SUM TING WONG (mainstream media)

Our choices of news-services reflect our prejudices, and vice versa. It’s probably always been like that. Those who are always quoting conservative newspapers or mainstream TV are conservative and mainstream individuals; those whose references are to online blogs or forums (while ignoring the standard news-sources) are probably rebels and sceptics. People judge our characters by our choices. The internet has broadened the range, but the division is an old one.

What the internet changed, mainly, are the quality of the reporters and the independence of commentators’ opinions. The official news-media allows no departure from the Party Line. Indeed, it allows no departure from the teleprompter’s version.

A couple of months ago a Korean plane crashed while landing at a California airport. A local TV newsreader carefully read out the pilots’ names, while her audience could see the names printed on the separate video feed. Sum Ting Wong (Captain), Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk (she pronounced it “fook” rhyming with “book”) and Bang Ding Ow. You can Google those names, if you want to do your own peer review.

It was a one-off, and it would be unfair to build a case on one brief example of mindless recitation. Or would it? It did illustrate the mainstream zombies’ instructions to say what their superiors tell them to say – no hesitation, no doubts, no deviation.

An Israeli senior executive at the BBC ordered his minions to play down Israel’s bombing of a Gaza suburb during one of its raids. That sort of manipulation is common in the MSM these days. In general, it is beholden to its advertisers and to the legislators who can make life difficult – and to the lobbyists who own the legislators. A satirist on a US TV channel invented the word “truthiness” to describe the official versions of events.

The “alternative media” is free of such restraints. It offers alternatives to the official “truths”. Mainstream reporters, to a man and woman, presume they are reporting the truth; freelance bloggers increasingly presume they are being lied to by the authorities. The alternative media doubted Saddam Hussein had WMDs; the mainstream media weren’t allowed to doubt. If they were told sum ting wong, they reported it.

The mainstream news sources parrot the official versions of WTC #7 (the building that allegedly collapsed in its own footprint because of a few office fires), the gassings in Syria, the Iranian nuclear plans, and the death of Osama. The blogosphere insists the official stories are blatant propaganda, and wonders what is being covered up, and why. I myself jeered at the Osama lies in a post of May 2011, and at the infamous “wiped off the map” false-translation in February 2012. [Both posts available in the Archives.]

There is a gulf of mistrust. Parallels are being drawn with earlier false-flag attacks. The Reichstag Fire paved the way for Hitler’s equivalent of the so-called PATRIOT Act, also drafted ahead of the event. It has emerged that most of the military experts interviewed on Western TV are in the paid service of companies with a vested interest in Western wars. They are all part of a pro-war propaganda machine – TV stations and interviewees alike.

Unquestioning belief generates heresies that must be quashed, and heretics who must be persecuted. The MSM has become an arm of a 21st-Century Inquisition. We are on a slippery slope, now, with a rapidly increasing distrust of officials and their mouthpieces. There is a disconnect between us and them. On the one side the establishment’s stooges and shills: on the other, amateurs and anarchists. There is little scope for compromise.

"Step away from the car!"

I have fond memories of getting pulled over for speeding along the Thames Embankment in 1963. A youngish copper in the old Bobby-uniform strolled back to us, poked his head through the driver’s window and enquired with the utmost deference, “Is this our car, sir?”

I didn’t quite know how to react to such a question. Fortunately, it was our car. At least, it belonged to the absent boyfriend of the girl I was with (he was off in Europe somewhere, silly man), and that was close enough. We were sent on our way with a gentle reminder of how naughty it was to exceed the posted speed-limit, and we drove off wetting ourselves with the effort to stifle the giggles.

The next time I got stopped for speeding was twenty years later, here in Cayman. The young copper was taken aback when I showed him the car’s papers. “This says Linda Barlow!” He said sharply. “Yes, that’s my wife”, I said. “It’s her car”. Stammering with embarrassment the poor fellow begged me to stay within the limit and hastened away. I wondered, what was that all about?

“Oh, that must have been Timothy Whatsit”, Linda said when I described the incident. “A lovely boy; he always wanted to join the Police.” To this day, she remains on hugging terms with just about all of her former students (Cayman Islands High School 1978-82). From time to time we still benefit in one way or another from her reputation as a teacher who really cared.

