land of enchantment

a change might come if nothing more is said
anger and joy combat to bring us gain
throughout this season there's a weight of dread

you felt the breeze touch gently on your head
and so much then was needed to explain
a change might come if nothing more is said

those days when shadows had the heft of lead
are gone and we won't see them here again
throughout this season there's a weight of dread

beyond the walls the messengers are sped
to places that have known no angry stain
a change might come if nothing more is said

we know that no one here speaks for the dead
and in the orchard not a one would feign
throughout this season there's a weight of dread

without much eagerness we eat our bread
no knowledge now is left within the grain
a change might come if nothing more is said
throughout this season there's a weight of dread

shaped by the season

winter may come and go and with it pain
and summer's heat reminds us of no woe
the passing storm will burnish solar glow
and life seem cleaner for the heavy rain
all of the signals turn out quite arcane
since we are left with words we cannot know
like creaking thunder or the lightning blow
they serve to crush all meaning in each brain
the darkness would not lift and when we spoke
of worry of or fear not one could say
just how the trend of all our thoughts would twist
from calm to fright at the old-fashioned joke
that seemed to presage one more judgment day
and monsters looming once more in the mist

wildfire

we watch as people run from paradise
to warning sound of siren and of bell
the hearts of heroes turn to blocks of ice

the news reports seem far now from precise
there is not much that there is left to tell
we watch as people run from paradise

a foolish wanderer might cast the dice
but only losers pause to give a yell
the hearts of heroes turn to blocks of ice

we might have made the journey once or twice
and had no thought that things would not go well
we watch as people run from paradise

the staunchest of our guardians turn to mice
what once seemed a great fortress is a shell
the hearts of heroes turn to blocks of ice

no one could tell you what the final price
turned out to be nor what broke the great spell
we watch as people run from paradise
the hearts of heroes turn to blocks of ice

the happiest music

this is the sound that must each heart enchant
trapping the moment in the tricks of chance
we know that others may in work advance

now here we see a newer sort of plant
worthy we know of more than a mere glance
this is the sound that must each heart enchant

a music that would make most saints recant
their holy vows and jump into the dance
run out into the great plain's vast expanse
this is the sound that must each heart enchant

Going round in circles

John Maxwell

My first piece for this paper, 12 years and about 700 columns ago, was called “Watching Ideas Burn”. It was about the confluence of unsustainable development and dysfunctional politics. The column began with these words:

‘I’m sitting at my computer, watching part of Jamaica’s future burn. It’s been burning for four days so far, and despite the best efforts of the fire brigade, it will probably go on burning perhaps for weeks or even months.

‘Garbage dumps are temperamental things and if there is enough carbonaceous material underneath to supply the methane, a garbage dump can burn for years, just like an oil well, and for the same reasons.”

A few months after that occurred another of our serial panics about crime and violence – about which most of the journalistic pundits – myself included – wrote ad nauseam. This followed panics of 1974 (Suppression of Crimes Act & Gun Court) and 1968 (Shearer’s “No Beatitudes”) and as far back in history as we care to go we have these regular outbreaks of lawlessness, hooliganism, ‘rude bwoys”; and for each outbreak there are the same solutions proposed: armed militias, more firearms, military service for youth, indefinite detention and long, long, prison sentences.

This latest outbreak of bourgeoise hysteria was given a poignant twist in an article by that former terror of the bourgeoise, Professor Don Robotham, now turned gamekeeper and a severe critic of working class lawlessness.

Robotham explicitly supports a programme of indefinite detention to be used to deprive people of their liberty because someone suspects them of criminal behaviour. Delicately, he proposes a “a law - and human rights-governed detention system. This makes it fundamentally different from all previous approaches, barring none.”

According to Robotham:

“ The first thing to establish, therefore, is (sic) the precise standards of information which any detention order would have to meet. Would such an order have to rise to the current standards for an indictment, or would the standards be lower? How much lower, and in what respects? With the help of our experienced lawyers and human rights community we can define this quite stringently and reduce arbitrariness to a minimum.”

In such a system we will not try people on evidence; they will no longer to face their accusers in court, they will no longer be deemed innocent until proven guilty. Robotham wants to suborn the whole hierarchy of the human rights lobby into surrendering their rights and the rights of the poor and helpless in the grand and noble cause of defeating crime.

Robotham’s article, entitled “Nolle prosequi” argues that there is something seriously wrong in the system of justice because “…cases … collapsed because the witnesses had vanished without a trace, some, no doubt, sent to join their ancestors. All the painstaking investigative work of the police and the diligence of the prosecution came to naught. The Government had no choice but to advise the court that they could not proceed - nolle prosequi. The guns barked, the witnesses fled, the cases collapsed, end of story”.

