SURVEY RESULTS for the third quarter 2005 Business and Consumer Confidence Indices in Jamaica report that business confidence has plunged precipitously.
In Milton's Paradise Lost, the fallen angel who is to become Satan remarks: "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven".
Jamaicans who have decided not to emigrate take a similar view that it is better to die in the heaven that could be Jamaica, than live in hell elsewhere.
Whenever we think of climes abroad, flames of dull contentment leap before our eyes, fed by a never-ending current of unhappiness over things that never quite seem to fit, nor mean as much as they could.
Yet, to live here is to risk being murdered or maimed in one form or another, all of them brutal. Life in Jamaica has become a madness too gruesome to recount.
HOPING FOR A HOUSE
I used to save a ceiling fan here or a wash tub there. This in the hope that one day I'd have a house on a hilltop looking down the valleys and out to sea. In the past five years, I've given away everything. Even if I could afford to buy a little cottage one day, I doubt that I could ever afford to pay two light bills in one month, not as long as Mirant is here. And no one can look out at the horizon through burglar bars. Today, one has to hide the keys so far away from thieves and murderers that there is no chance of even grabbing them in a fire.
So I was desperate to go out of town. When I finally did so, my favourite restaurant on the north coast was closed down. It had been owned by a customs man and now a ritual to the glory of Jamaica was gone. It was easy to imagine sitting on his seaside, that I had a yacht moored, and a jet parked somewhere. And joyous to realise that I'd got the feeling without needing a cent of money.
I know that people living in America can get a cheap thrill too. But there they would have to go into a Porsche dealer and take one out for a test drive. Then they'd have to return the keys. I never have to return the keys to get the same feeling. So my thrill is better than theirs.
This year, the Cayman Islands had three murders in four months or something like that, and tore themselves apart over it. We have twice as many every day, and all we do is seek solace in the hardware shops looking at padlocks. A march here or a placard there, but nothing more. But in Cayman last week, they instituted a visa system for Jamaicans. We who once used to own them, now have to ask their permission to enter. How far we have fallen.
PLANNING PUBLIC DEMONSTRATIONS
In 1999, as 'Citizens for Civil Society', I was planning public demonstrations against K. D. Knight for the murder rate, Omar Davies for the collapse of the economy, and Edward Seaga for the supine nature of official opposition, when a business executive with one foot in Miami came to me with a proposal. He said we were wasting our time, and that what we should do was damage the infrastructure to create a panic. He was perfectly serious and totally without irony.
Naturally, we didn't follow his insane advice, but he made a generous financial contribution to mounting our marches. Soon he had both feet in Miami. But now he's back with one foot here again, trying to confuse the head of anyone who will listen to him. If he could have been so full of despair in 1999, what more 2005? Why is he back? Because he feels inhuman there, and here he only talks like it. One place is hell. This could be heaven.
I spoke last week to the son of a once-huge businessman who had lost his 52 year-old business, and of course the Hatteras. And I was glad I didn't have a yacht to lose.
In the '50s and the'60s, the country was far more stable. People died, but usually of natural causes. Murders were few, and whole years would go by without a single suicide. People who were very rich remained very rich unless they were drunkards, and the poor could find decent work, and strove to educate their children, mindful of the fact that they had borne them in the first place.
Today, family fortunes disappear in a twinkling of the Finance Minister's eye. And the poor splash out on graduation dresses instead of school books. Much has changed in Jamaica.
'KINDNESS'
So I watch Ben Hur, and look for the part where the Roman consul shows Charlton Heston a kindness in the slave galley. The consul tells him that if the battle is won, he will still be a slave, and if it's lost he'll go down chained to the hull. Soon after that, the Roman unchained him, the only slave unchained in a ship that was indeed going to the bottom.
The benefit of the slavery of centuries past is that it allowed great people to do kind things, and act nobly. Today, every nigger is a star, and none of them gets looked after. We have substituted chattel slavery for slavery to partisan politics and the crony feeding trough. Since no one is allowed independence to prosper through steady and responsible government, there are new mouths every day for that feeding though.
RAPE AND PILLAGE
This is not better than colonialism. This is Zimbabwe. It is the grinding down of a country for personal enrichment without thought to national production. It is indeed the rape and pillage of the lumpen proletariat, the ones who were supposed to be saved by the whole exercise.
No one could have imagined such a cynical denouement to decades of positive development in Jamaica. Our Constitution copied by Singapore, our investment promotion strategies admired by Costa Rica and Ireland. Jamaicans, creators of a world religion and music, yet begging our politicians to bury our dead. Abject failure in the midst of such plenty and promise.
It's enough to drive you mad, and it doesn't have to be this way. We need a prime minister who is not content to reign in hell.
FOOTNOTE: I thank Sam Davis, head of government and regulatory affairs at the Jamaica Public Service Company Ltd., for pointing out that there is no GCT on the JPS bill.
