On our small island – eighty square miles in area – we rarely find ourselves far from home. Google Earth shows our house as an L-shaped white roof a mile south of town along the coast road, in a cul-de-sac off to the left. Linda and I each have a car – each seventeen years old, whose first five years were spent in Japan.
Such cars are popularly called “deportees”; they’re cheap to buy, and very reliable. There are probably 20,000 of them on Grand Cayman, and 20,000 other cars, mostly American. Traffic problems in general aren’t as bad as in most places, and are mostly confined to the morning and evening rush-hours.
I have no occasion to go downtown these days, but Linda drives through it along Hog Sty Bay (George Town Harbour, excuse me) on her way to work and back. It’s a pleasant drive, except when four or five cruise-liners are at anchor and their passengers take over the streets. They use the designated pedestrian crossings as often as not, which is nice, though they’re usually looking the wrong way. As a British colony, we drive on the left, and that confuses them.
Half our vehicles have the steering wheels on the left, too – just like back home in the USA – and that’s confusing. Who the hell knows what’s coming from where? The Japanese cars are like English cars: drivers sit on the right. When tourists rent cars here, they don’t always manage to remember all the possibilities.
We residents are commendably patient with them. When we see a car coming towards us on the wrong side of the road, we just slow right down until the penny drops. No cussing, no rude gestures, just that super-patient look that is more insulting than both of those.
We have five sets of traffic lights on the Island, plus a few red-light flashers at zebra crossings. The most fun to be had is at the four-way-stop junction up by the Hospital. There’s always some idiot who sneaks through in the slipstream of the car ahead of him, too impatient to allow the rest of us to exercise our democratic entitlement to move off in the exact order we arrived. Democracy is imperilled whenever a close finish occurs. It usually is, isn’t it?
What a virtuous feeling, to concede priority to a rival who may or may not have come to a complete halt a tenth of a second before us. What indignation, when the concession is not acknowledged with a pip of the horn or a wave. And what fury, when a wretched pedestrian crosses the junction and makes all the cars wait. Oh, the agony when the wretch is on crutches, or hobbling pathetically on his or her way to the Hospital to get crutches.
By the time the fool finally makes his crippled way across, we’ve all forgotten whose turn it is to move first. What tentative movements there are then, for the first four vehicles, all being urged on by reminders from the drivers behind them.
On mornings when I have my nine o’clock directors’ meetings, the traffic is a bit dodgy on Smith Road up beside the Prep School. Young kids are jumping out of cars and running across the road, parents are turning into or out of the designated drop-off spots, and the rest of us feel sorely put upon. It’s only a two-lane street, and two stopped SUVs half-parked on opposite sides of it reduce that to a single lane.
We childless cars squeeze past as best we can, and we resent the delay. After all, the lights by the cricket field are only a hundred yards away, and thirty seconds’ delay might cost us a green light. Cayman’s drivers are courteous, yes, and patient within reason; but there are limits. We are human. If you prick us, we bleed.
I always stop to pick up a coffee at the supermarket, where two hundred cars are angle-parked in banks of two (one on the left, one on the right), and where there are no designated trolley-paths. Again, pedestrians are saved from mass slaughter by drivers’ courtesy and patience. We give way to every shopping cart – “Go ahead, darlin’!” – never mind the dozen cars behind us backed up into the main road, and the three trying to back out in front of us. Ah well; it’s what we do.
It’s bad manners to stop and chat to a friend one hasn’t seen in a while, though, so there’s not much of that. Most of the time.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Buddy Holly’s father
It’s quite fun coming across old photos of one’s younger self. Somehow, one of mine had gotten caught up in Linda’s library of stamp-albums and first-day covers that we were sorting through last week. (After Hurricane Ivan all the albums were crammed up on the ledge above the washing-machine, and she wanted to unload some of them to a visiting cousin.)
This photo was of me in Arab dress – a professional portrait from Al Sharq Studio in Jericho, when I was 25. My Lawrence of Arabia moment, set up by our hosts in what was then Jordan. Somewhere there exists a corresponding photo of Linda: not nearly as glamorous, because in most Arab countries it’s only the men who are allowed to look cool.
I have always remembered being dressed up and photographed in Middle-Eastern gear, but I’d have said it was in Tehran in the home of one of our Mercedes drivers [reported in Cattle Class to Kuwait, April 2012]. But, no, the Studio’s name and address is on the back of the photo. We must have been staying with the owner of the Studio, but I can’t recall that, or him and his family.
It’s shameful of me to forget, but there is no ingratitude in the shame. The people of the entire region and culture were so hospitable to us, that any stand-out would have been an exception – had there been one, which there wasn't.
I tend to confuse Jericho with Jerash. At the latter, we were invited by a bunch of shepherds to share their evening meal, when their workday was done. So we dumped our rucksacks with them and went for a walk. To our shame (more shame!), we didn’t get back until two minutes after sunset – and this during Ramadan, which is the Moslem month of fasting. Hugely embarrassing!
The poor men hadn’t eaten a crumb since dawn, yet couldn’t break their fast until their invited guests arrived. We washed our hands in haste and sat down around a big circular bowl of food, and had to take the first dip. Only then could the hungry ones fall to. They forgave us. It’s a wonderfully tolerant culture, at ground level -- Western propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
We have only a few photos from our travels together, Linda and I. I’ve never been “into” photos, and dislike posing. We have one of me lying beside the little car on a hill overlooking Istanbul, with our clothes strung around drying in the sun. And there’s one of me hitching, with Mt Ararat in the background, just before the Mercedes convoy picked us up. But after that, nothing, that I can recall; and none at all of Linda.
Nothing from Esfahan or Kuwait or Baghdad. Only the two formal snaps from Jericho. Then nothing from Baalbeck or Cairo or Cyprus – or even Mykonos, the most romantic island in the world. Nothing until our wedding in Toronto, two full years after the Al Sharq portraits.
(For our 25th Wedding Anniversary, Linda got our local newspaper to publish a photo of us at the actual wedding – she young and pretty, me smiling in my black-framed glasses, fashionable at the time. A few days later, Roger the comedian greeted me at the tennis courts with, "Hello! It’s Buddy Holly’s father!” Which is funny if you remember who Buddy Holly was and what he looked like.)
Our home is festooned with snaps of Ross at all ages and stages, and of our grand-children. That’s what happens, isn’t it? His kids love seeing snapshots of their Dad as a little boy, just as their children will be glad we kept so many snaps of them. We have a paper wall-chart where we used to mark the girls’ heights when they were smaller. The older one is above the limit, now; but we like to keep it up for old time’s sake. Nostalgia is good.
Maybe we’ll leave it to them in our Wills. There's a thought! On the wall beside my computer as I type now, there is a painting of my great-grandmother Emily, from 1847. Cousin Lucy left it to me in her Will, together with the actual locket Emily wears in the portrait. A tattered wall-chart is not quite in the same league, but it’s the best we can manage.
This photo was of me in Arab dress – a professional portrait from Al Sharq Studio in Jericho, when I was 25. My Lawrence of Arabia moment, set up by our hosts in what was then Jordan. Somewhere there exists a corresponding photo of Linda: not nearly as glamorous, because in most Arab countries it’s only the men who are allowed to look cool.
I have always remembered being dressed up and photographed in Middle-Eastern gear, but I’d have said it was in Tehran in the home of one of our Mercedes drivers [reported in Cattle Class to Kuwait, April 2012]. But, no, the Studio’s name and address is on the back of the photo. We must have been staying with the owner of the Studio, but I can’t recall that, or him and his family.
It’s shameful of me to forget, but there is no ingratitude in the shame. The people of the entire region and culture were so hospitable to us, that any stand-out would have been an exception – had there been one, which there wasn't.
I tend to confuse Jericho with Jerash. At the latter, we were invited by a bunch of shepherds to share their evening meal, when their workday was done. So we dumped our rucksacks with them and went for a walk. To our shame (more shame!), we didn’t get back until two minutes after sunset – and this during Ramadan, which is the Moslem month of fasting. Hugely embarrassing!
The poor men hadn’t eaten a crumb since dawn, yet couldn’t break their fast until their invited guests arrived. We washed our hands in haste and sat down around a big circular bowl of food, and had to take the first dip. Only then could the hungry ones fall to. They forgave us. It’s a wonderfully tolerant culture, at ground level -- Western propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
We have only a few photos from our travels together, Linda and I. I’ve never been “into” photos, and dislike posing. We have one of me lying beside the little car on a hill overlooking Istanbul, with our clothes strung around drying in the sun. And there’s one of me hitching, with Mt Ararat in the background, just before the Mercedes convoy picked us up. But after that, nothing, that I can recall; and none at all of Linda.
Nothing from Esfahan or Kuwait or Baghdad. Only the two formal snaps from Jericho. Then nothing from Baalbeck or Cairo or Cyprus – or even Mykonos, the most romantic island in the world. Nothing until our wedding in Toronto, two full years after the Al Sharq portraits.
(For our 25th Wedding Anniversary, Linda got our local newspaper to publish a photo of us at the actual wedding – she young and pretty, me smiling in my black-framed glasses, fashionable at the time. A few days later, Roger the comedian greeted me at the tennis courts with, "Hello! It’s Buddy Holly’s father!” Which is funny if you remember who Buddy Holly was and what he looked like.)
Our home is festooned with snaps of Ross at all ages and stages, and of our grand-children. That’s what happens, isn’t it? His kids love seeing snapshots of their Dad as a little boy, just as their children will be glad we kept so many snaps of them. We have a paper wall-chart where we used to mark the girls’ heights when they were smaller. The older one is above the limit, now; but we like to keep it up for old time’s sake. Nostalgia is good.
Maybe we’ll leave it to them in our Wills. There's a thought! On the wall beside my computer as I type now, there is a painting of my great-grandmother Emily, from 1847. Cousin Lucy left it to me in her Will, together with the actual locket Emily wears in the portrait. A tattered wall-chart is not quite in the same league, but it’s the best we can manage.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
Private Property
One of the best-known myths in history is that a Dutch international trading company bought Manhattan Island in the 17th Century for $24 worth of beads. What a bargain, eh? It’s not quite true. What they actually bought was a right to use the land. Exclusively perhaps, and indefinitely perhaps, but the natives of that region had no concept of private property. Their representatives not only didn’t have the right to sell (alienate) any land, they wouldn’t have even thought of it.
When native Melanesian villagers in the South Pacific Islands that European invaders called New Hebrides and New Caledonia (and the French equivalents) solemnly agreed to sell their spare land in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they were pleased when the settlers planted long lines of coconut trees and gave the villagers some of the fruit. As the villagers increased in number, they naturally expanded their living space among the trees. To them, land-use was the same as land-ownership; unused land had no owner. They had no concept of private property.
Much argument ensued. Military might defined legal right – as it always does. The natives’ resentment was still strong in the New Hebrides in the 1970s when Linda and I lived in Vila, the main trading town. The resentment was assuaged in 1980, when the first government of the newly independent nation of Vanuatu confiscated all vacant land owned by non-natives. We lost our half-acre suburban plot in Vila, bought as a speculation. These forty years later, we still feel hardly done by, and we understand the old resentment of the villagers.
Centuries ago, all land in England was deemed to be owned by the monarchy. It had been appointed directly by God, and it claimed the “divine right” that King Charles lost his head over. Today, legal title to English land is in the names of individuals, and the monarch has no say in the matter.
That’s not quite true, either. The permission of the monarchy or its deputies (or its recognized legal successors in some former colonies) is an essential requirement for all transfers of land. A tax is payable, evidence that the State’s power is the power of an owner, never mind whose name is on the Title Deed. Death duties are a reminder. So is the doctrine of “eminent domain” – the right of the State to confiscate anybody’s land.
(The power of the State to conscript citizens for foreign wars is, equally, a reminder of its right to enslave its subjects, never mind what statutes have been passed banning slavery and indentured service, and never mind what international Human Rights Conventions have been solemnly signed. Military (paramilitary) might still defines legal right.)
When the British government began its conquest and occupation of Australia, in the years following the loss of its major North American colonies, it (the government) decided to experiment with an alternative to its American practices. This time, there would be no argument with native communities over the difference between land-ownership and land-use. There would be no moral dilemma over the theft of natives’ land.
This time – and what a brilliant notion it was – this time, the natives would simply not be recognized as human! Wow. British judges declared Australia an uninhabited continent. The nomadic sub-human natives were shoo’d out of the way, and were shot like outlaws if they baulked. Well, they were outlaws – creatures living outside the protection of the law. Let them play that on their didgeridoos and dance to it!
I have blogged [Grandfathers, January 2014] that my mother’s father used to negotiate with the local native community for the right to harvest trees in the forest and to establish sawmills to cut the felled trees into timber. It was prudent to negotiate those things in good faith, but by law he could have simply walked in and assumed the right – with the permission of the registered European owner of the forest, of course…
When native Melanesian villagers in the South Pacific Islands that European invaders called New Hebrides and New Caledonia (and the French equivalents) solemnly agreed to sell their spare land in the 19th and 20th Centuries, they were pleased when the settlers planted long lines of coconut trees and gave the villagers some of the fruit. As the villagers increased in number, they naturally expanded their living space among the trees. To them, land-use was the same as land-ownership; unused land had no owner. They had no concept of private property.
Much argument ensued. Military might defined legal right – as it always does. The natives’ resentment was still strong in the New Hebrides in the 1970s when Linda and I lived in Vila, the main trading town. The resentment was assuaged in 1980, when the first government of the newly independent nation of Vanuatu confiscated all vacant land owned by non-natives. We lost our half-acre suburban plot in Vila, bought as a speculation. These forty years later, we still feel hardly done by, and we understand the old resentment of the villagers.
Centuries ago, all land in England was deemed to be owned by the monarchy. It had been appointed directly by God, and it claimed the “divine right” that King Charles lost his head over. Today, legal title to English land is in the names of individuals, and the monarch has no say in the matter.
That’s not quite true, either. The permission of the monarchy or its deputies (or its recognized legal successors in some former colonies) is an essential requirement for all transfers of land. A tax is payable, evidence that the State’s power is the power of an owner, never mind whose name is on the Title Deed. Death duties are a reminder. So is the doctrine of “eminent domain” – the right of the State to confiscate anybody’s land.
