As with invoking "the reason for the season," the greeting-card wish for a "happy and holy Christmas" has always sounded like a rhetorical overreach.
It seems a change is gonna come this year, now that people are vowing to fall on their knees over coming days, in prayer for Prime Minister Patrick Manning. Once again, at time of writing, the man has come out on top, triumphantly surviving yet another crisis in his physical and his political life, the latter of which had just looked, in opinion polls, at least as threatened, as had the former in Cuban hospital scans.
Even before he entered the operating theatre in Havana, Mr Manning had a lot going for him. Suggestive of a medical Jeffery Ross, the English race-form expert, bowtied local urologist Dr Lall Sawh rated the Prime Minister's chances highly, because of his "positive" attitude. On the day before, the celebrated patient called up Energy Minister and PNM chairman Conrad Enill to talk government business and politics. He emerged on Thursday strong enough to call Cabinet colleagues from his hospital bed, and, so they reported, to announce: "I accept all the prayers which Trinidad and Tobago has sent my way." The power of T&T prayer was getting all the credit for a successful operation.
Advanced medical proficiency has been demonstrated, to Mr Manning's and T&T's benefit, in facilities provided by a formally atheist communist republic. In a precious irony, such Cuban accomplishment is already being underplayed, relative to the efficacy of prayers for divine intercession this far south in the Caribbean chain. To note this is to run the risk of being condemned as unduly impious, even faithless, inside this godful state of Trinidad and Tobago. What the hell! Over the pre-surgery days, favours were being urgently and confidently besought of an impressive array of deity figures and religious traditions.
"I strongly believed that our prayers penetrated the spiritual realm," said Pundit Mukram Sirju, "and we got the breakthrough we were hoping for."
Such testimony by a Hindu cleric found loud echoes among lay practitioners of politics, and holders of various PNM-administration day jobs. At a Woodford Square prayer meeting, SWMCOL executive chairman Ray Brathwaite spoke in the capacity of "adviser" to the Archbishop Council of the National Congress of Incorporated Baptists. A body, just then, hardly distinguishable from Cepep, it had embarked on 14 days of prayer.
Referring to signs of early recovery, the adviser warned that Mr Manning's Cuban surgeons could just have got it wrong. "We're not taking that risk," he said, reaffirming a sustained programme to "render all spiritual assistance." From San Fernando, Senator-Minister and Manning constituency chairman Tina Gronlund-Nunez spoke from the centre of another prayer circle: "We believe that prayer had a big impact on the outcome."
Social pieties
Eighteen years ago, when another sitting prime minister faced mortal danger in the Red House, the recourse to prayer was also notable. The prayers and well-wishings then, however, significantly avoided reference to an ANR Robinson who had been shot and wounded by insurgents, and stricken near-blind by glaucoma. Lively political bias was, and is, neither dispelled nor diminished by people closing their eyes, joining their palms and bowing their heads.
As one comparable in age to Mr Manning, I take a clinical and sympathetic interest in his condition. I also note his comparative advantage in treatment options and in prayerful attention. Personal liabilities are to be kept separate from my professional estimate of the lasting impact of the political mobilisation of prayers and social pieties. An aggressive platform of social pieties is already emerging. Attitudes of overkill expressed in proposed tobacco legislation must be taken together with Mr Manning's moralistic prejudice against casino and lottery gambling.
Liquor is also quietly being targeted. Stealthily this year, Sports Minister Gary Hunt had sought to ban liquor advertising in the National Stadium, even though beer companies here and abroad are major sponsors of sports. Holding up chutney lyrics such as "rum till I die," and soca-parang themes about "drinking ink, anything," a rising teetotallers' alliance is threatening to expand influence and political clout.
The constituency defined by prayer and piety could well, if not sternly challenged, develop into a born-again, prohibitionistic crusade, ostensibly dedicated to somebody's (guess who) notions of moral purity and "healthy lifestyles." For fear of the howling-down, hardly anyone speaks up for the adult right of choice to drink a rum; to gamble on a roulette or wappie table, on Play Whe or Lotto; and to smoke a cigarette, even in one's own private space.
Meanwhile, propaganda amplifies to paint harmless, even life-enriching, practices in nefarious hues, and to propose ever more restrictions. What used to be an underground, teeth-grinding, rage against, say, selling liquor in licensed places at the UWI campus, now awaits the upsurge of a movement of prayer and social piety. It appears to me the potential leadership for such a movement is alive and well. Indeed, it now stands to be exalted with the hero-survivor's charisma of a Patrick Manning, once again on the physical and political rebound.