After completing my standard three-year stint of work in an offshore-tax-haven in 1981, in Cayman, I retired again. This time, I became an unpublished author and a housefather (“parent of first resort”) to Ross from age six to age eleven. During those five years, absent from the world of business, I was known as either Linda’s husband or Ross’s father. I had no particular identity of my own.
Home all day, it was I who rescued Ross every time he fell in the swimming pool – and (once) in the septic tank with the too-easily removable cover. I was one of the few men at the parent-teacher meetings of the private primary school and later the government high school. I was the family’s representative in the neighbourhood baby-sitting club (one ticket for every hour before midnight, and for every half-hour after midnight).
I dealt with all the injuries – lacerated feet from broken beer-bottles beside the cricket-field, a bleeding thigh from a friend’s pocket-knife while out in the scrub playing, a dislocated ankle from slipping on a concrete culvert...
My terms of employment included hospital attendance, so it was I who took the ankle to be un-dislocated – and who discovered the traditional Jamaican remedy. After administering a local anaesthetic, the doctor said to me, “You might not want to watch this next bit”. But of course I did watch – and bravely stifled a yell when he knocked the bone back into place with a mighty thump with the heel of his hand. Yikes.
One Saturday morning I risked a lynching by walking into the Hospital’s Waiting Room with a six-year-old boy whose face was puffed up to double its size – for all the world, a victim of brutal child-abuse. Hands raised to ward off the hushed hostility, I faced the mob and said “maiden plum”. Upon which, the room sighed with relief and resumed its conversations, leaving us to go about our business.
“Maiden plum” is a wild plant with a very effective self-defence mechanism: the touch of a leaf brings pain and swelling. Think poison-ivy times ten. Ross had been fooling around in the scrub behind our apartments with Jay again, had touched a leaf and then his face. (Somebody told me of a bulldozer-driver who ran his machine into a whole patch of maiden plum. He saw the mist rising, and ran – left the machine in gear, left the field, left the job: left the Island, for all anybody knew.)
Linda took Ross to Peru for a couple of weeks, when he was eight. An accidental dunk in the Amazon River exposed him to possible infection by some dread disease whose name I can’t recall now, that required an antidote to be administered with a large needle. The hospital nurse recklessly showed him the instrument; Ross fought him off; and I helped hold my struggling son still. It was the most shameful thing I ever did to him, or anybody else; the very recollection makes me break into a sweat. I apologised desperately at the time, and he forgave me; but I never forgave myself.
A few days later, the hospital phoned and told me the inoculation didn’t take properly (or something like that) and had to be done again. I told Ross, “The doctor says if you don’t get the injection again you will probably get very, very sick. I think you should do it, but I won’t make you. And I won’t let that stupid nurse anywhere near you. You have to decide.”
He trusted me, as he has always trusted me.
I didn’t want to be a parent, and I haven’t been a particularly good one; but there is a huge, huge, love between us that makes for an amazingly strong bond. At age twelve, he begged me to give up cigarettes because he didn’t want to live without me. Well, fair enough: I knew I couldn’t live without him.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
A young man’s car
We courted in Canada, Linda and I, for much of 1965 and ’66. I worked in Toronto, she in Barrie. She had a VW Beetle, I a “Yank tank” – a rusty Oldsmobile that could wind up to 92 mph on the highway, the passing road visible through a ragged hole in the floor beside my feet.
Our marriage early in ’67 began a fabulous 8 ½ years of fun. We packed everything we owned into a drive-away car , delivered it to its snowbird-owner in Orlando, and knocked on doors in Nassau until we got jobs. Then we spent 90% of our savings on a brand-new Triumph Spitfire, which we drove around with the rag-top down – weather permitting. [Me and Miss Ohio, Archives April 2013]
In Perth (Australia, 1971) we bought a second-hand Spitfire, also with a rag-top. Like “Vee Dubs”, Spitfires were a young man’s car. In Vila (New Hebrides, 1972-5) we had a company car – a Toyota: an exec’s car. Far too sedate for us, but it was free; what can you do?
The next year, we (I...) determined to chase down the dream of retiring to the caves of Crete [Zorba the Greek, Archives January 2012] in a brand-new VW Kombi that I got converted into a camper-van in Reading while waiting for Ross. The chase was a disaster from the day we set out, pretty much – unexpectedly traumatic for us new parents. Where two had been company, three was a crowd.
The mess came to a head with what could have been a fatal accident when I ran a red light in Malaga. In those days, in that place, the traffic lights shone in excessively dull shades – each colour scarcely distinguishable from the others, in the late afternoon. A giant truck (running the pale green light) screeched heroically to a halt five inches from my door.
I drove across the junction (on green!) and sat in stunned silence for endless minutes before limping on to the first camping ground we came to. Progress was suspended for the winter. We rented a flat and actually enjoyed ourselves, but it took a barrel of 10-mil Valium tablets to remove the numbness from my fingers and to recover just enough confidence to resume the journey towards the Promised Land.
I never did recover it all. We moved in safe, short stages: a few nights in Monaco with Linda’s sister, a month in Vasto on the Adriatic (where the brother-in-law owned a flat), then three pleasant months in a camp-ground in Corfu. We were only 200 miles from Athens, as the crow flies, and Athens was only 200 miles from Crete by ferry. But psychologically Crete was as far away as the moon, and it was never mentioned again. That dull red light in Malaga had signalled the end of the road for our life of travel. There were a few flickers of defiance, in years to come, but there was no fire any more.
Linda and Ross flew to Australia for three months. My Mum came over, and we camped all the way to London through Yugoslavia and northern Italy and Switzerland. She loved every moment and never forgot one of them. It was a son’s delight to watch her revel in the experience.
Reunited as a family in Bath, where my English grandfather had been born and raised, Linda and I agonised over our future for a whole year. Then, by default, we threw in the towel and retreated to Cayman for the rest of our lives.
That’s the end of the story. We drive sedate Toyota sedans now – old ones, but in good shape. Sometimes I see an old Beetle around town, made in Mexico or Brazil or wherever; but I’m not tempted. They’re a young man’s car, and I haven’t been young since Malaga. Sometimes – sometimes – what can you do?
Our marriage early in ’67 began a fabulous 8 ½ years of fun. We packed everything we owned into a drive-away car , delivered it to its snowbird-owner in Orlando, and knocked on doors in Nassau until we got jobs. Then we spent 90% of our savings on a brand-new Triumph Spitfire, which we drove around with the rag-top down – weather permitting. [Me and Miss Ohio, Archives April 2013]
In Perth (Australia, 1971) we bought a second-hand Spitfire, also with a rag-top. Like “Vee Dubs”, Spitfires were a young man’s car. In Vila (New Hebrides, 1972-5) we had a company car – a Toyota: an exec’s car. Far too sedate for us, but it was free; what can you do?
The next year, we (I...) determined to chase down the dream of retiring to the caves of Crete [Zorba the Greek, Archives January 2012] in a brand-new VW Kombi that I got converted into a camper-van in Reading while waiting for Ross. The chase was a disaster from the day we set out, pretty much – unexpectedly traumatic for us new parents. Where two had been company, three was a crowd.
