OFF CENTRE: Hearts of iron(y) . . . hands with stones

By Sherwyn Walters | Tue, January 24, 2012 - 12:00 AM

I say to-may-toe; you say to-mah-toe. I say po-tay-toe; you say . . . . Gotcha! But seriously: away from pronunciation, I say irony; you say hypocrisy/insincerity/two-facedness.

So here’s the thing: Barbadians are always complaining about bosses. You frequently hear them called abusive, obnoxious, high-handed, dictatorial, egotistical, insulting, piggish, dictatorial, unfair, rude, dismissive, dictatorial, insensitive, dishonest, haughty, dictatorial, abrasive, deceitful, arbitrary, dictatorial.

The complainers don’t stop there. “Black man with keys”, unilateral, divisive, dictatorial, tactless, incompetent, pig-headed, dictatorial, disrespectful, double-dealing, “behaving like duh get wuh duh din expect”, dictatorial . . . . You don’ think I put dictatorial in there eight times by mistake, nuh?

It is probably not an overstatement to say that most working Barbadians have expressed one or other of those judgements of bosses or know someone fairly intimately who has. Yep, the widely held view is that management in Barbados is the pits.

Irony: The majority of the teaching staff of a school take industrial action because of what they claim is unacceptable behaviour on the part of their boss – and the overwhelming majority of Barbadians behave like it would be the strangest thing if a boss was perverse and pushed people too far. And virtually no disagreer could find an iota, a koohn of sympathy or empathy for the teachers. (You coulda disagree and yet have the heart to sympathize, you know – especially if you have expressed negative views of bosses yourself.)

Could it be that the multitudes who often complain about poor management are completely different people from the legions who showed no sympathy at all for the teachers who went against management? Yeah, right.

Some would explain it by saying that most Barbadians are hypocrites. As far as that is concerned, I am like the character Roc from the early 1990s show of the same name: “I ain’t worked that one out yet.”

Another explanation, coming from some social psychologists, is that passive people often respond with grudging, aggressive opposition to those who show the intestinal fortitude to take action.

I am surer of this: in an issue, many Barbadians don’t see people – unless they are in their F-word group (family, friends, favourites). It is as if they default to Paul Keens-Douglas’ “the hand, the ticket and the money” attitude.

I’ve lived long enough to warm to another explanation. Stanley Milgram’s experiments (I tell wunna read Obedience To Authority) led to this conclusion: in actual situations, most human beings will side with authority almost instinctively, even brutally – often acting counter to their own previously expressed values.

Except, it seems, as somebody else said, when the victim is close – as in friends, family, favourites – or where the authority figure is distant from them (and you know St Peter is close to everywhere in Barbados).

Replications of Milgram’s experiments have shown the same rates of obedience over time. It’s not just Nazis, baby.

Other ironies showed up.

Numerous Barbadians say this: you should not judge a situation before you have all the relevant facts.

Irony: in spite of the obvious difficulty in determining germane facts, lots of people went ahead and judged the Alexandra situation. Apparently, Sam Couchie and de Duppy in Barbados must get their daily fix of apportioning blame, of picking a side, of damning people.

Numerous Barbadians say this: don’t judge a man until you have walked in his shoes.

Irony: thousands of Barbadians easily, arrogantly, without the possibility of getting anywhere near enough evidence, judged the teachers as wrong. When talk – obviously cheap – met judgement zeal, virtually all the disagreeing folks showed no interest in walking in the Alexandra teachers’ shoes before judging them.

Numerous Barbadians say this: there is “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” and “the last straw”.

Irony: hordes of Barbadians easily believed that thirty or so others acted on the basis of having to deal with one straw. My God, the things we believe about others that we would never believe about ourselves!

Numerous Barbadians say this: do not publicly humiliate others.

Irony: A mass of Barbadians found nothing wrong – “once it is true”, they said – with what was publicly done to one of the teachers. Listen, I have never met a Barbadian who felt that it was ever right to do that to him/her.

There are a few more ironies that emerged, but if I say that numerous Barbadians say that Barbados is a Christian country, that would get me started on another irony (’bout how two thousand years after Jesus dealt with a certain adultery matter, people could still be tekking up stones to pelt at teachers without a trace of self-judgement) – but I don’t have the space.

Some say irony; others say hypocrisy/insincerity/two-facedness.

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Posted by Marc Menard 3 months, 3 weeks ago: I say ‘thank you, Sherwin. You are like a lonely li’l petunia in an onion patch, a voice of reason in the midst of ‘Kneejerkdom’.