Our Wounded Nations

The shadows of past traumas hovered low but tamely when Grenada launched one year of 50th independence activities in the runup to February 7 observances next year. It was however instructive that Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell appeared unafraid to acknowledge some key challenges of history.

He noted at the launch, for example, that the National Organising Committee (NOC) had chosen the scenic Carenage in St Georges for the occasion - a location that was significant because it had seen, in the life of the country, “the best and worst times of Grenada.”

In addition, the event had been initially planned for October 19 - the 40th anniversary of the deadly end of the 1979 revolution. This saw the assassination of Maurice Bishop and other senior operatives of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG).

The organisers were promptly forced to rethink this plan and October 31 became the new date for the launch. October 19 is now National Heroes Day.

True, there is always awkwardness in recalling certain features of history. The October 19 anniversary of the tragic events of 1983, for example, is too long ago for too many to remember first-hand (the current median age in Grenada is just over 31), and too recent for many of us to escape the dense mist of proximity.

I once questioned Bernard Coard, now resident in Jamaica, about the degree to which his book The Grenada Revolution – What Really Happened, can be competently challenged by people who were there and can lay claim to knowledge of well … what really happened.

Late leader of the People's Revolutionary Army, Hudson Austin, also had a lot to say in a 2021 interview with journalist George Worme. Much of it would alarm you.

Excerpt of George Worme's interview with Hudson Austin

Mitchell’s apparent awareness of such undercurrents belies the fact that when Eric Gairy was peacefully overthrown in 1979, the current Prime Minister was just one year old. In 1983, when the revolution imploded, he had reached his fifth birthday on October 8 – 11 days before the dramatic events.

Yet, by citing the leader of Grenada’s “first revolution”, Julien Fédon, and the integrationist ambitions of T.A. Marryshow, the Prime Minister displayed an understanding of some of the dynamics worthy of capture in observance of the independence milestone.

Surely, upon revisiting Marryshow, it would not be inconceivable to witness the return of a Caribbean Court of Justice referendum during this period of reflection. As part of a 2018 plebiscite on a new constitution, the CCJ did not successfully cross the line. Why not give it another try?

Caribbean leaders, including at its start former T&T Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, were of the view that full CCJ status as both a court of original jurisdiction on matters of the Treaty of Chaguaramas and as a final court of appeal had the potential to “complete our independence” as Caribbean states. Grenada should permit itself this kind of opportunity on its 50th.

It would meanwhile be a grave mistake for us to ever start believing that what happened in Grenada between 1979 and 1983 and its experiment with illiberal democracy is/was of only peripheral importance to us in T&T.

By the time we faced the terrorist attack of 1990, there ought to have been a measure of acquaintance with the embrace of violence and accompanying political aberration.

The scenic Carenage in St George's was chosen as the venue
to launch the celebrations Photo: Wesley Gibbings

There had also already been Grenada, the remarkably bizarre Operation Red Dog in Dominica in 1981, Walter Rodney had been murdered in Guyana in 1980, and A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James provides a brilliant narrative on events in Jamaica in the 1970s and 80s and their products in the 1990s.

For Grenadians, the anniversary of the collapse of the PRG had remained in relatively muted recognition - the kind of wound that is long in healing but to which attention is only paid when pain resurfaces.

It might well be, for Grenadians, that grand plans to observe half a century of political independence will provide opportunities for diagnoses beyond cold historical recall.

In the process, our close neighbour can perhaps help us over here and in the wider Caribbean come to terms with some stark realities that trouble us all too often, and in the process, contribute to healing some longstanding injuries of history.

Jamaica and T&T have crossed 60, we never took the time to do what Grenada now has the chance to consider. The wounds now run deep enough to challenge our options for recovery.

Essequibo lessons

Essequibo lessons

Wesley Gibbings

Current global developments are today contributing to an understanding of how our respective Caribbean countries are obliged to navigate international relations like few other occasions in recent history.

We can spend forever examining the internal dynamics that have spurred alarmingly diverse views, even over here, on the situations in Ukraine, Gaza, and even Haiti.

“Alarming”, perhaps because in today’s world there are countless avenues for the accessing of authoritative information and opinion on global affairs even while we are exposed to an abundance of dogma and ideological shibboleth.

On other occasions we can have a closer look at these three situations that have elicited quite an interesting, if not disturbing, variety of perspectives within our respective Caribbean countries, even in the face of general consistency at official national levels.

We have a university that owes us much more on such questions than has been extended both inside and outside its hallowed, traditionally fortified halls. Principal Rose-Marie Belle Antoine has urged the lowering of the drawbridges. For, this institution is a singularly important portal to greater public understanding of complex issues.

It also remains important to keep our gaze fixed firmly on our own geographical neighbourhood. For instance, the absence of an informed, enlightened Haitian solution persists and this will continue to be the case. Invasion by invitation, of all varieties, appears inadvisable.

But now, and just as urgently … and yet again … Venezuela’s longstanding expansionary ambitions with special emphasis on Guyana’s place in the scheme of things have recently and dramatically re-emerged.

It has always interested me that even in the face of intense, protracted, murderous internecine conflict, Venezuelan politicians have so frequently occupied bipartisan space on the troublesome Essequibo question.

It is hard to find, even among adult Venezuelans being welcomed here, those who do not believe that the land space comprising two-thirds of Guyanese territory is theirs. It’s taught alongside the alphabet at school. There is no argument between competing political parties save for occasional assertions of treasonous compromise.

This must certainly concern regional, conflicted, ‘Chavistas’ who have been inclined to gleefully toe the Caracas line on virtually everything, including the outright violent oppression and neglect that have led to unparalleled migration challenges in our part of the world. They do this even as they embrace a notion of Guyanese fraternity, and tout Caricom ambitions.

Had these people been vigilant on the subject of the Essequibo challenge in the face of Guyana’s social and economic transformation, their unrepentant devotion to fake egalitarian revolution might have taken a deserved turn for the worst much earlier than is currently the case.

Even so, there has been no unequivocal posturing on the subject from the red berets.

That a “Guayana Esequiba” referendum in Venezuela should now be deployed as part of a process of political recovery in the face of electoral threats and brittle political circumstance, tells us a story we should have all been familiar with long before now. Makes me wonder about the state of Caribbean ‘Chavismo’. They must all certainly be in some form of doleful confusion and contemplation.

This, you see, is not about being “left” or “right” or anywhere in the middle. The International Court of Justice will hopefully sooner rather than later determine it as a matter of juridical “right” and “wrong.” Though, even so, Venezuela seems afraid to engage the process.

It is also, significantly, a rare point of political cohesion in Guyana. Two political organisations that have been trading brutal rhetorical punches at each other have met and agreed, as has been the case in the past, that the challenge to Essequibo is a national issue requiring all hands on deck.

Sadly, such a predisposition is not always apparent in our case in T&T. There have been some significant lows. Incomprehensible Opposition foreign policy ‘whistleblowing” and the absurdity of proposed selective, personalised ‘sanctions’ slipped through the cracks of informed public commentary in the age of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, in Georgetown, Aubrey Norton and Irfaan Ali in an extremely rare display of solidarity, shook hands and met, and whatever the smirks across the table, partisan weapons were left outside just for that time. In Port of Spain, there are people who craved sanctions in 2020. There has been little shouldering of arms. Instead, there is the continued emptying of clips even as violence and murder stalk the land.

Clearly, there are lessons to be learned from Essequibo.

 

Sounding the alarm

One sunny afternoon, some years ago, I witnessed raw, sadistic cruelty being delivered upon a small boy of 12 or 13 – about the age of my son at the time. I was in my car, parked and waiting for a friend who was making a delivery in the house opposite.

When I heard the first doleful howl, I thought that a child had fallen from a swing or tree or had been stung by jack spaniards while throwing stones at a ripe mango. The screaming persisted and grew in intensity, so I got out of the car and looked to see what was happening.

I saw a large shirtless man dragging a little boy onto the balcony of a two-storey house delivering heavy blows with a thick leather belt on the head, back, hands and backside of the child.

“Kneel down! Kneel down!” I heard. Then the most alarming instruction as the blows continued: “Now pray! Lemme see you pray!”

At this point, there appeared little for me to do than to shout: “Hey!” at the top of my voice. The startled man looked at me for a split second, then turned quietly and left the child, sobbing and kneeling, hands clasped in fake prayer. I don’t know what transpired after I left.

