"This isn't lip-service to a lofty set of intangibles ... If we aren't accountable, fair, objective and transparent, if we aren't performing, or displaying courage and leadership, or if there is no integrity or compassion, or if our collaboration isn't authentic, then we aren't being true to our mission and we need to reassess what we're doing. As I said at the outset, we want to create a more caring, giving Bermuda. We feel it must be done and we feel it can be done ... (anthropologist Margaret Mead expressed) one of the most powerful sentiments I've heard about how to effect meaningful change: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has'. We're not trying to change the world, just a blessed island in the middle of the Altantic that should serve as a model to the rest of the planet about how to be your brother's and your sister's keeper." - Brian Duperreault, Speech to Hamilton Rotary Club, 2006

"There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?" - Woody Allen

THIS is Rumour Control: Despite what you may have heard in a recent, lay-it-on-with-a-backhoe address from the Environment Minister, a purpose-built new resort hotel at the Southlands property is not in Bermuda's "national interests". A public education system that produces graduates with even the most rudimentary skills to enable them to eke out a living in the new Bermuda economy is in our vital interests. A Police Service that has both the manpower and resources necessary to combat a gang problem that is escalating precisely because otherwise unemployable youngsters are gravitating towards an undergound economy that thrives by keeping a growing segment of our population permanenty sedated is in our vital interests. A public housing programme that actually produces bricks-and-motar solutions to the ever worsening problem of affordable homes is in our vital interests. Enriching the Southlands owners and the various contractors and sub-contractors associated with that project is in their vital interests, not Bermuda's. The Southlands Resort will have a demonstrably negative impact on Bermuda's economic, aesthetic and environmental interests - it is the very model of an unsustainable project, the Poster Child for Wretched Excess. Actually, the Environment Minister - a compassionate, able and intelligent woman whose credibility is now mortally wounded because she finds herself operating in the political answer to a viper's nest - might want to look around her at the next Cabinet meeting she attends. She may well conclude there are a couple of other areas where urgent remedial action might better serve the "national interest" than the Southlands Resort. Perhaps the purging of politicians who need to be wired to polygraph machines even to answer simple "Yes" or "No" questions. And certainly the introduction of regulations to clarify the boundaries of acceptable conduct in Bermudian public life given the systematic and systemic corruption that has led some to believe this Government is hellbent on establishing Bermuda as some kind of internatonal high-water mark of graft.

***

ALTHOUGH such displays are as rare as the Cahow in a modern Bermuda, there are times when Bermudians still demonstrate they would rather be on the side of the angels than on the asset side of the balance sheet.

At the weekend a group of "thoughtful and committed citizens" of precisely the type Brian Duperreault claims to admire gathered to try and effect meaningful change. They weren't the "unBermudian" environmental puritans and meddlesome foreigners the Premier and his more crackpot partisans have portrayed them as. Rather, they were thousands of ordinary Bermudians who place a somewhat higher premium on courage, ethics and principle than a Premier who did not so much bend as obliterate every rule in the Planning process to fast-track the Southlands development. While he was at it he might as well have consigned the thousand-page door-stopper of a document that is the Sustainable Development Plan to the shredder because clearly its recommendations will never factor into his thinking about how to best balance the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development in the Bermudian context should, by definition, mean respecting the extremely limited capacity of an extremely fragile ecosystem to absorb the impact of human activities. Ewart Brown's definition, by way of contrast, seems to respect only the profit motives driving Brian Duperreault and the cartel packaging the Southlands Resort.

Those who descended on Astwood Park to attend a concert-cum-rally organised by the Bermuda Environmental & Sustainability Taskforce were trying to effect change by persuading Brian Duperreault and his partners to change their minds about irreversibly despoiling one of the last major tracts of open space on this "blessed island". As crass an example as any imaginable of placing short-term profiteering ahead of the island's long-term interests, the proposed Southlands Resort - a sprawling plastic Pleasure Dome, a Parthenon of Putrescence - will scar Bermuda's landscape, add to the congestion in what is already Bermuda's most densely developed and populated district and do precisely nothing to resuscitate a long dead resort tourism industry. The signs of life the Premier, Mr. Duperreault and the other Southlands backers claim to detect in this defunct sector of Bermuda's economy are entirely illusory. They amount to the sort of post-mortem twitchings you get by running a Galvanic current through the leg of a dissected frog.

No wonder the cynical belief that Southlands is a colossal Trojan Horse project, an attempt to introduce tens of thousands of square feet of new residential and commercial space to the South Shore under the guise of a hotel development, is so very pronounced. No wonder so many people gathered at Astwood Park.

