WHEN Marsha, who sometimes works as a barmaid, is fired up with anger and hurls an earthenware dinner plate at her fleeing common-law husband, Tom, a mechanic, and shouts, “Yuh tink a neva si yuh when yuh a touch har? Is whey yuh han a do dey so?” the state of their relationship is very poorly captured by the official divorce rate of 7.1 per 100 marriages, averaged over the last five years.

The chance that Tom and Marsha, both in their 30s, will get married is greater than a four to one improbability, as the vast majority of live-in partners in Jamaica will not end up getting married. The reasons may stretch all the way back to slavery, but speak to the young lovers at street level and they will tell you that marriage is simply too expensive. All that really means is, the ceremony — with bridesmaids, best man, fancy clothing, too much food and liquor and family gawkers placing bets on how long the marriage will last — costs money, big money, but no one likes to spend big money on a marriage ceremony more than those who can least afford it — the poor.

Why should two young people who have lived together for three years or so and have saved $250,000 throw that all away on a ceremony when there is no guarantee that ‘God’s blessings’ will fall on them and confer happiness on the union until they are old and feeble?

Many official and common-law marriages that I know of are teetering on the edge. Household income is down and if wives, especially those in traditionally high-earning households ($300,000 and over a month – after tax) are not prepared to cut back on what some men would call frippery, there is bound to be tension and open displays of anger.

Typically, it is the woman in Jamaica who is the wiser spender of the household dollar because men, especially the younger ones, place too much stock on their own fripperies like music equipment, customising their cars, hanging out with drinking buddies and gallivanting with female company outside of the relationship.

Life in Jamaica has its positives. The rich live in huge mansions where some of the bedrooms are only visited by the domestic helper on cleaning day. The poor either live in rural areas where there is ample space outside of the cramped living quarters or in dense, inner-city, urban settings where there is always a dance being held nearby to immerse and lose the soul in the heavy thump of dancehall music.

In-between, the middle class live in hope that the times will not get worse.

The negatives far outweigh the positives in our tropical ‘paradise’. Too many of us are uneducated and too few of those so afflicted recognise the deficit. It is a lie for STATIN to be claiming that there is an 89 per cent literacy rate in Jamaica when probably about half of the population are functionally illiterate and are moved to anger at the simplest act of stupidity.

With violent criminality let loose upon the land and basic civility scraping the bottom of the barrel, the economic uncertainties, coupled with ineffective government and a people impossible to govern, create a recipe for social instability. A people spawned from that cannot make good partners for each other in a long-term romantic relationship.

Keeping it together in tough times

From my perspective the issues which tend to be the cause of most breakups are money, suspicions of sexual infidelity and personality clashes. Most couples who commit to each other, either through marriage or the purchase of a bed, a table, a long-term rented room and impossible expectations, do so in a manner that guarantees failure.

First, love alone cannot hold a relationship for long. If both are income earners, they should make their declarations, even though women tend not to tell all in this regard. Ideally, no relationship should be entered into if the man’s income alone cannot fund the household. Of course, that assumes a level of maturity on the part of the male which will not see him using his sole income status as a bargaining chip when delicate ‘discussions’ arise.

To start a relationship with the expectation that both pay cheques will always materialise is quite foolish.

In these tense times when we are never sure when (not if) the nation will erupt in an orgy of violence, it is important that both people find the time to comfort each other. Sex alone as a remedy is fit only for amateurs.

Men do not make the best comforters, especially with cable in the living room or bedroom. But even so, a word or two to her as she requests the remote control is much better than both of you just sitting there watching the boob tube watching you. The man should join her in the kitchen, if even to lift the pot and say, “Honey, this looks gooood!”

Two people do not lock off their chemistry for others when they commit to each other. One in the relationship may believe that enough attention is not coming from the other and there may be a tendency to look on someone else outside. But sometimes we expect too much from the other person in our natural urge to consume all aspects of that person’s life, both sexually and socially.

