Gordon Robinson | Three score and ten
Published:Sunday | December 31, 2023 | 12:07 AM
If life spare, as they say, tomorrow will mark my seeing the earth orbit the sun, as God promised, three score and ten times.
I owe the successful enforcement of that promise to The Old Ball and Chain. When I separated her from her mother 42 years ago, I had no clue what an excellent decision it was. Since then, she has devoted her life to keeping me on the straight and narrow; the family’s welfare; and enabling my laser focus on my tasks while organizing everything else in my life. Quite simply she has sacrificed her personal prospects (which were far better than mine when she decided to stop) to become Family Managing Director.
Or, to put it another way, she has loved me into being.
Because Old BC diverted me from a wastrel’s life, I’ve been able to witness every significant development in Jamaica since Independence. Trust me, despite her appearance, she was born before Independence. Her family (the McLeans) lived at 17 Gardenia Avenue (Mona Heights); mine at 16. When she was born I was 7. My playmates were her older brother and sister. She was a nuisance then and has continued to be so, with her nuisance value increasing exponentially, ever since!
They soon moved away and I lost track. After my parents’ divorce I lived with my mother whose second husband moved to Anthurium Drive (also in Mona Heights). Guess who lived right in front? The McLeans! Old BC was never the girl next door but the girl across the road!
Long before she took charge of my life in 1979 I’d been a keen observer of a variety of current affairs often via print/broadcast media. The evolution of media around the world taught me to believe Vidia Naipaul’s biographical mantra “The World is what it is.”
Old-timers are constantly telling the youth standards have fallen from their day. Not. True!
For example, I’ve moved from “watching” cricket on radio to watching it on TV. In 1960/61 I stayed up all night with my father to “watch” West Indies Test matches in Australia. We’d hear (try to imagine Alan McGilvray’s Australian accent): “Davidson bowls to Kanhai. Raps him on the pad. Loud appeal for LBW. Not Out says the Umpire!”
And that was that. Next ball please.
That same incident today would be followed by slow motion TV replays from every angle all proving the umpire wrong. There’s even a “third umpire” whose watches a remote screen and decides on real time incidents using slow motion replays, snick-o-meters, ball tracking and other newfangled techy tools unavailable to the real umpire. This fuels today’s umpires-are-clueless argument which only leads me to ask why use them at all.
Today’s umpires are no less competent than umpires of yore. Their errors are microscopically enhanced and thus visible. Every aspect of life is the same. Nothing changes. The world is what it is. And always has been!
In the 1960s the great Roy Lawrence, famously fond of his “tipple”, would welcome listeners to Sabina Park where “the breeze is shining brightly and the sun is blowing gently.” Roy (with Ryan Peralto) was a founder of Nuggets for the Needy which was a Christmas Season highlight. A tape was laid on Liguanea Plaza sidewalks stretching from in front of what’s now Wendy’s all the way around ending at what’s now Mother’s. People would put money on the tape until the entire plaza was lined with cash. Nobody interfered with the money. It was collected for charity. The campaign ended with a big concert at Ward Theatre (broadcast live on JBC-TV) where top artists, including Bob Marley, performed for free. The highlight for me was Roy Shirley’s annual rendition of “Gypsy.” He would roll on the floor and leave the stage to serenade ladies in the audience
Gypsy, my ’eartbreaking Gypsy,
Gypsy won’t you ever come home?
As a nerdy, awkward child and teen, music was my friend and companion. I listened to any and all of it. My father took me to Miami circa 1967. In the taxi from Miami airport, I heard a strange voice with a new song:
Well, my daddy left home when I was three
and he didn’t leave much for Ma and me
just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
I don’t blame him cause he run and hid
but the meanest thing that he ever did
was, before he left, he went and named me Sue
I apologise for the random nature of these thoughts. I’ve promised to write a Memoir one day where I intend to flesh them out. But, for now, my first introduction to politics came in 1963 in our living room in front of the radio. I wanted to hear world leaders’ messages of condolence after JFK’s assassination. The communications were broadcast alphabetically so I was literally hopping from foot to foot by the time PM Bustamante’s message came. It closed with “I hope dat dey ketch di criminal or criminals and bruk dem neck!” Like most other early childhood traumas, I’ve never recovered.
He was followed by the good, decent, kind hearted patriot Hugh Shearer who also suffered from a milder form of linguistic dysfunction. By the time the suave, smooth, intellectually stimulating orator Michael Manley came along, I was ready to be impressed.
And I was. I remember when his campaign train travelled up Hope Road past Campion with Delroy Wilson’s Better Mus’ Come and Peter Tosh’s Dem haffe get a beat’n blaring from monster speakers. Discipline collapsed as students rushed to classroom windows to see the show.
Politics was exciting in those days.
Everything changed during 1972-1980. Manley was voted into government on a wave of political optimism and oratorical grandiosity. By 1974, the government’s philosophy of Democratic Socialism was aggressively re-affirmed. Jamaicans took sides. Violently! The reliable, although sometimes kooky, media with which I grew up became polarized.
JLP sycophants love to blame 1970s’ economic ills on PNP politics which did play a significant role. But history records OPEC’s rise to international prominence during this decade and its members’ determination to control their domestic petroleum industries caused volatility in the global oil market to rise steeply. This was the catalyst for Jamaica’s fiscal shocks but, also, Jamaica’s politically immature reaction gave Big Brother from the North its opportunity to step in and add to our fiscal misery by destabilising Manley’s government allegedly to prevent another Cuba being created.
Michael Manley introduced Daylight Saving Time and urged Jamaicans to conserve electricity. My stepfather, a devout Manleyite, bought hundreds of candles and ordered all lights permanently turned off. The Bauxite Levy was introduced after contentious “negotiations” with mining companies. “Self reliance” and “non alignment” rhetoric motivated USA to escalate covert operations to eradicate the socialist threat.
Manley won re-election in 1976 during what was then a legally permissible but clearly immoral state of emergency. JLP candidates and activists were detained indefinitely. PNP campaigned against IMF involvement in Jamaica’s fiscal difficulties behind the slogan “We are not for sale”. As soon as victory was achieved, Manley struck an IMF deal that incensed PNP’s left wing and undermined PNP’s future electoral prospects.
JLP won a violence-prone 1980 election but the economic damage was already done. PM Seaga’s knee-jerk reaction to open up the economy to allow imports of too many foreign niceties made things worse. Jamaica’s debt to GDP ratio (89 per cent in 1980) became 160 per cent by 1985. Seaga had been heading essentially a minority Government since 1983 when USA’s Grenada invasion that painted Seaga and Dominican PM Eugenia Charles as regional heroes was the fortuitous circumstance that allowed him to call a snap election on an old voters list.
By 1989, when a reinvented Michael Manley was resurrected politically, debt/GDP had been reduced to 105 per cent but Jamaica struggled for 32 more years to find the political will to address this fundamental economic problem. In 2012 Jamaica was force fed that political will by IMF and World Bank.
Despite today’s habitual political finger pointing, Jamaica’s financial troubles actually began after OPEC’s 1974 worldwide intervention. For the next 38 years, Jamaica’s immature, reckless, self-serving political response prevented recovery. That response was unavoidable under Jamaica’s undemocratic governance system entrenching corruption and selfish profligacy with national resources.
In 2024, let’s focus on forcing fundamental constitutional change. Jamaica must convert its first-past-the-post-does-as-it-likes governance system into one of transparency, accountability and inclusion no matter what narcissistic political leaders want.
Peace and Love.
Gordon Robinson is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com