The mess came to a head with what could have been a fatal accident when I ran a red light in Malaga. In those days, in that place, the traffic lights shone in excessively dull shades – each colour scarcely distinguishable from the others, in the late afternoon. A giant truck (running the pale green light) screeched heroically to a halt five inches from my door.
I drove across the junction (on green!) and sat in stunned silence for endless minutes before limping on to the first camping ground we came to. Progress was suspended for the winter. We rented a flat and actually enjoyed ourselves, but it took a barrel of 10-mil Valium tablets to remove the numbness from my fingers and to recover just enough confidence to resume the journey towards the Promised Land.
I never did recover it all. We moved in safe, short stages: a few nights in Monaco with Linda’s sister, a month in Vasto on the Adriatic (where the brother-in-law owned a flat), then three pleasant months in a camp-ground in Corfu. We were only 200 miles from Athens, as the crow flies, and Athens was only 200 miles from Crete by ferry. But psychologically Crete was as far away as the moon, and it was never mentioned again. That dull red light in Malaga had signalled the end of the road for our life of travel. There were a few flickers of defiance, in years to come, but there was no fire any more.
Linda and Ross flew to Australia for three months. My Mum came over, and we camped all the way to London through Yugoslavia and northern Italy and Switzerland. She loved every moment and never forgot one of them. It was a son’s delight to watch her revel in the experience.
Reunited as a family in Bath, where my English grandfather had been born and raised, Linda and I agonised over our future for a whole year. Then, by default, we threw in the towel and retreated to Cayman for the rest of our lives.
That’s the end of the story. We drive sedate Toyota sedans now – old ones, but in good shape. Sometimes I see an old Beetle around town, made in Mexico or Brazil or wherever; but I’m not tempted. They’re a young man’s car, and I haven’t been young since Malaga. Sometimes – sometimes – what can you do?
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Phoning Princess Margaret
We had chatted to this English couple cordially for a couple of hours, and gotten on like a house on fire. We were surprised, then, at the response to our invitation to dinner the next Saturday. “Sorry,” the wife said, “but Richard will be sick that day.” Wow! How does one handle such an abrupt brush-off?
“Ahh,” she said. “I’d better explain that.” And she did, and we let it go, and sure enough Richard was sick that weekend. (We checked.) His malaria, contracted in Kenya some years before, was of the recurring kind, which laid him out for three days around the same date every year. They had it marked on their kitchen calendar. It never happened in England, because the climate was different there – but here in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, the tropical humidity was just like home, for the virus.
The New Hebs was an embryo “offshore” tax haven – and still is, pretty much, as the independent state of Vanuatu. A new Australian client flew in one day, checked into his hotel, and woke up with a high fever in the morning. The local British doctor was bamboozled. “It looks for all the world like malaria,” he said. “But the fever doesn’t come overnight. And you say you’ve never been up in this area before.” “That’s right,” the visitor said. “I’ve lived in Sydney all my life... except during the War, of course.”
Of course. Thirty years had passed since he had been a soldier in New Guinea, and the malaria-parasite had lain doggo ever since – coming to life as soon as conditions were suitable.
I was lucky with “my” malaria, when it came. It was the common-or-garden variety that required only a few days of heavy sweating at home in bed – and no repeats. Its worst effect was the weakening of my immune system that enabled Hepatitis ‘A’ to catch hold immediately afterwards. That kept me under for another week or so, but it didn’t recur either.
Neither illness warranted a trip to hospital, that’s the point of the story. Because the islands were a joint British-French protectorate***, our town had a British hospital and a French one. The latter was staffed by French Army doctors, who rarely met a leg they didn’t feel obliged to amputate. The British one had a better reputation, and very few people died in it. *** For a bit of background, read Aiding and abetting adultery in the South Pacific, in the Archives of November 2012]
The Paton Memorial Hospital (“PMH”) was a short boat ride across from where the populace lived, followed by a long and steep stairway up a rocky hill. A ferryman was on call 24/7, at least in theory. One had to phone him at his home, and wait at the dock while he got dressed (if he was in bed), rode his bike down and got the boat seaworthy. After that, he helped the patient's companions manhandle the patient on board and off at the other end, and help him or her up the exhausting stairs – to the hospital if still breathing, or to the mortuary if not. The hospital had an excellent survival ratio, but the stairs didn’t.
By coincidence, Linda and I were familiar with the initials “PMH” from our three years in Nassau, Bahamas. There, they stood for the Princess Margaret Hospital, named for the Queen’s sister. The time interval for us had been only fifteen months, so Linda’s mistake was forgivable.
She had to phone and reserve a bed for after her appendix operation, which she had delayed until after the Queen’s visit. Royalty was on people’s minds. Somehow the call was answered not by the switchboard but by someone at the nurses’ station, who assumed it was an internal call.
So the greeting was casual: just, “Hello?” Linda, thrown a bit by the informality, asked “Is that Princess Margaret?” “Uhhh...” Linda, uncertainly: “Is that Princess Margaret?” Silence. Had the line gone dead? That was common enough. Linda, again, giving it one last shot, “Is this the number for Princess Margaret?” Finally, politely, puzzled and apologetic, a small voice ventured, “She’s not at this number. This is Nurse Bong at the Hospital.”
I must say Linda was treated very respectfully, when the time came. It’s always nice to have friends in high places, isn’t it?
“Ahh,” she said. “I’d better explain that.” And she did, and we let it go, and sure enough Richard was sick that weekend. (We checked.) His malaria, contracted in Kenya some years before, was of the recurring kind, which laid him out for three days around the same date every year. They had it marked on their kitchen calendar. It never happened in England, because the climate was different there – but here in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, the tropical humidity was just like home, for the virus.
The New Hebs was an embryo “offshore” tax haven – and still is, pretty much, as the independent state of Vanuatu. A new Australian client flew in one day, checked into his hotel, and woke up with a high fever in the morning. The local British doctor was bamboozled. “It looks for all the world like malaria,” he said. “But the fever doesn’t come overnight. And you say you’ve never been up in this area before.” “That’s right,” the visitor said. “I’ve lived in Sydney all my life... except during the War, of course.”
Of course. Thirty years had passed since he had been a soldier in New Guinea, and the malaria-parasite had lain doggo ever since – coming to life as soon as conditions were suitable.
I was lucky with “my” malaria, when it came. It was the common-or-garden variety that required only a few days of heavy sweating at home in bed – and no repeats. Its worst effect was the weakening of my immune system that enabled Hepatitis ‘A’ to catch hold immediately afterwards. That kept me under for another week or so, but it didn’t recur either.
Neither illness warranted a trip to hospital, that’s the point of the story. Because the islands were a joint British-French protectorate***, our town had a British hospital and a French one. The latter was staffed by French Army doctors, who rarely met a leg they didn’t feel obliged to amputate. The British one had a better reputation, and very few people died in it. *** For a bit of background, read Aiding and abetting adultery in the South Pacific, in the Archives of November 2012]
The Paton Memorial Hospital (“PMH”) was a short boat ride across from where the populace lived, followed by a long and steep stairway up a rocky hill. A ferryman was on call 24/7, at least in theory. One had to phone him at his home, and wait at the dock while he got dressed (if he was in bed), rode his bike down and got the boat seaworthy. After that, he helped the patient's companions manhandle the patient on board and off at the other end, and help him or her up the exhausting stairs – to the hospital if still breathing, or to the mortuary if not. The hospital had an excellent survival ratio, but the stairs didn’t.