In that moment, I realised I was teaching myself the lesson of sounding a critical alarm. True, this appeared to be a violent, criminal assault. But which police officer at which police station would have acted on this?

Caning, tapping, giving licks, pinching, and squeezing have long been normalised in the delivery of lessons on “discipline”. My adult son, now an exemplary citizen, never experienced any of this.

No, we have not all turned out right because of licks. We are today a sick, depraved, violent society in part, but not wholly, because of this.

“I got licks and I turned out alright,” we so often hear. Then you look at the speaker and you understand why violence and force are so heavily routinised in everyday human behaviour here. No, sir/madam, you did not turn out “okay”. We have not, as a society, turned out “okay”.

Maybe Prof. Deosaran et al have done the research to find how many current prison inmates routinely received “licks” as children. I strongly suspect that the vast majority have themselves been the victims of such torture and violence.

In fact, much like the Tunapuna child some years ago, I am almost certain that both “licks” and coercive religious practice were standard practice in the households and schools from which these criminals emerged.

Relatedly, I am aware of a current effort to deliver “values training” at a selection of denominational schools, as a complement to “religious” education. Hopefully, the former completely replaces the latter. More of this as the project unfolds. But the developers of this programme appear to be on to something.

But back to the most common form of domestic violence and its contribution to criminal conduct. Nobody has been sounding alarms of any kind because almost everybody is certain nothing wrong is taking place. But no. We have not all turned out “okay” despite the fact that there has been no shortage of licks, church, temple, and mosque.

There are politicians today, who have received licks and pray every day, advocating more violence to counter violence. There are holy folks delivering verdicts of death upon people whose gender identity is not in compliance with their belief systems. Death, metaphorically or not, as an ultimate consequence.

This, of course, is not to say that we line up like sitting ducks. We are individually and collectively entitled to defend ourselves – though we are these days witnessing from close and afar a version of “self-defence” that is disproportionately deadly.

Through all of this, we find children – victims of every conceivable form of human wrongdoing. Wars. Combative politics. Forced displacement. Cultural norms, some of which are glorified as ancient cultural practice – child marriage, female genital mutilation, sexual initiation, human trafficking, and other forms of exploitative violence.

I read journalist, Janelle De Souza’s fine piece on child sexual abuse in last Sunday’s Newsday and wondered about the official records contrasted against silent realities. Those times when nobody sounded an alarm. When people knew … but chose to keep silent.

I also saw the reports about the two east Trinidad toddlers, disheveled and alone. Who paid meaningful attention? Who thought this could have been “okay” under any set of circumstances? Who has been measuring the parlous state of our humanity? Who has been sounding the alarm?

 

What "digital agenda"?

You can also listen to this here:

(Though meant for a Trinidad and Tobago audience via the T&T Guardian of October 11, 2023. It is my experience and knowledge that most of the Caribbean confronts lagging digitalisation ambitions.)

Not that I have been doing word counts over recent years, but I cannot recall a national budget statement with as many mentions of the words ‘digital’ and ‘digitalisation’ as the one we endured last week.

When it comes to such matters, I am probably overdoing it now. But I think it is necessary to keep tabs on where our country is or is not going when it comes to belatedly grasping opportunities before our very eyes that have the potential to dramatically improve the quality of our lives.

Today, we hear elaborate words and stated intentions – both within private enterprise and in the state sector. What are otherwise simple, routine exercises arranged at private levels within minutes on a laptop or handheld device are made to sound revolutionary and trendsetting.

For example, there are 16-year-olds capable of setting up secure online payment systems in the blink of an eye. True, there aren’t the legislative/regulatory bars of a state agency, but if there is this grand design and intent at a supposedly bipartisan level, what really are the real obstacles to getting such things done?

HTML forms are also hardly a mind-blowing innovation anymore. They are much more user-friendly than the PDF forms currently being touted as some kind of epochal, modern marvel by state agencies, but which greatly challenge users who neither have appropriate software for textual inserts and digital signatures or printers/scanners to undertake the arduous task of printing, signing, scanning, and emailing.

There is also the phenomenon that takes us one step forward (online appointments, for example) but two steps backward, such as “proof of residence” requirements that have been causing so many regrets among those of us who opted for online billing for utilities such as telecoms, electricity, and water.

So, yes, print that online bill, travel down to the utility to get it “stamped” and there you go! At WASA, they don’t “stamp”, you pay $11.25 at one window, then sit and wait for a “copy” at another window.

True, there is the convenience of an orderly online appointment system to renew your drivers’ licence (confirmation of which you are encouraged to print!). You download the PDF, print it, and walk with it. There goes the advantage of an online portal with the potential to minimise inconvenience and save paper.

The end product is at least the same amount of paper as before, but now the added inconvenience of the trip to the utility office, together with downloading, printing, and scanning of completed application forms.

Now, don’t get me wrong. As the finance minister suggested while presenting some startling statistics on the number of people and businesses without bank accounts, digital payment systems, or engage in online banking, the financial services sector has simply not done enough to foster sufficient confidence in such conveniences.

Framed as “the financial inclusion landscape”, minister Imbert dropped many jaws when he revealed: “72 percent of businesses do not have a business bank account, 88 percent of businesses do not accept digital payments, and 55 percent of individuals do not now have the knowledge to use mobile or web online banking.”

It is very easy to blame the victims aka prospective customers here. But it is also necessary to calculate underlying causes behind this apparent estrangement between people and the banking sector, in this instance.

It’s a deception, for example, that mechanisation of transactions to replace human contact at the counter, is now reflected in higher fees. For, much like telecoms assets, the initial capital costs are eventually offset by savings on wages, security and other recurrent cost centres.

The implicit message, therefore, is that mechanisation/digitalisation has net negative impacts on customers. Which service provider has reduced its fees because of digitalisation? Why are minister Imbert’s statistics so outrageously accurate?

It irritates many of us whenever we hear talk of a digital transition. One more example: The Environmental Management Authority (EMA) will soon be able to accept online payments (the same process the 16-year-old has now mastered), but what happens with the numerous copies of the same voluminous documents required for submission for transactions such as EIAs and the like?

When such anomalies disappear, only then you can talk boastfully about any “digital agenda.” Until then, people will continue not to trust such talk either from politicians or business leaders. Go find that bristol board vaccine certificate. Download the latest T&TEC bill. Lift that mattress. Find evidence of progress on any of this!

Pan as renewable resource

So, Budget Day and recent stormy winds have passed (for now), and the clean-up has presumably begun. To be sure, we’re not yet in the clear; as if we ever can be – small, exogenously vulnerable, and partially incapacitated by an instinct for self-destruction.

It therefore seems apt at this time to return to the steelpan – a singularly valuable yet elusive route out of current ruts. Pan, not only as music, but as a model for social organisation, prospective route to new forms of economic value, and as national metaphor for the triumph of ingenuity over despair.

To be sure, there is nothing else like it in our space. Such an assertion is beyond rational contestation, notwithstanding prevailing nonsenses in the public space.

For, whatever the vague details of early years and related cultural antecedents, the not disassociated emergence of pan remains an achievement of greater durability than even Walter Darwent’s bold excavations that struck the non-renewable resource of oil in the 1860s.

The steelpan and the official, informal, and other institutions it has produced, find in their human interface, vast value beyond even the beauty of music, steelbands, and industry, which have proven to be renewable assets at each epochal pass.

Others have recorded development and innovation emerging from disciplines such as pan manufacturing, tuning/blending, composing, arranging, performing, and the unmatched social influence of steelbands. Today, however, the prospects for capturing value have grown but are yet to be realised.

I stood in wait of a bake and shark at the Exodus Pan Theatre last Saturday and through the oppressive heat was able to witness young pan students rehearse a closing flourish.

In that moment, there was a promise of tomorrow that’s too easily missed, belying the myth of youth disinterest – measured by too many in measures of mere ticket sales.

Then, on Sunday, at the Birdsong Academy in celebration of his national award, Prof. Clem Imbert stood before a small, invited gathering and testified to his own development as a practitioner of science and engineering and the value such intellectual assets brought and bring to the steelpan as national instrument.

It was the kind of exposition from which books can be composed, and hope may be found amidst compendia of fear about the future.

On Sunday, there was also Birdsong director/manager, Dennis Phillip proposing a time when the music arranger in China would score orchestral parts for pan among the numerous other instruments. Not Bach or Handel or Beethoven in pan, but pan in Tan Dun, Chen Yi, and Qigang Chen, I suppose. Steelpan as a universal instrument.

And why not? Look up the duet of Josanne Francis and Chao Tian – pan and the Chinese dulcimer live from the Mansion Concert Series in 2020. There are folks reading this who can also cite, from memory, any other number of instances where pan occurs in the music of Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Not that any of this is required validation. What appears needed, at this time, is for tangible expression – official edict or not – of the national status of this remarkable instrument.

It is often mistakenly identified as “the only musical instrument created in the 20^th Century”, but which was actually (and even more significantly, I believe) the only new “percussive” instrument developed during that period.

Let the musicologists argue the fine points and also discuss innovations in traditional instruments that benefited from new technologies that amplified and modified the sounds produced.

Among the current, important challenges of pan remains its untapped intellectual property (IP) value. This is not a unique task, since people everywhere exploring creative industries as a viable economic sector, are engaged in dissecting the potential for “value capture.”

This goes way beyond the instinct to grasp for state largesse or coercive, regulated preference – a contention that resides so heavily behind lobbying for official proclamation.

Ask what is really meant when many rally around the call for official, codified “recognition” and you will find the heavy suggestion of regulated taste and even greater gratuitous official financial flows.

To follow such a path would be to ignore what pan can mean as a renewable, national resource, and how it contains virtually everything needed to transition us from where we are to a new reality led by digital technologies that are increasingly defining parameters between social and economic success and failure.

There was more than a hint of this when Imbert and Phillip spoke on Sunday. They are not the only ones, but they are on to something big here.

When you see the rain coming (2019)

Take it from me. There is never a dull moment in these here West Indies. Most of it the wonders of a new people from different places in an old land. Some of it unwashed self-destructive chupidness, and a lot of it improvised survival measures – fidgety fingers in the dyke.

In order to survive, you need to keep your eyes wide open, so you can tell the vital differences. So you can see the rain that is coming.

I swear though, you only really appreciate this small place teeming with creativity and resilience, when you consider it as a single space; knowing that the breath you take at the Marché en Fer in Port-au-Prince has the scent (and sometimes stench) of Tunapuna and Stabroek in Guyana and Coronation in downtown Kingston on a Saturday morning.

All of this comes to light around this time every year when, for instance, a TS Karen sails through, sweeping T&T and delivering glancing blows on her way en route to oblivion in the Western Atlantic. Or worse, a Hurricane Dorian that early on hurried the journeys of small craft off our own coasts, as it prepped for a single-minded campaign of destruction in The Bahamas.

But there are other storms that hover like dark, low-hanging clouds and hang before us at eye level. No alerts. No warnings. No official dicta to ease pain and suffering. They are storms of our own doing, you see.

There are storm clouds, for instance, when you apply quintessentially racist values to restrict access to education to our children and jobs for adults. Few things like this to establish a penchant for self-destruction.

Even as we debate the point in T&T, there are ludicrous “grooming guidelines” for school children in Jamaica which, in my view, credit some hairstyles and punish the manner in which certain hair-types grow naturally.

In Barbados, teachers are known to blow the cover on boys who “pat down” their natural hair to what is considered to be an “acceptable” height. I am not sure what is correspondingly done to measure and to remediate the length of other hair types which run in a different direction.

Here, in T&T we have had more recent examples of such racist official behaviour in the form of acceptable and unacceptable “hairstyles” in our schools. Has it occurred to anyone that this is discriminatory to the extent that the “hairstyles” ritualistically under examination are not available as a stylistic option for people with other hair types? That school officials are implicitly drawn in the direction of only one group of people to extend censure and punishment?

Self-hating chupidness is what it is. Self-hate as a companion emotion to racism can be as destructive as the real ting self.

Take, as well, the so-called dress codes at public institutions. What is this issue with people’s shoulders? Why, in 38 degree heat, people cannot use comfortable clothes and footwear? Isn’t this some kind of self-hate? How can this be explained? What kind of collective pathological condition does this reflect?

During my brief assignment in Fiji some years ago, I joined in the sandal, sulu-wearing bunch around town and at public functions and wondered when we in the Caribbean would ever join the club of tropical island people who have learned to love their natural environment … and by extension, themselves.

Then comes one of the darkest clouds around – the looming storm of the theocratic state. The reality that so many of us would prefer personal religious conviction become coercive policy, rule and law. The dominance of supposedly sacred rites over otherwise acknowledged human rights.

This is not delinked from the self-hatred and lack of self-esteem and confidence witnessed with so many other issues. How could it be that one of the most oppressive instruments of our history as an under-class could arise as a singularly influential indicator of our value as humans?

Through this, discriminatory hate agendas are normalised and coercion becomes the norm. Put my name down in the book where it is recorded that some people here resisted racism, the theocracy and the self-hate. Put my name down among those who saw the dark clouds and shouted “Rain is coming!” The rain is coming.

 (First Published in the T&T Guardian on October 2, 2019)

Joining the 15%

So, it was my birthday 11 days ago and I became eligible for a “Senior Citizens Pension” - provided I met set poverty criteria expressed as monthly incomes of between $2,500 and $5,500.

I however know that even if I didn’t receive a pension, there are colleagues on these pages who would describe me as a “pensioner” anyway. “Such and such ‘pensioner’ was found wandering aimlessly on Frederick Street …”

It nevertheless helps that in a socialist society there is no real shortage of options to provide most of the basics. Mt Hope is not far away, CDAP can take you pretty far in some, not all, instances, and there are numerous social support grants and other services.

The “elderly” now account for around 13 -15 percent of the national population, shrinking perhaps on account of migration and other factors. There were commentators at the height of the pandemic who were suggesting we were entirely dispensable.

Anyway, it was my birthday, and everybody was suddenly offering advice on diet, exercise, and stress minimisation. Even the UK Guardian chimed in last Saturday with recommendations on staying active and cutting down on protein intake via a “mostly vegan” diet!!! Hmm.

That I was unable to pass the “back scratch” test, proposed by the article, was also devastating. “One arm is placed as if giving yourself a pat on the back, while the other elbow is bent low behind you, the aim being to clasp at least the middle fingers of the opposite hands.”

Who the hell can do that??!!! I almost got my son, Mikhail, to try it, but he already thinks there is a measure of mental diminution, and I might have been given “the look”.

Of course, he has now forgotten my knock between innings two weeks ago. I hit them everywhere and they couldn’t get me out. “Uncle can bat!” I heard from the bleachers. “CPL!!!” I shouted back.

Then I had to explain that I could not play in the match because running on what was a hard tennis court would hurt troublesome ankles and knees. The cardio isn’t bad though. I do the treadmill from time to time.

Outside my house is a hill that takes you up Mt Everest. These days the temperature averages 40 degrees in the shade. Night walk? No. I might be forced to run from dogs or muggers on the hard asphalt road that will hurt those joints.

Speaking of which, ganja tea is now acceptable as evening fare to level off feelings from a day spent scanning news from everywhere it is being told or having to deal with bungling service providers of all varieties.

Yet, there have been several comforts. I no longer get calls from agents offering life and medical insurance. “Caring”, in such an industry, ends at fixed markers.

Nobody from the company checks up on you, and phone calls are rarely returned. The lady at the pharmacy can testify to frantic calls about contractual deductions from the bill.

On the other hand, while insurance agents have lost all interest, religious zealots now turn the manuals to the part on the inevitability of death. “I have a tattoo” is my stock response to any such strategy. That makes absolutely no sense, you say. But so is much of what they have to offer anyway.

The other day, while feeding the chickens (there are now two chickens in our yard, and, yes, yes, I called around to find out whether their owners were missing them), I thought about lifespans.

These cute, but increasingly meaty creatures are more likely than not to expire before I go – maybe even at my hands. Ditto the squirrels that gnaw at my coconuts, the cats that come to steal Oreo’s food, and the magnificent macaws that liven up our evenings on their way home.

Perhaps, I have been told, these stories are ideally suited for my “memoir(s).” Some of my favourite writers never quite put it that way, because the stories they tell and the poems they compose provide adequate testimonies and evidence of the time slots they have occupied.

More than 24 years ago, I wrote about growing “dependency ratios” in the Caribbean as a function of rising life expectancy – people living longer, but increasingly adding to costly support systems to keep them alive and healthy.

In an interview with me many years ago, the late diplomat/man of wisdom James O’Neil “Scottie” Lewis described the elderly as the socially “forgotten.” Now, let’s see. Was he right or was he wrong?