In an island where sleeping sickness of the soul is now as much of a scourge as Yellow Fever was in the 19th century, where complacency and resignation regularly need to dynamited like the obstructions they are on the path of positive action, this BEST-organised event was more a small-scale exercise in civil disobedience than a pop concert. Bermudians from all racial, cultural and social backgrounds gathered not, as the Premier has suggested, to engage in "unBermudian" pursuits but rather to demonstrate there are still those who are willing to serve Bermuda with their consciences. As a consequence, of course, they have been slapped on the ever-growing Enemies List by a Premier whose iron-clad intolerance for and resistance to opposing views is matched only by his soaring self-regard.

The Premier's ongoing attempts to muzzle dissent, to stigmatise protest, by characterising opponents of the Southlands project as either racially-motivated or "unBermudian" is entirely of a piece with what's become his Standard Operating Procedure - namely, saying "Shut Up" almost as often as the average Bermudian says "um um". He issues cease-and-desist orders in the form of taunts, racially-coloured insults, lawsuits and even the occasional threat of physical violence (balling his fists and having to be almost bodily restrained from clobbering an Opposition MP in the House of Assembly) when confronted with ideas he doesn't want to hear.

His galloping absolutism - absolute faith in himself and an absolute disregard for all points of view running counter to his own - is exacerbating the sense of powerlessness felt by so many Bermudians. Parliament, when it does meet, is increasingly an echo chamber for his own predetermined views rather than a genuinely popular forum where the people's business can be aired and debated in detail. The safeguards, the checks and balances, supposedly built into the political process to protect the common good by preventing ground from ever being broken for such monstrous aberrations as Southlands, a Vegas Strip-type ziggurat dedicated to the greater glory of the god of greed, are being ignored as the Premier increasingly resorts to rule by decree. By disenfranching the public and promising to dismember Bermuda, the Premier is hardly fulfilling his pledge to take Bermuda to "The Next Level". He is in fact dragging the island backwards in time, back to "The Level Before The Level Before The Last One". For you'd have to go back more than half-a-century to encounter another era when power was exercised in such an entirely arbitrary and unrestained manner. It's been at least that long since decisions effecting the common good were made at those private conclaves - far from the scrutiny of the public eye - where political and corporate power intersect and Parliament was used as a mere rubber-stamp. As even the New York Times has noted with acid disdain, the ongoing revoltion in Bermuda's off-shore financial services sector came about not because of any particular ingenuity on the part of our political leadership but because the insurance companies "arranged for the island to write rules that insurers found convenient". This alliance of convenience between a Government that still occasionally parrots socialist ideals and our corporate chieftains has produced wealth beyond the dreams of avarice for some of the political and business power players involved. It has also created a malignant dilemma in Bermudian public life. For the end results of such towering disdain for due process and democratic produres are entirely predictable. They were described as well as they ever have been more than 200 years ago by George Washington:"If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter."

While this Government's propagandists refuse to lay the ghost of Front Street to rest for reasons of political expediency, can anyone doubt where the real generating station of Bermuda's economy is now located? If Bermuda had a business-sponsored Government under the United Bermuda Party, it has swopped local for foreign overseers under the Progressive Labour Party. The invisible hand reaches out to the centre of political power now from Bermudiana Road, not Front Street.

By employing the classic political tactics of misdirection, by attempting to keep Bermudians racially divided and more fixated on past grievances than current events, the Premier seems intent on permanently relegating the people to the role of spectators rather than participants in the decisions shaping their increasingly uncertain future. It won't work. None of his strident and increasingly shopworn anti-colonial bombast can camouflage the fact a growing number of Bermudians, young Bermudians in particular, are less interested in keeping old blood feuds alive than they are in the longterm consequences that are accruing as a result of international businessmen recolonising the island in recent year. To any Bermudian under the age of 30 or so "Front Street" is just another address, not code for white supremacism. Increasingly dispossessed and disaffected, their attention is focussed on economic and social policies they view as little more than welfare programmes for the transplanted rich, enabling these newcomers to profit handsomely while further pushing the average Bermudian to the extremes of this society, metaphorically and, increasingly, literally. The emotionally potent myths and illusions that are Dr. Brown's stock in trade might placate an older generation of Bermudian. But the young are more concerned by a new economy they perceive as some kind of financial mystery cult, a type of secret society they will never be initiated into. Dr. Brown's backward-looking 1960s rhetoric has as little practical application to their futures as lessons in cultivating Bermuda Onions would have.

It's ironic and not a little bit sad that Dr. Brown, the one-time Thinking Man's radical pledged to overthrowing what he regarded as a hidebound and repressive Establishment, is in the process of installing a regime far more autocratic than the one it replaced. His bemused contempt for public opinion and the public mood, his accusations of "unBermudian" behaviour, are increasingly antagonising a community which views him as the man who introduced the genuinely unBermudian concept of commoditising local politics to the island. This perverse "Everything's For Sale For The Right Price" ethic includes, it seems, our children's birthright. Quite why a man so very gifted has embarked on a seemingly open-ended insurrection against moderation, against the give-and-take that has been built into Bermuda's political process for decades, is anyone's guess. But he's going at it as relentlessly as scrub-clearing day labourer chainsawing through a grove of cedars on a building site.

