It is in exceedingly poor taste, broadly and with an acute recognition of one's own frailty, to lambaste the recently deceased, when in life one could not have summoned up enough courage to defend one's criticism of him, before his face, so to speak.

Immediately after the death of former Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1997, Perkins took to the airwaves with a blistering attack on Manley, the public man. It bordered on a celebration of his death. As terrible as I saw it - and went on to criticise Perkins harshly in a column - the talk show host had to be given his due, simply because as a showman on the electronic airwaves and a fiercely trenchant journalist to all sides of a coin, and especially the edge, he had always expressed his belief during the leadership of Manley that the prime minister of the 1970s was rated as the worst experience this country has had in its political development.

At birth, nothing is as certain as death, and yet, at death, nothing is seen as so misunderstood and felt with such unbearable pain by family and close friends. Those recently and not so recently deceased have an annoying habit of not listening anymore; so vicious words hurled at them are meaningless to those who are only now, a memory. To the loved ones left behind, those words cut into the skin and rip their way into the centre of the heart. They hurt.

At Motty's death, many seemed not to have had much appreciation for that simple understanding, that socially accepted protocol.

Until 2 am last Tuesday, I had not logged into Facebook since last September. For my purposes, the experience of Facebook was only valuable to me in gaining new insight into how people's thought processes operated when they interacted with each other in such huge numbers. Based on the few postings I made, it probably meant that it had nothing more to hold me beyond that.

Anyway, early Tuesday morning, one real change for Jamaica forum comment I saw on Perkins, repeated many times by the person and with increasing levels of venom, even after being asked by others to find a more mutually acceptable lodging place in the death/criticism nexus, took me quite by surprise, especially as the person expressing the Perkins hate was Christian, always spouting God and, not by surprise, he was mounting the argument that God had done Jamaica a special favour by removing Motty from among us.

Just plain nasty

Motty had criticised my views and political positions as expressed in my columns more than quite a few times, and with the Perkinsian certainty that his viewpoint rendered my own completely redundant. All acceptable in a country where free expression is one of the few success stories we have.

Some time in the mid- to late-1990s, Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan announced that he would be visiting Jamaica, the birthplace of his father. Mark Kerr-Jarrett, a highly influential member of the business class/community in Montego Bay criticised the impending visit and spoke of the the timing of the visit and the sensitivities of the time.

To me, the criticism was important in two aspects. First, Kerr-Jarrett could well have been right, considering that Farrakhan was known as a purveyor of religious "doom and gloom" and racist vitriol. Second, Farrakhan saw himself as a defender of sorts of the black "race" while I saw something else at play, from Jarrett, a "high colour" member of the landed gentry expressing a position, which to me, reflected his fear of a threat to the status quo.

In a column I referred to the Montego Bay business icon as "Busha" Jarrett and suggested that he did not want the "natives" to become restive. On his programme that morning Perkins went to sea on his tearing of my position to bits. Said he, "Who has contributed more to this country, is it Mark Wignall or is it Mr Kerr-Jarrett?"

As one of my sons listened to him flaying me, he said, "Dad, I think that man loves you."

When we both visited Tivoli Gardens "looking for tunnels" in 1996 or 1997, Motty and his wife Elaine were star quality in the garrison pocket. He never walked an inch without holding her hands and one sensed that there was genuine affection operating between the two of them. Pretend stuff like that is easily detected.

But even in that visit, a little over a decade later we found reason to "quarrel" when I wrote after the Dudus matter in 2010 that in Motty announcing on his programme in the 1990s that "Mr Wignall and I went to Tivoli Gardens to search for tunnels and we found none," there was only a piecemeal search and in any event, Motty wasn't involved - only me. Quite possibly, because he wasn't physically up to it, or more likely, in terms of rank, I was a mere "prento" that day.

During the 2001 Tivoli "troubles", while I was in the belly of the beast, the first person I called was Chupski to tell her I love her and that no matter what happened I would be coming home. The second person I called was Motty Perkins.

With the security forces surrounding Tivoli Gardens, there was a ring of fire, bursts of it, coming into the community. After describing to him the general lay of the land and the situation analysis as I saw it, Mutty asked, "Do you see any guns?"

Amid constant gunfire, mostly from automatic weapons on rapid, and with me in a partially crouched position (the whisky did not sink in yet) I answered, "What do you think?" I honestly cannot recall if he asked any more questions.

In 2003 after Laura Facey Cooper had completed the US$800,000 bronze statue of a beautiful nude couple (commissioned by NHT) at Emancipation Park, Perkins immediately went at it and would hardly let up on criticising it (especially the impressive hanging penis, really hanging!), on his radio programme. I, in turn took him to task in a column, more in humour than in anything approaching a cerebral debate.

Said I, "Mr Perkins seems to have a problem with the huge size of the male's penis. One suspects jealousy on his part."

In response, Mutty hit back with, "Mr Wignall reminds me of that type of Jamaican with a small brain and a large penis."

With an excess of testosterone flowing, I could not resist going back at him in a follow-up column by writing. "You've got it half-right Mutty. You are dead wrong on the first part, but very right on the second."

It has never been ours to demand the love and adulation some of us crave and to get it in excess. The world doesn't quite work that way. Motty did his part and with gusto, and certainly seemed to revel in those who loved to hate him.

I can hear his laugh even now, "Ha, ha, ha, ha..."

observemark@gmail.com

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