian moment: last Saturday’s fatal ploughing into a group of cyclists by a motorist (probably, allegedly) considering only his own momentary driving advantage; or the question put to the (white) president of the Arrive Alive road safety pressure group, that, if it were brown or black people who’d been killed, not white folks, nobody would care.

No surprise that, 100 years after, World War I should dominate European minds when, closer to 200 years after Emancipation, our own attitudes to race & colour in Trinidad remain the ones forged– no, the ones we were branded with – on the plantation.

I would be a hypocrite to fault TV6’s Fazeer Mohammed for asking a race-based question: in 2006, despite my editor Keith Smith’s repeated direction not to raise it at all, the first question I asked pan legend, Andy Narell (who probably comes from Belmont as much as Brooklyn), was, “So, what’s it like, being a white boy come to play pan in Trinidad?” (It’s a reflection of Andy Narell’s dignity and decency that he answered the most shameful question I’ve ever asked.)

YOU FLING YOUR SOUL as you throw the dice on a last-ditch bet, chancing the children’s school fees against the mortgage payment and the Christmas presents, and you hold your breath, waiting for those little cuboid firetruckers to bounce off the wall; two or three seconds as long as forever when everything is riding on them; you don’t have to go to Vegas to know an everything-or-nothing risk is never a thrill for anyone but Maverick.

You brace yourself for sevens or craps and you remind yourself, perforce, of how little you need, in truth; but you will always forget, except at these heavy little moments, when you watch those dice like a month in jail, and you’re praying for everything… but your gut has already told you you’re going to come up with nothing.

Expecting either redemption or condemnation of the human spirit in the American mid-term elections next Tuesday, today’s column is in the form of a longer-than-usual entry in my spoof Secret Diary of Donald J Trump, aged 75 and 3/4. I hope you enjoy it; just don’t ask me how Fat Nixon heard about Trinidadian rock ‘n’ roll band jointpop’s Popography gig at Kaiso Blues tomorrow night. The entries in my spoof diary have headlines of their own, as in:

Northward, Hos! Come Out of Mexico and I’ll Kick Your Greasy Butts All the Way to Canada!

Deerest Dairy

I’m not the praying kind – more like the PREYING kind, LOL, PREY not PRAY, geddit, Dairy? God, I’m so smartly – but I’ll only PREY on nines or tens BUT NOT STORMY THE LIAR who work UNDER me and understand I AM THE RIDER in their contract – because, like, who would I PRAY to? Even if there was somebody more biglier than me SORRY, BUT NOT EVEN YOU, VLADDIE DEEREST – you only have to compare the hottie Ivanka and that other daughter or look at poor Eric to know for absolutely positivity that there could not be a God. Imagine having a handsome studly like me for a dad, many people are saying I’m the bestliest-looking man, not just in America AMERICA FIRST AMERICA FIRST AMERICA FIRST and the world but in all history, and who can deny a fact NOW THAT IS REAL NEWS but imagine having a tremendous terrific man like ME for a father… and looking like their mothers!!!! Why do you think I didn’t name Eric after me, Deer Dairy? Firstborn son, yes, but ugly-born, too, poor little guy. Didn’t even let him be on The Apprentice for, like, lots of seasons. You have to think of your ratings first AMERICA FIRST MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN.