On Populism

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There's a joke I once heard about the Bahamas government. If you ever find a good institution within it, don't tell anybody. As long as it's secret, it'll be fine. But if it ever becomes public knowledge, run. Somebody with power will come along and redeploy the equipment and the personnel and share all that goodness around.You see, we live in a society that believes in populism. Baldly put, populism is the practice of supporting the rights of the common person against the privileged elite. It's a political philosophy that has governed the Bahamas since 1967. There's no need to wonder where it came from; for almost three hundred years the needs and desires of the majority of the people were systematically ignored, to the benefit of a few. In reaction, the Bahamian governments that followed majority rule made it their responsibility to meet the needs of the people. And so we have eschewed elitism, making it a cardinal sin. We have all embraced populism.And embraced it to the point of absurdity.

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On Tourism

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I want you to do me a favour. Take a minute and write a short paragraph describing The Bahamas.Done? Good. Now let me guess: you wrote about the beautiful blue water, the white sandy beaches, the coconut trees, and the warm and friendly people. (Those people who didn't pick any of these things skip two paragraphs and read on.)Now tell me how many times you went to the beach in the past year, how much of that gorgeous water you swam in, how many coconuts you ate from the shell, and how many people you were warm and friendly to on the way to work this morning.We are living a myth. It's not our own myth. It is a myth created beyond our realities by people who live in cold cities with industrial economies, who dream of endless sunshine and warm water and sand that's as white as a wedding. Most of us live out of sight of the sea, and have to drive or catch bus to get anywhere near it. Most of us relate more to our fruit trees and our shade trees than we do to the coconut palm -- we rest in the shade of silk cottons and ficus, we grumble at the dirt dropped from our beautiful and troublesome poincianas, and we snack on jujus and guineps far more than we feast on fresh coconut these days. Our coconut water is as likely to come from the food store as from the shell; and as for the sun -- well, very few of us spend more time out in it than we have to. And as for the friendliness of the people: well. Warm and friendly we may be, but we're also stressed-out and overworked and underpaid and forced to sit in more traffic than is good for any human.Tourism created the myth. We sell it, but we don't live it. In the words of Marion Bethel: in our air conditioned service, we are blessed waiters of grace divine.But it doesn't have to be like that.

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On Carts and Horses

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Now that the silly season is over, the year has been spared, the halls undecked, the paychecks spent and the A-groups robbed, it seems a good time to lay out something I've been thinking about for quite a long while. I touched on it last week in my article about the sport of Junkanoo, but I didn't elaborate; so here's the elaboration, for what it's worth.These days, when we think or talk about Junkanoo in public we have a tendency to think and talk about things that are in fact incidentals. If we describe it to people who have never seen it, chances are we'll talk about the costumes. We may mention groups and performance, and we'll probably talk about the way in which all of Bay Street rocks when a big group comes down the road.We talk about the costumes. Or the B-52s. Or the brass section. Or the choreographed dancers. Or the bellers. Or the bleachers, for heaven's sake, or the tickets, or the way in which the fans respond. Rarely do we talk about the heartbeat of the thing.Rarely do we talk about the rhythm drum.

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On Junkanoo

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Well, it's official. Junkanoo is not a cultural event. It's a sport. Complete with winners and losers, gamblers and fixers, points and penalties and appeals.Think about it. In all the debate that we hear about Junkanoo every year, how much do we hear about the event itself? About the innovations in the art, the changes in the music, the use of colour, the presentation of the performances?The answer: virtually nothing.What we hear instead are insults to the judges, to the committee, to the Ministry, to the winning groups, to the losing groups, and to anyone who ventures to say anything remotely sensible about the whole. All that matters to the group, the press, the public, is who won and lost the parade. A sport, plain and simple, in which the referees are perpetually suspect and the umpires always under siege. Somebody get rob; somebody do the robbing. But we rarely hear anything about the art of Junkanoo.

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On National Identity

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When I was a little girl, my grandmother - who had been raised on the Royal Readers - used to ask us how we got so tall.  We'd always say we didn't know.  She would say:  "Oh, you just growed, hey? Like Topsy?"We inhabit a society that seems to believe (like Topsy) that things like culture and identity just grow.  We don't appear to believe that we need to do much to help them along; they come up, like seeds from the ground, and they become whatever they are supposed to become all on their own.The fact that we believe this shows just how far we've come from our farming roots.  People who grow things for a living know that seeds sown don't "just grow"; if they do, you can't predict the outcome.  There are all sorts of things that can happen to them along the way, as Christ's Parable of the Sower makes clear: the sun can scorch ‘em, birds can swallow ‘em, thorns can choke ‘em, stones can kill ‘em.

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On Creativity

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Recently, I've been watching a series of documentaries on the making of different blockbuster films. The first set was the collection of "Making Of" addenda to the Indiana Jones DVD trilogy, in which Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas talked about the process of creating special effects without the aid of computer graphic imaging. The second set was the supplementary information accompanying The Lord of the Rings DVDs.It's the latter that inspired me most. Lucas and Spielberg, for all their innovative spirits, are Americans working in Hollywood, and as such they are part of the media establishment that dominates the world. But The Lord of the Rings is the product of a relatively unknown film director, Peter Jackson, from a little-known country, New Zealand. In his creative madness, he decided to take on a project that no one believed could be done: turning the seminal fantasy of twentieth-century literature into a live-action movie. And he does it! What's more, he does it by taking hundreds of impossible things and making them possible: like shooting the trilogy as one long movie, like creating elves and hobbits and uruk-hai and ents who so are believable onscreen we never think of them as anything other than people, like shooting in locations that look the way many people imagine Tolkien's Middle-Earth.And I asked myself: why can't we do that here?

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On the Mind

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List the things you consider markers of what is "Bahamian". Go on. Put the newspaper right down, take up a notepad, and write down ten things.Done?OK. Now count and see how many of those things have anything to do with the mind.Let's see. Chances are you included Junkanoo, rake-n-scrape, conch, peas-n-rice, sun-sand-n-sea, Christianity, the way we talk, maybe Androsia.Chances are that you didn't include anything that demands much in the way of thought.

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On Discipline

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Almost a month ago, a group of Chinese acrobats came to Nassau and performed for Bahamian audiences. There were sixteen of them. Their average age was twelve; and they held their Bahamian audiences spellbound with their feats.One night -- the last night of the run, as is typical of performances in Nassau -- the side of the Kendal G. L. Isaacs Gym towards which the acrobats were performing was filled to capacity; there was standing room only, unless we wanted to open up the performance and turn the stage around, and seat people on the opposite side of the gymnasium. The acrobats performed, earning their "oohs" and "aahs". They were not alone; two Bahamian martial arts schools performed as well. In each case the performers demonstrated a level of discipline that was both remarkable and admirable.But the Bahamian audience did not.

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On Slavery

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Well, there's a dirty word for you. Slavery -- something that we would like to forget, or to deny, or to lock down in our history books and sanitize forever. We really don't like to talk about it. At all.

But we need to talk about it. Because even though it was abolished in 1834, it reminds alive and well today. And if we think we've left it behind, we've got to think again.

Now let me make something clear. This is not going to be a diatribe about race and racism. We have been raised to think of slavery as something that has to do with black people -- Jemimas and Toms -- all working on a plantation for a master, subjected to his whims and fancies, never free to go anywhere without his leave or direction. Now this form of slavery did indeed exist, and was most insidious. The enslavement and the dehumanization of people based on physical appearance and geographical origin was probably the most disruptive method of slavery, and the most complete; whole societies were built upon the social and economic structure of the slave plantation, and the legacy of that error remains with us today, among the descendents of both the masters and the slaves. But what I am going to talk about today is something a lot less easy to categorize, and therefore much harder to fix.

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On Mediocrity

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When I was a high school teacher, the thing that shocked me more than anything wasn't the rudeness of the students, the wildness of their lifestyles, or the paycheck, or anything that people suggested would shock me. What really shocked me was the fact that I taught students -- bright, articulate students -- whose aim in school was to pass. All they wanted was a 50% for their work, nothing more. They seemed to be quite satisfied with that.In fact, the most frustrating question I've heard as an educator is: "Why you give me this D?" -- as though grades were things I picked out of the sky. My answer -- the answer of most lecturers who "give" Ds -- was always: "I didn't give it; you earned it all by yourself." My question is: if students don't want Ds, why do so many of them work so hard to attain them?

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On Race

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Before I begin, let me make one thing quite clear. I'm writing about race, not racism. The first one is the idea that human beings, like animals and plants, are members of different groups that are physiologically and genetically different. The second one is making distinctions -- social, political, economic and otherwise -- based on these differences.I'm writing about race.It's an idea that has been around for a while, but not forever. It's an idea that can be traced back to a specific political point in history -- and by history, of course, I mean the history of the world, and not of the Bahamas. The idea of "race" was invented, and its invention had a function. That function: to conquer the world.

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On Service

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I've got a question. Why is it that in this country, service is a dirty word?I'm not talking about the kind of service that we charge money for, the kind of service that makes us a "service" economy -- though I could be. I'm talking about the kind of service that regards it as an inherent part of any blessing to give a bit of it away -- not to the pastor who hooked us up to the Good-Things Pipeline, but to people who have given us nothing, because they have less than we have.I'm talking about loving our neighbours as ourselves.

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On History

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October, we are learning, has been dubbed Bahamian History Month. As a result, the airwaves have been resonating with talk about national heroes, honours, and heroes' parks.At the same time, though, I'm sure there are some Bahamians out there who are observing these activities with a jaded eye. What national heroes? What's all the fuss about? Why shove aside Columbus, for heaven's sake, who is a hero of universal magnitude (having put our islands on the European map) for a clutch of Johnnies-come-lately in three-piece suits?Too many of us, still, thirty years after independence and thirty-six years after we began to govern ourselves, believe that things Bahamian are second-class, gauche, nothing much to write home about. And too many of us who think that are black.

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On Big Winds

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Anybody who knows me well knows that I have a thing about hurricanes. I've had it for a good quarter century, and it has led me to conclude that we Bahamians do hurricanes well.Either that, or Americans do them badly. I am always amazed at the death tolls and the property damage that hurricanes do in the USA -- often the same storms that we have experienced here in the Bahamas, and sometimes even at greater force. And that leads me to my topic today. What is it about us that enables us to weather storms relatively well?Well, first off, I don't believe it's because we're God's modern chosen. I'm not discounting the power of prayer by any means, but for me to believe that would have me believe that the only reason we have been spared is that we're better Christians, and God loves us more than other people. And I'm not prepared to accept that. I don't believe that there were no good praying Christians in the Twin Towers, or that there are no good Christians in Jamaica, Nicaragua or the Carolinas.Anyway, we aren't spared the storms. The Bahamas is a big place, after all, and while some islands are less likely to be hit than others, some place in the Bahamas is hit by a hurricane at least once every one to two years. That's enough to make it routine.

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On Federation

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Great minds, they say, think alike. Well, I'm not claiming to have a great mind, but I've been struck by the fact that one of the recent discussions that's been happening on air and in cyberspace is one in which I have an abiding interest. It's the idea of extending local government, of decentralizing our administration as far as possible, of broadening democracy by giving all Bahamians an immediate stake in their government. Thanks to Vince Ferguson, Steve McKinney and others, these ideas have entered the public's consciousness.I have long been dissatisfied with local government as it exists in the Bahamas. What I want to talk about today is similar to local government, but bigger. I'm going to propose that we Bahamians start thinking about becoming a federation.

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On Theatre

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On Saturday past The Landlord closed. The play ran for a month, for sixteen performances, and audiences kept coming. Now this seems to fly in the face of current wisdom about Bahamian theatre. These days, productions are usually put up for what amounts to a flash in the pan, a blink of an eye: two to three days over a weekend. The most ambitious stay open for a week, sometimes two. The Landlord was a leap into the unknown, and it flew.Part of the reason for this was the play itself. It's a very popular comedy, and every time it's performed it draws crowds. Part of it, too, was the buzz that was created by people who saw the play, liked what they saw, and talked about it: a review or two, some letters to the editor, and a fair amount of radio airplay. But the big reason, I believe, is that Bahamians are hungry for theatre.