The quiet warnings I received on both those occasions were all I needed – all most people would have needed, probably. The courtesy from coppers over the years has left me with a strong respect for – no, not all policemen, by any means, but for those who still remember what their true function is.

American TV programs have changed our local Force since then. A few years ago Linda was pulled over and told that one of her back lights wasn’t working. As she walked around to see for herself, she was ordered sharply: “Step away from the car!” She hesitated, because our two young granddaughters were in the back seat. Again, louder and more urgently, “STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR!” Prudently, she decided not to make a grab for the bombs and grenades in the trunk, lest the clown shoot the girls where they sat in their seatbelts.

I wonder if it could be the paramilitary uniforms that encourage bullying. How can guards of any kind – government or private – think of themselves as part of their community, when they dress in what is to all intents and purposes gang-paraphernalia?

A public Police Force is obliged to serve its community, not to bully it. Regrettably, that idea tends to be honoured more in the theory than the practice. Our local Force a few years ago actually changed its name to “Service”, without in any way softening its attitude towards the people who pay its wages. It still operates largely in secret. Its public announcements are a mockery; we rely on our “marl road” (grapevine) for information on all but the most spectacular of crimes. The man in the street feels no obligation to give information to the Police until “They” start giving information to him.

The other week our Police held a public meeting to which only a handful of outsiders went, in the middle of what by our standards is an epidemic of burglaries, muggings and robberies. Well, the last meeting I went to began with two full hours of prepared speeches read out by the uniforms, affirming what a grand job they’re doing. Only the most diligent of us stayed for the Q & A session. We all left with a feeling of exasperation, and a determination not to waste time like that ever again.

“My country, right or wrong”

This is written as a tribute to Eleanor Roosevelt. She is not as well known as she ought to be, and not as well revered. I revere her, because she fought for the recognition of what she called “human rights”. But the world loves a winner, and she was not a winner. In the end, not enough of us believed in basic rights for all humans. All her efforts came to naught.

Her memorial is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed as a Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution in 1948. What she did was persuade the UN member-states of the day to commit themselves to acknowledge and respect a list of defined “basic rights” for all humans. No mean achievement.

It was a first. All previous lists of basic rights had applied only to specific tribes, castes, classes or nations. The US Bill of Rights applied only to US citizens as then defined, the Rights of Man only to the French, the Magna Carta only to the English nobility, the Ten Commandments only to the Israelites. (“Thou shalt not kill” did not apply to foreigners; hence all the slaughters of Canaanites and what-have-you reported in the Books of Moses.)

Eleanor’s Universal Declaration was formulated in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials of German nationals and allies. The idea of a universal standard of behaviour was a new concept in international law. For the first time, national laws were accepted (in the strictest theory) as being subordinate to the Declaration whenever they were incompatible with it.

I was just following orders and I was just obeying my country’s laws were dismissed as illegitimate reasons for doing nasty things to people. Killing ethnic minorities (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, etc) was now “a crime against humanity”. So was torture; so was imprisonment without a fair trial. Above all, so was waging wars of choice, on the grounds that wars give cover to all kinds of atrocities.

After a nod of acknowledgment to a notional spirit of universal brotherhood, the first “human right” listed in the Declaration is the right to life. There was nothing in the resolution about chemical weapons or nuclear weapons or any other sort of weapons. All that UN member-nations undertook to do was to recognise no distinction in the worth of human lives, regardless of race, nationality, etc.

It failed from Day One, of course. How could it not fail? Tribal and national loyalties are always paramount. Mrs Roosevelt should have had the wit to know that. The human DNA is not designed to spurn loyalty to one’s own kind. All humans believe, consciously or sub-consciously, that they are exceptional – and their families, home communities and nations. Self and patriotism trump the brotherhood of man, every time.

Does any Westerner think it’s worth the death of one single member of his own family or home community to stop the chaos in the Middle East? Of course not. I once read of a bumper-sticker at the time of the Iraq invasion, which asked “WHY CAN’T EXXON SEND ITS OWN DAMN TROOPS?” It made sense to me, but it never caught on.

Today there are patriotic young gamesters in air-conditioned offices who are paid good money to wipe out foreign villagers at the press of a button once or twice a day. Is it a good thing that our boys aren’t being killed and mutilated, and “the others” are? Well, naturally. Only anarchists and communists would even doubt it. I mean, surely.

