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 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 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 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 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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