Circular No 797

Newsletter for alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 11 February 2017 No. 797

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Dear Friends,

Here I am enclosing an exchange regarding the future of the circulars as for possible use by historians or for the purpose of a future book.

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From: "David E. Bratt MD, Trinidad, West Indies" <dbratt@trinidad.net>

Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 06:07:19 -0400

Ladislao,

I have no problem with anything that you have sent or will send.

I do not think you should delete anything from your files.

I delete because I am depending on you to save everything! 

I think you should set up an archive which should be accessible to anyone who wants information on MSB.

It's a wonderful idea you have for a historian to use what you are collecting for a book on Mount.

All the best,

David

----- Original Message --------------------------------------------

From: "Ladislao Kertesz" <lkertesz1@icqmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2003 9:19 AM

Dear David,

Yes I agree that not all articles are to our liking or we adhere but I have made it a policy that I cannot censure the articles, only modify them by cutting parts of it is they tend to be a personal attack or something like that.

Should I delete the article from file?.

In the case of WVB he was upset because he thought that I was discriminating by not sending out his anti American ones.

I told him that it was not true; it was because I could not get it from the newspaper every week.

So he is sending them to me for inclusion.

So what can I do?

If the article has been in the public domain then it must have some merit.

I keep a file on all pertinent material for future sending out or to keep information that might help a historian for a book on MSB, which I hope someone would write.

I need help from kids like you to balance the contents of the circular and make it interesting.

I know that there is going to be an end to these in the foreseeable future because of the lack of stories and photos; I keep a few for me to write in case things go slow.

God Bless.

Ladislao

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From: "Wayne Brown" <wvb@kasnet.com>

Date: 28 Sep 11:00 (PDT)

Subject: Re: Circular No.98, The Abbey School MSB

Dear Ladislao--

In your latest MSB newsletter (reprinted, I gather, from a letter from you to David Bratt), you write:

"In the case of WVB he was upset because he thought that I was discriminating by not sending out his anti American ones. I told him that it was not true; it was because I could not get it from the newspaper every week so he is sending them to me for inclusion."

Since you have thus circularised the MSB Old Boys, I hope you will likewise pass on to them my response to yours above, as follows:

1 In the period under discussion--circa August-December 2002--my column was dealing with the impending US attack upon Iraq on an average of once every three weeks or so. You were reproducing my columns, to which I retain copyright (without my permission, although, to begin with, I had no objection), through most of that period--yet not one of my "anti-American ones" appeared. If that was a coincidence of the unavailability online of those particular columns, it was a most striking coincidence.

2 I explicitly disavow your view that my columns attacking the Bush Administration's imperial surge into the Middle East (which, you may have noticed, is now getting the comeuppance it so richly deserves, though Iraq itself will have been shattered and destroyed by the time the American legions are withdrawn from it) constitute "anti-American(ism)". American voices opposing the war have existed all along; today, fully half of those polled in the US are calling Mr Bush's Iraq adventure a mistake; and indeed there's a good chance that he and his bunch of barbarian raiders (raiders of the US Treasury, no less than of Middle Eastern oil, by the way) will be ejected from office by the American people next year because of it. I doubt you would be minded to call the American people "anti-American". For the record, I am no more that than they are.

WB.

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Unfortunately I missed the comments when I prepared the Circular, David.

As I said about a year ago, I do not censure the Newsletter, but sometimes I try to avoid confrontation to a minimum, knowing the stance of each writer.

Ups, I screwed up!!!!

Dear Wayne,

At first I thought that you sent me an article of your Scouting days or intervention during the fight between the Farcheg and Fedak brothers!!!

I am sorry my comments have brought up the controversy, but true to modern journalism,

I have printed your answer to Circular No.98 and I hope that the matter is settled.

I shall be more careful next time!!!!.

God Bless

Ladislao

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July 2002, Article by Wayne Vincent Brown CLASS 1960

And so, dearly beloved, to our theme for this Sunday, provoked by the following news item from AP:

'In what may be the most startling fossil find in decades, scientists in central Africa say they have unearthed the oldest trace of a pre-human ancestor: a remarkably intact skull of an apelike species that walked upright as far back as seven million years ago. The thick-browed, flat-faced skull was found in Chad, 1,500 miles west of pre-human discoveries in east Africa.'

Now, it goes without saying - or it should - that this column is no Christian fundamentalist platform doggedly pushing an infantile Creationism. Even if it isn't the whole truth, Darwinian evolution is manifestly a large part of the truth of how we - and all life - got where we and it are today; and my own reservations about it stop well short of disowning that fact. In the main, however, those reservations are:

1. *There are species, eg, a kind of beetle, that had to go through several maladaptive mutations before the sum of those mutations proved selective. What are the odds of that happening in a 'survival of the fittest' world, I ask myself.

2. *In the evolution of some species there appears to be a drive towards aesthetic expression which occurs despite being maladaptive. It's hard to explain the extraordinary and subtle visual glory of a peacock's fan as simply a sexual display (if that's all it is, the peahen must be the world's greatest art critic!). And a certain moth, eg, first reproduced two big round 'eyes' on its wings - which was fine, in that by suggesting eternal vigilance it may be presumed to have discouraged predators; except that it then went further and spoiled the effect by replicating them: adorning itself, for symmetry's sake, with four 'eyes', which rather ruined the camouflage. What principle was at play there?

3. It sometimes seems that there's a considerable mimetic or copycat 'instinct' at work in evolution. And while this can generally be explained by the selective value of camouflage, in particular instances it seems insufficient. The moth that replicates on each wing a waterdrop so realistic that the line that crosses it is 'refracted', exactly as it would be if it were a stick in water, smacks of an inutile but finical perfectionism.

4. The generally accepted graph of human evolution - barely inclining upward for five million years (actually, since last week, seven million), and then, since the Pleistocene, shooting straight up to arrive at, ta-dah! you and me, in our sudden, lonely and hubristic splendour - that graph seems to seriously under-imagine just how long seven million years are, and how many times the human story could have been told and retold, and retold and retold, in that time. In particular, we who, uniquely in primates, replaced bodily hair with subcutaneous fat; who, again uniquely, developed nose bridges (to keep water from forcing itself down our nostrils while swimming) and, in the female, long hair (for the young to hold on to in the water); whose females, again uniquely, developed breasts and fatty hips (for extra insulation of, respectively, their milk and foetuses in the cold medium of water); who retain vestigial webs between our fingers; whose newborn can swim instinctively (though they soon lose the ability); who have a primordial terror of sharks, rivalling our terror of snakes (or, in the case of Jamaican women, lizards); whose hair on our back is hydrodynamically shaped; and who, above all else, still exhibit an inconsolable need to 'go to the beach', even if, as in temperate countries, all we do there is sit in our cars and stare nostalgically at the sea - where, in the palaeontologists' graph of the ascent of man, is our epoch as seashore-dwelling, quasi-aquatic mammals?

5. Finally - and this may well be dismissed as mystical mumbo-jumbo - there seems to be an exuberance in nature, an espousing of riotous colours and intricate forms for their own sake, which leads to the sensation that life is good, and not merely a dour and violent struggle for survival.

And now I see that, with that last observation, I have described the Jamaican paradox. The reality, which is that life in Jamaica in our time is generally nasty and brutish - even when not short - is perfectly counterpoised by an irrational belief that life is good; and that belief, far from being a mere nationalistic lash, is expressed from the very centre of your Jamaican.

Just yesterday I passed a young woman walking on the pavement of Barbican Square. She was from that socioeconomic class where she must have known deprivation of one kind or another since birth, and the odds are she will also have seen violent death close up and personal at least once while still a child. Her present situation cannot be easy, and her prospects (weighed down herself in a few years time by several children and different baby-fathers) must be considerably worse.

And yet, in her expression, in the way she held her head, and in the trenchant exuberance of her stride (what in Trinidad would be referred to as 'flingin' de ting!') I saw, writ large, the bone-deep philosophical conclusion that life was good. Like the coat of the ocelot, declaring through its pure resplendence that life is good, is a festive thing, a carnival - no matter how the creature itself stalks and rends its prey, and snarls inconsolably at the moon.

By. Wayne Vincent Brown

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Directly from the hand writing of Justice Anthony Lucky.

I presently serve as a Justice of the Court of Appeal of Trinidad & Tobago.

After I left Mount, I completed my secondary education at Presentation College in San Fernando.

I then left for England where I graduated as a barrister-at-law from Gray's Inn in London in November 1961.

After a stint in private practice, I served as a Magistrate in San Fernando between 1964 and 1974 and as Secretary to the Law Reform Commission between 1974 and 1976.

Between 1976 and 1987 I was in-house counsel for Royal Bank of Trinidad & Tobago, after which I was appointed to the bench as a Judge of the High Court.

In October 2000 I was appointed to our Court of Appeal, Trinidad and Tobago's highest Court other than the Privy Council in London.

While engaged in these duties, I continued my legal education, picking up over the years, a Certificate in Legislative Drafting, a Diploma in International Relations, and a Masters in International Relations.

For my MSc degree I specialised on the law of the sea, and my thesis on the Legal Relationship of the Law of the Sea between Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela is on the reading list in some of the subjects at UWI.

I have been married to Cintra for 39 years. Cintra is a graduate teacher in Trinidad, holding a BA (General Hons) degree and a Diploma in Education from the Faculty of Education at the University of the West Indies. We have four daughters, Cindy-Ann, a specialist medical doctor in Canada; Gillian an attorney-at-law and Member of Parliament in Trinidad; Elizabeth whose degree is in Industrial Management and Accountancy and who lives in Canada; and Antonia who is an environmental management consultant in Trinidad.

Besides my work, I enjoy attending international law conferences and spending extended periods of time in Canada doting on my grandchildren.

Anthony

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EDITED by Ladislao Kertesz,  kertesz11@yahoo.com,  if you would like to be in the circular’s mailing list or any old boy that you would like to include.

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Photos:

06LK1402DINNER, Kendrik Allum, Isaias Farcheg and Roberto Lipasky

12NB0210AJAXREUNION, Group in Canada

12LK6493FBGKE, Gerard Kenny

12LK8235FBKKE, Kevin Kenny