Dickson Igwe

Country Bumpkin: our West Indian village thinker, rustic farmer, wild bull tamer, profound reader, and so on and so forth and much more! On this gorgeous West Indian afternoon, he is seated at a table in the local Pussers Restaurant and Bar in Road Town on the idyllic island of Tortola.

He has taken Mrs. Bumpkin and the two little Bumpkins out of their small hamlet village located on the West End of the Island for the day. The 30 minute journey to Road Town has been an event, a noisy odyssey in the family truck, a 1970 Ford Vintage that would be more appropriate on the Island of Cuba.

As the family await their order, the bar door swings open suddenly and violently: a group of US sailors from the Destroyer USS Barak Obama stumble clumsily into the bar.  The Americans are noisy and rowdy.  One in particular is obviously beyond it: he looks at Mrs. Country Bumpkin, proffers a rude wink, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, he then proceeds to wolf whistle with an attitude of utter condescension.  Country Bumpkin is about to deal with this situation with his characteristically efficient and effective pugnacious skill and capability. It is too late.  Mrs. Bumpkin, who does not bother with the foolishness of these young Americans, can see that her husband is no longer present.

Mrs. Bumpkin has seen that profound look on his face too many times in the past. He is no longer with the family.  Our favourite yokel is in recline and staring out of the Pussers Bahamas shutter. He is dreaming: currently he is flat on his back.  He is looking at an imaginary flock of pink flamingos flying across the clear blue sky. He is back in the mythical Cerebral Antipodes, his place of mental escape, he is seated on a heavenly beach that is totally empty and isolated, and he is engaged in something he does so very well: he is in deep thought.  

The United States, despite being bashed, criticized, even hated by many peoples and nations, remains freedom’s bastion and chief protector, and the best hope for a planet beset by war and famine, social and economic turbulence, and both political and military polarization.

This bashing of the US has appeared to have become fashionable: a trend that has appeared to have evolved in certain academic and intellectual circles, especially in Western Europe. And this US bashing has evolved over the past two decades in a Western Europe that paradoxically owes her very existence, to American intervention in both World Wars of 1914 and 1939.


And a Europe in which many in the establishment acquiesced with Hitler’s Nazi, racist and fascist ideology, and  slept in inertia while ten million Jews, and other peoples considered imperfect, were gassed to death in the gas chambersof Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Sorbibor and Dachau, the first, and hopefully last episode of industrial genocide in history.  This was mechanized mass-murder that sends a stench into the nostrils of civil humanity to this day.  And all this originating from a ‘civilized Europe: The collapse of the Berlin Wall is nothing to celebrate for this ‘’layman’’ as it is simply a symbol of the mass murder that preceded its construct.’ Who cares: ‘’yawn.’’

Between 1914 and 1918, President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly sent in American troops into that great quagmire in Europe that was the first World War, ending that War, and saving millions of lives, from a meat-grinder, that itself cost over 40 million lives, lives lost to famine and disease, and military deaths on the fields and trenches of France, Belgium and Germany- The Western Front. US troops, known then as the dough boys- and nearly 120,000 US troops died fighting on the side of Britain and France against German militarism- became a synonym for all that was best in US military intervention.  Europe was for the first time experiencing the power of its cousin, located on the other side of the North Atlantic.

Then between 1939 and 1945: during World War 2, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent in- after the attack at Pearl Harbor by Japan, and under the stewardship of General Dwight Eisenhower in the Atlantic and General Douglas McArthur in the Pacific- American troops, many who were lost on the fields of Normandy and Calais in Northern Europe, North Africa and Italy, on boats in the North Atlantic and the Pacific, and at Okinawa and Midway Islands near the Japanese Coast, The Philippines, and various other places in the Pacific Ocean.  Seventy-two million lives were lost during the Second World War.  The US lost well over 400.000 men in that war, but again US intervention, especially during the latter stages of that War brought closure and world peace. 

US intervention also brought an end to the Crisis in the Suez Canal in the late 50s.That crisis began with the nationalization of the Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Nationalist Leader of Egypt, over the Aswan Dam Project controversy. An invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel, was blocked by US diplomatic and economic power, all under the Administration of the now President Dwight Eisenhower.  That thwarted invasion, brought an end to British imperialism and colonial French aspirations. And it checked the power of the new nation of Israel, itself a creation of US magnanimity. 

Furthermore, in the 50s, 60s, 70, and 80s, US power represented a massive wall that stopped Soviet imperialism, and that ended with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, and the setting of Eastern Europe, and even former Soviet satellites in Asia, free from communist totalitarianism.

