Letters to the Editor, October 20, 2005
Fixing a phraseOctober 12, 2005
Dear Sir,As an English student, it struck me as somewhat curious that the debate surrounding Premier Alex Smith’s recent remarks comes down to something we normally take for granted: language. The Premier claims his statements meant one thing; certain members of the public claim they meant quite another.
Herein lays the crux: we can never hope to know precisely what the Premier meant when he said “look and sound like you”. There is only one man who can ever definitively know. That man is the Premier. Whether Mr. Scott’s language was targeting an individual or a broader demographic is a problem that will not be easily solved.
English is a superbly supple language; it is so flexible, we can assert an entirely different meaning on a man’s words merely by interpretation. It seems to me many of us have allowed our own personal and political prejudices, be they favourable or otherwise, to influence our interpretation. Indeed, Bermudian politics seem to be symptomatically passionate and emotional; a degree of temperance would not be awry. It has also struck me that many of the great men of letters have been recruited to both defend and condemn the premier, with Mr. Scott himself utilising the words of Shakespeare and Wilde.
A recent letter claimed these writers would be “offended”. I think not. Mr. Scott (and many of his detractors) relied not upon the writers, but upon their words, words crafted from the English language, a language that is indisputably public property, available to be used by whomever to whatever means they see fit. Indeed, the quotations are so prolific, I think it a shame not to get my two cents in.
My writer of choice is T.S. Eliot:
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
— The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock
It seems Mr. Scott has fixed himself in a phrase and the public has pinned him to the wall.
Cambridge, United Kingdom<$>The Zen of garbageOctober 16, 2005
Dear Sir,Take a half-ton truck. Then take another one. Then multiply that by 22. Mash it all together. You can now imagine 22 tons of metal. Multiply that by 1 million. You now can imagine the weight of the garbage that must be removed from New Orleans. This is how much must be carted away from a largish city in the United States when something goes wrong. And its not all one thing. Its is in many forms from rotting meat, to freon, to dangerous chemicals, to river water, to faeces, to building components to whole cars. It is a stark indication of what people who live in a developed country are: the dirtiest creatures on the planet.
The creatures who we consider to be gross like cockroaches, rats and maggots are only implicated because of their association with us. They live on the refuse we create in vast tonnage. They reduce it to biodegradeable matter, so they are actually cleaner than we are. They clean up after us.
You could say that my analogy is unfair, that catastrophes like Katrina happen rarely. But to see the truth in my analogy go to the incinerator on North Shore when it is empty. It is a very deep hole. That fills up every week with what we throw away. Nature has no wonders that can compare to this. We live as alterers of our environment.
We may love, live, fight breathe or whatever life brings to us, but what we do most is consume the environment around us. We acquire something, use it and then it becomes useless. It goes from having a specific useful identity, like wood or a blender or a microwave — something you would find in a dictionary — to a singularity of uselessness. It becomes one with the mass of garbage that is the ultimate human product. This is the Zen of garbage. It becomes nothing. The garbage collection department should be called the Ministry of Forgetting for they allow us to forget what we have ceased to want to be responsible for. New Orleans shows us what happens when the garbage man doesn’t turn up. Sooner or later everything we touch ends up in the garbage. When the garbage doesn’t magically disappear we are forced to remember its appalling proportions.
PembrokeWhere is the justice?October 14, 2005
Dear Sir,The Premier inadvertently makes public a blatant racially offensive remark and uses Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde as justification. In a private conversation, Dr. Sean O’Connell used the slang term “grease monkey” (a term used in the same way by The Royal Gazette and Time Magazine) and is dismissed without an independent hearing.
Dr. O’Connell had 29 years of dedicated service at the Bermuda College and has done more for Bermuda youth than the Premier has ever done. Mr. Scott remains; Dr. O’Connell is gone. Where is the logic, where is the justice, and where is the commitment to individual rights?
Smith’s ParishPrivate schools need busesOctober 14, 2005
Dear Sir, I believe to reduce the heavy traffic flow in the school mornings, private school students over the age of 11 should get their own private buses. Parents of these individuals may not agree since they feel they should be the ones to chauffeur their children to and from school but, think of the benefits:
1. Less traffic on the road early mornings (unless of course the parent wants to get to town early, now that’s different).
2. Parents not waiting outside in their car yelling at the top of their lungs, for the teen to get ready (the child shouldn’t make their parents suffer every day) so they can take them to school.
PembrokePut housing over cricketOctober 17, 2005
Dear Sir,Allow me a moment to stir up the hornet’s nest a bit concerning housing. In a recent letter to the Editor, “Watching it all Happen”, from Devonshire made a very valid argument concerning the housing that is just rotting and falling apart up at Morgan’s Point, the old US Navy Annex. I have been watching its demise for several years now and wondered why the Government would let such prime property just go to waste. Not only could affordable housing developments be placed here (enough to seriously alleviate some of the housing issues), but community fields where a family could enjoy a nice picnic and community recreation centres that could run continuing education programmes or host Youth group meetings or provide a constructive outlet for our youth who are just “sitting on the wall”.
All of these places are already present on this land following the American occupation, just in sad need of repair. I am told (and I may be corrected if my figures are off) that the cost of cleaning up the environmental issues surrounding the use of this land is somewhere in the neighbourhood of $30 million. So my question is simple — why then, when housing is such a visibly critical issue, does the Government see the need to allocate one third of this cost, $11 million dollars over the next four years, to the advancement of cricket?
Before someone flames me for being anti-sports, I will state unequivocally that I am not opposed to sponsorship of sports, far from it, as I see sports as a necessary outlet for Bermuda’s youth and a method to develop team skills and discipline. However, given the immediate housing needs of the Bermudian people, I think that the money would be better served to the public in a method that actually benefited the many, rather than the few. Government needs to get their priorities straight. Let’s start looking at the larger picture, for the benefit of all Bermudians.
SouthamptonGive dialogue a tryOctober 14, 2005
Dear Sir,Takbir Sharrieff’s anti-drug initiative may make some headway because in several ways he makes sense. His primary focus seems to be the street dealers whose customers taint the neighbourhoods where they work. Wisely he has not broadened his focus to the general party atmosphere that pervades Bermudian society in general. Then he would abruptly run into the deep contradictions in our drug laws. They are pervasive and severely compromise the police’s ability to cooperate with the public.
Does he mention alcohol as a problem? No. That drug, though more dangerous than marijuana and a gateway drug to other substance use, is simply not considered wrong. No one can explain why. Does he mean cigarettes — that drug nicotine, one of the two most addictive drugs one can obtain legally or illegally? No. He does not mean nicotine. Again, that drug is sanctioned for reasons that are beyond anyone’s explanation. Mr. Sharrieff does well to focus on the streets but he is wrong to criticise the public for not helping the police. For many years people have helped the police. People phone in complaints and watch as the cop cars drive blithely by the dealers without a wince. In some neighbourhoods, this carefree attitude of the police has gone on for years. Several people I have known have found it more expedient to cooperate with dealers than to expect the police to intervene.
These dealers are business people; and one can talk to them; ask them not to be around when children get out of school or to move to a different area, in the spirit of community relations. Of course they can and do refuse, but they cooperate more often than the police ever arrest them, so it is expedient to give dialogue a try. And it has worked.
In the absence of police enforcement it seems a little harsh to blame the public for trying to do the best it can. The bad thing about this community approach to dealing with drugs is that eventually people get tired of the legal but harmless channels and take justice into their own hands. They form vigilante groups that acquire a paralegal justification for their actions by being more effective than the police. This is often how organised crime begins. At that point, we have whole new set of problems.
Pembroke
