boundary of time

a single moment and we see the shade

vanish abruptly as the sun appears

night seems to caution but the new day cheers

towards the west late birds head in parade

nobody with their movement interferes

a single moment and we see the shade

some other meaning must have been conveyed

in all the gathering of daily cares

just as we note the changing of the airs

a single moment and we see the shade

wet sunday morning

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

in this half-light the kingdom of the rain

what we name silver is a brighter grey

no one is certain on this sort of day

but would not venture to speak nor complain

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

there are no shadows that is what we say

in the damp woods the leaf-mould leaves its stain

what we name silver is a brighter grey

with its cold hand the passing storm will slay

dry heat of summer and tie winter's chain

once past the dark the bronze and gold h old sway

beneath loose dirt is nothing but hard clay

red as the rust that wants to claim its reign

what we name silver is a brighter grey

it is no use to shout or disobey

the dull commands of human body's pain

once past the dark the bronze and gold hold sway

what we name silver is a brighter grey

The Human Zoo

John Maxwell

There is an ancient joke about an American tourist being shepherded round Europe on a package tour, collecting places without ever experiencing them. One morning his wife asked him: “Where are we? His bemused answer:  ‘If this is Tuesday this must be Paris.’

The cruise ship business is even more soulless than the land based package tour. Cruise ships are floating amusement parks designed to delude you into believing that you are taking part  in  a mind expanding experience – travelling to foreign countries to partake of the local culture. In fact the stops in the various islands of convenience are basically to buy cheap water and to allow the crew a day to clean the ship and make it ready for the next day of cruising and boozing and goofing off at great expense.

 

Ginnigogs Rule

Aeons ago, shortly after returning from my exile in the UK, I attended a press conference called by the entity called the Urban Development Corporation and featuring the UDC’s Chairman  Moses Matalon and the Minister under whose portfolio the UDC then fell –Mining and Natural Resources. The Minister was Allan Isaacs and I will never forget his astonishment and then rage when in answer to one of my questions, Mr  Matalon admitted that the UDC, then five years old, had never published an annual report, as it was supposedly bound to do.

The Minister publicly exacted an undertaking from Mr Matalon to publish annual reports covering the UDC’s first five years.

And that may have been the reason that Mr Matalon later described me as an over-educated Rasta – wrong on both counts. His five annual reports were combined in one short lavishly illustrated brochure, in which it was revealed that the Universal Devastation Conglomerate had incurred a significant proportion of Jamaica's public debt, without the authorisation of parliament. The UDC had simply issued IOUs to American banks, to finance its destruction of downtown Kingston preliminary to reconstructing the city as a modern Miami in the Caribbean. We are still waiting, 35 years later, for the reconstruction. What astonished me then was the fact that Mr Matalon, on his own, could mortgage Jamaica to American banks without the knowledge of Parliament. It did not appear that his former Minister, the famously oversightful Edward Seaga, either knew or cared what was happening.

This week, in a statement to the Gleaner, the head of the Port Authority sounded as if he had inherited Matalon's powers. According to the Financial Gleaner of November 21:

‘The US$102 million that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Limited (RCCL) is fronting on the Falmouth cruise pier project will not give the American company an equity stake in the port, the Port Authority of Jamaica has said.

‘The funds representing 45.5 per cent of the total project cost of US$224 million is, according to PAJ president and chairman Noel Hylton, a loan to be repaid on a negotiated schedule.’

Repayment

"The matter of repayment is well under consideration; it is expected to take place over an extended period.

The Prime Minister, Mr Golding is clearly au fait with this arrangement. On November 10 the press published a release from the PM’s office to the effect that three days earlier, Mr Golding “ was met by Adam Goldstein, CEO of Royal Caribbean International (RCI) in Kingston, ahead of signing a US$224 M contract to develop the Falmouth Pier to accommodate the world's largest cruise ship in May 2010. Under the contract, the government will invest US$122M to dredge the harbour and construct the pier. RCI will develop the land-based facilities, including shops and attractions.

 According to Mr Hylton, however, there is no joint venture. The Jamaican taxpayer will foot every penny of this extravagant and in my view, mad scheme. The PM’s release hinted otherwise:

‘Under the contract, US$122M will be utilised for harbour dredging and to build the facilities for ships to dock. The other US$102M will be used by RCCL to lease land from the Government, for the construction of all infrastructural development. The facility is due to receive the largest ship in the world come May 2010.’