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On Class

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I once taught a student who wanted to write a research essay on poverty. As she developed her ideas, it became clear to me that she was choosing to do so because she thought of the average Bahamian as poor, and of herself as an average Bahamian. I asked her a couple of questions, such as how she defined "poor", and how she justified the idea that Bahamians (in general) were poor people; her answer was that most people she knew did not have enough money to pay all their bills. When I asked her whether there was a more basic standard of poverty (Michael Jackson, after all, apparently has trouble paying his bills, but is by no stretch of the imagination poor), she disagreed. Poverty for her was the state in which the majority of black Bahamians found themselves. The fact that she had attended a private school, was employed in a very respectable position, and attended a church whose wealth was patently visible, seemed to make no difference to her belief that she was poor.She is not alone. Again and again, I run into students who believe that the majority of people in the Bahamas, themselves included, are poor. Now when I consider that there are 500,000 trips from the Bahamas to South Florida a year, (there are only 310,000 Bahamian men, women and children, according to the 2000 census); that Bahamians spend hundreds of millions of dollars in South Florida and still seem to have enough money left over to keep the malls and Palmdale in business; and that the number of registered vehicles in New Providence alone appears to be over 150,000 (this in a total urban population of roughly 200,000) I have to wonder just what size this "majority" is.

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On Land

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Over ten years ago I attended a lecture being given at the College of The Bahamas by Eris Moncur. His topic was, not surprisingly (as it was the Quincentennial year), the site of Columbus' landfall. Now I'm not going to debate that now; anyone who knows Mr Moncur even slightly knows what his view on the matter is. What I am going to raise is something he said, somewhat in passing, in that lecture. It was this: Bahamians are millionaires.Now many of us are fond of thinking of ourselves as "poor": "So-and-so like to take advantage of poor people," we say, or "The government job is to help poor people get ahead". I am not entirely sure what the cut-off point for wealth is; I suspect that poverty is something we own, while wealth belongs to the other guy. Be that as it may (and that's certainly fodder for another column), I want to argue Mr Moncur's case, because I agree with him. Many, if not most, Bahamians are extremely rich.

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On Waste

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I come from a line of obsessive-compulsives. I've got the tendency on both sides of the family. On one side is a collection of individuals who are probably some of the most meticulous in the world; if anything burns down, gets broken into, or blows up, it's not going to be their fault. On the other side is a group of people whose preoccupation with germs demands the frequent washing of objects and a proscription against breathing too hard on anything, even birthday candles. But neither side will throw anything away if there is any way of avoiding it. Food is given to dogs, cats, and birds. Cars are driven until they quite literally fall apart. Clothes are neatly put away until they come back into style. Books are kept, generally forever. Anything with print on it is saved — whether neatly, in scrapbooks, out of sight in filing cabinets, or (as is far more likely) on beds, on table tops, on the floor when all else fails. My family has a great fear of wasting anything.Now I know this makes us somewhat unusual for the Bahamas, where "new tings" are always better than old ones, and where cars and homes and objects are often got rid of when something fresher comes along. Most of us, it seems, believe that newness is next to Godliness, and will go to great lengths to be in style. What happens to the outmoded is not our problem; if we think they can move it, we will put it out by the roadside for the garbage men to collect, and if not, we will tow it away ourselves and throw it in the bush. So imagine my joyful surprise when I moved to British Columbia, Canada, to find myself in a country that had made laws about waste that suggested that what I'd been raised to do was not as weird as it seemed.

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On the Fourth Estate

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Last week, I happened to watch a documentary on the Watergate scandal of thirty years ago. Now I remember Watergate. I wasn't very old, but I was old enough to realize something big was happening; what I wasn't, was old enough to understand why it was happening.It was happening because two reporters, who were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, had noticed something unusual and had followed it up. To be specific: Bob Woodward was covering a routine court case for the Washington Post when he heard one of the defendants tell the judge, sotto voce, that he worked for the CIA. Nothing more, nothing less. He followed that up, with the help of Carl Bernstein, and together they began digging. They took nothing at face value, and ultimately they revealed a cover-up that brought down the President of the USA.Sixty years ago, in July 1943, Etienne Dupuch, the longtime editor of the Tribune, did something similar in the Bahamas. The philanthropic millionaire Harry Oakes was discovered murdered in his bed, in circumstances that remain confusing to this day. The Duke of Windsor, then the governor of the Bahamas, had begun a mystifying cover-up, which included contacting the Miami branch of the FBI, attempting to conceal certain facts of the case, and, apparently, framing Oakes' scandal-mongering son-in-law. Dupuch found out about the murder and dispatched reports about it to the international press, thus thwarting, at least for a while, the royal conspiracy.

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