(The power of the State to conscript citizens for foreign wars is, equally, a reminder of its right to enslave its subjects, never mind what statutes have been passed banning slavery and indentured service, and never mind what international Human Rights Conventions have been solemnly signed. Military (paramilitary) might still defines legal right.)
When the British government began its conquest and occupation of Australia, in the years following the loss of its major North American colonies, it (the government) decided to experiment with an alternative to its American practices. This time, there would be no argument with native communities over the difference between land-ownership and land-use. There would be no moral dilemma over the theft of natives’ land.
This time – and what a brilliant notion it was – this time, the natives would simply not be recognized as human! Wow. British judges declared Australia an uninhabited continent. The nomadic sub-human natives were shoo’d out of the way, and were shot like outlaws if they baulked. Well, they were outlaws – creatures living outside the protection of the law. Let them play that on their didgeridoos and dance to it!
I have blogged [Grandfathers, January 2014] that my mother’s father used to negotiate with the local native community for the right to harvest trees in the forest and to establish sawmills to cut the felled trees into timber. It was prudent to negotiate those things in good faith, but by law he could have simply walked in and assumed the right – with the permission of the registered European owner of the forest, of course…
Saturday, April 19, 2014
A wedding to attend (New Hebrides)
The New Hebrides (before it went independent as Vanuatu) was a fascinating place. This archipelago in the South Pacific was and is populated by ethnic Melanesians, with a scattering of Polynesians – biologically related, very distantly – to Australian aborigines and native Hawaiians, respectively. Plus a few ethnic Europeans on the fringes, stealing slaves for Australia’s sugar farms (until 1901) or operating coconut plantations, or trading.
In the 1970s, the two nations made half-hearted attempts to establish an offshore tax-haven (paradis fiscal, in French). Their attempts were thwarted by the inadequacy of international communications. The overseas phone service was an antiquated radio link, like something out of a World War One movie. (“Do you copy?” “Roger! Wilco!” “Over and out!”)
We were connected to the world via an undersea cable to Australia during the scheduled British sessions, and one to Tahiti during the French sessions. I was once cut off in the middle of an incoherent exchange with a client in New York, when the session changed. I pleaded with the French operator (je vous en prie!), and she kindly gave me an extra three minutes.
There were reckoned to be 113 separate Melanesian languages, some spoken in only one or two villages, and four Polynesian ones. The lingua franca was and is a simple local pidgin called Bislama – described in my August 2013 blog Unexpected Places.
The territory was governed eccentrically by France and Britain in tandem – not in any Euro-bullying fashion but in cordial partnership with the local village chiefs. The European powers had only invaded in the first place, in the late 1800s, in order to forestall Germany’s presumed intentions. Their later governance concentrated mainly on the affairs of all non-native traders, visitors and residents.
When the Christian conquerors arrived, they stopped the traditional practices of head-hunting, cannibalism, and wearing no clothes, and tried manfully to stop domestic violence and revenge killings. The Native Code of the Islands (explained in my Aiding and Abetting Adultery, November 2012), negotiated by the two European administrators and the village chiefs, put the punishment of violent crimes into the hands of the Europeans. Offenders were prosecuted in The White Man’s courts, and served time in The White Man’s jails.
The British jail was a source of wonderment for us British expats. The rickety fence was designed (deliberately) not to keep prisoners inside but to keep their families outside. Why would anybody bother to escape, when his village chief would only send him back? Except on special occasions, naturally.
At one village wedding, a British Magistrate friend of mine caught sight of a prisoner he had sent to jail earlier that day. “I carefully didn’t catch his eye, and he carefully kept out of my way,” my friend told me. “Neither of us wanted to spoil the party. No harm done. He took himself back to jail before morning. I did check that.”
What is now called “community service” was part and parcel of jail sentences. Work-gangs of twenty men (violent offenders all) swarmed up and down the town streets armed with sickles and machetes, under the benign supervision of an unarmed native policeman. A chain-gang without chains…
Because old habits die hard, the jail was always full. So there was always a waiting-list of sentenced offenders who had been sent home to their villages to await official recalls by the government radio station. The station was on the air three times a day – half an hour in each of English, French and Bislama, each time: news, followed by public announcements.
“This message is for Henry Bong, believed to be (…!) on Malekula. Please meet the Motor Vessel Maskelyne at the jetty on Saturday morning. On arrival in Vila, report to the jail to commence your sentence. Also, Peter Vatu on Erromango, please meet the Maskelyne at about noon on Saturday –" [and so on until the half hour was up].
And, wonderfully, they all did report, unless they were severely sick or injured, or had a wedding to attend… I don’t know what they did if they didn’t know where the jail was, when they got to Vila. Asked a policeman, I suppose.
In the 1970s, the two nations made half-hearted attempts to establish an offshore tax-haven (paradis fiscal, in French). Their attempts were thwarted by the inadequacy of international communications. The overseas phone service was an antiquated radio link, like something out of a World War One movie. (“Do you copy?” “Roger! Wilco!” “Over and out!”)
We were connected to the world via an undersea cable to Australia during the scheduled British sessions, and one to Tahiti during the French sessions. I was once cut off in the middle of an incoherent exchange with a client in New York, when the session changed. I pleaded with the French operator (je vous en prie!), and she kindly gave me an extra three minutes.
There were reckoned to be 113 separate Melanesian languages, some spoken in only one or two villages, and four Polynesian ones. The lingua franca was and is a simple local pidgin called Bislama – described in my August 2013 blog Unexpected Places.
The territory was governed eccentrically by France and Britain in tandem – not in any Euro-bullying fashion but in cordial partnership with the local village chiefs. The European powers had only invaded in the first place, in the late 1800s, in order to forestall Germany’s presumed intentions. Their later governance concentrated mainly on the affairs of all non-native traders, visitors and residents.
When the Christian conquerors arrived, they stopped the traditional practices of head-hunting, cannibalism, and wearing no clothes, and tried manfully to stop domestic violence and revenge killings. The Native Code of the Islands (explained in my Aiding and Abetting Adultery, November 2012), negotiated by the two European administrators and the village chiefs, put the punishment of violent crimes into the hands of the Europeans. Offenders were prosecuted in The White Man’s courts, and served time in The White Man’s jails.
The British jail was a source of wonderment for us British expats. The rickety fence was designed (deliberately) not to keep prisoners inside but to keep their families outside. Why would anybody bother to escape, when his village chief would only send him back? Except on special occasions, naturally.
At one village wedding, a British Magistrate friend of mine caught sight of a prisoner he had sent to jail earlier that day. “I carefully didn’t catch his eye, and he carefully kept out of my way,” my friend told me. “Neither of us wanted to spoil the party. No harm done. He took himself back to jail before morning. I did check that.”
What is now called “community service” was part and parcel of jail sentences. Work-gangs of twenty men (violent offenders all) swarmed up and down the town streets armed with sickles and machetes, under the benign supervision of an unarmed native policeman. A chain-gang without chains…
Because old habits die hard, the jail was always full. So there was always a waiting-list of sentenced offenders who had been sent home to their villages to await official recalls by the government radio station. The station was on the air three times a day – half an hour in each of English, French and Bislama, each time: news, followed by public announcements.
