THE first time I saw Ragashanti was at an uptown social event to which the cream of the crop of Jamaica’s business elite was invited, in addition to people like Raga and me, who were there only because we had a space in the local media and were very good at smiling at people we did not know and making it seem as if we had known them for 20-plus years.

Unlike Raga I am a mere armchair social scientist with no impressive degrees to give credence to any other claim. Although he has a PhD — his journey would be the greatest Jamaican Cinderella story ever told — we are fairly similar in terms of where we place our ears to the ground in our efforts to observe and assimilate the ever-present cacophony of humming and scratching out of life in the torturous paradise known as Jamaica.

Ragashanti has a daily talk show on NewsTalk 93, and although I have neither seen nor sought to determine the results of media surveys, by my informal observations I would guess that the popularity of his show, at the very least, adds up to the aggregate popularity of all the other daily radio talk shows on the other stations.

His show’s huge popularity is beyond doubt. If, however, one should tune in to his show because one is a proponent of the idea that the level of debate needs to be stepped up another notch, one would be sorely disappointed. The fact is, Ragashanti is pure entertainment and the people are lapping everything up.

For all the good that intellectual debate at all levels (UWI Mona, various fora, radio and TV talk shows) has done for this country, Raga’s entertainment, called locally Mix up and Blenda, earns its legitimacy. In my columns I have had reason to both commend and harshly criticise his show.

His audience, one would imagine, would not be those interested in endless debates in protecting the dollar, closing the gap in the fiscal deficit and bringing decency and order in our polity, which is not to say that they have no interest in these matters. His listeners would much prefer to buy into the belief that daily talk shows have done little to positively alter the socio-political and the socio-economic landscape. Therefore a show which entertains and does so in a purely Jamaican context is 10 times better than some old guy with water on his brain repeating himself a thousand times.

It is ironic that NewsTalk 93 used to be Radio Mona – right on the UWI Mona Campus. With Ragashanti being the main money spinner for the radio station, I am certain that some of the academics with connections to it would have hoped that the station’s other more intellectual productions were making money for it so that those in charge would be able to have more say in what content is aired and what is not.

From my standpoint, NewsTalk 93 cannot at this time lose Ragashanti simply because he has connected. Mix up and Blenda presents raw snippets of sexual behaviour in Jamaica. One female caller will telephone him to relate how she is ‘sorting out’ a married man much better than his safe, secure and very boring wife. Then she will say how much money her married man parted with to ensure that the ‘sorting out’ continues.

I hardly ever tune in to his show but I find that I cannot avoid it completely because people everywhere tune in.

Many of the more educated people in Jamaica are quite fond of pushing their opinion of what is right and what is wrong on the poorer, less educated public. I confess to being guilty of that. Although Raga pushes the limit of decency to just where it avoids a national scandal, he has pretty much locked himself in to what moves a sizeable percentage of the Jamaican people.

Again, his legitimacy is that he does not pretend to wave any magic wand on his show; one which has the power to save the nation from itself. Where sexual gossip is big, he wades into it, spreads it out full frontal and encourages his listeners to penetrate the discussion, rip it apart and put it back together again.

Similar to Pinky and the Brain, I suppose that if one should ask Ragashanti what he will be doing tomorrow, his reply would be, “Same thing we do every day. Mix up and blenda!”

A show like Ronnie Thwaites’ morning talk show on Power 106 tends to go for the important issues, but it does so with monotony. Too many of us believe that all we have to do is get the information out there and as long as we do that, we have done our bit. Not true.

Most are intellectual bores and very few in the society listen to those types. I am not encouraging Ronnie Thwaites and Mutty Perkins to open their shows with a “Yow” and “Whey onnu a sey today. Mi wan hear bout it!” A person must be comfortable in doing what he or she does, but if a communicator is quite comfortable in trying to connect with a subject that few are interested in and then does so to a population nodding off, what would be the point? Self-titillation?

When one considers that most of the country’s leaders are sexual conservatives in public but in more private company are busier than Tiger Woods and hence are grand hypocrites, Raga’s show and his full-frontal approach, for adults only, gains its legitimacy from its very absence of that sexual hypocrisy.

