Old men and US politics

THE EDITOR, Madam:

You would’ve seen five older black men, some who are fathers of his students, walking their school’s new, young, white teacher back to the campus in near-total darkness on a narrow, uphill road. He’d had only two glasses of white rum and spent only an hour or so with their questions, answers and discussion, but you could never imagine what a time he’d had! Those who think a preoccupation with US politics these days is a wasted effort might reflect upon such conversations.

Author Joseph Heller, in his novel Catch-22, expresses through the character of a very old man, who says he’s had 107 years and lives well cared for in a mid-WWII, Italian bordello – a sentiment that best characterises today’s global political conflict. He is arguing with an American flyer, in this case, played by Art Garfunkel, about his basic philosophy of life.

The flyer, a pilot, like the political right in the US today, says, “It’s better to die on your feet, than live on your knees”; hence, the spirit of patriotism, nationalism, and capitalism goes easily with his position. The old man says the far younger man has it all wrong, that “it’s better to live on your feet, than to die on your knees’’ – a sentiment that today’s political left and those who would sell out their freedoms to follow the tenets of socialism and communism are said to readily ascribe.

I wonder what my friends in that little rum shop, just down the hill from the campus of one of Jamaica’s finest high schools, there in St An, so long ago, would have said about all this. The one or two nights a week I gave to a community relations effort there as part of my all-too-brief teaching adventure on the island were enlightening experiences indeed.

With a good ear for languages and dialects, after a while I began to think I understood a lot of what they were discussing – which was just about anything you might find to discuss, especially politics, anyone’s politics. I had the impression then that most of those who lived there with their families in freedom for several generations would have supported the American flyer’s position. I doubt that’s changed.

So if you think that discussing US politics should be irrelevant for Jamaicans today, you’ve never had two glasses, three-fingers each, of overproof rum and tried to walk home uphill in the dark on a narrow, unlit road late at night. Even if sometimes you can’t stand squarely on your own two feet, at least among Jamaica’s ageing followers of freedom and those who live in the world where all politics are born, you’ll find you have true friends who know the way home.

ED MCCOY

Bokeelia, Florida