By coincidence, Linda and I were familiar with the initials “PMH” from our three years in Nassau, Bahamas. There, they stood for the Princess Margaret Hospital, named for the Queen’s sister. The time interval for us had been only fifteen months, so Linda’s mistake was forgivable.
She had to phone and reserve a bed for after her appendix operation, which she had delayed until after the Queen’s visit. Royalty was on people’s minds. Somehow the call was answered not by the switchboard but by someone at the nurses’ station, who assumed it was an internal call.
So the greeting was casual: just, “Hello?” Linda, thrown a bit by the informality, asked “Is that Princess Margaret?” “Uhhh...” Linda, uncertainly: “Is that Princess Margaret?” Silence. Had the line gone dead? That was common enough. Linda, again, giving it one last shot, “Is this the number for Princess Margaret?” Finally, politely, puzzled and apologetic, a small voice ventured, “She’s not at this number. This is Nurse Bong at the Hospital.”
I must say Linda was treated very respectfully, when the time came. It’s always nice to have friends in high places, isn’t it?
Thursday, September 12, 2013
... you, and the horse you rode in on!
It has never made sense to me that the curse-word fuck was somehow related to the word for sexual intercourse. In fact it’s not related: the two words are homonyms. They look the same, sound the same and are spelt the same. But their origins are different – as different as the bill of a duck and the bill of rights. The curse-word may not be welcome at Grandma’s dinner-table, but it’s not obscene.
Back during the Vietnam War, a protestor in California was prosecuted for obscenity, for carrying a sign saying “Fuck the draft!” His lawyer argued (successfully) that advocating sexual intercourse with a law was such a meaningless comment that it couldn’t possibly be obscene. Correctamundo. BUT, he was lucky the judge didn’t know about homonyms. If he (the judge) had known, and had read the sign as “Curse the draft!” the protestor might have gone to jail for blasphemy. Who knows?
“May almighty God damn the draft to everlasting hellfire!” “Here’s my middle finger to the draft!” Those make sense. So do “Fuck it!” and Fuck you!” and “Fuck him!” and “Fuck off” and “Fuck me!” (“Somebody must be cursing me!”) Even “What the fuck?” We can take it to mean “God, I beg you: please tell me what’s going on!” It’s all very religious.
Most English curses call on the god of the moment. Today we say “Jesus Christ!” the way our ancestors said “Damn!” (from Domine, an earlier lord of heaven) and “Bugger!” (from Bog, a contemporary name of God, and still the name of God in some Slavic languages). “Shit/shite!” as a curse is probably the Arab or Indian evil divinity “Shaitan”, as is French zut!
There is a sameness about modern English curses that is frankly boring. Old reports tell of men who could curse for minutes without repeating themselves; but they must have been extremely mild curses. Cleaning out the camp-toilet box a few weeks ago, my son accidentally sloshed some of the liquid onto himself. He tried valiantly not to swear in front of his mother and me, but failed. “Oh shit! [longish pause] Fucketty fuck fuck fuck!!” he cried in exasperation. That’s about as original as modern swearing gets, these days.
The curse-word is probably related to our word finger – fig, in some early Germanic dialects. One of my grandmothers used to say “I don’t care a fig for that!” In many religions – perhaps most – fingers are used by priests to convey approval. “Bless you, my child!” The sign of the Cross; hands clasped in prayer or greeting; a hand raised in salute or greeting; both hands raised in the gesture of peace. Did I say “hands”? I meant fingers. Even shaking hands with someone in greeting or farewell, or to seal a deal.
Fingers crossed, two index fingers crossed to ward off the devil, knock on wood – they all reinforce silent prayers. One of my favourites – which I use myself – is the silent curse with index finger, pinky and thumb jabbed forward. Oooh, very powerful! The same gesture when pointed downwards at one’s side or behind one’s back is a prayer. It wards off the Evil Eye or any other devilish danger. I learnt that in Italy, if I remember. I wonder if they still use it.
Reportedly, it is a confrontation in an old Western movie that is reckoned to be the inspiration for what must be one of the most satisfying curses in circulation. “I’ll fight you, and the horse you rode in on!” Some character said.
Substituting “Fuck you” for the first bit while retaining the rest of the quote adds genuine quality to the curse, I believe. The poor old horse is so wonderfully irrelevant that the overall effect is just plain funny. Spoken solemnly and in genuine anger, though, it is a surprisingly effective curse. Perhaps the menace lies in daring the object of the curse to smile. After all, it really is still funny.
Back during the Vietnam War, a protestor in California was prosecuted for obscenity, for carrying a sign saying “Fuck the draft!” His lawyer argued (successfully) that advocating sexual intercourse with a law was such a meaningless comment that it couldn’t possibly be obscene. Correctamundo. BUT, he was lucky the judge didn’t know about homonyms. If he (the judge) had known, and had read the sign as “Curse the draft!” the protestor might have gone to jail for blasphemy. Who knows?
“May almighty God damn the draft to everlasting hellfire!” “Here’s my middle finger to the draft!” Those make sense. So do “Fuck it!” and Fuck you!” and “Fuck him!” and “Fuck off” and “Fuck me!” (“Somebody must be cursing me!”) Even “What the fuck?” We can take it to mean “God, I beg you: please tell me what’s going on!” It’s all very religious.
Most English curses call on the god of the moment. Today we say “Jesus Christ!” the way our ancestors said “Damn!” (from Domine, an earlier lord of heaven) and “Bugger!” (from Bog, a contemporary name of God, and still the name of God in some Slavic languages). “Shit/shite!” as a curse is probably the Arab or Indian evil divinity “Shaitan”, as is French zut!
There is a sameness about modern English curses that is frankly boring. Old reports tell of men who could curse for minutes without repeating themselves; but they must have been extremely mild curses. Cleaning out the camp-toilet box a few weeks ago, my son accidentally sloshed some of the liquid onto himself. He tried valiantly not to swear in front of his mother and me, but failed. “Oh shit! [longish pause] Fucketty fuck fuck fuck!!” he cried in exasperation. That’s about as original as modern swearing gets, these days.
The curse-word is probably related to our word finger – fig, in some early Germanic dialects. One of my grandmothers used to say “I don’t care a fig for that!” In many religions – perhaps most – fingers are used by priests to convey approval. “Bless you, my child!” The sign of the Cross; hands clasped in prayer or greeting; a hand raised in salute or greeting; both hands raised in the gesture of peace. Did I say “hands”? I meant fingers. Even shaking hands with someone in greeting or farewell, or to seal a deal.
Fingers crossed, two index fingers crossed to ward off the devil, knock on wood – they all reinforce silent prayers. One of my favourites – which I use myself – is the silent curse with index finger, pinky and thumb jabbed forward. Oooh, very powerful! The same gesture when pointed downwards at one’s side or behind one’s back is a prayer. It wards off the Evil Eye or any other devilish danger. I learnt that in Italy, if I remember. I wonder if they still use it.
Reportedly, it is a confrontation in an old Western movie that is reckoned to be the inspiration for what must be one of the most satisfying curses in circulation. “I’ll fight you, and the horse you rode in on!” Some character said.
