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​High Noon for Democracy, BC


LIFE IMITATES ART in the rest of the world but, in Trinidad, life imitates Westerns. No matter how bad things get, a Trini audience or electorate just knows that, in the last reel, either the cavalry or Kamla will ride een to save the day, a faith unshaken no matter how many times they’ve voted for that party or seen that movie and know footy-well that it’s always the bandits that turn up in the end, to rape anything still breathing and loot the corpses.

But this week I’m thinking my own life imitates Westerns completely.
On Tuesday morning, as the Grand Old Neo-Nazi Party began sizing up the US midterm elections for its potential for American Kristallnacht, I entered the cancer ward at St James for my fourth chemo blast; if that’s not a scene straight out of High Noon or Shootout at the OK Corral, it’ll do until one arrives, as Cormac McCarthy would say.
Maggot Republicans and chemo are persistent, like hatred, and have similar side effects. My pre-surgery chemo cycles comprised four 24-hour infusions, with two weeks in-between each, a schedule allowing just enough time to begin to lose the taste of lead pipe from your coffee before the next blast shovels iron filings back into everything; I’ve had betrayals from old friends that left a better taste in my mouth.
The chemo itself is as abrasive as it is invasive. You feel it enter your bloodstream as the hot alien liquid chemical it is and often see it, too, as black marks on your skin. If you forget, fleetingly, the dread taste, a chemo burp will remind you; it’s easy to imagine this stuff killing everything in its path, like the Russian army, or clinging to and incinerating everything it touches, like napalm.
And tell me the Republicans in the USA weren’t doing the same thing to democracy that FLOT was doing to my tumour on Tuesday.
Hundreds of maggot Republican election-deniers are likely to win. Not even in Nazi Germany did they so openly boast of their evil intent. There is nothing like hate emboldened.
You only have to look at the images of my tumour or any photo of their figurehead – grotesque, fat-arsed, fatheaded, stupid, proudly ignorant, self-obsessed, hoggish, hateful and emotionless – to understand why people never twig that their cause is evil. Maggot Republicans are as much of a cancer to democracy as the adenocarcinoma in my gullet is to me.
But I have chemo.
And the promise of surgery.
They have the conviction that American Hitler was sent by God.
I hope you never find out firsthand how chemo works but you spend two to three days physically tied by a plastic tube in your arm to something that looks like a mini-cash register on a mobile rack. (I am literally getting mine in the neck, my chemo going straight into my jugular vein via a port attached to my clavicle.) For 48 to 72 hours, chemicals are pumped into you. You spend hours shuffling from your hospital bed to the toilet, to empty the bladder that never stops being refilled with mostly toxic liquid. You go to sleep and wake up attached to the pump. It rarely happens but, if you turn too roughly in your sleep and the needle comes out, you can wake up soaked in your own blood.
And, worst thing, you’re always watching the bag, hoping it will empty with the next drip and not the 19 hours 37 minutes the monitor plainly shows.
For two or three days, chemo takes over every part of your circulatory system. It kills everything it touches, like Trump, including everything good in you. And the price you pay for getting rid of the cancer, if you’re lucky, is you’re entirely defenceless against the slightest infection borne on the wind. A flu could lay you low. Or out.
Tell me that doesn’t sound like the madness we witnessed on Tuesday (even if it wasn’t as awful as it could have been).
On Tuesday, I felt like the sheriff standing alone in the high street as the gang of murderous outlaws descended on my town: my cancer and my civilisation going mano-a-mano on the same day.
And the whole audience knowing there can be only one winner.
High noon.
Shots ring out.
There’s a long wait between the ricochet and the body falling over.
And only then do you find out who got it between the eyes.

BC Pires is the Man with No Name for This Kind of Evil

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