As we imbibe the bad news about budget preparation, ineptitude, killings, visa cancellations, the last thing one partner wants to hear from the other is a brusque, “I could not get you on the phone for one whole hour! Who were you with?” No, no, no.

How about, “I had something so important to tell you and I tried to get you on the phone. In fact, I tried for almost an hour. Anyway, maybe it wasn’t that important.” In other words, do not jump to conclusions.

There are times when I am very wary of leaving my home in the evenings, even to visit Devon House for ice cream or to go to a movie at Carib Theatre. Such are the times. When the fear is twinned with increasingly smaller amounts left to spend on recreation, both partners may run the risk of crowding each other at home, and it is during those times that personality clashes are likely to surface.

Chupski devours Dean Koontz (one novel per week) and I have never read one. And she still loves dancehall music, which I positively dislike. If we are in front of the TV, she always heads for Lifetime Movie Network (LMN), while I am trying to find something with action and guns and violence, or reruns of Sanford and Son. After 13 years together I now find reason to watch LMN sometimes, but eventually we hit common ground with Sanford and Son.

Most days we do not watch prime time news because it depresses us. It is our way of surviving.

We need to be honest, though. There are some relationships that would not have made it in better times. In these tougher times, both partners need to shed a greater percentage of the baggage they carried into the relationship without compromising their respective personalities, that is, if they believe the relationship is worth saving.

If every time you talk to your partner, it slowly and painfully ends up in a full-blown quarrel, it is time to call it quits and move on. If you no longer sleep on the same bed with each other, you may need to examine what it is you both want in the relationship. If you no longer speak to each other – not even to share bad news of the times – while living under the same roof, it is time to split.

If, however, you believe that the troubles of the times can be used to determine the resolve of the love you have for each other and your commitment to the relationship, then remove yourself from your easy chair and go and sit beside the person whom you say you want to spend the rest of your life with. As television has now become more important in the household than food, take the remote control and say, “Your channel or mine, or should I turn to a mutual one?”

The Government is looking very shaky

Recent revelations coming out of certain proceedings taking place have made it appear that the Jamaican people may have been given a six for a nine on election day in September 2007.

What was the point of wooing this man? Was it in an attempt to throw egg in the face of the other side? If it was, it had to have been devised by schoolboys whose only qualifications centred on the number of marbles in their pockets.

Surely, they cannot be that stupid? Or are they trying to prove to us that yes, they can be and even more?

If the deals were designed to loosen the tongue in a particular direction, that has now fully backfired for the simple reason that it will almost surely guarantee the other one’s freedom from accusations.

I am dumbfounded that not even dumb men could have proceeded in such a reckless manner.

One online commentator said, “Bruce’s weaknesses will always prevail. If the teachers get what they demand, I want mine too. I can’t see how this Government never came to the people early after the general elections and told them the economic realities that existed (pre and post-recession) and explained to the people how we were going to pull together to overcome the many years of economic quagmire. Instead they went on a spending spree fixing roads without a budget, paying teachers and nurses without identifying the funds, and then told us that the economic recession would not affect us. Now everybody is asking for their pound of flesh, and as far as I can see, if the Government is taken to court, it is going to lose every case, because of their lack of competence, lack of understanding and vision with a ‘flippity-floppity’ leadership in place even with a few very hard-working ministers like Chris Tufton and Edmund Bartlett. Poor G2K, their work is cut out for them.”

In 2006 when then prime minister Portia Simpson Miller entered her first budget exercise, I criticised her for what I saw as the bits-and-pieces approach in crafting that budget. Now those who claimed that they knew better are having their time at the bat and it gets no better.

In the Caribbean Online Forum, Professor David Wong had this to say, “The scope and depth of incompetence in the Jamaican establishment is simply mind-boggling. I use the old amorphous term ‘establishment’, with its moth-ball odour of established church and all, because I am referring to the whole formal structure of the Jamaican society – both spiritual and temporal and both private and public.