“This message is for Henry Bong, believed to be (…!) on Malekula. Please meet the Motor Vessel Maskelyne at the jetty on Saturday morning. On arrival in Vila, report to the jail to commence your sentence. Also, Peter Vatu on Erromango, please meet the Maskelyne at about noon on Saturday –" [and so on until the half hour was up].
And, wonderfully, they all did report, unless they were severely sick or injured, or had a wedding to attend… I don’t know what they did if they didn’t know where the jail was, when they got to Vila. Asked a policeman, I suppose.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Catch and release
“Catch and release” is a term common in game-fishing tournaments. Catch a fish and reel it in, weigh it for the record, and throw it back in the water in order to preserve the stock. In Cayman, the term is also applied, cynically, to our justice system. Catch and try a criminal, take him to court, and throw him back on the streets again.
Sometimes there is a brief time in prison between court and release, but not always. Our Prosecution Service doesn’t always prosecute a bad guy for the correct crime, and doesn’t always prosecute him enthusiastically when it is the correct crime. It’s a small island, and people know people.
Our judges’ sentences are erratic; concurrent terms are the norm instead of consecutive. Only a few convicts seem to serve their full sentences in prison. Parole is readily granted; the Probation Service seems to operate more generously than is warranted. And although Police lock-ups are notoriously dreadful places, the actual prison is not as tough as my old boarding-school used to be.
I don’t know how much help convicts receive when they are released from prison; it’s all pretty hush-hush. Cayman’s governance in general operates on a need-to-know basis, and the public doesn’t need to know much at all, according to our rulers. Policing and justice are secretive, and scarcely monitored. Corruption is universally suspected, and no serious effort is made to dispel that suspicion. Recidivism is rife. So. How can we (our society) get our repeat-criminals off the carousel?
The latest new idea is a day-release program that will (hopefully) persuade selected convicts that they can cope with life after prison. They will become useful members of society, earning an honest living and not go back to their criminal careers and bounce in and out of pokey the rest of their lives.
It hasn’t been decided yet what jobs they will be doing, or how much they will be paid, or – most important – what degree of criminality will be addressed by the program. The public wouldn’t stand for any baby-rapists to be chosen for the list, or violent offenders of any kind, surely. Or seducers of children, or gang members. Drug-dealers would probably be out of consideration, mainly because it’s hard to believe they ever retire from such a lucrative line of business. That leaves only petty thieves, burglars and embezzlers, really.
The voluntary risk-taking employers would have to be very community-minded people indeed, wouldn’t they – very determined to thwart Cayman’s drift towards the development of a permanently lawless underclass. One must wish them well, and their auditors and insurers…
To what extent will our politicians and Civil Servants cooperate? How will the employment of convicts fit into government’s existing labour-policy? Will Caymanian convicts on day-release be given priority over the three thousand supposedly unemployed Caymanians? Some of the latter may be shiftless and lazy, but they are not convicts, or at least not at the moment.
Will the convicts receive wages at the going rate, or will they have to work for nothing, like slaves? Free labour generally has difficulty competing with slave-labour, for obvious reasons. Would the risk-taking employers be exempted from the Labour Law, and the Minimum Wage law when we have one?
And another thing… Half of all Cayman’s Civil Servants are reckoned to run private businesses from their desks. Would they favour themselves in the allocation of no-wage convict workers? Damn right they would.
What about government’s permanent immigration policy, which requires that Caymanian citizens be hired and promoted ahead of Work Permit foreigners, regardless of ability? Might employers of convicts be rewarded with extra Work Permits, say one-for-one? Huh. Not likely! So how would they be rewarded? Public approbation, alone?
Sometimes there is a brief time in prison between court and release, but not always. Our Prosecution Service doesn’t always prosecute a bad guy for the correct crime, and doesn’t always prosecute him enthusiastically when it is the correct crime. It’s a small island, and people know people.
Our judges’ sentences are erratic; concurrent terms are the norm instead of consecutive. Only a few convicts seem to serve their full sentences in prison. Parole is readily granted; the Probation Service seems to operate more generously than is warranted. And although Police lock-ups are notoriously dreadful places, the actual prison is not as tough as my old boarding-school used to be.
I don’t know how much help convicts receive when they are released from prison; it’s all pretty hush-hush. Cayman’s governance in general operates on a need-to-know basis, and the public doesn’t need to know much at all, according to our rulers. Policing and justice are secretive, and scarcely monitored. Corruption is universally suspected, and no serious effort is made to dispel that suspicion. Recidivism is rife. So. How can we (our society) get our repeat-criminals off the carousel?
The latest new idea is a day-release program that will (hopefully) persuade selected convicts that they can cope with life after prison. They will become useful members of society, earning an honest living and not go back to their criminal careers and bounce in and out of pokey the rest of their lives.
It hasn’t been decided yet what jobs they will be doing, or how much they will be paid, or – most important – what degree of criminality will be addressed by the program. The public wouldn’t stand for any baby-rapists to be chosen for the list, or violent offenders of any kind, surely. Or seducers of children, or gang members. Drug-dealers would probably be out of consideration, mainly because it’s hard to believe they ever retire from such a lucrative line of business. That leaves only petty thieves, burglars and embezzlers, really.
The voluntary risk-taking employers would have to be very community-minded people indeed, wouldn’t they – very determined to thwart Cayman’s drift towards the development of a permanently lawless underclass. One must wish them well, and their auditors and insurers…
To what extent will our politicians and Civil Servants cooperate? How will the employment of convicts fit into government’s existing labour-policy? Will Caymanian convicts on day-release be given priority over the three thousand supposedly unemployed Caymanians? Some of the latter may be shiftless and lazy, but they are not convicts, or at least not at the moment.
Will the convicts receive wages at the going rate, or will they have to work for nothing, like slaves? Free labour generally has difficulty competing with slave-labour, for obvious reasons. Would the risk-taking employers be exempted from the Labour Law, and the Minimum Wage law when we have one?
And another thing… Half of all Cayman’s Civil Servants are reckoned to run private businesses from their desks. Would they favour themselves in the allocation of no-wage convict workers? Damn right they would.
What about government’s permanent immigration policy, which requires that Caymanian citizens be hired and promoted ahead of Work Permit foreigners, regardless of ability? Might employers of convicts be rewarded with extra Work Permits, say one-for-one? Huh. Not likely! So how would they be rewarded? Public approbation, alone?
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
"No other gods before me"
In a post in January 2012 I speculated on the origin of the Biblical Children of Israel, which came into existence some time around 1500 BC. The names of its gods and legendary heroes suggested that it was an artificial tribe constructed from diverse elements of refugee groups during a clash of empires in northern Phoenicia.
The tribe was created and consolidated over several generations by a ruthless gang (all that unnecessary smiting…) of warrior priests that I called “the Taliban of their day”. A year or so later (February 2013), The Hebrews took the story back to Father Abraham in the city-state of Haran, and in October of that year Noah and Company moved it even further back, to the original homeland of at least some of the ancestors in the vicinity of Ararat.
“Ur of the Chaldees” is more plausibly identified as Ur of the Khaldis in north-eastern Anatolia than as the city on the southern Tigris River. A slow-but-steady tribal-drift (folk-wandering) from Ararat down to Haran is infinitely more likely than a pointless migration down to the Persian Gulf and back, for Abraham and his forebears. (Haran was a focal point of one of the busiest trade-routes in the region, and the legendary Abraham left there a rich man.)
