The Tribune

By DR IAN BETHELL-BENNETT

We have stepped into a period in our history where almost everything we do is known shortly after doing it.

The internet has provided access to all kinds of information and entertainment, which has been augmented by social media. Everything is posted somewhere online.

This has created conflicts in society. We see all these honourable men behaving badly and then claiming to be victims of incomprehensible smear campaigns. This bad behaviour and national pappy show crosses blue, yellow and red lines. They appear in videos that grace social media and show them behaving engaged in nation building. They then defend those videos and the organisers. They claim that Bahamians are less good, less worthy than high net worth foreigners who frolic with them in their play lands.

Men behaving badly has become a national pastime. From joking and laughing about beating women to boasting about being untouchable. We have entered a phase of national development where public officials behave worse than most other citizens, and even more reprehensibly than many criminals.

They then cry that a small group of people are being unfair to them and they are trying to do their best. They throw rocks and run and hide; they do not expect anything they do or say to be consequential. They expect that if they do say something and it is recorded, they can simply say they didn’t say it – “It wasn’t me” – and all shall be forgotten and they will march on to glory. However, glory has checks and balances.

What we are seeing nationally and internationally is a deterioration in decency and respectability, in honour and honesty.

As someone said the other day, honesty is overrated. When governments become so corrupt that they cannot remember their last lie nor how to distinguish it from their first fib, how do they really expect a country to develop?

They beat the Bible to death but don’t act accordingly. They know the verses of the Bible that serve their purposes - they must be honoured and obeyed - yet they conveniently leave out the rest. At the same time, they berate their colleagues and the common man for bringing the nation down, and they hold their heads high and cast aspersions on all the poor young men with whom they claim allegiance in the streets but deny knowledge of in public. They bring their generals in to protect them and encourage their will to be served at all levels of society with whatever fallout their desires may have.

We live in a period where irresponsible masculinity is revered. Men are not held accountable for any of their actions. It is much like pregnancy. When a young woman becomes pregnant she alone is to blame. There was no male participation in this game. It is so interesting that these same men will boast afterwards about having x number of children, but do nothing to support any of them. This is the reality of irresponsible masculinity.

The lessons of irresponsible masculinity have been well learnt from slavery and colonialism, where those in power operated above the law yet walked with the Bible in one hand and the whip in the other. They held the law books, the keys to the city and the economic wherewithal to destroy and build any society; they thought nothing of moving the players around a board, as if humanity mattered nothing and life was but a game where they chose not to get caught, and if they eventually did get caught one of their underlings would be charged and hanged in their stead.

Those days are in the past, hidden in the history books of a colony that cannot read; those characters dead and gone. Today we simply have a bunch of men who mark their territory, sell it to the lowest bidder and bring shame and dishonour into their homes and laugh when we talk about gender-based violence and the equality of women.

Why would a woman need equality, they smirk, when she can so easily follow her husband to his country?

As the crazy season heats up, our honourable leaders flex their honourable big and small muscles and stick out their chests and behave badly. They show that they are the kings of the sandpit and that they can piss further than anyone else and expect it not to blow back in their faces. They teach lessons to a community of young men who see only their bad deeds as things to emulate. They say that men are heads of households, beaters of women and performers of illegal acts, but take no responsibility for any of their actions. Their brand of masculinity means that they are not accountable to anyone, but they hold everyone accountable to them.

This reads like a story of 19th century sexploitation, only the drama is very current and the backdrop is paradise.

• By Dr Ian Bethell-Bennett, bethellbennett@gmail.com