It’s been interesting, watching the human rights experiment, and I am sorry it never got off the ground. A world without respect for foreigners’ rights is a world forever at war, and that bothers me. I have grandchildren, who may one day find themselves targets. (They live in Norway, and Norway has lots of oil. More oil than Syria, actually. Uh-oh.)

In the age of drones, foreigners (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, and their modern equivalents) can be slaughtered without the slightest personal risk to the slaughterers. That is tribalism gone mad.

Noah, Yahweh and company

Two earlier posts of mine (The Children of Israel, January 2012, and The Hebrews, February 2013) offered a revisionist history of the Israelites and their beginnings, working backwards in time from the exile in “Egypt” to the Ebuwa-im whose name was the fictional Abraham. The posts reflected my personal speculations, as does this one. I realise how cheeky it is to offer them as competition for the official history, backed by 3500 years of peer-reviews. Nevertheless...! The current job is to trace the Hebrew gods back to the new world that began with the arrival of Noah and his boat in the mountains of Ur/Ararat.

We are faced with the usual difficulty of working with English transliterations of words recorded in the ancient Hebrew of more than a hundred generations ago. Those records were transcribed at irregular intervals by different writers, were based on oral legends kept alive by tribal bards during the preceding fifty-odd generations, and bent into shape by the propaganda needed to facilitate Moses’s creation of The Children of Israel – the fanatical religious military force that was the Taliban of its day.

With that small problem in mind, one can perceive the similarity of the gods’ names that crop up in the story. Noah (No-wah) was a variant of (Ya)h'weh, (Je)hovah and Yakov/Jacob - all of them possible variants of Heber/Hepat, a god widely worshipped in the Hittite and Assyrian empires of the age.

Abraham’s god was Yahweh, written YHWH without vowel-indicators, in order to avoid squabbles among the diverse tribes that comprised the later Israelites. Different tribes, different dialects, different accents...

[B is a common vocalisation of P in different dialects, and N is a vocalisation of H, though not a common one. H is notoriously easily dropped, in speech. Ebuwa/Ebla (w=l) was a city and region named for Eber/Heber, and “Abraham” was Ebuwa-im, the people of the place. W and V are common variants of each other, as are V and B. This is not the place to expound on other variants. Some other time, perhaps.]

The similarities would have been chosen in order to credit the Hebrews with remarkable consistency in their loyalty to the god of their ancestral homeland, for the entire period from their departure from Ur of the Chaldeans to their arrival in Haran [Genesis 11.31] in the border state of Ebuwa. Haran was a thriving commercial centre on one of the main trading routes from west to east. Merchants would have gotten rich from doing business in such a place, and Genesis describes Abram/Abraham as “very rich in cattle, silver and gold” when he left the town.

Those were disturbed times for the border regions of the rival empires of Hattia (Hittites), Assyria and Egypt. Many of the peoples – Abraham/Ebuwa-im, Mitanni/Midians, Hurrians/Aryans, Amurru/Amorites – would have experienced turmoil from changes of the boundaries. Tribal communities would have been pushed hither and yon.

By their association with the Hebrews (Ebuwa-im), the Children of Israel claimed the same ancestral god, with new legends to back up the claim. Once the Children’s priests and military leaders had expelled or killed those of the refugees who declined to buy into the legends, the new tribe and its god conquered the independent cities of the south. The “wilderness” in which the slaughters occurred is far more likely to have been the Lebanese hinterland than the Sinai Desert, by the way.

It remains only to wonder how “semitic” the Hebrews and Israelites were. Peering through the mists of time, historians have determined (provisionally) that the ruling classes of the Hurrians in the mountains and foothills of Ur spoke an Aryan language. What the lower classes spoke, is not yet decided. The best guess is “some unidentified native-Anatolian language”; all such languages were of the Aryan family.

Language is not the same thing as race, but it is to some extent indicative. It’s not at all out of the question that some of the Hebrews and Israelites had Aryan ancestry. However, whatever the cultures of the component tribes were or weren’t before their sojourns in Haran and “the land of Egypt”, they would have been thoroughly semiticised during those sojourns.

On being a housefather

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.

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?

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?

... 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.

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!

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!