C. Roy ReynoldsWHATEVER LITTLE relevance the NDM might have had left appears to have been dissipated with the apparent evaporation of the latest attempt of its president to spread alarm. And unless Mr. Golding can offer hard proof that a 40-foot trailer of one-thousand dollar bills was stolen from some facility in England he ought to apologise profusely for his faux pas and try to wash the egg from his face.
Had there been indeed the disappearance of a 40-foot container of thousand-dollar bills it would have been catastrophic. It seems to me that one of the first measures that would be indicated would be the immediate recall of all such notes in circulation in the island within a very short span and the abandonment of this denomination. Otherwise there could be total collapse of the currency.
In the face of such crisis one would have expected any responsible citizen, let alone an aspiring leader of the country, would have reacted out of the national interest, which interest would have demanded that said citizen take every step to establish the authenticity of his information before spreading it abroad. This would reasonably include contact with the Bank of Jamaica, the Minister of Finance, and the external printing company at a very minimum. And realising the potential danger and sensitiveness of the matter, would be more concerned with establishing what he could do to ameliorate the situation. About the last thing such an aspiring politician would be expected to do was to contribute to creating national panic.
Yet, Mr. Golding tells us that he and his party are "new and different" and in a manner of speaking this might be so, at least in this instance. His old boss, Mr. Seaga, has something of a knack for ferreting out things and exposing them. But at least he tried to get them right.
It now appears that Mr. Golding left his apprenticeship too early. That like the wasp apprenticed to the bee to learn the honey-making trade, he left after only mastering the honeycomb.
But as we know situations are seldom without opportunity, and this now gives the moribund NDM an opportunity to be indeed "new and different". To do that it would have to call Mr. Golding to account, marshal the facts and if they so indicate it would have to remove him from leadership or at least censure him. It would be the boldest political stroke for decades and would signal to the country at large that it need not be business as usual indefinitely.
For some time now I have been convinced that there is a vast windfall waiting for any who would dare to offer positive alternatives to the electorate.
The NDM should know that rather than salivating over the huge per cent of so-called uncommitted voters it needs to realise that by pandering to politics as usual it has done its share to create that category of potential voters. It has allowed itself to become part and parcel of the unattractiveness of politics and failed utterly to live up to its early promise of being "new and different".
I have a strong feeling that politicians would do their cause a great favour by appearing more constructive and obviously less destructive. That missing link is the ingredient in the phenomenon of public disinterest.
The further tragedy is that what passes for the media in Jamaica today seems to have bought hook, line and sinker into the prevailing political orthodoxy. Time was when caution and a commitment to fairness would preclude the more responsible sections of the media from running with unproved stories.
When being in the media was regarded as a privilege to be exercised in the interest of the nation and not as a right to publish unsubstantiated stories, especially where they could have an undesirable effect; when we did not regard our position as conferring carte blanche authority to inform or misinform as the fancy struck us.
Morass and malaise
Time was, as well, when we realised that the art of good interviewing was not to highlight the interviewer but to elicit the information the public needed to be properly informed. Instead of being the star of the occasion the interviewer would be in the background, the seasoning in the stew instead of the main ingredient.
These, in my thinking, are necessary things we need to recover to get us out of the present morass and malaise where anything goes and the need to be sensational and stir emotions dominates both politics and the media. In such a recovery there would be no place for creating mass alarm over an unproved allegation that a 40-foot container of thousand-dollar notes has disappeared and that somehow our authorities were to blame. That is bad politics and worse journalism. In a climate of "anything goes" it should not be surprising if in the end we find that nothing goes.
C. Roy Reynolds is a freelance journalist.