The name of the tribal god Yahweh/Jehovah appears in several guises, notably Noah and Jacob. (n is a vocalisation of h in human speech, so Noah is the same name as the second syllable of Ya-hweh.) All the names and their variants, and all the contemporary legends – were memorized and recited by thirty or forty generations of tribal bards before being written down in later tribal dialects. The writing was done around the time Celtic-speaking tribes were conquering the native peoples of the British Isles.
The huge time-scale provides scope for superficial changes of names and dialects. My speculations are based on the premise that names (holy names in particular) retain their basic structures. The claimed meanings of proper names in all languages, have always been assigned on the basis of folk-etymology; they shouldn’t ever be taken seriously.
The proto-Hebrews carried Yahweh-the-god from the Mountains of Ur down to the Land of Egypt – not in the Egypt of our modern maps, but the part of northern Phoenicia under Egyptian rule at the time. That’s a defensible and legitimate speculation, based on history. But speculations can’t cope with the time before The Flood. The names of Adam’s descendants are mostly the names of regional gods – probably the ancestral gods of the wanderers before they settled on Hebe (and variants), and before their adoption of Yahweh/Jacob.
Every tribe has always had its own god, whose duty was to protect the tribe. The creation of the world was usually not ascribed to tribal gods. Generally, creation-gods did their Big-Bang job and left the stage. The Children of Israel, being an invented tribe and not a traditional one with a long history, and having selected one of their ancestral gods to be their very own, went the extra furlong and declared that their newly-agreed-upon tribal god had actually created the entire world and everything that was in it. Wow!
That declaration didn’t make them monotheists, but it did give their god a great customer-relations boost. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, the god said, and “I am a jealous god”. In effect: Look, I’m number one; the rest of them are make-weights; don’t waste your time with them. The priests who wrote the script were on a winner, with that line - at least for the time being.
But monotheism arrived only with the energetic heresy of the cult of Christianity. That cult’s fervent proselytising among the pagans embraced large numbers of other tribal gods, but its priests (oh, the chutzpah!) refused to acknowledge them as gods. Agents and saints, yes, but not gods. One single god since the beginning of the world – not limited to one tribe – was irresistible. As Christianity (and Islam, later) proved in much of the world.
Yahweh’s original tribe became marginalized. Over the centuries it gained some converts here and there – Berbers in North Africa were the ancestors of the Sephardic Jews, and the mini-empire of the Khazars north and east of the Black Sea produced the Ashkenazi Jews. But in the Levantine homeland, most of the original tribe fell prey to (and converted to) the two major heretical cults. Their descendants are today’s Palestinians.
Captivated by the romance of an ancient tribal ethos, and cynically manipulated by JINOs (Jews In Name Only) the European descendants of converts to the Yahweh cult are currently engaged in the slow-motion conquest of the ancient homeland of their cultural forebears.
But the old tribal ethos demanded the mass slaughter of all who stood in the way of the jealous Yahweh and his people, and mass slaughter is out of fashion now. Even ethnic cleansing is frowned upon, in an age of human-rights. So it’s a futile exercise, strategically – an historical aberration that has nothing to do with the Israelites.
The tribe was created and consolidated over several generations by a ruthless gang (all that unnecessary smiting…) of warrior priests that I called “the Taliban of their day”. A year or so later (February 2013), The Hebrews took the story back to Father Abraham in the city-state of Haran, and in October of that year Noah and Company moved it even further back, to the original homeland of at least some of the ancestors in the vicinity of Ararat.
“Ur of the Chaldees” is more plausibly identified as Ur of the Khaldis in north-eastern Anatolia than as the city on the southern Tigris River. A slow-but-steady tribal-drift (folk-wandering) from Ararat down to Haran is infinitely more likely than a pointless migration down to the Persian Gulf and back, for Abraham and his forebears. (Haran was a focal point of one of the busiest trade-routes in the region, and the legendary Abraham left there a rich man.)
The name of the tribal god Yahweh/Jehovah appears in several guises, notably Noah and Jacob. (n is a vocalisation of h in human speech, so Noah is the same name as the second syllable of Ya-hweh.) All the names and their variants, and all the contemporary legends – were memorized and recited by thirty or forty generations of tribal bards before being written down in later tribal dialects. The writing was done around the time Celtic-speaking tribes were conquering the native peoples of the British Isles.
The huge time-scale provides scope for superficial changes of names and dialects. My speculations are based on the premise that names (holy names in particular) retain their basic structures. The claimed meanings of proper names in all languages, have always been assigned on the basis of folk-etymology; they shouldn’t ever be taken seriously.
The proto-Hebrews carried Yahweh-the-god from the Mountains of Ur down to the Land of Egypt – not in the Egypt of our modern maps, but the part of northern Phoenicia under Egyptian rule at the time. That’s a defensible and legitimate speculation, based on history. But speculations can’t cope with the time before The Flood. The names of Adam’s descendants are mostly the names of regional gods – probably the ancestral gods of the wanderers before they settled on Hebe (and variants), and before their adoption of Yahweh/Jacob.
Every tribe has always had its own god, whose duty was to protect the tribe. The creation of the world was usually not ascribed to tribal gods. Generally, creation-gods did their Big-Bang job and left the stage. The Children of Israel, being an invented tribe and not a traditional one with a long history, and having selected one of their ancestral gods to be their very own, went the extra furlong and declared that their newly-agreed-upon tribal god had actually created the entire world and everything that was in it. Wow!
That declaration didn’t make them monotheists, but it did give their god a great customer-relations boost. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”, the god said, and “I am a jealous god”. In effect: Look, I’m number one; the rest of them are make-weights; don’t waste your time with them. The priests who wrote the script were on a winner, with that line - at least for the time being.
But monotheism arrived only with the energetic heresy of the cult of Christianity. That cult’s fervent proselytising among the pagans embraced large numbers of other tribal gods, but its priests (oh, the chutzpah!) refused to acknowledge them as gods. Agents and saints, yes, but not gods. One single god since the beginning of the world – not limited to one tribe – was irresistible. As Christianity (and Islam, later) proved in much of the world.
Yahweh’s original tribe became marginalized. Over the centuries it gained some converts here and there – Berbers in North Africa were the ancestors of the Sephardic Jews, and the mini-empire of the Khazars north and east of the Black Sea produced the Ashkenazi Jews. But in the Levantine homeland, most of the original tribe fell prey to (and converted to) the two major heretical cults. Their descendants are today’s Palestinians.
Captivated by the romance of an ancient tribal ethos, and cynically manipulated by JINOs (Jews In Name Only) the European descendants of converts to the Yahweh cult are currently engaged in the slow-motion conquest of the ancient homeland of their cultural forebears.
But the old tribal ethos demanded the mass slaughter of all who stood in the way of the jealous Yahweh and his people, and mass slaughter is out of fashion now. Even ethnic cleansing is frowned upon, in an age of human-rights. So it’s a futile exercise, strategically – an historical aberration that has nothing to do with the Israelites.