***

EVER since he arrived in Bermuda to claim the status he was entitled to and to take up his position at the head of ACE Ltd., Brian Duperreault has manfully attempted to put distance between himself and the facile, Prada-draped quick-buck artists who tend to characterise the island's re/insurance sector.

He is generally regarded as one of the few genuine "good guys" in the catastrophe re/insurance industry he helped to establish here (although even fellow insurers say given the predatory nature of their business this simply makes him the shark with the best table manners at the feeding frenzy). Mr. Duperreault claims to be proud of his Bermudian status and this island's history and culture. He says he wants to serve the greater good in Bermuda and does so by spearheading the Centre For Philanthropy.

Whatever his private beliefs or core values, in the Southlands scenario Duperreault is in fact emblematic of what used to be called the "wreteched spirit of monopoly" - its "mean rapacity" quite impervious to reason.

No one seriously questions the Southlands Resort would be a "Go" project without his involvement. Yet for a man who made his name and fortune in an industry predicated on calculating risk, he seems entirely oblivious to the already pronounced impact runaway growth is having on Bermuda's physical and cultural environments. Now, indeed, he wants to exacerbate that impact by several orders of magnitude with an overscaled resort.

You can't walk around Bermuda and fail to notice how severe the social costs of an overheated economy are becoming - the overbuilding, the increasingly overtaxed infrastructure, the resulting dislocation. The endless growth spurt in the off-shore financial services sector is paralleled by an ongoing contraction in the local employment market. With retail space in the city now commanding rents that are, on average, a third higher than in Manhattan is it any wonder the days when Bermuda led the world in the resort tourism industry, when Hamilton was the "Shop Window of The World", are long gone? Is it any wonder that Triminghams and Smith's are shuttered and Cooper's has only survived into the 21st century by subsiding its retail operations with rents it collects from the office space in its new building? Government is now the largest employer of Bermudians, an ominous development for the long-term economic and social well-being of this island. With an enfeebled public education system, with no large pool of skilled workers for the off-shore financial services sector to draw on, this trend will continue - imported labour being brought in to man our primary industry, Bermudians being mopped up by a public sector that will have to keep raising taxes and increasing borrowing in order to keep them gainfully employed.

Bermuda is going through a period that mirrors the worst, most self-serving period of Reaganomics, only the impact is all the more pronounced because it's taking place on such a microcosmic scale. The infrastructure, everything from the public schools to the public roads, are in a state of collapse. But as long as the financial services sector continues to grow, and grow so rapidly, neither the captains of the off-shore industry like Mr. Duperreault nor the Government prefer to scrutinise the dark side of our prosperity. While there's certainly no callous disregard for the "surplus population" on either of their parts, neither is there any fully developed sense of social responsibility, nothing recognisable as firm social convictions. Nor is there any realisation that by continually encroaching on the tiny habitat of the Bermudian goose that lays all of these tax-free, 24-karat eggs, the poor, distressed thing is eventually going to die.

The limits of Bermuda's ability to absorb new developments on the scale of the Southlands project have not only been reached but far exceeded; the infrastructure's elasticity has gone as completely as the waistband on a pair of an anorexic supermodel's petite-sized knickers after King Kong has tried squeezing into them. It's gone along with almost all of the island's open space.

To live, said, Ibsen, is to war against trolls. To live in Bermuda these days is to war against trolls on two fronts - the Tsars of commerce and the Premier and his political hatchetmen - quite the strangest bedfellows imaginable but ones who incessantly chorus that a powerful economic tide has lifted all boats in Bermuda. Not so. More akin to a hurricane's rampant storm surge, this mighty economic force has actually swamped many smaller vessels and pulverised long-established social and community structures. In a particularly bitter irony, many of the charities Mr. Duperreault's Philanthropy Centre mentors actually exist to cope with the personal and social disorganisation stemming from this economic deluge. There's been heightened demand for everything from improved adult education services to more drug rehabilitation schemes in recent years as Bermudians embrace coping mechanisms ranging from self-improvement programmes to, too often, self-medication for culture shock. This island needs time to mend, it needs to recuperate from a period of rapid-fire change and acclimatise itself to its new circumstances. If Mr. Duperreault is in earnest aboutmaking Bermuda a model to the world when it comes to being our brother's and sister's keepers, then he might want to consider this before further pursuing his Southlands project.

Otherwise, instead of crafting a "more caring and giving Bermuda", he will be more responsible than any other single individual for making the attainment of such an ideal society as remote as the prospect of demonstrations of genuine humility and forward thinking on the part of Dr. Ewart Brown. - Tim Hodgson