June 20,
<$>SO the curtain is up on Act II of a saga some hack would no doubt title Brown’s Revenge. With the score left unsettled after the first attempt to seat Dr. Brown as Premier, it seems another bloodless coup is in the offing. And melodrama replaces farce. The familiar intrigue, betrayal, and cheap theatrics will soon vanquish the almost comic ineptitude that has been the recent traffic on our political stage. And the Bermudian public is still the unwilling fool.
Of course, this latest round of scheming comes as no surprise. Yet even as the conspirators sharpen their daggers and close in on their hapless prey, there seems to be a doleful resignation about it all.
It is, perhaps, a sad commentary on Bermudian affairs that the hopes for a brighter future lie in the hands of Mr. Scott and Dr. Brown.
Although billed as a visionary leader and a “man who gets things done”, Brown’s reputation does not bear scrutiny. The man is another self-promoting charlatan, another mountebank proffering his false remedies, a self-made man in love with his maker.
Behind his well-polished veneer of intellect and determination, Dr. Brown is merely a single-minded demagogue intent to force his desperate ambition on a submissive electorate.
This is a man who admitted three years ago to wholesale deceit but did not apologise for it, a man whose solution to everything is to make Bermuda look more like Los Angeles. Even his political ethics are American. His involvement in the sordid pay-to-play affair remains unexplained and unpunished.
Dr. Brown is also responsible, perhaps above all others, for making wretched our political discourse. The man never met a microphone he could resist. His fiery, inciting rhetoric in the last election has been tempered little by the spoils of power. He remains as divisive as ever.
And then there’s Mr. Scott. For him, it was always going to end this way. He was never destined for power. The man has all the personality of a paper cup and a charisma to make Dick Cheney seem positively Churchillian.
His threadbare authority, his ability to confound and astound at every turn and his utter lack of principles or shame no doubt contributed to his inevitable demise. If he ever did inspire the public’s confidence, he surely squandered it long ago. I imagine it will be a happy parting.
Let us hope he can fashion his exit from politics with the same grace managed by his deposed predecessor.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently, Mr. Editor, about the sickly state of Bermudian affairs. Government here staggers along like a blind beggar; possessing no direction or purpose, neither inspiring faith nor showing any moral authority at all. As it is, our Government is a haven for the corrupt and the easily corrupted. The best and brightest know well enough to stay away, and the rest of us suffer as a result.
You remarked, sir, in a recent Opinion of how perilously near Bermuda came to nuclear calamity during the Cold War. How, for nearly 40 years, they went about their affairs blissfully unaware that they could be among the first to see the annihilation of the human race. But it does not take an thermonuclear bomb to dismantle paradise. Just look around.
In Hamilton the towering cranes gaze over the changing landscape, as the face of that old city is chiselled away to the screams of heavy machinery. Talk continues of building the sort of drab high-rise apartment complexes typical in a North American city. Meanwhile, in the outer parishes, a housing crisis continues without relief.
Our flagging education system graduates barely half of its students. It does not, however, prepare them for Bermuda’s changing economy. Some do succeed and join the masses of foreign workers making minor fortunes in the international business sector.
Meanwhile, those without the proper training and qualifications are relegated to the shadows of society. To the neighbourhoods where the rich fear to tread, surrounded on all sides by the encroaching frustration and despair.
They find themselves on Bermudiana Road, looking up from the outside at monuments of someone else’s success, of an industry they did not create and do not understand. They look in bewildered awe, like so many longtails lost amidst the growing storm.
Bermudians see their common identity transforming, changing before them until they don’t even recognise it.
Yet our leaders talk of Independence. They recycle tired clichés and borrow stale ideas and call it revolution. All around them our treasured green space is vanishing before our eyes and the Old Bermuda — it if ever it existed — is breathing its last.
These are wearying and confusing times. They require a leader of foresight and wisdom. Bermudians should act in the next election to give rest to what remains of this failed Government. If they don’t, they will wake to find themselves the heirs to their own folly.
Hamilton Parish<$> Blind stupidity
<$z$>FAITH” promoting chairman of the Tourism Board, Andre Curtis, is much given to grandiose sweeping statements in respect of sexual “sin” and Human Rights. The Bermuda Constitution protects the right of Mr. Curtis to believe what he likes, however off the wall. It cannot, however, protect Mr. Curtis from his own utter stupidity.
He seems to be entirely unable to see that the Human Rights Act has already “legislated and legitimised”, as he so ignorantly perceives it, adultery and fornication by protecting people from discrimination on the grounds of marital status.
