An almost amusing quote ...

No matter your opinion of the men, this is intriguing ... and were it not for the circumstances, it would be beyond hilarious:

"It is very sad to be dying, and on top of that, be visited by Hugo Chávez."

(From today's Miami Herald column by Carlos Alberto Montaner, about Castro)

What the h... is Bahamianisation? Really?

So ... this subject continues to leave me perplexed rather than anything else. OK ... maybe sometimes a little bit upset. OK ... it makes me mad!!!

I just don't know what it's all about, unless it's simply and only for political consumption. It's certainly not reality. And it won't help anyone get or keep jobs.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who "shoot out the lip" about having been victims of discrimination against Bahamians by employers ... particularly foreign employers ... can see beyond the end of their noses.

If they would only stop focusing short, they'd know about all the Bahamians who have been sent abroad by those same employers. I'm one. And I can name any number of others without even trying hard. I don't have enough fingers and toes to count those I know personally who have benefited from postings abroad by their accounting firms, banks, trust companies, etc. And those are only the ones I know about. And to kill that other bugaboo ... they're every colour in the spectrum.

One guy has held two positions in Nassau that were the result of "work permit" ads - one quite senior. In one case the Englishman's personal effects - labelled for Nassau - were stopped on the docks in Manila. Years later he was still upset! Just to show that foreign employers are more than willing to save money by hiring a Bahamian rather than swing for the rent and vehicle allowances, etc. they have to pay the "import". And before you say it ... this company has a fixed pay scale worldwide for each executive grade. So no savings on that score by hiring a "cheaper" Bahamian.

Not saying there aren't exceptions to this stuff ... but good policy - let alone life decisions - should never be based on the exceptions.

Instead of constantly crying "woe is me" the short sighted naysayers should ask themselves if maybe ... just maybe ... they are not employable for reasons other than the fact that they are Bahamian. They could perhaps change those aspects of personality - their basic aproach to life - that deny them what they consider to be the "good positions".

One [white] Bahamian aquaintance of mine years ago made a career of alienating pretty well every potential employer. If he considered himself capable of handling a job, then it should have been his. Said he. And he threatened lawsuits. 'Cause after all he also had a law degree. And in this little town pretty soon every human resource professional around had heard of him and avoided him like the plague. If he was willing to be belligerant before getting hired, it was a pretty good bet he'd be a "problem employee". Eventually he moved to the US ... and got treated pretty much the same, for what it's worth.

So ... it's not about nationality, is it? It's about character and ability and potential and willingness to learn and work one's way up.

Some of us went overseas low on the totem pole. We could have taken the tack that, after all, we had degrees ... MAs, even PhDs. But we learned the ropes ... did what we were asked. And we went beyond that. And pretty soon we had bosses that didn't want to see us go. We got promoted up against others who appeared to be better qualified on paper. And we were in somebody else's country. And we waited for work permits. And they were granted fairly. In part because each of those governments knew that part of the "tit-for-tat" was that their nationals were being sent abroad to other places for training and experience which would later be valuable to them.

The only influence we could bring to bear was who we were. What we could do. How hard we were willing to work.

We've received training in countries both more and less developed than our own. We've been away for short periods and long ... and we've been everything from trainees to management. Some of us got language training. Some of us got further education at our employers' expense.

In due time we came back home to contribute. To raise our families. To do what we could for our little corner of the universe.

I ask myself where I would be today had I been treated by my host countries overseas the way Bahamian politicians seem to be proposing. You just can't have it all. As much as you'd like to. If we're going to treat others this way, we shouldn't expect much better ourselves.

In my humble opinion, in one short month the politicians have managed to pretty well kill any hope we might have had of becoming a serious international finance centre.

Think it through, folks. There are consequences to all this.

And why doesn't the story of Bahamians overseas get told more often? Hunh? Why? Is it only politics? Or does the media love to feed only on the negative? 'Cause it gets people worked up? Why not tell the good stories. Of the Francises, the Wells, the Fountains, the Havens, etc. etc. etc. who have been away, done the hard time, and come back. Of the others that are still there, learning, accumulating experience.

Where's that story??

Finally: "Rising Tide. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America"

It was my frustration with the US media's nonsense over hurricane Katrina last year that got me to dive in to this. I got to the point that if I heard another "worst natural disaster in American history" or "storm of the century" remark I just knew I'd throw something at the TV or radio or rip up the newspaper or magazine or whatever.

First up ... "American history"? What's that? We've got like 200 years or so of the kind of presence on the continent that might be capable of recording this kind of information for posterity.

Second ... the idea that the kind of mess that was Katrina needed to be reported in superlatives is beyond me.

I can't pretend to be aware of the whole panoply of history, but I was aware (partly because it happened around my birthday) that the Galveston hurricane of 1900 was horribly more deadly. See "Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History".

"Rising Tide" is a hard slog. I won't try and convince anyone otherwise. On the other hand, it's worth every re-read of a pithy comment, or double-take at a surprising fact. And if when you're done you want to learn more, there's an excellent bibliography at the back.

Barry's epic - and it is just that - covers not just the flood which dispaced almost a million people (in a nation 1/3 of it's current size) and inundated many times more millions of acres in up to 30 feet of water. It's an incredible commentary on the national society of the day, on New Orleans politics and personalities (the "Big Easy" was by far the most influential city in the South at the time and was, essentially, the cause of much - if not all - of the upstream disaster). This alone is worth the price of the book. Was it ever more colorful or interesting anywhere else? Still is.

Barry gives insight into the national politics of the day (and I had forgotten - or never knew - that the Republicans owned the black vote back then). The disaster was the launching pad for the presidential ambitions of Herbert Hoover (and many think he would never have been president without it). He's a terribly interesting recurring character, by the way.

Sometimes there are flashes of brilliance in the way Barry turns a phrase or expresses a concept. But at other times the text is about as clear as the Mississippi mud of which he writes. Never mind. You'll learn of the engineering history of the Mississippi, and of the fascinating personalities who fought over their theories, sometimes in the most incredibly violent of ways.

The economy of the South and integration of ex-slaves is given a rather different treatment by Barry than what one is accustomed to in popular films and media. The thought comes across quite clearly that were it not for the 1927 flood, integration - at least in the Mississippi Delta states - would have taken a much different turn. Many assume that the black exodus from the South to the North had to do with the Civil War or, later, the legal racial discrimination which was so prevalent. Not the vast majority. It was the 1927 flood, which left a devastated economy and destroyed the infrastructure in the Mississippi Delta, and particularly on the east bank all the way up beyond St. Louis. No houses, no jobs, no home-town - why hang around?

So ... dive in. I don't think I've ever felt more educated by a book. Take it in small doses if you will, but you'll end up knowing a heck of a lot more than virtually every news anchor out there, as far as I can tell!

Happiness is ... the Bahamas??

Say what?
Yup ... according to the University of Leicester, as reported in the Nassau Guardian yesterday and splashed on TV screens everywhere, we're no. 5 in the world "league table" of content.
Do these guys listen to the same talk shows we do??