Monday, March 31, 2014
The Gay Marriage thing
Most people in the West are tolerant – if that’s the word – of same-sex sexual relationships, but half of us draw the line at same-sex marriages. Why is that? Most people in the world probably couldn’t care less if siblings live together, but very few approve of sexual goings-on between or among them. Almost all of them would draw the line at sibling marriages. Why is that?
What is so special about marriage? It can’t be all about children, surely, in these sophisticated times. At least, not in the West. Promiscuity is blatant, adoptions are easy, artificial insemination is routine, divorces are simple, surgical sex-changes abound, birth control is everywhere, and serial monogamy is the norm. The old ideal of “the nuclear family” has gone out the window.
Why should we (society) draw the line anywhere, as long as there are no children involved or envisioned? What would be lost, if we scrapped the idea that society needs to formally approve every marriage? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The law governing civil contracts can take care of any children.
Is it about taxes, pensions or other entitlements? It may be. The last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died in 2003, and the last surviving son of a US Civil War Veteran was still alive just last year. (I would want a DNA test for him, but the relevant US Government agency was still paying his pension of $70 a week.)
It was the custom for young girls to be married off to ancient Veterans specifically in order to inherit their lifetime pensions. Sex was not always required of them. Deathbed marriages were just a way for old codgers to do their friends’ families a favour. Sometimes the favours would be reciprocal. Today’s marriages of convenience are following some fine precedents.
Some private companies will not pay spouses’ lifetime benefits (pension and medical) if the age gap is greater than a designated number of years. It’s a good idea. Why don’t national governments introduce a similar measure? Or, why don’t they simply get out of the marriage-approval business altogether? (Or, busybody-ness, which is what it really is.)
The original purpose of community-approved marriage was to give tribal elders the power to ensure the stability of the ruling classes. In the earliest civilisations, marriages within the nobility had to be carefully monitored to mimimise the likelihood of factional rebellions. Marriages were designed to cement alliances of families, clans and factions.
The serfs were generally left alone to arrange their own marriages, though rulers kept a weather eye out for suspicious alliances. Slave families were deliberately split up in order to remove any temptation to plot against their masters. It happened to the Africans in the Americas, and the provenance is an old one.
The difference with same-sex relationships was the absence of children, but in actuality the ruling classes were less against homosexual marriages than for the traditional form. Long ago, empires in China were largely governed by eunuchs, whose value to emperors was that they could not produce lineages to which they might owe their primary loyalties.
National histories are cluttered with examples of military dynasties jostling for political power. As individual rights have gradually superseded community rights, the reason for the official licensing of marriages has lessened. There is no point in the custom any more, and if it were scrapped altogether, it would be no loss.
Even today, there is occasional deep suspicion by hereditary rulers of a “Pink Mafia” whose members, like Masonic lodges, might be loyal to each other at the expense of loyalty to the community as a whole or to the ruling classes. That kind of loyalty might indeed exist here and there, but formal marriage doesn’t and wouldn’t frustrate it. Some state, somewhere, ought to have the courage to give up on marriage altogether. It doesn’t serve any useful purpose any more.
What is so special about marriage? It can’t be all about children, surely, in these sophisticated times. At least, not in the West. Promiscuity is blatant, adoptions are easy, artificial insemination is routine, divorces are simple, surgical sex-changes abound, birth control is everywhere, and serial monogamy is the norm. The old ideal of “the nuclear family” has gone out the window.
Why should we (society) draw the line anywhere, as long as there are no children involved or envisioned? What would be lost, if we scrapped the idea that society needs to formally approve every marriage? Nothing. Not a damn thing. The law governing civil contracts can take care of any children.
Is it about taxes, pensions or other entitlements? It may be. The last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died in 2003, and the last surviving son of a US Civil War Veteran was still alive just last year. (I would want a DNA test for him, but the relevant US Government agency was still paying his pension of $70 a week.)
It was the custom for young girls to be married off to ancient Veterans specifically in order to inherit their lifetime pensions. Sex was not always required of them. Deathbed marriages were just a way for old codgers to do their friends’ families a favour. Sometimes the favours would be reciprocal. Today’s marriages of convenience are following some fine precedents.
Some private companies will not pay spouses’ lifetime benefits (pension and medical) if the age gap is greater than a designated number of years. It’s a good idea. Why don’t national governments introduce a similar measure? Or, why don’t they simply get out of the marriage-approval business altogether? (Or, busybody-ness, which is what it really is.)
The original purpose of community-approved marriage was to give tribal elders the power to ensure the stability of the ruling classes. In the earliest civilisations, marriages within the nobility had to be carefully monitored to mimimise the likelihood of factional rebellions. Marriages were designed to cement alliances of families, clans and factions.
The serfs were generally left alone to arrange their own marriages, though rulers kept a weather eye out for suspicious alliances. Slave families were deliberately split up in order to remove any temptation to plot against their masters. It happened to the Africans in the Americas, and the provenance is an old one.
The difference with same-sex relationships was the absence of children, but in actuality the ruling classes were less against homosexual marriages than for the traditional form. Long ago, empires in China were largely governed by eunuchs, whose value to emperors was that they could not produce lineages to which they might owe their primary loyalties.
National histories are cluttered with examples of military dynasties jostling for political power. As individual rights have gradually superseded community rights, the reason for the official licensing of marriages has lessened. There is no point in the custom any more, and if it were scrapped altogether, it would be no loss.
Even today, there is occasional deep suspicion by hereditary rulers of a “Pink Mafia” whose members, like Masonic lodges, might be loyal to each other at the expense of loyalty to the community as a whole or to the ruling classes. That kind of loyalty might indeed exist here and there, but formal marriage doesn’t and wouldn’t frustrate it. Some state, somewhere, ought to have the courage to give up on marriage altogether. It doesn’t serve any useful purpose any more.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
“The death of Lady Mondegreen”
Things aren’t always what they seem, in the English language. They say (“They”!) that English is the easiest language in the world to be understood in, but one of the hardest to speak well. With only 800 words (They say), a total stranger can get by, but years of practice will usually leave him a bit short of perfection. (Surely German is fifty times more difficult. It’s a wonder anybody speaks it well. And actually, when you think about it, we only have their word for it that anybody does speak it well.)
English spelling is a hodge-podge of folk-etymology and class eccentricities. Who else but the English upper class would identify one’s nightly sleep as a dietary “fast” to the point of calling the first meal of the day “break-fast”, while abbreviating it to “brekkie”? Well, until recent Centuries only upper-class clerics were literate, and claimed to know everything there was to know about the language.
An infinitely more plausible speculation is that the word we pronounce brekfust is but a dialectal variant of Scandinavian frukost, which means a meal comprising fruit (fruk) and cheese (ost). That might be folk-etymology too, but who knows? Fruit and cheese is a man’s brekkie. When we break our “fast” is when we get up in the middle of the night for a pee and raid the fridge on the way back. I know, the Vikings didn’t have fridges, but they would have shared the same nocturnal habits. ***
*** A friend has pointed out that the Scandinavian word may have originated in the German word frueh-kost meaning "early food". This seems a more likely explanation than mine; but, either way, English "break-fast" is nonsense.
