Many years ago, when I first went to live in the Cayman Islands, a journalist from the British Sunday Times, by the name of Simon Winchester, came to Cayman and wrote a one-dimensional hatchet job on the whole country, ridiculing the government, the tax haven status, even the shopkeepers, without ever mentioning one positive thing about the country. I took the calypsonian route of writing a musical jab, addressed to Simon, telling him to write about the messes in his own country before coming to Cayman and screaming about the messes there. The song, called Write About That Simon, was a big hit in Cayman, and to be fair, Winchester took the song in his stride, featured it on his radio programme, and even dedicated a book to me. (Winchester is now a best-selling author with several excellent books to his name including The Professor and the Madman which is the fascinating story of the writing of the Oxford English dictionary; The Crack in the Edge of the World that deals with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; and, his latest, The Man Who Loved China, which is the story of Cambridge scientist Joseph Needham who focused on the stunning originations from China – printing, the compass, suspension bridges, even toilet paper.)
My encounter with Simon Winchester was some 30 years back, but unfortunately that disposition to point out deficiencies and irregularities in the less developed countries in the Caribbean region, and elsewhere, continue with the myopia expressed then by Simon being more obvious than ever now. My gripe, then and now, is that the developed world is yelling at us about the same problems they have in their own backyards but to which they are apparently blind or deaf. Based on what we now know of the developed world, they don’t have the credentials to criticize the failings of other countries.
The most recent example is the Wall Street collapse which revealed that the so-called free-market system that the West has been telling us is the panacea to the world’s ills is actually a house of cards propped up by some of the most brazen crooks in history.
Madoff and Stanford are only two we know about; there are clearly dozens more.
Here we are in the Caribbean agonizing, and rightly so, over the CLICO frauds, but that exercise is not even on the radar compared with the institutionalized dishonesty and blatant deceit pervading reputable private financial institutions now revealed from the world’s recent financial crisis that has wrecked economies, large, medium and small.
The irony in that particular scenario is that we now find that a number of the doctrines we have been hitherto induced to embrace are being abandoned by the same folks who propagated them and who ridiculed us for not following them.
We used to be told we should leave the free market alone; it would fix itself. Now we have, the USA, one of the progenitors of that position having to cough up $750 billion to prevent catastrophe in their economy.
We used to be told that economic results should be the principal business criterion; if a business was losing money it should close. That rule, cast iron for decades, went out the window, virtually overnight, when companies like AIG and General Motors – you know the other names – were heading for bankruptcy. (The latest news is that, contradicting the earlier assurances, we’re now being told the GM money won’t be repaid.) We now have a new commandment in Western economic thinking: “Some businesses are too big to fail.” Can you imagine the first-world derision if some Caribbean nation or some African country had proposed that edict?
And the collection of woes in the “outer world”, as the West Dem people would describe it, is not just economic. The social fabric in Western societies is looking pretty tattered these days: rampant opiate abuse driven by steady North American demand; the divorce rate in America reaching almost 1:1; alcohol abuse now claiming more lives than any other aberration.
We hear from the pundits outside how autocratic and spiteful our leaders are at a time when Ivan Lewis, a British MP, critical of PM Brown, suddenly discovers that his indiscreet text messages, addressed to a female subordinate, are leaked to the British tabloids. Martin Bright, editor of the New Statesman, was effectively pushed out of his job because he was rash enough to object to the Labour machine in the London Mayor’s office.
I won’t go on with the litany – if you’re paying only passing attention to the international press you’ve got the picture. Now before I go any further with this I can hear you already like the Bourda Market vendor who told me: “wha’ happenin’ outside don’ concern me; I studyin’ wha happenin’ hay.” And I agree with that sentiment, but my point is tangential to that: my gripe today, as it was with Simon Winchester 30 years ago, is simply that I’m tired listening to people who are responsible for the most massive screwups in history coming down to the Caribbean, and poor little GT, and shaking their heads at our foibles.
The very things they are supercilious about here are happening, and at a far worse level, in their own countries, but they are brazenly oblivious to that; we should begin making that point when the occasion arises.
We should be saying: “If you in these first-world countries, with the best brains and the most money, and economies of scale, are falling off the cliff, what is the basis of your coming to condemn us about our problems? What, in effect, are the credentials for your lecture?”
As we are finding out from one brouhaha after another – Wall Street collapse; US governors in jail; skyrocketing drug problems; global warming – our critics, with all their money and expertise, are in fact getting it wrong far worse than we are.
The folks in the “outer world” need to fix their own house first, then they can come show us the models we need to fix ours. In other words, develop some credentials; in the meantime, cut us some slack.
