Tar-Bathing Nations: How the Caribbean Is Being Slowly Drowned by the Merchant(s) of Mediocrity

There is a new cultural substance quietly hardening across Jamaica and much of the Caribbean. It is not ideology in the classical sense, nor policy failure in the narrow one. It is thicker than habit, darker than fatigue, and far more dangerous than ignorance. It is tar: viscous, sticky, slow-moving, and suffocating----often billioneering. And its chief merchants are those who have learned how to survive—indeed, to thrive—by keeping standards low while sounding reasonable.

This is not a polemic against ordinary struggle. Our societies face real pressures: small size, climate vulnerability, post-colonial inheritance, fiscal constraint, migration loss, hurricanes, pandemics. These are facts. But something has shifted. Context has ceased to be a lens and has become a shield. And behind that shield operates a class of cultural actors—political, bureaucratic, professional, and intellectual—who keep on billioneering from managed underperformance.

The Merchant of Mediocrity does not argue against excellence. That would expose them. Instead, they redefine realism so that ambition appears naïve, standards appear cruel, and accountability appears foreign. They do not say “do badly”; they say “be practical.” They do not say “settle”; they say “be compassionate.” And slowly, inexorably, the bar sinks.

One of their most effective tools is normalisation. Chronic failure is framed as structural destiny. Weak literacy outcomes become “global trends.” Collapsing school attendance becomes “post-COVID trauma.” Infrastructure delays become “procurement realities.” Energy stagnation becomes “transition complexity.” Each explanation may be partially true. But their cumulative effect is cultural anaesthesia: a public trained not to expect repair, only explanation.

The second tool is performative reform. Task forces proliferate. Consultations multiply. Workshops are held. Pilot projects are launched with fanfare and quietly buried. Documents are produced—glossy, jargon-laden, and conveniently unmeasurable. Motion substitutes for movement. Timelines dissolve and responsibility evaporates until failure belongs to no one. At least, that is what Dr Chris Tufton suggests by invoking Shakespeare to sanctify a balding 'saga-boy'—an indulgence of ‘fair lover’s style’ that is, quite frankly, nobody’s business.

Equally corrosive is the hostility to measurement. The Merchant of Mediocrity fears data not because it is colonial or crude, but because it is unforgiving. Benchmarks expose drift. Comparisons embarrass. Metrics remember what rhetoric forgets. So numbers are resisted, audits by the Auditor General of Jamaica resented, and international standards dismissed as “not contextualised.”

Vagueness, by contrast, is safe. It can never indict.

Then there is the quiet but lethal practice of rewarding compliance over competence. In too many institutions, the most valuable trait is not rigour but agreeableness. The questioner is “difficult.” The dissenter is “bad mind.” The person who insists on first principles is “elitist.” Meanwhile, mediocrity—if polite, loyal, and silent—is promoted and protected. This is how organisations steadily rot while managing 'navigable scandal'.

Perhaps the most revealing feature of this tar-bathing-culture is its fear of excellence, especially when it is local. Imported consultants are tolerated; home-grown brilliance is threatening. Why? Because excellence exposes choice. It proves that outcomes are not inevitable, that constraints can be engineered around, that standards are decisions, not accidents. Nothing unsettles the Merchant of Mediocrity more than someone who succeeds without excuses. (Kindly, refer that to Dr Dana Morris-Dixon for interpretation, readers.)

In education, tar-bathing manifests as sympathy without urgency. We lament children’s struggles but hesitate to restructure asinine "pools" timetables, arcane curricula, or inept teacher deployment. We talk endlessly about “the child” while tolerating systems that waste the child’s time. Compassion becomes an alibi for low expectations. And low expectations, dressed as kindness, become cruelty.

In governance, tar-bathing appears as ritualised outrage followed by institutional amnesia. Scandals erupt, commissions sit, reports gather dust. Lessons are “noted.” Nothing changes. The public grows weary, then cynical, then disengaged. This, too, benefits the Merchant of Mediocrity: a tired citizenry is easier to manage than an exacting one.

Let us be clear: this is not an argument for cruelty, austerity, or technocracy without soul. It is an argument for adult seriousness. Small societies cannot afford cultural sludge. We do not have surplus generations to waste, nor slack decades to drift. Every cohort lost to low 'McGreror Gully and Taylor Land' standards is a compound loss. (Please refer to The Honourable Mr Desmond McKenzie who should, by now, be able to interpret what that means.)

The Caribbean has no shortage of talent. What it lacks is intolerance for those who sell diminished ambition as maturity. The true danger is not failure; it is making peace with failure and calling it wisdom.

Tar is hard to remove once it sets. But ask Mrs Jeanette Calder of JAMP, it can be resisted early—by naming it, by insisting on measurement, by rewarding competence, by protecting inconvenient excellence, and by refusing to let context become destiny.

If we do not act, the future will not collapse dramatically. It will simply move more slowly, breathe more shallowly, and expect less of itself—until even decline feels normal.

And by then, the tar will be everywhere.

by Dennis A. Minott, PhD.