It was, reportedly, an 18th-Century Earl of Sandwich who introduced his handy snack to his aristocratic chums at the roulette wheel, but his serfs had been munching pieces of bread with bacon + a wedge of cheese for many generations before. One can picture the chums laughing at his adoption of such peasant fare: “A sarney-wedge, my lord? More of a Sand-wich, what, what? Hahaha!”
Next: why is “cupboard” spelt the way it is? A cupboard is a cubby-hole with a door, and a cubby is simply a variant of a cabi-net. All cupboards have doors. A cupboard without a door is a pantry. A board that you keep cups on is a shelf. Sheesh! The bizarre spelling “cupboard” is folk-etymology deriving from upper-class eccentricity.
My personal term for this sort of rot is “muster-bin”. The imagined origins of English surnames present a long list of muster-bin falsehoods. The first person bearing the surname Smith must ha’ bin a smith by trade. The first Mr Brown must ha’ bin brown in skin or hair or eyes. The first Jones and Johnson were the sons of men named John. And so on. They simply must have been. Actually, as we say in the Caribbean, “they don’t must.” There are more plausible alternative explanations for those names. But plausibility finds it hard to beat out facile assumptions.
To Lady Mondegreen, now. Not quite a folk-etymology, because it was invented by a child who grew up to be a writer – one Sylvia Wright. In 1954, she published an essay on a verse her mother used to read to her from an 18th-Century collection of ballads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have ye been?
They have slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The little girl felt desperately sad for the poor lady who died with one of Scotland’s famous martyrs, and resented the poet’s failure to mention her again in his story. Decades passed before the adult Sylvia Wright actually read the poem for herself, and learned that the killers of the Earl o’ Moray had in fact laid him on the green. Unaccompanied.
Wikipedia tells the story, and gives other examples of what are today called Mondegreens. We all have our favourites. Bob Dylan sang “the ants are my friends”, Creedence in Bad Moon Rising sang “there’s a bathroom on the right”. And, at Number One, for me, the last verse of Psalm 23, which begins “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”.
English spelling is a hodge-podge of folk-etymology and class eccentricities. Who else but the English upper class would identify one’s nightly sleep as a dietary “fast” to the point of calling the first meal of the day “break-fast”, while abbreviating it to “brekkie”? Well, until recent Centuries only upper-class clerics were literate, and claimed to know everything there was to know about the language.
An infinitely more plausible speculation is that the word we pronounce brekfust is but a dialectal variant of Scandinavian frukost, which means a meal comprising fruit (fruk) and cheese (ost). That might be folk-etymology too, but who knows? Fruit and cheese is a man’s brekkie. When we break our “fast” is when we get up in the middle of the night for a pee and raid the fridge on the way back. I know, the Vikings didn’t have fridges, but they would have shared the same nocturnal habits. ***
*** A friend has pointed out that the Scandinavian word may have originated in the German word frueh-kost meaning "early food". This seems a more likely explanation than mine; but, either way, English "break-fast" is nonsense.
It was, reportedly, an 18th-Century Earl of Sandwich who introduced his handy snack to his aristocratic chums at the roulette wheel, but his serfs had been munching pieces of bread with bacon + a wedge of cheese for many generations before. One can picture the chums laughing at his adoption of such peasant fare: “A sarney-wedge, my lord? More of a Sand-wich, what, what? Hahaha!”
Next: why is “cupboard” spelt the way it is? A cupboard is a cubby-hole with a door, and a cubby is simply a variant of a cabi-net. All cupboards have doors. A cupboard without a door is a pantry. A board that you keep cups on is a shelf. Sheesh! The bizarre spelling “cupboard” is folk-etymology deriving from upper-class eccentricity.
My personal term for this sort of rot is “muster-bin”. The imagined origins of English surnames present a long list of muster-bin falsehoods. The first person bearing the surname Smith must ha’ bin a smith by trade. The first Mr Brown must ha’ bin brown in skin or hair or eyes. The first Jones and Johnson were the sons of men named John. And so on. They simply must have been. Actually, as we say in the Caribbean, “they don’t must.” There are more plausible alternative explanations for those names. But plausibility finds it hard to beat out facile assumptions.
To Lady Mondegreen, now. Not quite a folk-etymology, because it was invented by a child who grew up to be a writer – one Sylvia Wright. In 1954, she published an essay on a verse her mother used to read to her from an 18th-Century collection of ballads:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have ye been?
They have slain the Earl o' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.
The little girl felt desperately sad for the poor lady who died with one of Scotland’s famous martyrs, and resented the poet’s failure to mention her again in his story. Decades passed before the adult Sylvia Wright actually read the poem for herself, and learned that the killers of the Earl o’ Moray had in fact laid him on the green. Unaccompanied.
Wikipedia tells the story, and gives other examples of what are today called Mondegreens. We all have our favourites. Bob Dylan sang “the ants are my friends”, Creedence in Bad Moon Rising sang “there’s a bathroom on the right”. And, at Number One, for me, the last verse of Psalm 23, which begins “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life”.
Friday, March 14, 2014
In memory of Rachel Corrie
March 16th is the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, a young American girl (aged 23) run down by an Israeli Army bulldozer in occupied Palestine while protesting the destruction of Palestinian homes.
All those of us who care about human rights should make a point of remembering her, and of respecting her physical bravery in defence of those rights. It takes a special degree of bravery to step outside the protection of one’s tribal and ethnic loyalties, in defence of members of some foreign community.
Often, there is a large element of naivety to physical bravery. Victoria Cross winners in war zones aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. Mostly, they seem to have the same mind-set as suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots – prepared to die for the sake of their fellows.
Military personnel in hospitals and ambulances, and individual medics who retrieve wounded soldiers from free-fire zones, often (usually?) presume “the enemy” won’t target them. Amazingly brave, and naïve. That describes young Rachel to a T. She seems to have believed that she would be protected by both her US citizenship and Israel’s notional human-rights ideals. Instead, a Los Angeles gang would have given her as much help.
I tend to bracket her name with that of Bradley Manning, the naïve young US Army clerk who blew the whistle on a war-crime committed in occupied Iraq by an Army helicopter crew. The killers were deemed to be acting in the best interests of the USA and were let off with a caution. Bradley was jailed for 35 years without parole, for putting a higher value on the lives of defenceless foreign civilians than on the gratification of his tribal fellows. How dare he!
During the US occupation of Vietnam, the unarmed civilian villagers of My Lai – mostly old folk and children – were hacked down en masse by an Army platoon, in the perceived best interests of the American people. Those killers, too, were let off with a caution. (I don’t know what happened to the whistle-blower of that atrocity; he probably fell out of a tall building somewhere…)
The theme common to all three incidents is the easy victory of tribal solidarity over universal human rights. One has to wonder why national leaders who condone such blatant flouting of the human-rights ideal even bother to pretend they care about the ideal. Is anybody ever taken in by the hypocrisy?
Western MSM (main-stream media) organs are currently reporting the US President’s hesitation in ordering the assassination of some obscure US citizen in Yemen. Hey, come on, man! The CIA has promised that the victim is a terrorist, a traitor, a Muslim, and a jobless layabout who picks his nose at the dinner-table. Is that not enough? Anyway, when sustained physical torture is such an everyday occurrence in the American gulag, why hesitate for an instant?