Substituting “Fuck you” for the first bit while retaining the rest of the quote adds genuine quality to the curse, I believe. The poor old horse is so wonderfully irrelevant that the overall effect is just plain funny. Spoken solemnly and in genuine anger, though, it is a surprisingly effective curse. Perhaps the menace lies in daring the object of the curse to smile. After all, it really is still funny.
Friday, September 6, 2013
The man with the shopping bags
A Google search for “the man with the shopping bags” throws up the famous photo of the young Chinese fellow stopped in front of a column of tanks in Peking in 1989 on their way to Tiananmen Square. It’s a very moving photo and story. Bravery is always moving, isn’t it?
We should spare some praise for the tank-commander and his crew. They could have just squashed him like a cockroach, as the Israeli bulldozer did to Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003. An Egyptian man tried the same thing with a Police armoured car in 2011, and was shot dead on the spot.
When the US government was faced with its lone protestor, it chose the Israeli-Egyptian option. Bradley Manning was an Army soldier who blew the whistle on the “collateral murder” incident in 2007 in Baghdad, when an Army helicopter shot up a group of civilians including children. He was the only soldier in the entire Army with the courage to report the murders. For his courage, he was immediately jailed for twelve months in a bare isolation cell, in conditions amounting to torture (by international standards, if not US ones).
Manning’s defiance of the juggernaut of the US Army and its brutish prison guards is equal to the bravery of those other three examples. A comparison of the public-relations effects of all the incidents leaves the Chinese one looking good. How can that be? Whatever happened to Madison Avenue’s expertise in public relations?
My blog-post on Julian Assange in September 2012 marvelled at the British Government’s refusal to allow Assange free passage to Ecuador. I contrasted it with China’s generosity in a similar dilemma. Just recently, the world has been reminded of Britain’s cruelty. The contemptuous treatment by the London Police of Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian boyfriend was stunning.
Ah well, as someone wrote about the interrogation of the boyfriend – he was lucky: the last Brazilian the UK Police had in their clutches ended up with eight bullets in his head.
Greenwald is an investigative journalist employed by an English newspaper. The paper's computers (some of them) were gratuitously destroyed by the Police in the newspaper’s offices - in broad daylight, in the Editor's presence. I kid you not. It really happened.
What on earth is wrong with these people? Don’t they care what the world thinks of them? If their nation goes National Socialist like Germany did in the 1930s, they won’t be held accountable. Is that what they think, or hope? The killing of Dr Kelly, the war crimes in Iraq and Libya – are they all to be shrugged off without credible explanation? Will all future dissidents and their associates be in line for similar treatment, at the whim of a Big Brother official called O’Brien?
A picture is worth a thousand words; an iconic picture is worth a book. The man with the shopping bags... Rachel Corrie in her yellow plastic overcoat in front of the bulldozer... the Iraqi hotel clerk’s dead face, beaten to a pulp by British soldiers ... each incident is worth a book.
The POW in the orange jump-suit shackled to a trolley, being wheeled by six huge stormtroopers to the torture-chambers of Guantanamo... the hooded prisoner standing on a stool wired for electrocution in Abu Ghraib... each of those photos illustrates America’s contempt for the Geneva Conventions more than a whole shelf of books could.
Again – why do they do it? Is it to frighten us into accepting the idea that we might be next? Could that conceivably be true? Have our rulers genuinely abandoned the moral values the rest of us still cleave to? Interesting times.Gosh!
We should spare some praise for the tank-commander and his crew. They could have just squashed him like a cockroach, as the Israeli bulldozer did to Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003. An Egyptian man tried the same thing with a Police armoured car in 2011, and was shot dead on the spot.
When the US government was faced with its lone protestor, it chose the Israeli-Egyptian option. Bradley Manning was an Army soldier who blew the whistle on the “collateral murder” incident in 2007 in Baghdad, when an Army helicopter shot up a group of civilians including children. He was the only soldier in the entire Army with the courage to report the murders. For his courage, he was immediately jailed for twelve months in a bare isolation cell, in conditions amounting to torture (by international standards, if not US ones).
Manning’s defiance of the juggernaut of the US Army and its brutish prison guards is equal to the bravery of those other three examples. A comparison of the public-relations effects of all the incidents leaves the Chinese one looking good. How can that be? Whatever happened to Madison Avenue’s expertise in public relations?
My blog-post on Julian Assange in September 2012 marvelled at the British Government’s refusal to allow Assange free passage to Ecuador. I contrasted it with China’s generosity in a similar dilemma. Just recently, the world has been reminded of Britain’s cruelty. The contemptuous treatment by the London Police of Glenn Greenwald’s Brazilian boyfriend was stunning.
Ah well, as someone wrote about the interrogation of the boyfriend – he was lucky: the last Brazilian the UK Police had in their clutches ended up with eight bullets in his head.
Greenwald is an investigative journalist employed by an English newspaper. The paper's computers (some of them) were gratuitously destroyed by the Police in the newspaper’s offices - in broad daylight, in the Editor's presence. I kid you not. It really happened.
What on earth is wrong with these people? Don’t they care what the world thinks of them? If their nation goes National Socialist like Germany did in the 1930s, they won’t be held accountable. Is that what they think, or hope? The killing of Dr Kelly, the war crimes in Iraq and Libya – are they all to be shrugged off without credible explanation? Will all future dissidents and their associates be in line for similar treatment, at the whim of a Big Brother official called O’Brien?
A picture is worth a thousand words; an iconic picture is worth a book. The man with the shopping bags... Rachel Corrie in her yellow plastic overcoat in front of the bulldozer... the Iraqi hotel clerk’s dead face, beaten to a pulp by British soldiers ... each incident is worth a book.
The POW in the orange jump-suit shackled to a trolley, being wheeled by six huge stormtroopers to the torture-chambers of Guantanamo... the hooded prisoner standing on a stool wired for electrocution in Abu Ghraib... each of those photos illustrates America’s contempt for the Geneva Conventions more than a whole shelf of books could.
Again – why do they do it? Is it to frighten us into accepting the idea that we might be next? Could that conceivably be true? Have our rulers genuinely abandoned the moral values the rest of us still cleave to? Interesting times.Gosh!
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Unemployment in Cayman
Several of my blog-posts have criticised Cayman’s generally low educational standards, which are the consequence of a poor educational strategy. Two generations ago, the Islands’ political representatives seem to have been persuaded by the British Colonial Office (now the FCO) not to bother about the standards of all but the brightest of their fellow Caymanians.
Last February [Protection versus Education], I noted that the permanent affirmative-action program installed by the FCO negated the need for ethnic Caymanians to ever compete on equal terms with migrants and immigrants at any level. Foreigners’ expertise and qualifications would be trumped by the birthright entitlement of local bloodlines.
As long as an ethnic Caymanian was “adequately” qualified for a job – in the opinion of a committee of ethnic Caymanians – he or she must be hired or promoted or retained ahead of any foreigner. (Once, in the 1990s, the Immigration Board actually turned down the Work Permit of the Manager of the Bank of China. Beijing called in the British Ambassador, and the problem went away – but, crikey...!)
