CHARLES... has been a major influence on every major strand of modern American music

WHAT can anyone say about Ray Charles that has not already been said, more eloquently and at greater lengths? One of my favourite tributes was paid to him on the CBS programme, Sunday Morning, and I was so stunned by the eloquent simplicity and truth of the commentator's words that I neglected to write them down. I also neglected to note the commentator's name. His point, however, was simple. Ray Charles had been a major influence on every major strand of modernAmerican music, from Rock to Country while confecting Soul out of the Blues. That's pretty much my opinion too, and I shall not rest until I identify the author and the story.

The truth wasn't what was most prominent in the obituaries for Ronald Reagan, who died the week before Ray Charles. I must confess to being completely unable to encompass the 'greatness' of a man who could consider Grenada a threat to world peace and whose pursuit of Freedom and Democracy was responsible for the deaths of nearly a hundred thousand peasants (and some intellectuals and nuns) in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Perhaps Reagan's chiefest distinction was that he made respectable the primitive idea that government was the problem and not the solution to mankind's efforts to survive.

Like his sidekick, Margaret Thatcher, Reagan was against the whole continuum of modern civilisation which is based on the idea that human beings must cooperate to survive. There is an old, politically incorrect, nineteenth century joke told against the Irish:
An Irishman is shipwrecked on some foreign coast. After being dragged from the sea and restored to consciousness, his first words to his rescuers are:
"Is there a government in this place?"
On being informed that there was, he replied:
"Well, I'm agin it!"

The problem was that Reagan was no joke.
It is his pernicious ideology which is right now tearing the world apart, reducing working people to slaves and transforming the middle classes of the world into disinherited casual labour. Last week, the US Congress approved a tax cut which will take even more from the poor to hand to the rich - the Reverse Robin Hood syndrome, so popular these days among governments in the Third World which, having been castrated by structural adjustment, willingly yield to the most grotesque excesses of globalisation. We in Jamaica are particularly unfortunate in being one of the test beds for these processes. Haiti is another.

It is clear from the results of the G8 meeting in the Sea Islands, Georgia, last weekend, that the rich and powerful of the world see no reason to change anything.
Their reasoning is simple: In the long run, as Keynes said, we are all dead.
Here in Jamaica, we are busy starving ourselves to build a monument to Reaganism-Thatcherism called the Millennium Highway, or as I prefer to call it, the Doomsday Highway.

By the time this highway is finished, petroleum products will be affordable only by the wealthiest and we will have a stretch of concrete right across Jamaica which we should be able to sell for advertising when space travel becomes an everyday phenomenon.
What'd I say?
One of the delights of being commander-in-chief is that when you address the troops, any heckler will face court martial. As I watched Mr Bush addressing his military audience on Friday, I suddenly realised what 'captive audience' really means.

Mr Bush told his troops that the United States was faced by enemies, who, among other things, wished to replace all religions with their own (presumably Islam) and to subjugate women. He seemed to be unaware that in invading Iraq, the US was invading the one Middle Eastern country in which all religions were tolerated and in which women were completely free.
As I pointed out in a column on March 23, last year:
"If Saddam's regime was characterised by decades of neglect, perhaps we could use some of that neglect in other countries.

"In 1960, the Iraq life expectancy was 45 years. By 1975, six years after Saddam's takeover, it had moved to 59, and by 1987 to 65. The under five year-old mortality rate had moved from 224 per 100,000 in 1960 to 94 in 1987. Adult literacy overall was 34 per cent in 1970 and 85 per cent 15 years later. Most impressive of all, for a country (supposedly) with rape camps, is the fact that literacy among women moved from 18 per cent in 1970 to 87 per cent in 1985. Enrolment in primary schools had tripled. Women, as a proportion of the Iraqi parliament were 13.2 per cent in 1987, as against 11 per cent in Jamaica today. (UNDP Human Development report 1990)"

And when Mr Bush spoke of his troops respecting the cultures of others, I couldn't help but be reminded of Field Marshal von Rumsfeld's casual aside, "Freedom is untidy", when told of the rape and looting of 8,000 years of human history in the museums of Iraq.
As Mr Bush said, on Friday, "When the President of the United States speaks, he must mean what he says." He was happy that he had destroyed the Taliban, but didn't say much about al-Qaeda (almost an American invention), which is reported to be proliferating, strengthening and just as determined to slaughter its enemies as ever.
There are, of course, people who don't think that the president of the United States has been saying what he meant, or, if he has, that he has been speaking the truth.