The end of communism saw once again the conflagration of the Balkans.  This part of South Eastern Europe has been in conflict from medieval times: conflict, both ethnic and religious in nature. Again US intervention prevented fratricidal genocide in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina and even Croatia. Today, the Balkans remains quiet. 

And US pressure on the apartheid Government of F W De Clerk in South Africa, saw the election of the African National Congress’ Nelson Mandela, as the nation’s first black President on the 27th of April 1994.

Today, with an ascendant totalitarian superpower China in the Pacific, and a resurgent, oil rich, militarily ambitious oligarchic and authoritarian Russia, then add to that the rush to obtain nuclear weapons by tyrants, dictators and terrorists, the US remains a rock of security, in the midst of increasing global insecurity. 

And the nearly 100 years of US power has been critical to these West Indies.  The Caribbean, made up mostly of tiny island nations and oversea territories of The United States and Europe, lying off the Latin and South American Coasts, has always been especially vulnerable to predator nations.  During the Second World War, Adolph Hitler’s designs for the Caribbean were stopped by the combined actions of the navies of Canada, Britain and the United States.  Eventually, victory in the South Atlantic helped pave the way to victory at Normandy in the North Atlantic, that battle, determining the Allied victory over the Axis Nations: Germany, Japan and Italy.

Thus, and despite the obvious idiosyncrasies even anachronisms of US Power, and these range from global technological, military, cultural, intellectual property and corporate domination, to errors in foreign policy, made in Vietnam and Iraq, and Rwanda and The Sudan, the United States has remained a reluctant superpower, prone to isolationism. And many in the US would be happy to cut ties with the rest of the world and live in continental separateness- or splendid isolation, the name given by academic society.  Also, most of those same members of the European intelligentsia, with their rabid anti-American sentiments would decry the day the US departed the World stage.

For us here in the Caribbean, as we enjoy the rich heritage of our cultures, customs and traditions, living in safety and tranquility, on a peaceful ocean, and enjoying freedoms many can only dream of, let us remember the young men, especially American, who died in war so that we would enjoy these freedoms.  And we can be in no doubt; we owe these freedoms to the sacrifices of families who lost loved ones, especially in the United States. 
This Thanksgiving, as you take a walk down a lane on a peaceful harbor, and look upon the sea, and instead of gunboats and warships, you see waters with fishing boats, catamarans and yachts bobbing about.  And then, on a picturesque evening, gazing out from a balcony, on a hill top home, at that brilliantly lit cruise ship floating gently on the channel out front, cruising the archipelago, a full moon and countless stars in the sky, and filled with families, many from the Caribbean, and enjoying short vacations, say that little prayer, beloved by many US Presidents and Statesmen, it goes like this: “God bless the United States of America.’’

US junior Seaman Sam Bigmouth stumbles into a local bar with his fellow sailors.  They are part of the crew of the USS Barak Obama conducting naval exercises in the Caribbean Sea. On this divine day in paradise, they are off the coast of Tortola, largest of the British Virgin Islands.  They have decided to paint Road Town, Capital of the Island group, red. The men are drunk and loud.

Bigmouth sees this incredibly beautiful West Indian woman seated at a table: she is obviously seated with her family.  A tough, good looking, tall, muscular man in a wide brim straw hat is staring at the ceiling fan: powerful arms and hands determine that he is some kind of yokel: a country farmer of some sort. He appears far away in thought.  Must be her husband Bigmouth determines:  Bigmouth does not care, he is intoxicated and he has his buddies to back him up; he will make a move on her.

Bigmouth proceeds to ogle then wink at her rudely, he then wolf whistles, he looks back at his drunken friends, and they urge him on.  Suddenly, this country yokel springs to life.  He leaps at Bigmouth, picks him up like a rag doll and proceeds to hug him and kiss him on both cheeks. He then places a dangling Bigmouth on a bar stool.  He is grateful that Bigmouth is at work with his sailor buddies patrolling the Caribbean Sea, keeping violent brigands at bay. Bumpkin places a handful of bills in the palm of the Pusser’s barman for the benefit of the sailors.

He then waltzes with a rustic grace and panache back to his family to the tunes of a calypso artist and steel pan performing in the restaurant; at the restaurant table, the children are busy chomping at their wings and fries, Mrs. Bumpkin is sucking a straw from a tall glass of mango dachree. There is a look of deep appreciation on the now seated Country Bumpkin’s tanned and furrowed face as he gazes intensely at Bigmouth. And Bigmouth, amazed at the friendliness of this local hillbilly, does not realize that had our favourite thinker not been taken out of the current reality by his dreamy foray into the Cerebral Antipodes, Bigmouth would have received the ‘’hiding’’ of his life. 

*Dickson Igwe is a Christian thinker and writer

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