“Is there no standard methodology for preparing the Government’s budget, including the appropriate exchange rates that are to be used in making various calculations of foreign expenditures and payments in Jamaican dollars? More cause for concern, are we not yet at the summit of our concern over the height of our national incompetence? I guess not!

“By the way, I agree that Dr Wesley Hughes is largely to be blamed for this gross display of incompetence in the preparation of the budget. I am reminded ruefully that Wesley was once a student of mine in the MSc course in microeconomics in the late 1970s. Anyway, I’ll not bore you by dwelling on that infelicitous recollection.”

Is the US government destabilising the JLP administration?

In the 1970s the PNP claimed that the JLP was fully into a programme of destabilising the lawfully elected government. Others went further by pointing to the CIA’s operation in Chile and said they saw the same footprint in Jamaica.

Just as how one man’s terrorist is another man’s saint and hero, we may find that the word ‘destabilisation’ in 2010 could also mean whipping into order or simply, because it is largely absent, managing our affairs for us.

The cancellation of visas of well-known Jamaican entertainers who make most of their money by touring in the USA, along with the possibility that more high-profile Jamaican businessmen may find theirs cancelled too, signals to me that the Americans are into the third and most serious phase of forcing the hand of the government to sign the extradition request for Christopher “Dudus” Coke.

The first phase was the leaking of the request. The second phase was the back and forth with the Government. The third phase is where nails become driven into our coffins long before we are buried.

The tactic seems plain to me: Hit Jamaican businessmen where it hurts. Through no fault of theirs, revoke their visas. Second, target another sector of the society – those who are closest to the lumpen and revoke their visas too.

For what purpose? Since the Government on its own will not give up the West Kingston ‘President’, the Americans are putting pressure on key elements of the society so that they can bring pressure to bear on the Government.

Something tells me that in the coming months, governance will become increasingly difficult, and it may not be too far-fetched a thought to say that this administration may not last out the year.

Why is the Government doing this to its people? If fear is so real an obstacle to the prime minister, does he not believe if he shared the details of it with us we would understand and then empower him to act within reason?

One online reader who responded to my column last Thursday said, “Accounts of the problems Jamaica had with the US in the seventies that omit reference to the impact of the response Uncle Sam gave to his bauxite companies who came back bawling angrily to him after we outsmarted them, imposed the bauxite levy in 1974 and really beat back their court challenge, are incomplete to say the least.

“Just to remind you, the bauxite levy was passed unanimously by the Jamaican Parliament, but whenever it was mentioned in US newspapers, especially the Wall Street Journal, it was always preceded by the word ‘controversial’. Uncle Sam’s hostility to Jamaica then was, yes, within the context of cold war, but was also very powerfully a matter of business as usual. (Uncle Sam has always taken care of his business interests abroad – whether in sugar, bananas, citrus, copper or bauxite, not to mention oil.) The question would be whether, absent the other events of 1974 – expulsion of US Ambassador Vincent de Roulet (over bauxite), establishment of JBI, and establishment of IBA – the Angola issue by itself would have resulted in the clampdown. That issue never had any traction whatsoever in the US media at the time. The bauxite levy did.

“On the Dudus matter, it seems to me that Jamaica has the answer staring us in the face and I am sure you have thought of it. Uncle Sam wants Dudus, but we are afraid all hell will pop loose when the ‘well-armed militias’ of Western Kingston react. We need to abolish the militias. Clearly, our police are not up to the job. While I am not sure what our army would do, it would be worth considering what would happen if Bruce were to appeal to Uncle Sam for help in completing the extradition – send us a few marines for a month or two… Do you see that request being refused? And do you not think it would bring big pause to those who are issuing threats of disaster? Although that is not my preferred approach, it seems it could actually be used to make a big dent in garrisonism! Of course, the Government would then have to take over from the ‘Robin Hoods’ and provide for the people though, wouldn’t it?”

One thing is quite certain. The present stand-off between the whale and the sprat cannot continue. Anytime soon the whale may decide to roll over on its back.

Poor, poor sprat.

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