That headline is a made-up word, the blending of “gullible” and “vertiginous.”
“Gullible” meaning easily fooled and “vertiginous” meaning an inclination towards frequent and often pointless change.
What’s the point of this hybrid? To highlight a national condition, although not unique to us, which strangles any attempt at real progress and which, worryingly, wraps its tentacles suffocatingly around the many variations of media.
Take the local football scene as case in point. Why football again? Because it is not just the country’s most popular sport but, as it involves so many of us at almost every strata of society, it best reflects the level of disconnect where we--as has happened over and over again for decades—talk impressively about shooting for the stars while the fuel for that challenging journey is allowed to leak out of rusted, dilapidated storage tanks.
Look at the complete mess that is the 2024 Secondary Schools Football League season and ask yourself who, whether it’s the parents, teachers, school officials or SSFL administrators, emerges with any credit from this debacle?
Why not include the students too? Because they are just that-- students, or at least they are supposed to be. They are the pawns in this perennial game of manipulation where the culture of corruption never changes even if the names of the culprits occasionally do.
As befits an environment addicted to masquerade, we have a professional league that is anything but, except that an obsession with posturing prevents us from owning up to the reality that this thing has been on life-support from its inception, relying almost entirely on government handouts (another national pastime) and unable to attract any proper, long-term corporate support for one simple fact: the administration of football in Trinidad and Tobago, at all levels, is defined by corruption and incompetence in an almost 50-50 split, just like our politics.
Obviously football is not alone in this regard. In fact, the one downside of the cricket season just ahead of us in our local coaching academy is that every Sunday morning I get to hear of experiences, again with children as the ultimate victims, which seriously question the notion that mankind, at least the Trini version, is inherently good.
But this where we, meaning the media, should not just ask but insist upon proper responses to uncomfortable questions and not shrink in the face of either intimidating or smooth-talking public personalities. And if those personalities flatly refuse to respond, sure in the knowledge that a don’t-care-damn culture like ours will allow them to get away Scot free, then at the very least it is our duty to constantly remind the public of the valid questions which remain unanswered.
Take this first payment by the Sport Company to the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association, which we now know to be the TT$ equivalent of US$2 million, for the 2026 World Cup qualifying campaign.
When this was first announced two months ago, there was no reference to the two million being in US$. Because this is public money, will we get a precise breakdown of how much is going where? Apparently the balance (50 per cent) of the US$2 million will be paid next year.
But what happens if Trinidad and Tobago are eliminated after the games at home to St Kitts and away to Costa Rica in June? Will be the balance be paid? If yes, where will it go?
And this is where the role of the media, as compromised and as imperfect as we are, is so relevant. As someone who was the manager of the sports desk at the Guardian newspapers (not because of experience or ability but because I was too ambitious to realise I was being exploited) in the heady days of 1989 when the “Road to Italy” dominated everything, I was as guilty as anyone else of avoiding the uncomfortable questions—and there were plenty—because I was caught up in the euphoria of the experience.
But instead of offering up a media version of Desmond Carty’s “All ah we t’ief!” from 1986, we should reaffirm to at least attempt to do our jobs properly by holding all to account, starting with ourselves, and especially in matters close to our hearts, which is why the decision-makers should explain Joshua Regrello being named Express Youth of the Year for 2024 for a performance two weeks after the deadline for submissions.
This business is not about accepting public utterances carte blanche and then scrolling through social media for reactions, whether it is from a politician, TTFA, TTCB or even Pan Trinbago, whose triumphalism over Regrello’s performance, unfortunately endorsed via an editorial, takes doltishness to a whole new level.
To shy away from scepticism is to remain gullible and content with a vertiginous experience. In a (made-up) word: Gulliginous.
SOURCE: T&T Express