Melville CookeI KNEW that the lead story in last Sunday's Gleaner was incorrect from about 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night. That was when I bought a copy at the Devon House stoplight, saw the headline 'I Will Not Go', a picture of Edward Seaga and thought 'here we go again'.
Seaga could have avoided Sunday's JLP conference much as a moth can resist trying to read the writing on a hot lampshade. And how many times previously had we seen him threatening to resign, only to supposedly recant at the beseeching of green-clad supplicants?
Edward Seaga is an opposition leader, as opposed to being the leader of the opposition, for life. I was two years old when he became leader of the JLP, nine when he became Prime Minister and 17 or 18 when he was sent onto the unfortunate side of Gordon House again, a place from which he was never to return.
In all my awareness of the man from the media, I have formed an opinion of him as a man who thrives on conflict and while there is nothing wrong with rising to meet a challenge, there is something very wrong with not being able to do without 'cass cass'.
And that is how Seaga has operated, finding the quarrels more inside his party than with the PNP, and when he reached the stage where he could no longer exorcise gangs and command sankeys to be sung, I believe he manufactured one with his
successor. (Isn't it abjectly sad that the JLP has just got its third leader in its entire history?)
SEAGA'S FAILING
Seaga's failing is a reflection of a national one, in that as an opposition leader instead of a leader of the opposition he did not seek to design and present an alternative to the system he was criticising as much as he simply opposed.
Stretching the words another way, he was not a position leader, someone you could say has made a plan that we as a nation can believe in the centrepiece of his strategy. Hence talks of 'breeder', 'boom bye bye' and election loss after election loss.
I often point out that Edward Seaga's JLP did not win the 1980 general election. The PNP was voted out because the populace could not take any more of the food shortages and the violence, and were scared by talk of communism (much as the United States has been scared by terror alerts). I remember my mother having to go to Mr. Myrie's shop in York, on the way to Seaforth in St. Thomas, for basic items and I remember the crawling insects in the rice tossed out of a particular supermarket in Morant Bay after the election was over.
I do not count that election as a victory for Seaga; it was a triumph for the upper class which starved Jamaica away from socialism and uttered in unfettered capitalism.
So, as an opposition leader for life, Seaga has been an outstanding failure - but in this country where so many of us are opposition leaders in our far less public lives, putting far more effort into our grudges than building a foundation for our children, he will be celebrated for his clashes and flashes of brilliant verbal swordsmanship.
This celebration of the clash and the flash can be seen in two other significant areas of national life, entertainment and sports. Take the example of Ninja Man and Shabba Ranks from over a decade ago. Ninja Man won the clashes with ease. Shabba got the Grammy and the lucrative contract, Ninja Man got bushwhacked at Sting by the next generation.
ON THE ROAD TO FRANCE
In football, you should be able to recall a defender called Gregory Messam, who loved to play to the gallery on the 'Road to France'. He was eventually put on the soft shoulder by Rene Simoes, because while we were there cheering the 'shifts', the coach was looking past the deft footwork to the fact that it was not helping to achieve the goal of a goal.
So of course, true to our national psyche, the media played up talk of Seaga upstaging Bruce Golding, but mark my words, Golding is going to be a position leader and a leader of the opposition, not an opposition leader.
Seaga? He will be going back to the National Arena for the JLP conference year after year after year to collect the accolades due to a spectacular failure, until all the chlorophyll is gone.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer
