Melville Cooke

It is 4:42 a.m. on Tuesday and, behind a door to the left of the cluttered (to put it mildly) desk I use, a television is on. It is the time of morning when advertorials targeting insomniacs, night workers, seekers and early risers are running at length, invariably interspersed with the urging to call that number on the screen now and have that credit card ready.

On this particular programme a preacher is hawking the green prosperity prayer handkerchief an without the visuals I cannot tell it's size or shade, I do know that it promises huge differences in purchasers' lives. And those differences are not only the usual walking out of the wheelchair and miraculous fall in blood pressure, but also (naturally) prosperity of the material kind.

And I smile a little to hear the notion of a God of prosperity being sold in an American accent from the inescapable black box (silver seems to be a popular colour now), much like a church THE STAR featured recently, where the pastor was not afraid to say if you have a million dollars, bring it unto me.

So much for the camel and the eye of the needle (which we Jamaicans know is very different from the needle eye).

The preacher's assistant (his wife, from the sound of it) reads a letter from a satisfied user whose blindness had been cured instantly and he asks rhetorically 'you can see clearly now' and they break into song a la Jimmy Cliff, "I can see clearly now the rain is gone."

Entertainment events

I have been awake at that time of morning many, many times over the past five years, reporting on entertainment events. While listening to the low frequency rumble from those much larger black boxes (silver is definitely not a choice) I almost always have my eye on the stage and I have seen the transformation of the Rastafarian entertainer's image from the 'roots man' of my much earlier days to the 'bling Ras' (very expensive clothes, jewellery and all) of many a young firebrand deejay.

And more than once I have heard a turbanned deejay declare "Selassie sey people fi have good tings." So we have two Gods of prosperity, one of the Christians the other of the Rastafarians, their respective followers generally in opposition on the image of the Almighty, when and where to worship, concepts of heaven and rites of praises, but almost totally in sync on the principle that their God is a God of prosperity.

Not simply comfort, but prosperity. Concepts of how much money, how many cars and how expensive a house constitutes that level of prosperity is may differ, but it invariably comes down to materialism.

And I submit that with this underlying principle of materialism, the differences of form between different Gods of prosperity are immaterial. What difference does it make, really, if one person shouts 'Jesus Christ' and another intones 'Haile I', when they both aspire to drive the most expensive car they can (or cannot) afford?

Bond

This common bond of materialism applies to Republicans and Democrats, it applies to athletes of different clubs and countries straining to best each other in compe-tition, it applies across the great gender divide that would have done in Evel Knievel faster than the Grand Canyon. Yet, still, those who have materialism in common are at odds the most. For is not the ultimate objective of materialism to have more than the other person or group of persons? Is that not why the USA is keeping a very wary eye on an economically booming China?

It is ironic that the common bond of materialism, which makes all other differences immaterial, is the motivation behind the ultimate conflict for a bigger television, a more expensive car, a higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a more expensive perfume.

Twenty minutes after, on that hidden television, another preacher asked 'What is the difference between the most expensive restaurant in the city and the hogs eating the same food? It is in the presentation'. And I ask "What is the difference between the revolutionary and the right-winger, if both drive the same model Mercedes-Benz?"