 

Crazier and crazier

The world is now in the toils of the worst economic crisis in history. Even on CNN, the journalist-millionaire anchors are publicly worrying about their 401(k) nest eggs, rotting away with the stock market. All over the world credit is acutely short. Jamaica owing 137% of its GDP to usurers of various stripes has had its sovereign bonds downgraded to little more than junk. The only source of funds is going to be the IMF, and they will compel us to fire more people and strip our cupboard even barer than it is already. The world’s tourism industries are bawling about the crunch coming from the contraction in disposable incomes. And yet, with our Jamaican hotels on the bones of their balance sheets, we are going to borrow money to destroy the integrity of Jamaica’s loveliest town,, dilapidated though it may be now, in the interest of a foreign corporation. We are prostituting ourselves for a foreign entity with no obligation or loyalty to Jamaica.

It is instructive to learn how the decision was made.

The Custos of Trelawny, speaking at what was alleged to have been a consultation about an Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed cruise shipping port, said, inter alia “Now, the Port Authority has taken upon itself to make this bold move, and that is to reincarnate as it were, not only the ports of Falmouth but the attendance and glory and historical heritage of the town of Falmouth”

Mr Hylton explained why he was doing all that he was doing for Falmouth. Having developed the ports of Kingston, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Port Antonio it was Falmouth’s turn to be blessed by the attentions of the Authority.

 Mr Hylton explained what provoked him to build the new port:

“There is a new ship that is being built, which is called 'The Genesis of the Sea', and this ship is capable of taking ten thousand (10, 000) passengers and crew, and we would like to host that ship in Jamaica.”

That is clearly good and sufficient reason to undertake a quarter of a billion US dollar debt. It will allow a foreign corporation to show off the largest and most vulgar expression of  capitalist excess in existence.

The process of site selection, was as one would expect, painstaking and thorough, although Mr Hylton did provoke laughter at one point:

“So, one Sunday morning I drove along the North coast and on arriving in Falmouth I went over the wharf area – actually I had to jump the wall.”

[LAUGHTER]

“And I looked at the place and I thought this is such a beautiful place that we should develop [it] Looking at the historical charm of the place and so on, I thought here it is.”

From the horse’s mouth, as it were, you get confirmation of something I have been saying for years. Nothing so satisfies our developers as the prospect of obliterating natural beauty and charm with concrete and asphalt.

“So, we invited one of the major shipping lines down and we walked this whole town on foot. We walked the whole town, and we thought that there was sufficient materials here to reconstruct the waterfront of this city to bring it back to its original glory. [APPLAUSE] And that morning when the shipping line and myself walked this place, we sat down and we said, let's do it.”

And that was how the decision to brutify Falmouth was taken, with care, deliberation and extensive research.

After more careful deliberation the Port Authority decided to hire a firm to redesign Falmouth

The artist selected for this job was, surprisingly and purely coincidentally no doubt, a firm called Idea Inc. which Mr Hylton described as “an International Design and Entertainment Company. It has developed story lines and thematic approaches for destinations all over the world, and is currently developing port projects in four other Caribbean Islands and Mexico, also a consultant to the world's two major cruise lines, Royal Caribbean and the Carnival Cruise Lines. Its president is with us today, Mr. Hugh Darley, he is the Projects Vision Planner. He is a past Walt Disney Imagineer and has experience in developing projects in over 70 countries. He has developed concepts for the Walt Disney Company, Universal Studios and Paramount.”

 Mr Darley, being a man of great imagination will no doubt bring an entirely new vision to Falmouth, unsullied by his past affiliations and visions. We are going to pay him to mess up Jamaica to the specifications of a foreign corporation

Although the new cruise liners will dominate the landscape and obliterate the view of  Falmouth from the sea, Mr Darley promises to make it so that the two cruise ships with their fifteen or twenty thousand passengers do not ‘overpower’ the seven and a half thousand who live in Falmouth.

