The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

“The Monkey Song” is a once popular calypso about a frustrated gentleman who couldn’t seem to shake a monkey off his back. He tries and tries but every sound he makes, every move he takes the monkey mimics him. (You can hear it by Googling Blind Blake and the Royal Victoria Calypsos).

This song came to mind recently when trying to digest another incoherent rant from William Arthur Branville McCartney, founder of the DNA and a man who wants us to see him as a prime minister in waiting.

The mercurial Mr. McCartney beat up his gum with the pure fiction about a First Lady of the Bahamas. “Everything I do, the monkey wan do.”

For starters, there can be no such thing as a First Lady in a monarchy. The Bahamas is a monarchy where the head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, represented here by the Governor General. It would surely be impertinent to refer to the Sovereign as a First Lady. Her Majesty would not be amused. When the Sovereign is a King, no one would think to call him the First Gentleman.

In the Bahamas there is no official role for the wife (or husband) of the Prime Minister. Protocol dictates that the wife of our current Prime Minister is officially addressed as Mrs. Bernadette Christie, wife of the Prime Minister. Never First Lady.

First Lady is a term associated with the United States, a Federal Republic where the President is both the Head of State and the Head of Government.

They won their independence over 240 years ago. British culture and traditions may have been rejected at that time but it was still the prevailing custom and so when George Washington became the country’s first president his wife Martha was referred to as Lady Washington, in keeping with the nomenclature of that time. It was meant as a sign of respect.

John Quincy Adams’ wife Abigail was referred to as Lady Adams; Mrs. James Madison was called Lady Madison. Dolly Madison was so good at social affairs in Washington that at her funeral in 1848 President Zachary Taylor gave her eulogy in which he praised her social graces and called her the “first lady of our land”.

The Americans outside of elite Washington D.C. circles didn’t much like the term first lady. They had just fought a war to eject the British and felt that the term “lady” sounded too much like the royal titles they had renounced.

Terms like Presidentress and Mrs. President were used instead when the President had a wife in the White House. Because Presidents like Thomas Jefferson (whose wife had died) and James Buchanan (who was a bachelor) had no wives, their unmarried nieces or daughters stood in and could hardly have been called Mrs.

A newspaper coined the term “First Lady of the White House” to refer to Buchanan’s niece and the name stuck. But it was not universally liked. As recently as 1961 John F. Kennedy’s wife Jacqueline Kennedy bristled at being called First Lady saying it sounded like a name for a racehorse.

None of this occurs to people like Bran who believe, quite erroneously, that the Bahamas has a first lady. If we did, then surely it would be the wife of the Governor General when the office holder is a man. Curiously, our current GG is a widow, and this particular Lady is a Dame, thank you very much.

It is typical of our propensity for mimicking American culture without appreciating our own. The Canadians call their Prime Minister’s wife, Mrs. Justin Trudeau, to be formal, or Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau to be professional, never First Lady of Canada, which she isn’t.

Bran has a duty to be on the right side of this subtle point of order. He knows (or ought to know) better and if he wants to be a leader of an independent Bahamas then he must not be subsumed by the dominant culture in our neighbourhood, no matter how tempting.

The trouble is some prime ministers (the PLP ones) flout this Republican nonsense by acting as if they preside over a presidential system of government. One Prime Minister even wanted his own standard so he could fly it next to the Governor General’s.

The Governor General, as befitting her office in our monarchy has an official standard that traces its origin back to the Royal Standard and is used with consent of Her Majesty.

The current Prime Minister likes to rush about in motorcades with hordes of police outriders, flags fluttering on the hood of his car. Again this is the bastardization of the protocol to fit the ego and the vanity of the office holder.

The official cars of Government House have a crown on the license plate for a reason. They belong to the Sovereign who in turn assents to their exclusive use by her Governor General. The GG commands the armed and protective forces and it is she that the motorcades and outriders must protect, not a mere politician who just happens to be the preferred or “prime” minister of the woman in whose name he forms a government.

Because we haven’t cut this nonsense off at the head we see the foolishness take place elsewhere, no doubt driving the nation’s civics teachers to madness.

We have the First Commoner of the land, aka, the Speaker of the House of Assembly referring to matters “across the aisle”. This comes straight out of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and has no standing in our system.

In our tradition there is a “floor” between the government and the opposition in parliament (not aisle) with the government on the right of the Speaker and the opposition on the left. A member is said to “have the floor” when speaking and to have “crossed the floor” when he leaves his party and joins the other side. The floor is also sometimes referred to as “the green carpet”.

Our culture is already under attack by the inundation of American hegemony. We see it in the movies, on TV, in the press and in our interaction with the millions of American tourists who come here each year.

Let’s not devalue our rich history and culture by mimicking everything the Americans do. A Bahamian TV news presenter recently started off with “this Thanksgiving morning … ” Since when do we celebrate Thanksgiving? And is Black Friday now more important than our historic Black Tuesday?

There must be some things the monkey just won’t do.

THE GRADUATE

Nassau,

November 29, 2016.