Belief more important than behaviour

A day after I appeared on Ian Boyne’s Religious Hard Talk discussing atheism, I received a call from an older friend who is somewhat close to a former prime minister.

“Yuh is a madman. Yuh mus’ be. As a media person, yuh mus’ know that 98 per cent of the population is Christian, so how can you come on to a show and tell people seh yuh don’t believe in God? Is Jamaica this, yuh know. People wi lick yuh dung a road.”

I suggested to him that although I am quite capable of playing diplomatic games, hypocrisy was never one of my strong points. But I wondered at those people who he suggested would ‘lick mi dung’.

A street vendor I know who, in hard times, is always professing his faith in God, in last year expressed to me his difficulty in renewing his stock. He wanted to borrow $6,000 from me. I mulled it over and told him that I could find $4,000. I gave him the money and wrote it off in my head. I knew there was just no way he would be able to pay me back.

A few months later I came to his stall and ordered a Guinness. He was out. I drove to a liquor store and bought a case of Red Stripe and a case of Guinness. I returned and gave them to him. There was an embarrassed look on his face when he said, “Missa Mark, mi still owe yuh.”

I said to him, “Whenever you can, pay me back but the Guinness and Red Stripe are not involved. Try to do a better job of controlling your stock.”

Many months later, after my appearance on Religious Hard Talk, I approach his stall. He doesn’t greet me or make eye contact. I buy a Red Bull and he hands it to me as if I am not there. I sense the coldness. The next day someone nearby pulls me aside. “Bwoy, some people yah so a hypocrite.” He calls the vendor’s name. “All yesterday him seh him nuh wan you come roun’ yah so nuh more because yuh nuh believe in God.”

He had sought out my assistance and had accepted it. Now he was rejecting it, rejecting me, because I did not share his beliefs, his culture of superstition. To him, to the extent that my beliefs did not include any social perversions, if it did not match with his belief in God, my open behaviour was totally immaterial.

Stevie Wonder is one of America’s greatest songwriters/singers/entertainers. To me he is pure genius. In his song Superstition, the opening lyrics read, “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer, Superstition ain’t the way.”

To me, most religious people believe in things before first questioning them and never consider that they really don’t understand what they believe in.

A man may not understand the concept of electricity as current flowing through a conductor, of voltage being the potential difference between two points in that flow and of resistance as the specific retardation of the conducting element in that flow.

But he knows if he sticks a pair of scissors in a wall outlet he will be shocked. He cannot see it but he knows that it will harm him, plus, if the iron is plugged in, it will get hot. With religion, no burden of proof is sought and it is just accepted because most people do just that: remain in a safe zone.

But if it is OK to lie, steal, cheat, kill and do so in the name of a big, unknown Kahuna in the sky, I choose to remain not OK. If a man believes that the moon is made of cheese, which it obviously isn’t made of, as long as his public and private behaviour complement the national good, I will choose behaviour any day over belief.

My disbelief in any God comes simply from the absence of any evidence of a God. Some people suggest that the universe, the earth and all of its wonders are manifestation of that God. I say, how can God with such awesome power hang the stars in the skies and fix the delicate balance in earth’s seasons, and yet He cannot stop a little nine-year-old girl from being raped and her throat cut? There is a huge credibility gap.

He brought about the Great Barrier Reef in Australia yet He cannot save a poor fisherman lost at sea off the coast of St Elizabeth. A God with godly powers has to be a proactive God to deal with mankind if He is to be given reality.

Minister Andrew Holness has disappointed me

Another public official has decided to bury his head in the sand and pretend that solutions to specific problems do not exist. Speaking recently at the launch of the National Primary Schools Mathematics Competition, Education Minister Andrew Holness suggested that alternative solutions to improving the methods of teaching Mathematics may have to be considered if Jamaica is to achieve developed country status by 2030.