The policy explains the predominance in government jobs of ethnic Caymanians of doubtful ability, work-ethic, and international experience. In the private sector, the program has pushed and pulled native Caymanians to the top of the ladder in many fields of employment, regardless of their experience or competence. Some are properly qualified, some are not; it’s not always easy to tell, from the outside.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. Private- sector employers don’t like to be ordered who to hire, promote or fire. Their reaction to orders was outlined in one of my very earliest blog-posts – Everybody’s Cheating, in December 2010. Corruption, intimidation, tokenism and quotas became embedded in our society. Resentment and contempt between expats and Caymanians are almost palpable in many workplaces. In private conversation, the hostility is evident.
An economic recession, aggravated by the British FCO’s recent decision to rein in Public Expenditure and the huge unfunded Public Debt, has generated 3000 registered unemployed Caymanian citizens (including immigrants), out of a local workforce of 25,000 or so. The foreign workforce is about the same size, split 50-50 between skilled and unskilled. (I’m guessing the figures; no reliable ones are available.)
So why can’t unemployed Caymanians replace 3000 of the unskilled foreigners? Bearing in mind our annual Education Budget of thirty or forty million dollars, how come there are any unemployed Caymanians? The answer is, that for all practical purposes they are unemployable. The combined weight of government disapproval, intimidation and legal sanctions cannot shift more than half a dozen of them.
The 3000 feel entitled to be supported without working. “It’s our Island. We’re the landlords. From Jamaican domestic servants and Filipino security guards on five dollars an hour, to British lawyers and Canadian accountants earning a hundred times as much, every expat sucks at Cayman’s teats. Let them pay for the privilege!”
It could have worked, you know. Paying the ethnic-Caymanian community for their “birthright” could have worked. Fees paid by tax-haven clients could have been put aside into a special reserve fund and distributed to all native-born individuals and their descendants. Why wasn’t it tried?
Because the FCO clerks of the day didn’t think of it, that’s why. Civil Servants are all trained to think in terms of precedents. The Whitehall/Westminster system of governance was the model for our micro-legislature and micro-public-service hierarchy. The importation of indentured labour in post-slavery times was the model for the new Cayman tax haven.
With precedents in hand, the whole strategic plan for Cayman was probably devised one afternoon before a Bank Holiday weekend, and wrapped up in time for the FCO clerks to catch the 6.12 train home from King’s Cross and St Pancras. Done and dusted. Well done, Sir Humphrey!
Last February [Protection versus Education], I noted that the permanent affirmative-action program installed by the FCO negated the need for ethnic Caymanians to ever compete on equal terms with migrants and immigrants at any level. Foreigners’ expertise and qualifications would be trumped by the birthright entitlement of local bloodlines.
As long as an ethnic Caymanian was “adequately” qualified for a job – in the opinion of a committee of ethnic Caymanians – he or she must be hired or promoted or retained ahead of any foreigner. (Once, in the 1990s, the Immigration Board actually turned down the Work Permit of the Manager of the Bank of China. Beijing called in the British Ambassador, and the problem went away – but, crikey...!)
The policy explains the predominance in government jobs of ethnic Caymanians of doubtful ability, work-ethic, and international experience. In the private sector, the program has pushed and pulled native Caymanians to the top of the ladder in many fields of employment, regardless of their experience or competence. Some are properly qualified, some are not; it’s not always easy to tell, from the outside.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. Private- sector employers don’t like to be ordered who to hire, promote or fire. Their reaction to orders was outlined in one of my very earliest blog-posts – Everybody’s Cheating, in December 2010. Corruption, intimidation, tokenism and quotas became embedded in our society. Resentment and contempt between expats and Caymanians are almost palpable in many workplaces. In private conversation, the hostility is evident.
An economic recession, aggravated by the British FCO’s recent decision to rein in Public Expenditure and the huge unfunded Public Debt, has generated 3000 registered unemployed Caymanian citizens (including immigrants), out of a local workforce of 25,000 or so. The foreign workforce is about the same size, split 50-50 between skilled and unskilled. (I’m guessing the figures; no reliable ones are available.)
So why can’t unemployed Caymanians replace 3000 of the unskilled foreigners? Bearing in mind our annual Education Budget of thirty or forty million dollars, how come there are any unemployed Caymanians? The answer is, that for all practical purposes they are unemployable. The combined weight of government disapproval, intimidation and legal sanctions cannot shift more than half a dozen of them.
The 3000 feel entitled to be supported without working. “It’s our Island. We’re the landlords. From Jamaican domestic servants and Filipino security guards on five dollars an hour, to British lawyers and Canadian accountants earning a hundred times as much, every expat sucks at Cayman’s teats. Let them pay for the privilege!”
It could have worked, you know. Paying the ethnic-Caymanian community for their “birthright” could have worked. Fees paid by tax-haven clients could have been put aside into a special reserve fund and distributed to all native-born individuals and their descendants. Why wasn’t it tried?
Because the FCO clerks of the day didn’t think of it, that’s why. Civil Servants are all trained to think in terms of precedents. The Whitehall/Westminster system of governance was the model for our micro-legislature and micro-public-service hierarchy. The importation of indentured labour in post-slavery times was the model for the new Cayman tax haven.
With precedents in hand, the whole strategic plan for Cayman was probably devised one afternoon before a Bank Holiday weekend, and wrapped up in time for the FCO clerks to catch the 6.12 train home from King’s Cross and St Pancras. Done and dusted. Well done, Sir Humphrey!
Friday, August 23, 2013
Pablo the Mexican
I was the youngest member of Churchie’s 1951 intake of boarders from “the bush”. (The Church of England Grammar School in Brisbane had always been called “Churchie”, for some unimaginative reason.) Painfully shy, and small for my age, I was put in the charge of a veteran boarder of my own age (eleven), who introduced me around.
Four or five of us squatted in the dirt and scratched our names in block capitals with twigs. When some older boys came by to see what we were doing, we hastily erased them, but I wasn’t quick enough to do more than wipe out my first name and bits of the surname. One of the intruders looked down scornfully at what was left. “What’s this name? It looks like PABLO! What is he, a Mexican? Hahaha.” “Yes he is”, my protector retorted. “So what?” “Huh. He doesn’t look Mexican.” “Well, his mother’s Mexican. Have you got something against Mexicans?”
Shamed, the intruders wandered away. My companions felt obliged, ever after, to call me and refer to me by the invented name, lest they be beaten up by the older boys for lying. The exotic newbie became a nine-day wonder. And indeed longer, for the name stuck like glue. Very few of the 1200 pupils ever knew my real name. Most of those alive today still don’t.
When my brother came the next year, aged nine, he was Little Pablo. Our baby brother came after we left, and he was Pablo too. Each of us was introduced to parents as Pablo, as a matter of course. Parents as a species don’t ask questions about their sons' friends' nicknames. “Rags” Alexander was always called Rags, and nobody ever knew his first name.
Six years at boarding school is a big chunk of one’s life. All of us boarders went home during vacations; on “long weekends” those of us from far away stayed with friends who lived closer, or were day-boys. One of my long-weekend hosts was Graham, whom I bumped into in Shiraz in late 1964 – reported in my blog-post Cattle Class to Kuwait [April 2012].
Years and years later, my mother apologised for sending me away so young – but I never minded, and in truth she had little option. I was in the oldest group at the one-room, six-classes, Hannaford Primary School, and the two others were scheduled to go off to (different) boarding schools the same year. I was the brains of the outfit, such as it was, and Churchie was noted for its academic achievements, so that's where I went.