There are lots of things wrong with this scenario. The main thing is that unlike almost any other police force in the world, the Jamaican police depend almost exclusively on eye-witness evidence. To talk about painstaking investigation is mostly a joke.

There are two problems with eye-witness evidence. One is that it is the most unreliable evidence; two is that there are not normally that many witnesses to a crime who hang around to be identified by the cops. Many policemen work by what I call approximation. ‘You were approximately here so you must be a witness and you were approximately there so you must be the gunman.’

The real problem is a problem of police intelligence.

It is my belief that the incidence of unsolved crime is correlated to the number of police cars imported over any five year period.

Beat duty has been abandoned and the police swoop down on ghetto communities like the American Special Forces in Vietnam. This is not an original observation. I first made it more than 40 years ago in Public Opinion.

When a policeman walks down a street on a regular beat he will talk randomly to all sorts of people who will tell him good morning or offer him a glass of water or drop a casual word in his ear. Nobody but he will know who told him what. Nobody is identifiable as an informer. As he goes through the community other bits of information will filter down to him, second hand, third hand and, sometimes, firsthand. As the community develops confidence in his presence that alone will ‘cool’ some of the least daring and will make the most reckless more careful, at least. But more than that, the unarmed beat duty policeman becomes a walking data base of useful information which he can eventually hand over to the investigators.

Unfortunately, we have abandoned this simple preventive device in favour of mechanised counter-terror.

That has never worked anywhere in the world

No criticism of the police

Robotham, like many of us, is afraid of police violence. He will never criticise the police force for its carelessness and ineptitude which may be far greater dangers than corruption. The police federation has been allowed by successive governments to become almost a law unto itself, the only trade union of which Jamaicans are afraid.

If we are going to begin a serious assault on crime we have to strengthen those in the federation who understand and practice good police work and get rid of the noisemakers whose purpose is simply to get by with as little work and study as possible. We are paying the police enough to be entitled to expect a much higher level of performance.

In my time, I have solved two murder cases leading to successful prosecutions. One was the Headless Corpse case about 1953. The police were following all sorts of false leads and had almost given up the case when I wrote two articles in the Star analysing, from the commonsense point of view, what had probably happened. The police had been looking for a foreign murderer, a doctor, they thought, and they were trying to identify the headless body by recourse to Interpol. The dead woman clearly must be a missing tourist.

I pointed out that the spot where the body was discovered (the Anchovy sea caves near Port Antonio) was unlikely to be known by anyone from outside the district, let alone a foreign visitor, and that far from surgical skill being needed to so cleanly sever the head, the murder’s skills probably lay in butchering and banana work. The woman, I guessed was probably of Indian descent. I was right on all counts. Several detectives told me that the case began to come together when the police decided, having nothing better to do, to follow my line of reasoning. They found the murderer, (a butcher and banana-man from Anchovy) identified the victim (his wife, an Indian) and with the forensic help of Professor Harper of the UWI, concluded a sensational case with a conviction.

In the second case the prosecution was hampered by the fact that the murderer was a policeman (Cons George Porter) and I was threatened with jail by the DPP (Huntley Monroe, father of Robotham’s former sidekick, Trevor) unless I could prove my allegations against Porter. I did, even though it meant an exhumation of the murdered man’s body.

Judicial killing or police execution is no answer to murder. They simply provoke more bloodletting. Depriving people of their liberty on suspicion is no answer to the failure of forensic investigation and human intelligence.

In Alcoholics Anonymous they say that doing the same thing over and over in the hope of achieving different results each time is one definition of lunacy.

The value of old men is that we can remind the successor generations of our mistakes and counsel them not to repeat them. We have already wasted so much – so much time, so much energy and treasure and above all, so much lost liberty and so many lives. That is lunacy.

Watching Ideas Burn

Every time we have a problem we are counseled to seek the short term solutions, the draconian laws, the restriction of Liberty in the interest, we are told, of Liberty. That is President Bush’s solution and the solution of every power seeking demagogue through history. Mussolini made the trains run on time, Lee Kwan Yew has not yet figured how to punish the involuntary discharge of anal wind but he has every other orifice covered. We too can lock down the society in the interest of the Gross Domestic Product.

What no one has ever figured out is how to make people accept enslavement. Robotham derides ‘holistic’ solutions, but he clearly hasn’t read a slew of documents from his own intellectual headquarters – the World Bank. After dozens of studies the World Bank has published several books which make it clear that structural change is the only answer to most of our problems – especially including CRIME.

The World Bank is not a Socialist organisation. It is in fact the Colonial Office of Globalised Capitalism. Yet, the Bank says that education, putting children in school and finding ways of keeping them there will not only reduce violence and crime significantly, but also boost the Gross Domestic Product by increments of from 2 percent to 9 percent.

Nothing we have done in our misconceived, unsustainable development has ever managed to produce such returns. We can raise the GDP by education, social welfare and small farm agriculture; programmes of soil conservation and reforestation. The problem: those would look too much like distributive politics, and the patron saints of the bourgeois, Carl Stone and Wilmot Perkins both denounce the unmitigated evil of such an approach.

The real problem with Jamaica? We can read but we don’t; and we can think but we prefer not to.

It really is as simple as that.

Meanwhile, thousands of children are being maimed at this moment by crime, by disease, by hunger and by the poisonous emissions from Riverton City.

Most of our movers and shakers have air-conditioned houses, air-conditioned SUVs, air-conditioned offices and air-conditioned minds. Riverton City Dump is not on their horizons. But take a look at the pictures taken three hours apart on Thursday morning. In the first one nearly a third of Kingston, including Port Bustamante and Norman Manley International Airport have disappeared.

copyright ©John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

morning to evening

a moment more and the great sun will shine
you'll see more visions and the world will crack
open into its parts you'll see the track
and follow it you'll know the simple line
as well as i do and you will divine
how to go forward and the swift way back
the best reward and what we will not lack
some mark of wisdom some redeeming sign
there is a meaning in each stage each test
of working patience but we do not wait
on simple matters fear will lead to flight
and eagles flee into the ruddy west
but those aren't symbols of a deadly fate
merely the harbingers of normal night

a sudden flutter

in the long distance there is a green wall
the boundary of light and of our place
in middle summer a leaf may now fall

the days are warm the trees are safely tall
joy's written we may think on every face
in the long distance there is a green wall

a happy music might begin the ball
each dancer showing us a ready grace
in middle summer a leaf may now fall

we don't expect the moment soon to pall
each has to rest before the next swift chase
in the long distance there is a green wall

the sweetest savour will not turn to gall
we tell ourselves and then we have to brace
in middle summer a leaf may now fall

we think our hearts and minds are far too small
to hold within them all we would encase
in the long distance there is a green wall
in middle summer a leaf may now fall

voices of a failed future

so in the end we make a baby smile
displays of virtue or of beauty mean
not much when we have left the human scene
but love may last more than a little while
each journey takes us a long country mile
and when it starts all vistas seem quite green
the final desert is so stark and clean
and the oasis but falsely fertile
no places clearly marked upon the map
to show us where to go or where we leave
our hopes and harmony for the next fool
to see and puzzle his way through the trap
or better yet more thoroughly conceive
just what we could not the ultimate cool

repeated nightmare

enough to dream but not to see the dawn
what is desired may not awake the heart
to know that certain magic from the start

instead each of us fears that note of scorn
all of its weight will strike like a sharp dart
enough to dream but not to see the dawn

the rule has changed much since each child was born
and now it is a task to play each part
but smiling is the hardest sort of art
enough to dream but not to see the dawn

odour of woodsmoke

there is a ghost that hangs about the fire
made out of memories and dead folks' pain
we note it only through our deep desire

on sundays we are loudest in the choir
the better to forget the weekly strain
there is a ghost that hangs about the fire

reminding us that each is still a liar
and nothing that we say is truly plain
we note it only through our deep desire

for what we know the future might acquire
in recollection of the fallen rain
there is a ghost that hangs about the fire

an unquiet air that leads each to perspire
and will negate each moment of our gain
we note it only through our deep desire

upon this mountain we're taught to aspire
where others would with greater sense abstain
there is a ghost that hangs about the fire
we note it only through our deep desire

saying the right words

somewhere on far atlantic there is rain
the winds drive onward and we wait to hear
of joys diminished and of times so drear
that not a person would have hope of gain
in such an age as ours filled with such pain
the price of justice seems to be too dear
and honour is too far past the frontier
not one thing seems to be honest or plain
the route we take is not a thing of choice
all words were said by those who understood
so well the meanings but who spoke too soon
and so were sorry and could not rejoice
when we desired that all would turn to good
yet things seem better underneath the moon

full measures of anguish

there is a way to find the safest road
back to the lands where our journey began
to where the early swift bright river ran

