“All kingdoms . . . are doomed to revolution, convulsion, or decay; and so it fared with the empire of the three kings of Bermuda, albeit they were monarchs without subjects. In an evil hour, in their search after turtle, among the fissures of the rocks, they came upon a great treasure of ambergris, which had been cast on shore by the ocean. While poor devils, with nothing to share but the common blessings of the island — they were loving and united. With riches came envy and covetousness. Adieu the delights of the island!”

— Washington Irving, The Bermudas THERE’S still something of the scavenging beachcomber about the Bermudian politician. Corrupting influences have found ways of infiltrating this pocket-paradise ever since the island’s trio of founding fathers succumbed to greed and embarked on a ruthless three-way battle for supremacy in this vestige of Eden.The Three Kings of Bermuda were members of the Sea Venture <$>party left behind to maintain the Virginia Company claim to island when the Deliverance and Patience belatedly completed Sir George Somers’ relief mission to Jamestown in 1610.

They fell out among themselves when the serpent of greed invaded their paradise in the waxy form of ambergris — “grey amber” — a whale discharge that, then as now, is an unlikely but highly-prized ingredient in perfumery.

It’s a local morality tale with universal applications which is why the story of the Three Kings is known — with some minor variations — around the world. A secular version of the Biblical Fall, the Deadly Sin of avarice substituting for Original Sin in another paradisical setting, generations of children have been weaned on this sermon against greed and the seductive qualities of evil.

It’s an example of history being subsumed by folklore because the Three Kings provide a perfect object lesson in how short-sighted self-indulgence can have catastrophic long-term consequences. Played out in a charmed environment, one in which the characters would seem to be quite literally marooned from any of the usual enticements that lead men into temptation, it speaks to the ubiquity of human frailty. And folly.

Of course, this folk tale of a mid-Atlantic paradise that was lost almost immediately after it was accidentally found should have a special resonance in the island where these events took place. For Bermuda has never been Utopia, those charged with protecting it have never been self-denying saints. Whether the prize is ambergris or the acquisition and consolidation of political power, the avaricious nature of Bermuda’s caretakers has remained essentially unchanged for almost 500 years. The ghosts of the Three Kings have never stopped haunting Bermuda’s public affairs.

This has never been more apparent than it is at this juncture. WITH his nation-building exercise stalled it seems the Premier has temporarily abandoned an Independence initiative nobody wants for another type of grandiose building project, one that nobody needs. His Government is threatening to tear up one of the island’s few remaining expanses of natural beauty to further the creation of its ill-defined man-made paradise, the “New” Bermuda supposedly being erected on the ruins of the old.

And his lowest common denominator justification for anything done to further this end always amounts to the same thing — essentially, that you can’t make chowder without chopping up a few fish (or in this case without chopping down a few trees).

Social justice is invoked to defend every injustice done to both the public purse and common sense; the “New Bermuda” social revolution is trumpeted although it has always seemed to be based more on the perceived political advantage to be gained from pillorying the designated oppressor than on improving the circumstances of the historically oppressed .

The Premier, like so many simple-minded revolutionaries before him, regards political office as that magical lever with which it is possible at a whim to move, if not the world, then certainly the 20-square miles that make up Bermuda. It isn’t, of course. Decision-making on this scale must, by necessity, be arrived at by compromise and consensus.

But this Government is no more interested in preserving even the appearance of consultancy, inclusivity and rationality than it is in preserving the Botanical Gardens. Instead, decrees that are not open to question and the peevish David Burch “Get over it!” mantra are everywhere in evidence when it comes to the hospital project.

The social and ecological value of the Botanical Gardens, one of the few green swathes in the centre an increasingly urbanised island, should not be sacrificed simply to further the abstract notion that everything is permissible in pursuit of the chimerical “New” Bermuda — the new society the Premier has so far been no more successful in constructing than he has low-cost housing.

And make no mistake about it, there’s typically overstated political symbolism reflected in both the scale of the proposed new hospital as well as the preferred location. It amounts to a need to bludgeon the mind of onlookers, to overwhelm the senses, with a grandiose concrete symbol attesting to the supposed power and greatness of the “New” Bermuda ideal.

What’s being proposed is an ideological message in stone, a elephantitis-stricken shrine to the Government’s own greater glory with the once inviolate Botanical Gardens a propitiatory sacrifice intended to appease its designers’ self-regard and power mania.THE hospital complex proposed for the site of the Botanical Gardens is also another massive capital project along the lines of the Berkeley campus, that bricks-and-mortar monument not to an extraordinary institution’s rich history but to kickbacks, graft and the enrichment of this Government’s privilegentsia. <$>Aside from any symbolic value, the impetus for this project more likely lies in the scores of patronage jobs and half-billion dollars in contracts, fees and other Government-controlled outlays that will be created rather than in feasibility studies or cost/benefit analyses.

The Premier believes it will both leverage the popularity of the Government among the general population by dispensing jobs and largesse while ensuring the inner circle is amply rewarded with contracts to work on the project (public funds appropriated to cover the inflated bills for construction costs on capital projects represent the sum total of this Government’s commitment to redistributing wealth — and the redistribution does not extend very far beyond its closest hangers-on).

The Berkeley precedent provides ample cause for concern. When the torrent of disinformation being spewed by a former Works Minister (who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, is the current Premier) could no longer divert attention from the scale of the Berkeley debacle, the Auditor General was asked to conduct a special investigation. He identified practices that suggested some associated with the project were channelling the spirits of Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall cohorts who used ostentatious public works projects as camouflage to plunder New York City finances in the 19th century.

It’s not known if those practices were ever corrected. Government’s only response so far has been to evict the Auditor General from his offices while threatening to castrate him at Independence.

But the final Berkeley bill was $50 million more than first estimated — and that’s before the multi-million-dollar severance package for the original contractor is factored in.

With the new hospital projected to cost some seven times what Berkeley did, it’s not surprising so many onlookers have concluded that a Government which unapologetically presided over levels of corruption and waste unprecedented in the modern history of Bermuda’s public sector will likely be seven times more inefficient than it was the last time.

The Premier has done nothing to alleviate these concerns. Instead his habit of avoiding the complexities of reality, his Twilight Zone logic which suggests everything can be put right simply by wishing it were so (and spending enough money), his view that the ends justify even the most fantastic and ill-considered means, the entire grab-bag of his crackpot principles have all been in evidence since the hospital project was announced.

Adieu the delights of the island, indeed.

Tim Hodgson