Of the Hannaford kids, I ended up a political trouble-maker in the Caribbean; Ian wasted several years in Parliament in Canberra [Politics of exclusion, May 2013]; Richard was a wool-dealer in Sudan for a while; Liz Cox did professional modelling in Paris, reportedly; Kevin became a shearer in Victoria, the school magazine said. Everybody else made their lives close to home, as far as I know.
The local school didn’t open till I was seven and a half. Before then, all our lessons had come in the mail each week from the State distance-learning unit in Brisbane. Mum was a good teacher, and the seventeen-year-old sent out from Brisbane to open the School was too. So I carried my parents’ hopes and ambitions off to Churchie. I don’t think I returned much value for the money they spent on me; I should have been the one to apologise.
Academically, I peaked at age thirteen. I struggled dutifully, but could never see much sense in what I was being taught. The learning did enable me to qualify as an accountant, eventually, and that freed me to go overseas and try my luck. To the degree that it gave me a way to make a living in exotic places, it was worth the effort and expense, I guess.
Also, I finally got to Mexico, though I can’t say I identified with the culture. If my mother really had been Mexican, I might have done better. Who knows?
Four or five of us squatted in the dirt and scratched our names in block capitals with twigs. When some older boys came by to see what we were doing, we hastily erased them, but I wasn’t quick enough to do more than wipe out my first name and bits of the surname. One of the intruders looked down scornfully at what was left. “What’s this name? It looks like PABLO! What is he, a Mexican? Hahaha.” “Yes he is”, my protector retorted. “So what?” “Huh. He doesn’t look Mexican.” “Well, his mother’s Mexican. Have you got something against Mexicans?”
Shamed, the intruders wandered away. My companions felt obliged, ever after, to call me and refer to me by the invented name, lest they be beaten up by the older boys for lying. The exotic newbie became a nine-day wonder. And indeed longer, for the name stuck like glue. Very few of the 1200 pupils ever knew my real name. Most of those alive today still don’t.
When my brother came the next year, aged nine, he was Little Pablo. Our baby brother came after we left, and he was Pablo too. Each of us was introduced to parents as Pablo, as a matter of course. Parents as a species don’t ask questions about their sons' friends' nicknames. “Rags” Alexander was always called Rags, and nobody ever knew his first name.
Six years at boarding school is a big chunk of one’s life. All of us boarders went home during vacations; on “long weekends” those of us from far away stayed with friends who lived closer, or were day-boys. One of my long-weekend hosts was Graham, whom I bumped into in Shiraz in late 1964 – reported in my blog-post Cattle Class to Kuwait [April 2012].
Years and years later, my mother apologised for sending me away so young – but I never minded, and in truth she had little option. I was in the oldest group at the one-room, six-classes, Hannaford Primary School, and the two others were scheduled to go off to (different) boarding schools the same year. I was the brains of the outfit, such as it was, and Churchie was noted for its academic achievements, so that's where I went.
Of the Hannaford kids, I ended up a political trouble-maker in the Caribbean; Ian wasted several years in Parliament in Canberra [Politics of exclusion, May 2013]; Richard was a wool-dealer in Sudan for a while; Liz Cox did professional modelling in Paris, reportedly; Kevin became a shearer in Victoria, the school magazine said. Everybody else made their lives close to home, as far as I know.
The local school didn’t open till I was seven and a half. Before then, all our lessons had come in the mail each week from the State distance-learning unit in Brisbane. Mum was a good teacher, and the seventeen-year-old sent out from Brisbane to open the School was too. So I carried my parents’ hopes and ambitions off to Churchie. I don’t think I returned much value for the money they spent on me; I should have been the one to apologise.
Academically, I peaked at age thirteen. I struggled dutifully, but could never see much sense in what I was being taught. The learning did enable me to qualify as an accountant, eventually, and that freed me to go overseas and try my luck. To the degree that it gave me a way to make a living in exotic places, it was worth the effort and expense, I guess.
Also, I finally got to Mexico, though I can’t say I identified with the culture. If my mother really had been Mexican, I might have done better. Who knows?
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Unexpected places (pidgin English)
Our housemaid (four hours on Fridays, from an agency) is from Colombia and speaks English as her native tongue. She’s from San Andres off the coast of Nicaragua, which is home to forty thousand descendants of African slaves taken there by their British owners when the Island was British.
Our first-ever maid in Cayman was from Nicaragua – a large and cheerful woman who was on hugging terms with us and our son for years afterwards, till she retired back to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast, which used to be a British protectorate. She was a Miskito Indian, who spoke standard English, too, as well as Spanish and the local patois. I remember her with tears streaming down her face one day in 1980. The last of the Nicaraguan Somoza dynasty had just been assassinated. “They have killed my President”, she sobbed. I hugged her until she stopped crying.
The English language pops up in one form or another in unexpected places all over the world, as a by-product of Britain’s former trading empire. The Bay of Islands off Honduras is populated with families of early settlers from Cayman and Jamaica, as evidenced by the surnames. On the north coast of Panama, the black residents of Colon are descended from the diggers of the Canal, recruited from Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean islands. After Castro’s revolution, English-speaking residents of the southern islands of Cuba fled to Cayman, from where their ancestors had emigrated.
What should amaze us, but doesn’t, is the fluency of English spoken by so many black people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America. It was the strict policy of slave-owners and traders to split up tribes, clans and families on their arrival in the New World, in order to minimise the danger of revolt. Pidgins and patois originated to provide means of communication between owners and slaves and among the slaves themselves. Nevertheless, most blacks in the US, for instance, speak standard English.
Trade is the most powerful of forces. The word pidgin is reckoned to be the closest the Chinese merchants of Canton could come to the English word business. (It’s plausible.) Pidgin is called creole in most languages other than English. In Haiti everybody speaks a French-based creole except the brown-skinned social elite. In Curacao, Papiamento is Portuguese-based. The best-known Dutch-based pidgin is Afrikaans – influenced by so many other tongues as to be almost a separate language today.
Almost. Chris, my flatmate in London all those years ago, spoke Afrikaans, and could be understood in the Flemish part of Belgium. Once, though, he narrowly escaped getting beaten up in a bar for speaking what the locals heard as mocking baby-talk.
In the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific, a pidgin called Bislama (from the French beche-de-mer, the sea-cucumber animal of the region) was the simplest possible pidgin. English words strung together separated only by long and blong (= belong). Something like that. We all made it up as we went along. It doesn’t seem to have developed much since we lived there in the 1970s, but – as happened in New Guinea – the native politicians changed the spelling of words to disguise their English origins.
It is now the main official language. The national motto (Wikipedia says) is "Long God yumi stanap", which translates as “in God we stand”: yumi is you-me, and stanap is stand-up. I would have said “blong God” was more correct, but what do I know? Bambae is “soon” or “later”, a vaguely phonetic rendition of “by and by”. Olgeta is “everybody”, literally “all together”. And so on. Wonderful stuff!
Well, that’s what politicians tend to do, especially in artificial nations with no common language and no sense of the ridiculous. In other circumstances, the process works in reverse. One of Britain’s former Australian colonies has a city called Air Delight, named for a British Queen Consort. Fortunately, the original spelling, Adelaide (she was German, actually), has been retained. Thank God for small mercies.
