Most spaces in Jamaican public life are geared to exclude and the consequent need to accommodate the waiting. But the waiting are barely accomodated. Often this is because the object put in place to accomodate the waiting have been known to be vandalised or stolen To many this is a source of frustration. But that frustration must not go unquestioned.

Efficency as an irreducible icon of society has here only penetrated as far as the desire to be efficient and thus to be like others. Consumerism, with the advertising industry as its proselytiser converting by commercial, uses efficiency as its justification. Commercials promise efficiency. As one lives longer in Jamaica one is able to understand that promise for what it is, an intention and maybe even a conviction, the difference between the literal meaning and the figurative meaning of that promise becomes very important. It represents the ill-defined gap between the immune and the newly arrived.

But efficiency is a dubious icon. The frenzy of Western life which icons like efficiency have helped to generate has so far gone unquestioned. Our increasing despair or acceptance at not finding a convincing deeper purpose to life, has redirected our teleological craving towards the short-term goal.

Efficiency as such is the epiphany of its own justification. If there is a goal, it must be reached efficiently and so the word has come to mould our ethics according to small goals. The means justify the end, the means become the end. A goal reached inefficiently has to be further justified. There being no visible deeper goal apart from purposeful existence, we have subsituted the short-term, realizable goal for any deeper objective. This may not be a bad thing, I am certainly not judging it, I am merely evaluating its consequences. The goals which are conducive to efficiency are short-term, immediate, and realizable: informed by the aesthetics of science. In that sense they can be achieved. But then, once having achieved the goal: a product, a certain turn-over, a re-organization, there is emptiness until the next short term goal is formulated. And so the painful question of a larger purpose need not be opened up while our life becomes increasingly inactive and comfortable.

The logical extreme investigated often in the cutural products of Modern Life is a life lived in form of semi-conscious suspended animation. As such, our efficiency has, despite the wonderful products it has produced and the amazing bounds of the imagination it has made common, in fact, only been able to produce more: it has never reached any deeper goal in any conventional sense as it has raised efficient production to the status of ultimate goal. Manifest creation is our goal, or so it would seem.

The consequence of this is that the icon of efficiency has allowed the frustration at the lack of it to go unquestioned.

That is the West. Jamaica is different, for one because of the presence of religion, which we will come to later. Having said that, efficiency as an Icon has the same awesome presence in Jamaica as elsewhere. Howver, many of the short-term goals have to be postponed recurrently. Few of them are reached, and when they have been reached, they are no longer relevant or hopelessly compromised, inadequate or broken. This is not mere cynicism on my part. Nor is it necessarily true. It is the image of what is true -truth in the words of Brecht, as standing for what is plausible. And the manifestations of inefficiency are so sorely visible, so often rehearsed, they have become the catechism of the rich, the ex-pat community and the waiting. The consequence of this is that there is a pervasive cynicism which has polarised society into those who are excessively cynical and those who ar excessively concerned with altering that image grasping at the merest strands to generate a feeling of pride in their country.