Orville W. TaylorWI lecturer found dead!” Caption below – “Orville Taylor – shot and killed.” Imagine? I almost dropped dead upon reading last Friday’s headlines in the Gleaner. Like my mother, who always smirks that she has outlived all her ‘enemies’, reading the obituaries is a daily routine. However, my motive is more akin to my sage, Kenny, who declares that it is, “to make certain I am not in it”.
Bwoy! That was close, especially because last year, after Kingsley ‘Ragashanti’ Stewart’s ordeal, I decided that my next car would be a hatchback with very little trunk space.
Needless to say, like another Orville, ‘Shaggy’ Burrell, ‘It wasn’t me!’
However, it could have, and it might have even been you. It was indeed someone. It doesn’t matter that the headline referred to an esteemed academic, who did massive amounts of work to preserve Jamaica’s natural heritage. Neither is it important that my murdered namesake was ‘only’ a vendor in the Jubilee Market. What counts is that they were men, human beings, people’s fathers and sons.
No life is more significant than any other the fact that Dr. Peter Vogel was an important white man pushes it to the front page. Indeed, Vogel will be difficult to replace because those of us who understand the importance of lizards, snakes and crocodiles, appreciate his work these creepy-crawlies sneak around at night and grab unsuspecting prey and look harmless in the day, that is their only resemblance to politicians.
Nonetheless, when VIPs get killed, it awakens the national conscience and we feel a collective sense of revulsion because ‘top man’ and ‘top woman’ dead. Therefore, for whatever it is worth, the lessons to be learned is that no one is immune to the homicide virus. Unlike AIDS, that can be prevented if you use a rubber bullet-proof vest, the very murder vaccine that you use can kill you. In the twinkling of an eye the murder ‘condom’ can become the murder ‘condemn’ because the security workers and other persons that you take into your confidence can take you down.
‘Loyal’ soldiers
A few weeks ago, in the security of a partisan crowd, the former Security Minister got a small box that could have turned into a long one made of board. Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, was assassinated by her bodyguards. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat died at the hands of his ‘loyal’ soldiers, even with four layers of security. Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, died as a consequence of treachery within his ranks of supporters, and Saddam Hussein was betrayed to coalition forces by his security troops.
The list of political leaders who succumbed to violence due to duplicity among their faithful is the substance of both fiction and history. Among the works of William Shakespeare this is a common theme. Julius Caesar is the best example of tragic misplacement of confidence. In his famous last words, in Act III, Scene I, Caesar gasps after being stabbed and looks at his closest comrade in the Senate, “Et tu Brute? (“And you Brutus?)” and died.
In another Shakespearean tragedy, Macbeth, the protagonist, having plotted an earlier murder, finds himself on the verge of his own demise. In one of the most famous soliloquies, Macbeth recognises that judgment is something that faces persons who allow evil to be done in their names in their blind obsessive pursuit of political power.
Judgement
He notes that here (on Earth), upon this bank and shoal of time we’ld jump the life to come (we may escape judgement until the next life). “But in these cases, we still have judgment here; that we but teach bloody instructions, which, being taught, return to plague the inventor: this even-handed justice commends the ingredients of our poison’d chalice to our own lips.”
Although written in the same obscure English of the Bible, its message is clear. If we teach people to kill in our name or allow them to learn to do so for our political ambitions, we can never feel comfortable, because we will feel judgment on this Earth. The killers may come back to haunt you and you may be forced to drink from the cup that you poisoned.
Even if they don’t kill the actual person who taught ‘bloody instructions’ and who supplied the guns, they will kill some of their friends and relatives who were not the intended victims.
Bruce Golding learned Shakespeare at St. George’s College and Portia Simpson Miller has often recited Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice. In the concluding lines, the disguised Portia preaches that even where someone has been wronged and there is the legal recourse of bloodshed, we should show mercy and not seek ‘justice’ (revenge). All have sinned and have done wrong. She declares, “In the course of justice, none of us; should see salvation: we do pray for mercy; and that same prayer (The Our Father) doth teach us all to render the deeds of mercy.”
I am tired of the speeches and political one-upmanship. If politicians are committed to having a violence-free election they must show leadership. Both Portia and Bruce, being part of the system as it disintegrated in the 1970s to 1980s, have collective responsibility for this disease of political violence.
Tomorrow marks the 228th anniversary of the hymn, Amazing Grace. Slave-ship owner John Newton almost died at sea on one of the very slave ships he owned. Recognising the evil of his past deeds he confessed his sins, repented and wrote it.
Trust me; he was a bigger ‘wretch’ than these politicians. Who will follow suit?
■ Dr. Orville Taylor is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the UWI, Mona.