Our first-ever maid in Cayman was from Nicaragua – a large and cheerful woman who was on hugging terms with us and our son for years afterwards, till she retired back to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast, which used to be a British protectorate. She was a Miskito Indian, who spoke standard English, too, as well as Spanish and the local patois. I remember her with tears streaming down her face one day in 1980. The last of the Nicaraguan Somoza dynasty had just been assassinated. “They have killed my President”, she sobbed. I hugged her until she stopped crying.
The English language pops up in one form or another in unexpected places all over the world, as a by-product of Britain’s former trading empire. The Bay of Islands off Honduras is populated with families of early settlers from Cayman and Jamaica, as evidenced by the surnames. On the north coast of Panama, the black residents of Colon are descended from the diggers of the Canal, recruited from Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean islands. After Castro’s revolution, English-speaking residents of the southern islands of Cuba fled to Cayman, from where their ancestors had emigrated.
What should amaze us, but doesn’t, is the fluency of English spoken by so many black people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America. It was the strict policy of slave-owners and traders to split up tribes, clans and families on their arrival in the New World, in order to minimise the danger of revolt. Pidgins and patois originated to provide means of communication between owners and slaves and among the slaves themselves. Nevertheless, most blacks in the US, for instance, speak standard English.
Trade is the most powerful of forces. The word pidgin is reckoned to be the closest the Chinese merchants of Canton could come to the English word business. (It’s plausible.) Pidgin is called creole in most languages other than English. In Haiti everybody speaks a French-based creole except the brown-skinned social elite. In Curacao, Papiamento is Portuguese-based. The best-known Dutch-based pidgin is Afrikaans – influenced by so many other tongues as to be almost a separate language today.
Almost. Chris, my flatmate in London all those years ago, spoke Afrikaans, and could be understood in the Flemish part of Belgium. Once, though, he narrowly escaped getting beaten up in a bar for speaking what the locals heard as mocking baby-talk.
In the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific, a pidgin called Bislama (from the French beche-de-mer, the sea-cucumber animal of the region) was the simplest possible pidgin. English words strung together separated only by long and blong (= belong). Something like that. We all made it up as we went along. It doesn’t seem to have developed much since we lived there in the 1970s, but – as happened in New Guinea – the native politicians changed the spelling of words to disguise their English origins.
It is now the main official language. The national motto (Wikipedia says) is "Long God yumi stanap", which translates as “in God we stand”: yumi is you-me, and stanap is stand-up. I would have said “blong God” was more correct, but what do I know? Bambae is “soon” or “later”, a vaguely phonetic rendition of “by and by”. Olgeta is “everybody”, literally “all together”. And so on. Wonderful stuff!
Well, that’s what politicians tend to do, especially in artificial nations with no common language and no sense of the ridiculous. In other circumstances, the process works in reverse. One of Britain’s former Australian colonies has a city called Air Delight, named for a British Queen Consort. Fortunately, the original spelling, Adelaide (she was German, actually), has been retained. Thank God for small mercies.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
The slow-boiling frog (Chamber of Commerce)
My friend Colin used to refer to it as The Chamber of Comics. For its first 21 years it existed only as a monthly luncheon club. Then it had a few years in the public eye attending to its founding principles, and then twenty-odd more years of futility. The Chamber of Commerce today stands for nothing and achieves nothing. It has remained silent and immobile. A frog in a pot of water will stay there while the heat is raised one degree at a time, until it has no energy to jump out before the pot boils.
Back in its glory-years of 1985-90, led by dynamic Presidents and Councils, supported by Managers who believed in the founding principles, the Chamber had a strategic vision that is absent today. When Cayman’s first Labour Law was mooted, our people clearly perceived the danger of establishing a state labour-control entity to reinforce the existing affirmative-action program for native Caymanians. For the ruling politicians and their Civil Servants, control of the local workforce was an end in itself.
A new Labour Office would further forestall the prospect of a private-sector labour union. The Immigration authorities could deport any experienced labour organiser brought in from overseas; and the Labour Office would act as the Islands’ monopoly labour union. It was a standard Soviet trick. The British FCO knew that, but the locals didn’t.
The FCO had failed to perceive any long-term danger in the establishment of the semi-slave workforce in the early 1970s that bedevils our society today. And it is the FCO that is reaping the whirlwind. Its lack of strategic vision at that time is why Britain is having to send in its own auditors, accountants, and economists to fix the present fiscal mess.
To oppose the proposed Labour Law, in 1986, the Chamber’s newly created back-office assembled all the trade-associations into a Council of Associations. In response, the politicians threatened to suspend their de facto subsidies to the hotels. It was a bluff, but it worked; the Hotel Association broke ranks. Government’s annual budget for overseas advertising was several million dollars, and the hotels chose not to risk losing that.
The Labour Law passed pretty much as drafted – a year late, but that made no difference. Emboldened by this success, the politicians pushed ahead with their next socialisation measure – a tax on private-sector wages and payrolls. The revenue raised would fund government’s Civil Service pensions-liabilities and perhaps even its equally unfunded healthcare liabilities.
Again our Chamber people clearly perceived the politicians’ purpose, and considered the new threat even more dangerous to Cayman’s future prosperity than the Labour Law. Cayman’s private sector had already developed a defence against additional labour costs [my blog-post Everybody’s Cheating, December 2010]; everyday shelf-price increases took care of them. But Cayman Islands Social Security (CISS – “the CISS of Death”, we called it) would force the private sector to bail out government’s reckless over-spending until the end of time.
In the years since the CISS battle, the Chamber’s leaders have been careful to stay on the right side of the politicians. “Look what we did to Gordon Barlow” [Confessions of a Subversive, October 2012] was warning enough for employees; “Look what we did to Nick Duggan”, enough for Councillors. [Our President was denied citizenship for sixteen years for his devotion to duty.]
Now the Chamber – and we the public – are back to Square One. Again the FCO and its local agents are desperately seeking revenue, as an easy alternative to cutting waste and extravagance. Will the Chamber find the courage to do its duty? Doubtful. Like a slow-boiling frog it just doesn’t have the energy, now, to jump out of the pot.
Back in its glory-years of 1985-90, led by dynamic Presidents and Councils, supported by Managers who believed in the founding principles, the Chamber had a strategic vision that is absent today. When Cayman’s first Labour Law was mooted, our people clearly perceived the danger of establishing a state labour-control entity to reinforce the existing affirmative-action program for native Caymanians. For the ruling politicians and their Civil Servants, control of the local workforce was an end in itself.
A new Labour Office would further forestall the prospect of a private-sector labour union. The Immigration authorities could deport any experienced labour organiser brought in from overseas; and the Labour Office would act as the Islands’ monopoly labour union. It was a standard Soviet trick. The British FCO knew that, but the locals didn’t.
The FCO had failed to perceive any long-term danger in the establishment of the semi-slave workforce in the early 1970s that bedevils our society today. And it is the FCO that is reaping the whirlwind. Its lack of strategic vision at that time is why Britain is having to send in its own auditors, accountants, and economists to fix the present fiscal mess.
To oppose the proposed Labour Law, in 1986, the Chamber’s newly created back-office assembled all the trade-associations into a Council of Associations. In response, the politicians threatened to suspend their de facto subsidies to the hotels. It was a bluff, but it worked; the Hotel Association broke ranks. Government’s annual budget for overseas advertising was several million dollars, and the hotels chose not to risk losing that.