The New York Times, for example, on Friday took Mr Bush to task in an editorial entitled "The Plain Truth".
"Mr Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before September 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration's actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world."

There are others too, highly placed and of some significance in Mr Bush's world, who seem to think that the 'War President' is not as good for the United States as he thinks.
Hit the Road, Jack.!
"In an unprecedented broadside, more than two dozen top retired US career diplomats and military commanders, many of whom reached their top positions under former President George H W Bush, have called for George W Bush to be defeated in his re-election bid in November." (Jim Lobe, InterPress)

In a statement which has put a tiger among the Bush chickenhawks, a representative slice of the American Establishment - former generals, admirals, ambassadors and other high-ranking former officials of the US government have come out to tell Mr Bush to hit the road. In an open letter to their president, the signatories complain that his administration is destroying the good name and reputation of the United States at home and abroad.
"It is time for a change. Never in the two-and-a-quarter centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted.

"Over nearly half a century we have worked energetically in all regions of the world, often in very difficult circumstances, to build piece by piece a structure of respect and influence for the United States that has served our country very well over the last 60 years. Today we see that structure crumbling under an administration blinded by ideology and a callous indifference to the realities of the world around it.
". The Bush administration has shown that it does not grasp (the) circumstances of the new era, and is not able to rise to the responsibilities of world leadership in either style or substance," the statement concluded.

The statement is significant, particularly because it represents the feelings and reasoning of people who are expected to be conservative and many who could be described as 'rock-ribbed Republicans".
There are no anarchists here, no socialists, certainly no one who could remotely be suspected of harbouring anti-American feeling, no one who would not pass the highest security clearances of the United States.
Among them are Admiral William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan, and General Joseph Hoar, head of the US Central Command under President Bush senior. And there is General Merrill McPeak, former chief of staff of the Air Force, who, four years ago, was a member of the "Veterans for Bush" campaign but who is now advising the Kerry campaign.

Chaos on 9/11

I was involved in a kind of 9/11 scenario 34 years ago, when, as one of two copytasters in the BBC External Newsroom, we were hit by four aeroplane hijacks. The copytaster is the man or woman through whom all raw news passes, who selects and rejects teletype reports and decides whether to send material to the senior editors who direct the sub-editors to write the stories. As you may imagine, it is a nerve-racking job and most people don't survive long in it. As I reported on the Sunday following 9/11:

"On September 6, 1970, on a bright and sunny day much like last Tuesday I was copytaster for the BBC's World Service in London. One of the teletype attendants ran to me with a piece of tape - a flash from Agence France Presse reporting the hijacking of an American airliner. Before that incredible day was out, we knew that four airliners had been targeted and that three of them were sitting at an airfield in Jordan with more than 300 hostages in the hands of agents for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On Tuesday, my mind leapt back 30 years to that day, with the same frisson of horrified fascination."
I therefore have a good idea of what the American air traffic controllers felt on September 11, 2001. They did pretty well. In a situation where nothing is known until you are hit by a new fact; they kept their cool, got the word out, and managed to bring down safely, the more than 3,000 planes then in the air over the United States. It was fortunate for thousands of people that 9/11 did not happen in the weeks following Ronald Reagan's firing of all unionised air traffic controllers in the US. These had had time to learn.

Outside of these people, however, systems broke down. The White House itself and the president were out of the loop for huge slabs of time. The North American Air Defence System (NORAD) malfunctioned. It was a huge failure of communication.
Even had there been no failure of communication, however, it is hard to see what could more have been done on the day. You cannot order an airliner to be shot down if you aren't pretty sure that its pilot's intentions are malign. And you can't shoot down planes whose position you don't know.

The real failures were before the attack when the White House, the FBI and the CIA made mistakes which were to prove fatal. And some of those mistakes were made because of wishful ideological thinking. The 9/11 Commission is a month away from issuing its final report. Life in the White House is going to get much worse than it already is, when that report comes out. And the fact that the White House tried to bar any 9/11 inquiry or commission, and that it placed one of its own as the chief executive of the commission are facts which are unlikely to help Mr Bush and friends.
Although the Bush Administration is in trouble, it may be that the rest of us are in even worse straits. Perhaps we all should imitate Louis Jordan, one of Ray Charles' predecessors: "Ain't nobody here but us chickens, ain't nobody here at all .!"

Copyright 2004 John Maxwell
maxinf@cwjamaica.com

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