Perhaps there exists a skerrick of tribal solidarity in the President’s mind and the minds of his advisors. There certainly isn’t any sense of mercy there, or compassion. They will gladly order the slaughter of housefuls of innocents, as long as they are not fellow-citizens. I wonder how long that exemption will survive, though.
A blog of mine back in October 2012 (The war on women) speculated that those veteran soldiers and drone pilots who are not kept awake every night by their guilty consciences are well suited to become the torturers and executioners of our children and grandchildren, in a dystopian Big Brother society. Those who are kept awake by their memories are, by default, the hope of mankind. At least for as long as they manage not to kill themselves out of remorse. Ain’t that the truth?
All those of us who care about human rights should make a point of remembering her, and of respecting her physical bravery in defence of those rights. It takes a special degree of bravery to step outside the protection of one’s tribal and ethnic loyalties, in defence of members of some foreign community.
Often, there is a large element of naivety to physical bravery. Victoria Cross winners in war zones aren’t usually the sharpest knives in the drawer. Mostly, they seem to have the same mind-set as suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots – prepared to die for the sake of their fellows.
Military personnel in hospitals and ambulances, and individual medics who retrieve wounded soldiers from free-fire zones, often (usually?) presume “the enemy” won’t target them. Amazingly brave, and naïve. That describes young Rachel to a T. She seems to have believed that she would be protected by both her US citizenship and Israel’s notional human-rights ideals. Instead, a Los Angeles gang would have given her as much help.
I tend to bracket her name with that of Bradley Manning, the naïve young US Army clerk who blew the whistle on a war-crime committed in occupied Iraq by an Army helicopter crew. The killers were deemed to be acting in the best interests of the USA and were let off with a caution. Bradley was jailed for 35 years without parole, for putting a higher value on the lives of defenceless foreign civilians than on the gratification of his tribal fellows. How dare he!
During the US occupation of Vietnam, the unarmed civilian villagers of My Lai – mostly old folk and children – were hacked down en masse by an Army platoon, in the perceived best interests of the American people. Those killers, too, were let off with a caution. (I don’t know what happened to the whistle-blower of that atrocity; he probably fell out of a tall building somewhere…)
The theme common to all three incidents is the easy victory of tribal solidarity over universal human rights. One has to wonder why national leaders who condone such blatant flouting of the human-rights ideal even bother to pretend they care about the ideal. Is anybody ever taken in by the hypocrisy?
Western MSM (main-stream media) organs are currently reporting the US President’s hesitation in ordering the assassination of some obscure US citizen in Yemen. Hey, come on, man! The CIA has promised that the victim is a terrorist, a traitor, a Muslim, and a jobless layabout who picks his nose at the dinner-table. Is that not enough? Anyway, when sustained physical torture is such an everyday occurrence in the American gulag, why hesitate for an instant?
Perhaps there exists a skerrick of tribal solidarity in the President’s mind and the minds of his advisors. There certainly isn’t any sense of mercy there, or compassion. They will gladly order the slaughter of housefuls of innocents, as long as they are not fellow-citizens. I wonder how long that exemption will survive, though.
A blog of mine back in October 2012 (The war on women) speculated that those veteran soldiers and drone pilots who are not kept awake every night by their guilty consciences are well suited to become the torturers and executioners of our children and grandchildren, in a dystopian Big Brother society. Those who are kept awake by their memories are, by default, the hope of mankind. At least for as long as they manage not to kill themselves out of remorse. Ain’t that the truth?
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Turning left at Galveston
Everybody’s life has turning-points, and it’s a fascinating study. If one had taken a different bus, or visited a different house, or met a different person, one’s life today might have been quite, quite, different. Turning-points galore! But there is usually only one incident that actually defines one’s life, and it can be fun searching for it.
In my blog called Turning
Point in November last year, I reported that the famous American author Mark
Twain identified his personal turning point as when he contracted measles
(deliberately) at the age of twelve. The incident changed the entire course of
his life.
I identified my own personal turning point as having occurred at age 26, when I baulked at the prospect of a long wait to be interviewed by the US Immigration Office in London. With a long time to wait until my number would be called, I hurried around to the Canadian Consulate to see whether Canada’s queue was more manageable. They saw me right away, and I never went back.
I identified my own personal turning point as having occurred at age 26, when I baulked at the prospect of a long wait to be interviewed by the US Immigration Office in London. With a long time to wait until my number would be called, I hurried around to the Canadian Consulate to see whether Canada’s queue was more manageable. They saw me right away, and I never went back.
Leaving Australia to
“see the world” was always my ambition, from when I was a boy. It never
occurred to me not to go, so my eventual departure can’t be claimed as a
turning point. Catching a boat to London was one of Linda’s turning
points, although it was the thing to do for young Aussies in those days, so it
wasn’t a big deal.
Actually, she was all set to marry a stolid chap from her home town, until a domestic tiff persuaded her to put the wedding on hold. She went off on a cruise to Fiji, came back and planned the wedding again, had second thoughts (or was it third thoughts?), cancelled it altogether, and booked her passage.
Actually, she was all set to marry a stolid chap from her home town, until a domestic tiff persuaded her to put the wedding on hold. She went off on a cruise to Fiji, came back and planned the wedding again, had second thoughts (or was it third thoughts?), cancelled it altogether, and booked her passage.
In London she
answered Louise’s ad on an Earl’s Court notice-board for a travelling companion
in Europe. That deal lasted until a blazing row one night in Greece prompted
her to storm out and hitch a ride to the nearest Youth Hostel. That was her
life’s true turning-point. There happened to be an English-language movie
playing at the local cinema, and – well, I wrote about that in Zorba the
Greek in January 2012. It wasn’t love at first sight for us, but I was a
more compatible travelling companion than Louise, apparently.
Our son Ross’s
turning point has been harder to identify. There was never a chance that he
would stay in Cayman. Local success is much too easy to achieve. There are no
challenges to win, only money to be made, and he is even less interested in
money than I am. We both feel a compulsion to do things the hard way.
A Scuba instructor, a
submarine pilot taking tourists 800 feet down into the local trench, a mechanic
on the bigger submarine… boring, boring! Bumming around Australia for a couple
of years… unfulfilling. So back home in Cayman, aged 24, he hitched a ride with
some American yachties to Galveston, Texas, and that was his turning
point. That was the re-set button.
Turning left at
Galveston, he drifted along the Gulf Coast, working odd jobs in exchange for
bed and board. While cleaning car engines for a dollar an hour in Mexico City,
he lucked into a career modelling clothes and doing TV commercials for a
hundred dollars an hour. Pride of place in my bedroom today hangs Coca Cola’s
calendar for the year 2000, with Ross on the page for July. But easy money
couldn’t compete with the lure of a hippies’ life in Guatemala and points
south.
One of the hippy communes in the region had attracted an adventurous Norwegian girl and her toddler, and they attracted Ross. Another child was conceived in Ecuador, and the tender trap sprang shut.
At age 38, his life
is still a work in progress. Fatherhood has slowed him down and focused his
attention, but it would be rash to conclude it has stopped him. I don’t know
where he’ll go from here, or if there will be another major turning-point. In
theory, he still owns a tree-house in Guatemala [Not the Swiss Family
Robinson, August 2013], so who knows?
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