Morris Cargill

THE LAST week or so has been full of bad news. The worst bit has been the terrible situation in Park Lane which runs off the Red Hills Road. In two days five of the residents there have been killed by gunmen and this has caused many of the other residents to flee their homes. It is quite clear that this area has been taken over by the gunmen, but other parts of the Red Hills area are also under threat. A lot of business places there have closed.

There was a peaceful demonstration asking the Bank of Nova Scotia not to close its Red Hills branch, but the fact of the matter is that the people working at the branch as well as the management of the bank have concluded that it is too dangerous to keep the branch open. Some of the local business people feel that the branch could remain open if there was heavy security. I hardly think that this would work for long for five security guards have been killed within three days recently. Apart from the fact that the gunmen attack the security guards in order to get their guns I suspect that there is also a conspiracy to threaten our entire security arrangements. At the moment it looks as if our entire system of law and order is under threat. It is time that the Prime Minister descended from cloud nine and that the entire Government should give some effective consideration to what is happening to the country today.

Kingston Ice bites the dust

Hardly a week goes by without the news of another institution going bust. The latest is the old firm of Kingston Ice. More than half of all our listed companies have now gone belly-up.

Kingston Ice says that it might recover when it gets its new machinery working, but I keep on wondering who it sells its ice to in these days when everybody owns a refrigerator. Many years ago the ice trucks did their rounds with the man in charge deftly cutting off chunks of ice from the larger blocks. Some chunks weighed 50 pounds and some 25 pounds. House-holders would buy up to 50 pounds to put in their ice-boxes. A good trade was done too with the highly decorated snow-ball carts most of which bore the words. "In God We Trust" written upon them. It is many years since I've seen a snow-ball cart. The sky-juice people still ply their trade.

Tourism

It is not only the Kingston Ice Company which has recently gone bust. The Lagoon Development in Montego Bay has also come under the auctioneer's hammer. This reminds me to mention a rather strange thing which is called our 'Tourism Master Plan' which now appears to have stalled. It consists, I understand, of three alternative propositions. There is also a fourth alternative which will come about if bits of the first three are combined. This sounds as if some very considerable confusion will be created.

The strange thing, however, is that in no part of this master plan are casinos mentioned. One would have thought that the most important part of any such plan would be given over to the establishment of at least one top class casino. That the subject is not even mentioned gives me no confidence in those master planners. For example a casino, which would have been readily financed from abroad, would almost certainly have saved the Lagoon Development in Montego Bay from failing. Even now a casino in that area, quickly developed might save a good part of the Lagoon Development from having to be sacrificed at public auction.

Slave talk

I prefer to describe what we call our patois as either slave talk or yahoolish, for that is what it really is.

When I was going around the other West Indian islands during the Federation I was greatly impressed by two important things. When Grantley Adams made his speeches in the Federal House he often spoke with a thick Barbadian accent. But beneath that accent his speeches were well structured, and were in excellent English. I soon found that to be true of all the Barbadians I met. Never mind the accent. Whatever they said was firmly based upon well structured English.

The Trinidadians had a different but softer accent, yet they too spoke excellent English. When one phoned a private home both the maid and the mistress spoke the same excellent English with the same charming lilting accent.

The situation in Barbados and Trinidad differs greatly from the situation in Jamaica for our patois is nothing more than hopelessly broken English, unstructured and incapable of dealing with abstract concepts, without tense or number.

Although a few Jackasses, some of whom are at the University, keep on claiming that Patois is some kind of language, it is nothing more than an undisciplined and unstructured kind of chattering. An undisciplined and disorderly way of speaking makes for an undisciplined and disorderly mind. Of course the converse is also true. A disorderly and undisciplined mind also brings about a disorderly and undisciplined way of talking.

One doesn't know which comes first but I don't think it matters. Every writer complains about the lack of discipline in Jamaica but it doesn't seem to occur to many that that indiscipline is expressed by, and probably results from, the undisciplined way so many talk. We should watch our language and stop calling slave talk some sort of cultural heritage. It is nothing of the sort. It is simply mental sloppiness. Barbados and Trinidad both have a useful lesson to teach us. It may well be the reason why both those countries are so very much more successful than we are.

Footnote

I read with sadness that the bond offer by the Jamaica Public Service Company suffered the same fate as the bond offer by the Jamaica Government.

All have failed. In the meantime CitiBank has come to the rescue of the Government and CIBC has offered to rescue the Jamaica Public Service Company. It makes a welcome change to have two banks rescuing us rather than the Jamaican tax-payers having to rescue the banks. What bugs me however is that a few of the scoundrels responsible for some of our bank failures have been able to walk away from the wreckage apparently in good personal financial health.