by Colin Hyde
Way, way back, maybe in the first year of this column (2003), I wrote about a story that was in a comic book. There’s a lot of real life in comedy which you’ll miss if you get lost in the laughter. In the story, a very disgruntled guy (a politician, mayoral candidate who was rejected at the polls, and laughed at in the worst way) set about horrible revenge. He gets a device and chisels under a district in New York, I think Manhattan. He fills the cavity with foam, and then he hires a couple tugs, pulls Manhattan out to sea, and holds the borough for ransom. What a devil!
There are no little egos in these political gangs. The line of questioning when aspirants go before their respective ODS’s goes like this: What’s the extent of your hubris, how much do you feel you are God’s gift to the earth? How angry do you get when people don’t love you or kiss your blank? On a scale of 0 to 10, zero being humble and ten being God’s gift, you get any score less than 8 and you don’t get your pass. Aha, about the one rejected in Manhattan, as it is said, hell hath no fury like a politician whose big fat ego got bruised.
Stuttering is NOT a disability
By the time this piece is in print the results of the general election will be known, which is okay with me, because its intent is only for understanding my view of things, my opinion. But if the Amandala had published a Tuesday edition this week, I wouldn’t have withheld my comments, not because I have an interest in Mr. Balona’s candidacy, only because of fairness. It’s okay if I’m only speaking to a tree. I must still tell it as I see it.
I saw comments raining down on the 2020-2025 Cayo Central area representative, the PUP’s Mr. Alex Balona, after a video clip was shown with him mimicking, mocking popular Twin Towns television personality, Mr. Kent Pandy. It’s politics season, but I can’t believe that all of the one hundred or so people who scolded Mr. Balona were from the red camp. The main line was that he had savaged someone with a disability.
Of course, I cheer those Belizeans who rose up in defense of those of us with disabilities. For that, we could say a good purpose was served. The problem here is that a brother got savaged in the worst way when I think he only deserved a chiding. You don’t get lower than attacking someone for a real disability, which is a condition that seriously diminishes their quality of life. If you argue that stuttering greatly lowers your opportunity in life because you might not be able to earn a living as a news anchor, I would argue that “clumsy” is a disability too, because no one will pay to watch you play football.
A stutter is like Terry Thomas’s front teeth, or the face of Don Knotts, Tim Conway, or Chris Rock. Many of those guys in the funny shows would be duds if they looked like Humphrey Bogart. The likeable Mr. Pandy’s stutter contributes greatly to making him a television hero.
A forever joke among my parent’s children is that, according to story, one of our brothers, who speaks so fast sometimes it sounds like he is stuttering, beat Ernesto Vasquez in an elocution contest in school. We seh definite bias; di joj dehn teef Ernesto. If the judges didn’t teef Ernesto, then when that young fellow went home his “merciless” dad spoke to him roughly. And from then on little Ernesto was before his microphone day and night, and that’s how today he can read news like hihn baan fu dat.
There’s a whole long list of heroes and heroines who have a stutter. I Googled, and the heroes list is a thousand people long. With a quick glance I snatched these giants with the “disability” who earn(ed) their livings with their tongues: James Earl Jones, Bill Walton in his commentating life, Elvis Presley, Joe Biden, Samuel L. Jackson. True Colors Festival (truecolorsfestival.com) says presently 70 million people in the world have this neurological condition, 4% of them will outgrow it, and 1% will have to deal with it their entire lives.
I don’t think Abby Barnes, M.S., CCC-SLP, at Expressable, at expressable.com would disagree with me. She says “stuttering is a difference in verbal communication, it is a form of verbal diversity … a stutter is a part of a person, just like the color of their hair.” She said “when a person who stutters receives a diagnosis, the clinical term is childhood-onset fluency disorder.” She noted that some people who stutter might have “negative feelings about their speech”, and there is “still a certain stigma around stuttering” which could cause anxiety in some people.
Going to the meat of this case, after seeing a clip of an exchange between Mr. Balona and Mr. Pandy by the riverside at the start of the La Ruta Maya canoe race, and getting a second chance to hear what Mr. Balona was saying when he mimicked Mr. Pandy, I get that Mr. Balona was accusing Mr. Pandy of trying to disable his political career with a fake profile. Whether the accusation is fact or fiction, there is the suggestion there that Mr. Balona believed Mr. Pandy was campaigning against him.
Previous to this “stutter” clip, an old clip emerged which appeared to show Mr. Balona spitting on someone. Ah, the evil that you do doesn’t ever go away. The story about is that the spitting clip comes from Mr. Pandy’s files.
Spitting, there’s nothing nice about that! For a while some wondered if Roberto Alomar, arguably the best second baseman in the one hundred plus years of major league baseball, would make it to their Hall of Fame. In a flare up with an umpire, Roberto spat on the ump. Aaagh, the definition of disgusting!
Why did Balona spit? Put aside the nonsense about ching gum, or something stuck in his throat. It’s hard to find a pass for a spitter, but the sentence could be reduced with a major mitigator. Serious bizniz: did a guy say something nasty about him or one of his family members, and he couldn’t beat the guy in a fist fight, and he didn’t want to shoot him? There is preliminary judgment, but before we put the seal of damnation, we need to know the whole story.
Returning to stutter, for better understanding I like to put myself in other’s shoes. That’s from disciplining from my ma from when I was about ten years old. I learned a lot from Brother Natividad Obando, my direct boss when I worked at Alta Vista. He told me in one of our discourses that one should be very careful when arguing with a man who stutters, because if he hits a spot where he can’t bring out his words, he is likely to throw a punch.
A punch is the best solution for many a difference. Most everyone in Belize puts the right thumb up for City Councilor Thompson, for duking it out with the fists, manly bizniz! Mr. B lost points with his mockery. In the territory where he lives, he would have gained respect if he had gone for the right cross, uppercut, or bolo. Mr. Balona must not have passed history in school. If he had, he would likely have borrowed a page from Salva’s and Dito’s book. I don’t know the details, but the story I have is that one night Pandy and Ramon Vasquez were saying unsavory things on their radio station about Dito Juan and Salva Fernandez; and those two brothers pulled up to the transmitter in their red shirts an bos dehn r*#$.
Of course, we can’t rule out that, in this matter, staying away from fisticuffs might be a case of discretion over valor. Punches from Mr. Balona wouldn’t have worked if Mr. Pandy could beat him up. Naa, I would never have thought of suing. I am not familiar with that game. And I couldn’t have fought a word war either, because my tongue has been on pause since I was 15-years-old. One day I said to that despicable low behavior: Get thee behind me, Satan!
Haha, if Mr. P didn’t speak with a stutter, Mr. B would have gotten a laugh from the belly when he said he stuttered before he blurted out his ehm, damned lie. Stuttering is not a disability. Mocking can be the work of savages, but in this instance it was idiotic, big pikni.