Thus I am prohibited by law from denying a job or housing to an adulterer (a sexual sin also Governmentally “legislated and legitimised” by divorce laws and remarriage) and a fornicator, no matter how many children she may have given birth to without benefit of “holy” matrimony.
These sexual “sins” are not publicly opposed by the churches. The churches don’t demand that I be able to refuse a job or housing to a fornicator or an adulterer. Indeed more than half the congregation of most of these churches must themselves be adulterers and fornicators. They are the bread and butter of the clergy. Mr. Curtis, however, is resolutely determined that everyone should be able to deny housing and jobs to gay Bermudians.
In his wilful, blind stupidity Andre Curtis cannot see the obvious similarities between one sexual “sin” and another. Thus he is nothing if not deeply prejudiced. Sauce for the gander, in Mr. Curtis’ distorted, bigoted mind, cannot possibly also be sauce for the goose.
Mr. Curtis is also at the root of a new kind of tourism. He calls it “faith- based” tourism. No one objects to religious groups coming to Bermuda for a convention or whatever they come for, possibly a little adultery and fornication on the side.
What a great many of us do object to, however, is the use of our hard- earned tax dollars to subsidise such groups. The financial support by Government of any church or “faith-based” group offends the religious freedom principle of the constitution by forcing me to pay for something that offends my own religious beliefs and which thus contravenes my religious freedom.
Andre Curtis’ idiotic notions and deep prejudices are a grave danger to the freedom of religion of all Bermudians and will, as long as his “faith-based” tourism is subsidised by the public purse, continue to be contrary to the democratic public image and constitutional values Bermuda stands for.
I can imagine his reaction to a proposal to use the public purse to subsidise a “faith-based” convention of Wicans on the island, let alone the much more lucrative possibilities involved in promoting Bermuda in the American and European gay press. There is, however, real money to be earned there; subsidies would be quite unnecessary.
Andre Curtis should be immediately dismissed from his position on the Tourism Board.
Warwick Unnecessary change
I CANNOT be the only citizen in the People’s Banana Republic of Bermuda who cringes at our Premier’s “humour” — as VSB generously described his latest demonstration of frank rudeness this weekend at Springfield.To make a remark about the Governor having performed “his first real day of work” during a demonstration of good-natured sportsmanship as he cut stone slate is so typical of P.’s smouldering resentment and, to most of us on the island, is simply embarrassing.
Then there was the swearing-in ceremony for the new Deputy Governor where P. took it upon himself to correct the Queen’s representative’s job description for his own second-in-command . . . Err, Mr. P., if you really must take it upon yourself to speak for the rest of us, at least stay polite and get your facts straight.
But what am I thinking? This is P., the self-styled “Man”, whose conscious departures from objective reality are now so commonplace as to have become part of the routine Bermuda gruel.
Will Dr. Big improve our situation. Not sure. If we take the putative Premier-in-waiting’s plantation remark along with his recent public pronouncement that — in effect — one section of Bermuda’s society is collectively and actively responsible for preventing the advancement of the majority of Bermudians (namely those of African descent), all does not bode well for truth and reconciliation within our community, a community kept perpetually divided by our politicians.
Dr. B is no Nelson Mandela; he could have been, but he isn’t.
There may be no better litmus test than to ask Dr. Brown how he feels about the proposed site of the new hospital. P. clearly wishes to see several thousand tons of concrete covering every bit of the old Agricultural Show ring in order that no Governor, ever, should again have the chance of delighting the clapping, rainbow-coloured crowd of Bermuda residents by doing a round in his horse-drawn landau.
Those like P., whose objectives are ultimately so very personal, will attempt to force unnecessary change upon us to further their own — not the public’s — agenda.
Indeed, perhaps we Bermudians should try to stay more abreast of current world events if we wish to better understand what is going on locally. What, for instance, do Bermuda and Burma have in common except for the first letter in both of our names? A hell of a lot more than one might initially assume, geography and topography aside.
Burma too has an unelected leader. They had experienced an open and democratic election, where the outcome was simply ignored because it did not suit the purposes of the existing power brokers . . . and now a military government in Burma, in a madcap effort to legitimise itself, has called a constitutional conference at which all the delegates are hand-picked and have been taken to a remote location where media access is strictly controlled.
Their leaders are highly suspicious of the media and re-work statistics and facts to suit their own truths. During contact with foreign journalists, every ill is blamed on former colonial masters and the common folk do not know what is best for them and therefore cannot be trusted to vote the “right” way in any referendum concerning the constitution. Sound familiar?
City of Hamilton
Letters
