Heroes and a 'heroin'

Orville Taylor, Contributor

The title of this column might appear to be a crack about Whitney Houston, her well-publicised drug addiction and her ultimate demise, and you are free to interpret it as such. After all, we all tried to make her into much more than what she was - a singer with a beautiful voice. The truth is, like anyone else with exceptional talent, she was just a flawed human being and never asked to be put on a pedestal as a role model.

We, the Jamaican public, have been up in arms over the penchant of our young people for selecting a pantheon of idols, whose private and public lives would make the average parent puke. Thus, we tear out our hair (me, figuratively speaking) over Vybz Kartel's charges. If he is convicted on them, he will face not just a long sentence but several paragraphs and the chapter of his life will have ended.

Then, we convict Elephant Man, the man of more babymothers than tax payments, of his alleged rape, and feel little sympathy for Ninja Man. Ninja, the 'original gold teet', gun pon teet', brush teet' with toothpaste don gorgon', had frequent run-ins with the law until he finally found himself in such deep water, he ought to learn to swim like a fish.

Role-model crisis

Add to the crew, the sub judice matter with Mavado, Bounty Killer's hammering out of his legacy, and the entrapment and conviction of Buju Banton on drug charges and we have indeed a role-model crisis - the same one I have asked the Church to help me address.

Banton's case is a bit different, because most of us are unconvinced of his role as a drug distributor, although his expert recognition of the quality of the cocaine as "fish scale" points to his being a 'rock' star like Houston was.

Nonetheless, we are disingenuous about superstars, as we expect them to be super-persons and excuse their peccadilloes when their character is far from impeccable. For example, we mourned the death of Michael Jackson and tried to suppress our intellect as he moonwalked out of charges which still reek of suspicion. The acid-test question would be to all his Jamaican fans, "Would you have trusted your own children into the custody of Michael Jackson?" Who's bad?

Whitney, Michael, Gregory Isaacs and Amy Winehouse - whose name was prophetic - and all the others should not raise our children for us, and they never asked to be role models. It is a different undertaking, however, when one offers oneself for public office or takes on a role as an opinion-shaper in media.

Wilmot 'Motty' Perkins understood this perhaps more clearly than the rest of us. Assuming that we remain conscious after death, Motty must be shaking his head and laughing in his inimitable guffaw at the hypocrites who disliked him and are now trying to make him into an idol. Perkins never hid his resentment towards the embellishment of the lives of the deceased under the idiotic cliché, 'speak no evil of the dead'.

Of course, Motty demonstrated just how ludicrous this was by drawing references to Hitler and other evil historical figures. Imagine if we were to apply such a maxim to Vlad Dracul, the infamous Romanian count whose sheer evil and bloodlust made him kill thousands, impaling them via their anuses and leaving them to die over days. It is Dracul who inspired the Bram Stoker creation, Dracula, the vampire.

'Hero' worship

Motty was heroic in that he spoke his bigoted, opinionated mind and hardly made statements which he could not substantiate, even if it meant ignoring other facts which could shape an alternative view. He was fearless and thorough, and that is what we all can learn from him. However, he was no hero and never wanted to be one.

Similarly, Dudley Thompson, the great pan-Africanist and statesman, is elegised and eulogised as a sort of saint. True, a great man and statesman he was. However, he was not the sort of person to cross in political matters and he never relinquished his 'don't-play-with-me' soldier attitude.

Still, we have some real heroes now, who have not necessarily sought to be role models, but understand the importance of their service to nation-building. Two Wednesdays ago, the Caribbean Community of Retired Persons honoured 70 persons whom it believed have made major contributions to nation-building. At the top of my list is 'Mamma Joy' Baker, who, using her meagre resources, has raised almost 400 disadvantaged children.

Then comes Father Richard Ho Lung. With the choice of a cushy teaching job at the University of the West Indies and a PhD, he walked away and formed the Missionaries of the Poor. Ferdie Mahfood, already a wealthy man, founded Food For the Poor, now a multibillion-dollar organisation, catering to the needs of the impoverished in Jamaica and internationally.

Real heroes and heroines do not put themselves up on a mountain or Hill. They put people, community, and country first. Thus, I find the current revelations regarding the deal for the sale of our sugar assets to be too sweet for my heart. Unlike the People's National Party, it is not my intention to make an issue of the fact that the divestment has left the country with a $35-billion debt that it has to absorb. The former minister of agriculture, Christopher Tufton, has attempted to explain that had the sales not taken place, the haemorrhage of taxpayers' money would have continued, leaving us with a debt as large as the egos of some of our brainiacs.

Value for money

What gives me as much comfort as a haemorrhoid is that Jamaica-born international financial guru Aubyn Hill led the negotiations and was rewarded with a modest $40 million for his heroic effort in saving the country billions to staunch the flow of public funds in holding on to the sugar estates. That it is value for money is such an obvious truism that we could remind the Pope that he is Catholic.

No one doubts Hill's financial know-how, because he is reputed to have navigated the icebergs of Wall Street, the sand dunes and deserts of the Middle East, and accumulated major expertise in finance, economics and international trade negotiation. He is also believed to be a wealthy man, who is capable of giving nominal national service for the country that birthed him.

One thought with the return of this patriot to the soils of his motherland, he had come home to 'bill back'. In street parlance, it simply means to relax. But for those of us who are tired of unfulfilled promises from Universal Adult 'Suffering' in 1944 to the respective elected governments since 1962 which have essentially failed the populace, we expected him to 'build back'.

This is a country with a shallow talent pool in Parliament and a cadre of ministers who are not experts in their respective portfolios. We need help from all angles and all of our nationalists. This country cannot afford to pay our prime minister what the job deserves or our academics and other sages who can find better-paying work in other countries.

Thousands of Jamaicans give far more value for their pay than they are receiving, and this is not a Hill-conceived idea.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer in sociology at the UWI and a radio talk-show host. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.