we know this place and want it to explode
with all the pain that put us under ban
there is a way to find the safest road

you know so well that truth is just a goad
what we will do is all set in the plan
not one of us is truly a whole man
there is a way to find the safest road

to please the patron

we set the limits to the human art
but then we worry at the thin remains
only the robot now may have a heart

across the road we watch the children dart
not knowing what we'll give them for their pains
we set the limits to the human art

all things seem likely at the very start
and even winter's hopeful for the rains
only the robot now may have a heart

what they have learned must fit into the chart
and be mapped into the coming campaigns
we set the limits to the human art

this is a principle we should impart
to those who think that they will break the chains
only the robot now may have a heart

and so we think ourselves both wise and smart
to have avoided all the tears and strains
we set the limits of the human art
only the robot now may have a heart

sound the trumpet

we work for silver and betray for gold
these are the facts that define humankind
not one of us who is not bought or sold

this story has so many times been told
we know so well how we got in this bind
we work for silver and betray for gold

the lamb feels safe within the winter fold
the springtime slaughter is far from its mind
not one of us who is not bought or sold

we aren't surprised to find our fellows cold
at sight of human pain we turn quite blind
we work for silver and betray for gold

the honest one is the first one who's rolled
into the gutter and to hell consigned
not one of us who is not bought or sold

so thief and villain are the most extolled
while decency and honour are maligned
we work for silver and betray for gold
not one of us who is not bought or sold

academic service

this is a place where bluebirds guard their nest
so much we know about this summer's height
a holiday is when we get no rest

at length we learn the meaning of this test
the clouds arrive to cut down the sun's bite
this is a place where bluebirds guard their nest

my task to see if youth has done its best
and words have been set down in order right
a holiday is when we get no rest

in duty and in work i acquiesced
the meaning of the signs is in the light
this is a place where bluebirds guard their nest

we have to play our cards close to the vest
assume that each of us is in this plight
a holiday is when we get no rest

day after day we have to produce zest
and say that what we do makes each life bright
this is a place where bluebirds guard their nest
a holiday is when we get no rest

this is our purpose

a vision leads us onward to the gate
this is the crowning moment of the day
we are the makers both of time and fate

to slay the past and clear the filthy slate
has been our task has given us our sway
a vision leads us onward to the gate

and what we see there will not let us wait
but draws us into speech and what we say
we are the makers both of time and fate

you might expect that someone would berate
our tardy action curse our mortal clay
a vision leads us onward to the gate

where we can rest and set down all our freight
knowing that now we cannot go astray
we are the makers both of time and fate

this is the moment this is the true date
of our achievement of the human way
a vision leads us onward to the gate
we are the makers both of time and fate

for gail a miracle

what matters is that we have reached the shore
and seen the waves that break upon the sand
the miracle of sea that touches land
and then goes back and touches it once more
it is enough to find that i adore
the sight of you the touch of your soft hand
this is a thing that i could not demand
all i desire and then a gift of more
what i can say is said by better men
no doubt of that but still the words must come
and i must say them here and set them free
there is so much that just escapes the pen
i want to speak but feel i am struck dumb
just overwhelmed by what seems a vast sea

slight encouragement

somewhere a message has been left for you
all of your friends have gone on far ahead
there is some wine here still and some soft bread

the world that opens up is not quite new
but that's no reason for disdain nor dread
somewhere a message has been left for you

once you depart the city fades from view
in a short time your feet have turned to lead
your mind is filled with thoughts of rest and bed
somewhere a message has been left for you

voluntary decree

in clarity of noon the forest glows
we listen as the leaves begin to fall
and see in proper place a single rose

we got our answer rightly on the nose
the world we found out now is very small
in clarity of noon the forest glows

there is no reason for the gate to close
you note the light upon the garden wall
and see in proper place a single rose

praise of the moment would seem grandiose
there is so much that we have to recall
in clarity of noon the forest glows

this is no time for slumber or repose
you have to set things up within the hall
and see in proper place a single rose

now is the time for one who thinks he knows
the meaning of the days when they are tall
in clarity of noon the forest glows
and see in proper place a single rose

dropping a sign

changing the symbol changes the whole sense
we go from altitude down to the core
from fullest grace to places we abhor
and all we do turns out to be pretense
our choice was made when we were being dense
and though we tried we failed to swoop or soar
to do those things we'd planned to do before
all of our hopes now go into suspense
you think this is some kind of magic pill
that changes frogs into princely shape
but you are wrong this is no such device
what we have here is a besetting ill
that leaves each of us in the form of ape
and lets us know quite well what is our price