As he described it, whatever is architecturally valuable in Falmouth will be incorporated into the new development which will become in effect, a gated community stretching the entire waterfront of Falmouth. There will be a facility to allow nearly two hundred large buses and an unknown number of taxis, to transport the fifteen thousand or so guests to approved attractions, and after their labours, return them to a segregated Market Square and a Merchant Square where nearly half a million square feet of shopping mall will be built and which will incorporate the historic Falmouth Courthouse as a museum including a ‘Rum Bar’

 

Chaos to be built-in

“The idea is that the courthouse could be a living museum; it would be restored and developed to represent what was originally there” according to Mr Darley. This fidelity to history will probably include people playing the parts of the slaves who were originally there. I am not being malicious. In several of the North American examples of historic recreations, blacks are hired to play the parts of slaves to make the experience as true to history as possible. Maybe the one thousand jobs promised for Jamaicans as part of the development will include these, or perhaps they will be part of the fruit and vegetable stalls and the fish stalls and curio stalls which will be among Mr Darley’s “ opportunities for locals to participate in sales within the development through these types of chaos opportunities  all along the waterfront.”[sic]

Wendy Lee, the tireless engine of the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association, was, as usual, a voice crying in the wilderness. “"If this is the complete EIA, it means the terms of reference have not been met because there is no adequate archaeological assessment of the town which is the heritage gem of the north coast,"

She, and many others deplore the extensive, mindless destruction of the phosphorescent lagoon, the wetlands and the other characteristics that make Falmouth uniquely Falmouth.

Trelawny’s famous black crabs will get even shorter shrift than the human inhabitants of Jamaica and Falmouth.

Jamaica is a small country and every development affects all of us. Developers get away with EIAs that treat the immediate neighbours of any development as the ‘interested public’ – as in the Doomsday Highway, where the EIA was debated in a small restaurant in Spanish Town. Projects which should be discussed in Parliament are explained to small audiences in hurriedly arranged meetings in obscure places.

The fallout from these brazen assaults on the Jamaican physical – natural and built – environment is not important; twenty vigorous claqueurs in some church  hall are thought adequate to give Jamaica’s assent to some of the most monumentally destructive and environmentally unsustainable enterprises on earth.

Pretty soon, our people will find themselves cut off from their ocean, with their biodiversity destroyed, their natural heritage and culture debased and their national patrimony owned by others. We won’t be able to swim in our beaches, see our coastline, or explore the intellectually stimulating casinos which will provide the prism and prison bars through which we can view twenty-first century reality where courthouses become museums and justice becomes a rum bar joke.

Copyright ©2008 John Maxwell

jankunnu@gmail.com

from the first echo

from the first echo of the shout of doom

there was a sense that time itself would lend

the means by which those who could best attend

would start by emptying each cluttered room

in the clear daylight no dull weight of gloom

would keep us back nor hold us from that end

which in our hearts we have to comprehend

the universe is not truly a womb

name what we suffer and it does not die

there are no magics here nor ever were

faith cannot work to save us from our fate

it always seems that we desire the lie

want one more moment simply to confer

upon ourselves the burden of deep hate

when mosquitoes come

at sunset when mosquitoes come to play

their urgent buzzing games of sucking blood

the darkness comes upon us like a flood

we long for cleansing light of the next day

behind the net there is not much to say

outside the frogs are croaking in the mud

a misplaced word falls now with heavy thud

this is the season when thought goes astray

smoke blends with fog in the short humid night

as all our measures pause within the heat

not one is certain and they all seem wrong

in their slow circle all the clouds move right

over the mountains to a steady beat

and deep within each heart there is a song

time for a change

your duty is to serve without a pause

those who are worse than you and who must hurt

your heart and soul and give you justest cause

to overturn them and cast into dirt

all of their forces you must disconcert

those who expect that you are just a pawn

who do not think that you get your desert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

the ones who always get loudest applause

are those who in their way have to assert

entitlement both to tears and guffaws

it takes you little effort to exert

your claim to justice that is not covert

against a force that is not soon withdrawn

it is no easy matter to assert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