Well, minister, it has not only been considered, it has been demonstrated. Most math teachers in Jamaica are extremely boring and are sadly unable to connect the teaching of math to real-world situations. In the 1960s when I was first taught high school math at KC by Miss Young, she kept our restless minds focused by reading to us Lord of the Rings in serial form five minutes out of each class.

We were so anxious to find out what happed to Bilbo Baggins that it was difficult to separate algebra from the trolls under the bridge.

In 2004 through the Caribbean Online Forum, the Gibraltar Institute designed a week-long math workshop for teachers. Trevor Campbell and Reggie Nugent wrote about it in the Gleaner. The article said, “The educational community in Jamaica has been desperately searching for some answers to the enormous crisis facing the teaching and learning of mathematics in the public education system, which has broad implications for the future prospects of the competitiveness of the Jamaican workforce. This is what motivated the Gibraltar Institute to design a week-long mathematics workshop for high-school teachers. This was held on the campus of the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) from August 9-13, 2004.

“This workshop, titled ‘Unlocking Barriers in Mathematics Education: A Mathematics Innovation Programme’, engaged high school-based mathematics teachers in Jamaica in a dialogue about how to get their students excited about learning the subject, and to explore creative methods of teaching mathematics. The objective was to create a core group of math teachers throughout the island who could benefit from a global network of researchers outside of Jamaica who are actively engaged in exploring ways to unlock the barriers that students face in learning math.”

Week-long workshop

“Professors Michael Orrison and Jon Jacobsen of the math department of Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California, developed the curriculum and conducted the week-long workshop. In the end, our hope was that participants would leave the workshop excited about teaching mathematics with enthusiasm and purpose, and that they would gain some ‘bigger picture’ ideas. We also see this as a first step to creating a network of dedicated mathematics teachers whose experiences and new ideas can be disseminated widely throughout the island.

“As examples of mathematical ideas within broad mathematical and social contexts, the participants explored the connections between the natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, real numbers, and complex numbers. They pondered the mathematically and visually stimulating world of fractals while discussing the mathematical framework in which fractals arise. They also saw how mathematics can be used to predict, detect and analyse paradoxical results that can arise in voting.”

Early reactions of the teachers

“It is interesting to note that, at the end of the first day, many of the teachers felt disoriented. They were under the impression, given their previous experience at workshops they had attended, that they were going to be given a tool kit of instructions on how to get the students to pass the math exams. They were shocked that this workshop had been designed to raise their level of understanding of the complexities of the universe of mathematics that would allow them to be more effective and creative teachers.

“The organisers and the professors led a discussion with the group about why it was important to move beyond the practice of narrowly focusing on preparing students to pass an exam. By the end of the second day, the teachers began to open up to a whole new approach to the study and teaching of mathematics. By the end of the week, they were raving about the conceptual breakthrough in their thinking regarding the study and teaching of mathematics. They said that they now felt more intellectually empowered as teachers.

“A few of the responses of the teachers were, ‘I’ve found the workshop to be a mind-opener to the various topics in mathematics. It has built my enthusiasm towards the subject and enabled me to see clearly the link between mathematics and our environment.’

‘I realise more clearly that mathematics is fun, power and life. I am empowered to be more of an ambassador for the subject and transfer this zeal to my students.’

‘The workshop has allowed me to connect topics I did in college to real-world situations. I now realise that these topics can be used to make my lessons innovating.’

‘This workshop is the first for us. Hence, one would expect that there may be hitches here and there from the onset. On the contrary, it turned out that the sessions went quite well because of good coordination, moderation and facts well presented. The presentations made by Reginald and Trevor made our expectations more specific. We were kept in constant update of the proceedings. For Mike and Jakes, they certainly know what they were about. Their thoughts were inspiring.'”

Minister Holness cannot claim that he was unaware of this, or is he like most politicians convinced that a solution has authenticity only if it comes directly out of his office? If the minister is serious, and I believe he is, about education in Jamaica, he should have bottled the workshop ideas and sold it throughout the schooling system across Jamaica.

Minister, I can make the link for you if you wish. And I do not require a finder’s fee.

observemark@gmail.com