The Labour Law passed pretty much as drafted – a year late, but that made no difference. Emboldened by this success, the politicians pushed ahead with their next socialisation measure – a tax on private-sector wages and payrolls. The revenue raised would fund government’s Civil Service pensions-liabilities and perhaps even its equally unfunded healthcare liabilities.
Again our Chamber people clearly perceived the politicians’ purpose, and considered the new threat even more dangerous to Cayman’s future prosperity than the Labour Law. Cayman’s private sector had already developed a defence against additional labour costs [my blog-post Everybody’s Cheating, December 2010]; everyday shelf-price increases took care of them. But Cayman Islands Social Security (CISS – “the CISS of Death”, we called it) would force the private sector to bail out government’s reckless over-spending until the end of time.
In the years since the CISS battle, the Chamber’s leaders have been careful to stay on the right side of the politicians. “Look what we did to Gordon Barlow” [Confessions of a Subversive, October 2012] was warning enough for employees; “Look what we did to Nick Duggan”, enough for Councillors. [Our President was denied citizenship for sixteen years for his devotion to duty.]
Now the Chamber – and we the public – are back to Square One. Again the FCO and its local agents are desperately seeking revenue, as an easy alternative to cutting waste and extravagance. Will the Chamber find the courage to do its duty? Doubtful. Like a slow-boiling frog it just doesn’t have the energy, now, to jump out of the pot.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Not the Swiss Family Robinson
You have to be pretty fit to be a hippy, sometimes. When my son lived in Guatemala, on the outskirts of a lakeside village, he had to lug a huge bottle of water every three or four days up a zig-zag path to his treehouse, then up a narrow ladder of 28 steps to the platform halfway up the trunk. Then go back for the two-year old and carry her up the ladder; then help his heavily pregnant girlfriend up too, and then the groceries.
I never stayed overnight there, not wanting to be present when the little girl fell over the fragile wooden railings. This was not a treehouse built to Swiss Family Robinson standards, I may say.
The local Mayans had built the platform to his specifications while he was away in Peru and Ecuador. He had bought the land for a song, in order to protect access to a sacred cave where a Mayan shaman held court. Something like that. I think I paid for the treehouse, and maybe the land too; I really can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter now. He still owns the narrow strip of hillside – in theory, at least: Guatemala has no central registry of land-titles.
On my next vacation in England, I checked in with my cousin Pip, a respectable lady who had not forgotten her own hippy life of thirty years before. Was it smart of me to be subsidising my son’s exotic lifestyle? She gave me a look that was half amused and half indignant. “Gordon, really! One should never not support somebody who chooses to live in a treehouse.”
The Norwegian was one tough Viking woman. She stopped for breath at each zig and each zag, but she made it home up to the platform every time. And her daughter was one tough Viking toddler.
By the time of my visit, Ross had been promoted from Ross to Papa Ross. Being el papa de Ross, it made sense for me to be called Papa Gordon. The little scrap spoke Spanish (well, two years old...) with Ross and the Mayan girls who babysat her from time to time: all forgotten now, more’s the pity. Spanish Papa became Norwegian Pappa when they removed to Norway for the birth of the new baby, and I became Pappa Gordon. Indeed, I am Pappa Gordon to both girls, and Linda is Mamma Linda, by analogy.
In Oslo, Ross took up the cause of the homeless, fighting in the front lines. He helped them “squat” in buildings left vacant by property speculators. The girls tagged along. The baby slept through most of the action in a pram, but the other was totally on her Dad’s side, whatever it was. During one Police-enforced clearing of an occupied apartment block, she wandered off on her own. After a frantic couple of minutes she was found in the cubicle of a security guard, lecturing him (well, three years old...) on his human-rights obligations. “She told me, ‘these people have to have somewhere to sleep, you know’”, he said.
Today, they live in their mother’s forest cabin, except when visiting their father’s cabin in a different forest. There is a court-sanctioned custody-arrangement, which the parents observe more often than not. The parents and their new partners, and grandparents both official and unofficial, all provide a regiment of support. School concerts and PTA evenings can attract a delegation of as many as four adults. “We have so many people who love us”, they say in wonderment, to us in English.
Forest cabins are a step up from a treehouse, by and large. But there is a ladder inside Ross’s place, and a thousand steps up to their mother’s house from where she parks the car. We look forward to the day when flush-toilets and septics will replace the present camp-toilets traditional in Norwegian cabins. Then, there will be no ritual daily burning of the family toilet paper, for the first time in the girls’ young lives.
Sigh. Hasten the day!
I never stayed overnight there, not wanting to be present when the little girl fell over the fragile wooden railings. This was not a treehouse built to Swiss Family Robinson standards, I may say.
The local Mayans had built the platform to his specifications while he was away in Peru and Ecuador. He had bought the land for a song, in order to protect access to a sacred cave where a Mayan shaman held court. Something like that. I think I paid for the treehouse, and maybe the land too; I really can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter now. He still owns the narrow strip of hillside – in theory, at least: Guatemala has no central registry of land-titles.
On my next vacation in England, I checked in with my cousin Pip, a respectable lady who had not forgotten her own hippy life of thirty years before. Was it smart of me to be subsidising my son’s exotic lifestyle? She gave me a look that was half amused and half indignant. “Gordon, really! One should never not support somebody who chooses to live in a treehouse.”
The Norwegian was one tough Viking woman. She stopped for breath at each zig and each zag, but she made it home up to the platform every time. And her daughter was one tough Viking toddler.
By the time of my visit, Ross had been promoted from Ross to Papa Ross. Being el papa de Ross, it made sense for me to be called Papa Gordon. The little scrap spoke Spanish (well, two years old...) with Ross and the Mayan girls who babysat her from time to time: all forgotten now, more’s the pity. Spanish Papa became Norwegian Pappa when they removed to Norway for the birth of the new baby, and I became Pappa Gordon. Indeed, I am Pappa Gordon to both girls, and Linda is Mamma Linda, by analogy.
In Oslo, Ross took up the cause of the homeless, fighting in the front lines. He helped them “squat” in buildings left vacant by property speculators. The girls tagged along. The baby slept through most of the action in a pram, but the other was totally on her Dad’s side, whatever it was. During one Police-enforced clearing of an occupied apartment block, she wandered off on her own. After a frantic couple of minutes she was found in the cubicle of a security guard, lecturing him (well, three years old...) on his human-rights obligations. “She told me, ‘these people have to have somewhere to sleep, you know’”, he said.
Today, they live in their mother’s forest cabin, except when visiting their father’s cabin in a different forest. There is a court-sanctioned custody-arrangement, which the parents observe more often than not. The parents and their new partners, and grandparents both official and unofficial, all provide a regiment of support. School concerts and PTA evenings can attract a delegation of as many as four adults. “We have so many people who love us”, they say in wonderment, to us in English.
Forest cabins are a step up from a treehouse, by and large. But there is a ladder inside Ross’s place, and a thousand steps up to their mother’s house from where she parks the car. We look forward to the day when flush-toilets and septics will replace the present camp-toilets traditional in Norwegian cabins. Then, there will be no ritual daily burning of the family toilet paper, for the first time in the girls’ young lives.
Sigh. Hasten the day!
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