... a cutlass and a whippa-snippa ...

... "we use machete to farm, but the worl' in general use machine ... so, when you check it out, can machete compete wid machine?"... when pronounced appropriately (machete sounds more like ma-she-ate) and uttered with knowing, tonal certainty, the humble man's wisdom resonates with truth and significance ... it captures an entire polemic as explored in Stephanie Black's insightful 2001 documentary Life and Debt ... a socio-fiscal, musical representation of Jamaica in the heady seventies and the Developing World's relationship with the IMF and U.S. regional interests of the time ...

... while I highly recommend the film as essential viewing if you're going to inhabit the pages of Ackeelover Chronicles with me, my thoughts, as I sweated through some yardwork with my trusty weed-whacker in the Caribbean heat, were of a more mundane and literal nature ... one of those while-you-work contemplations, yet still inspired by the veracity of the quote from the film ...

... I ain't sayin' the grass is any greener on the other side but I was picturing in my mind a previous time when I enjoyed clearing overgrowth at my former domicile on B.C.'s temperate Sunshine Coast, wielding instead the aforementioned machete or cutlass ... scything readily through clustered dandelions and cabbagy ground-cover causing neighbors to scratch their heads at the rudimentary approach, even as they kept one nervous eye on the flashing blade ...

... in the Caribbean the cutlass is a time-honored and honorable extension of a worker's arm, just as the weed-whacker has become in richer nations ... my own, a Brasilian twenty-six incher, is always close at hand for all sorts of everyday tasks ... (yeh-yeh, I know how that sounds) ... but the sheer irony of this mirror experience, being in the tropics, handily racing through the yard with a Stihl Pro-Series FS-85R machine, was not lost on me ...

... just as there was an audience for my cutlass capers in Canada, so too here ... Australian visitors got a kick out of the pervasive islandwide use of the "whipper-snipper", to use an evocative Down Under term for the gas-powered tool sometimes unassumingly referred to as a "line-trimmer" ...

... figurative analysis of the disparity between machete and machine can be macro or micro, adding textural insight to your perception of geo-political economics ... Life and Debt draws from thoughtful sources and a liberated Jamaican perspective ... it's not always possible to achieve clear-cut conclusions with a subject so broad, still, I'm now able to testify to one conviction ... the stone-cold truth is, weed-snippin'-whipper-whackin' will save on time and labor ...

... but "alas," said the cutlass ... "it can't chop a coconut" ...