we find it written in a complex clause

that scholars have no reason to pervert

reason is subject to no human laws

we must to basic principles revert

and from its course the evil power divert

by dint of honesty as well as brawn

until the force of terror lies inert

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

prince we are flattered you have not been curt

and have not chosen our hopes to subvert

these are the times when hopes are not yet gone

we might with many choices have to flirt

night lasts its time but the earth turns to dawn

ballade of doubt

no one will think an error self-corrects

blind folk see better than those who have led

our startled crew and learned from the effects

that it were better if they all had bled

completely flat and nothing more were said

it being time now to express true rage

and letting no kind words the mood assuage

we will not let the hero get the blame

it is our duty now to set the stage

before we pass into the final flame

the kind of man who his own thought collects

might think that there was time to prevent dread

but he who speaks knows best what he expects

when facing those who he with lies has fed

at the right moment when the world turns red

he has learned swiftly their weak minds to gauge

and shows himself to them as king and sage

while not revealing the whole thing is a game

there's no defence monocyte macrophage

before we pass into the final flame

you might have thought of these human defects

as bringing matters to a stirring head

but not a one here fact with fact connects

or sorts the clearly living from the dead

all are just here to earn a little bread

make some small money collect daily wage

for that alone they would their time engage

you might think that a kind of mortal shame

it's not their task to answer your hard gage

before we pass into the final flame

prince you might wonder at these things backstage

but they're the matter of our dying age

we say the words and give the facts a frame

but that's no more than simple persiflage

before we pass into the final flame

royal command

to mete out magics is no complex task

a sterner duty comes to try the heart

we leave the hangman to his gentle art

and do not hear the hungry when they ask

for dryest crumbs nor grant drops from the flask

compassion is not what we would call smart

just fling the bodies on the diggers' cart

and do not seek to look behind the mask

so many lies and all upon the page

that  hide plain fact behind a scrim of glare

we would not have you see the world entire

as simple subject for your honest rage

nor yet as calling forth a word of rage

respectful silence now until the fire

its tribute of wild tears

at the last end naught's left but a bare name

there is no straight account of loss or gain

you can't expect loud hatred or acclaim

this is the price each pays to avoid shame

to keep things hidden and stave off the stain

at the last end naught's left but a bare name

this siren blast will serve to point the blame

right where you want it where you won't complain

you can't expect loud hatred or acclaim

instead some mention of the sort of game

that you would play so you could ascertain

at the last end naught's left but a bare name

no one has set the picture in its frame

the proper sequence is not yet in train

you can't expect loud hatred or acclaim

after this run no wonder you turn lame

there's no escape you must accept the pain

at the last end naught's left but a bare name

you can't expect loud hatred or acclaim

so much for balance

narrow the vision and a world's unseen

withhold the names and much is left unsaid

a simple thing but so easy to dread

you learn the facts and then you are not keen

to face what is to come the things that mean

not merely change but that you were misled

by a false light and too soon will be dead

to all that mattered and will leave the scene

this altered light suffices to inform

our surging hearts of the firm pace of time

just as our eyes catch sight of the grim bird

that circles slowly just before the storm

clear testament to what had been a crime

that speaks as loudly as a human word

night-walker's song

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

allows a truth that we must never bend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

you'd challenge what is said just for its brass

words that would hurt but had no warmth to mend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

not clear to us the road through the morass

nor what to do to change the downward trend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

leaving us with no grace but drying grass

and sullen folk who will not comprehend

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

the wisest one looks foolish on his ass

nor will the servile bother to pretend

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

into the memory of the tardy class

as one more message that we cannot send

so now this clarity in unflawed glass

these are the days that far too swiftly pass

what has been seen

fractions and fragments broken on the head

of tiny knowledge things that have been turned

between swift signals when the court adjourned

throwing us out into the wider dread

of rotting time and weeds in the rose-bed

such were the wages which our fear had earned

in the dry season while the forest burned

you spoke and no one heard a thing you said

justice requires a citizen must pay

for all the pleasures and the sins of state

since honour's lash is straightforward and harsh

this rule is clear there are no shades of grey

nor compromises on the road to fate

just noisy birds that call out on the marsh

human veins

knowing the hour must mean we know the place

where justice meets with anger and they ride

the horse of pain this is where heroes stride

in open season none would fear disgrace

since not a one would dare bow or abase

his own deep need before the other side

there is a proper setting for true pride

where understanding gives each monster space

between the echoes we might hear a word

conveyed with clarity and given due force

by those whose task it is simply to speak

of matters complex and of the absurd

conditions under which we chide the weak

obliging them to step out of the course

a simple matrix

those who mean well end up not knowing much

our very reason in the end rebels

at what are simple but resounding yells

we cannot reach and so we have to clutch

before calm force absorbs or else impels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

we watch the ball bounce hard right out of touch

our ears are deafened by the warning bells

nothing remains but what we hope excels

those who mean well end up not knowing much

so now change

the autumn flower's not delicate of kind

but sturdy growth is what we most desire

a stunning smile then winter's stern attire

we must take on these are the goods we find

as times grow stern to our hard tasks we bind

so many wishes and we hope the choir

sings just as clearly as the days require

for all our visions now have left us blind

so much that's good has passed out of plain sight

into the dust where we cannot recall

just how to make what should matter suffice

but now fresh day has come out of the night

and there's no reason for a soul to stall

while double sixes come up on the dice