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Columnists and awards
Morris Cargill
Considering that for many years previously, the Press Association of Jamaica and I had not got on well, it was big of the Association to give me an award.
It was also big of them when, for health reasons, I couldn't attend the luncheon, to send a group to my home headed by the president Desmond Allen and the first vice president, Donna Ortega, to give me the award. It was delightful meeting them all and my only complaint was that I was not able to enjoy their company for longer.
I am also grateful to my old friend and political antagonist, John Maxwell, for his kind words about me in the Sunday Observer of November 28. In defending his right to express his opinions in 1962, I was not being at all heroic. I simply thought that it was deeply wrong that the opinions of a good writer should be suppressed. I thought that the whole business had become too unsavoury for civilised people to tolerate.
Incidentally, in his article, John, with his usual choice of a telling phrase, wrote that I view socialism as a notifiable disease. It's true that I don't like socialism for I don't think it works. But come to that, with FINSAC being a free lunch counter for every failed capitalist in Jamaica, I can't say that free enterprise is working well either.
But then again, nothing seems to be working well in Jamaica at present except the institutions of thievery and murder.
On the general subject of columnists in Jamaica, I wish it were possible for our writers to read the columns of the American columnist, the late great H. L. Mencken for he was, in my view, the best American columnist. Alas, he was followed later by the very popular Walter Winchell who was semi-literate, a rascal and a liar.
I mention Mencken as a good example of a columnist because while we have many excellent writers in both newspapers, most of them are really feature writers or essayists and not really columnists at all. A feature writer and a columnist are two quite different animals.
The other day, one of our feature writers wrote, "with respect, I beg to differ" during the course of a piece he was writing about a politician. No good columnist should beg, with respect, to differ. His job is to kick butt.
Another good writer has the habit of including long quotations from some admired author. That's fine for an essayist, but a columnist is paid to write his own stuff,
Father Gregory Ramkissoon recently said that a journalist should not merely be a mirror of our society, but a lighthouse. Well, I've been doing my lighthouse act for some time now in an effort to stop our Government running us all into the rocks. It hasn't done the slightest good. Perhaps instead of getting an award, I should be described as a light that failed.
However, for Father Ramkissoon's sake, I'll try in future to increase the voltage. After all, I've just had new batteries put into my pacemaker. One quick note about that. My bill from the hospital states that I had a pacemaker installed. Isn't that a nice thought?
Morris Cargill is The Gleaner's senior columnist and has been writing for more than forty-five years.
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