Bermuda is where good people go when they die, or so it seems to me right now. I'm sitting on the veranda of my room here at the Rosedon Hotel in Hamilton. It is a lovely morning with flowers all around, and I am eating my breakfast. There is a gecko lizard near my feet, but he is far too polite to try to sell me insurance. It is a very British sort of hotel with tea in the afternoon, surgically clean and well-maintained rooms, and the nicest staff I have met anywhere on planet earth. Basil Fawlty is nowhere to be found. Stretching credibility to its limits, the cab driver last night tried quite hard to talk me out of a tip I had offered him. I insisted. As the slogan says, Bermuda is a "different world." Probably the best part is that I'm actually here to teach a series of classes on behalf of my dear friends at Mindsharp, and I would rather teach than go on vacation. But I digress. On the other hand it is very Bermudean to digress, and so I am right at home.
But what does this have to do with taxonomies? The "Mid-Ocean News" was delivered with my breakfast (of course!), and the leading headline screams from top of the front page "Elderly fall victim appeals to City to fix sidewalks." The poor dear apparently twisted her ankle on uneven pavement as she entered her car. This is front page news in Bermuda. Coming from the states, where this event would not have gotten front page coverage even if the Mayor had then personally walked over to her and shot her several times with a pistol, I wondered at the priority given such an everyday event.
The Bermudean taxonomy has a different definition for the category called "Important." This is a pretty small nation of sixty thousand or so people. Having grown up on a small island (Vashon) I understand that everyone knows or is related to everyone else here, in spirit if not in fact. The woman who fell is not just a statistic but a real person. "Important" news elsewhere is defined as big things done by powerful people. Here important seems to be "real things done by real people." It is amazing how culture shapes taxonomy in nations as well as in corporations.
Comments