Radio Sistema Tropical Cardinal Pointsstories.diegoazeta.org/resources/PDF_files/Azeta-RST-CP-01-CP.pdfCardinal Points DiegoAzeta.org 2 case, the name is “Teriaki” while the second

Radio Sistema TropicalCardinal Points

Diego Azeta

Posted 18 March 2016 ※ Edited 17 May 2018Copyright © 2016, 2018 Diego Azeta ※ All Rights Reserved ※ Derechos Reservados

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WELCOME, FRIENDS, to the première broadcast of Cardinal Points, RadioSistema Tropical’s English programme on geopolitical affairs. I am ShahrazadBoyko, global correspondent at Radio Sistema Tropical. Joining me is TeriakiTeiwaki, our newly appointed host for Cardinal Points. Mr Teiwaki, hello andwelcome to Radio Sistema Tropical, to Cardinal Points, and to the Caribbean.

Teriaki Teiwaki: Thank you, Ms Boyko. I am very pleased to be here.

Shahrazad Boyko: Since you will be hosting Cardinal Points, we would like todevote this first broadcast to introduce the host to our audience. We think ourlisteners would welcome the opportunity to make your acquaintance.

TT: I hope they don’t find the interview boring.

SB: Oh, I have a feeling they won’t, sir, for your background is interesting andcolourful, and your insight on international relations is unique.

TT: Thank you, but you are too generous.

SB: Thank you, sir. Now, you hail from a charmingly picturesque nation, theRepublic of Kiribati. (A minor aside for our listeners: the name is pronouncedKEE-ree-bas but spelled Ki-ri-ba-ti. The phoneme s is written as ti in Kiribati.There is no symbol for the letter s in the Kiribati alphabet.) Mr Teiwaki, wouldyou like to share with us your experiences about your home country?

TT: It will be my pleasure. To begin with, I should explain the nature of ournames. In my country, we do not use surnames as such. Instead, we append toour given name the name of our father to facilitate identification. Thus in my

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case, the name is “Teriaki” while the second appellation distinguishes me fromother namesakes as the son of Teiwaki. My father, in turn, is Teiwaki, the sonof Teitikai, and so on. Surnames, cross-generational family names, do not existin the Kiribati culture. A person’s name is properly only one, their given name.So please feel free to call me Teriaki, Shahrazad.

SB: Very well … Teriaki. Single names were also the tradition in Persia untilearly last century. A bit of heritage there from the maternal side of my family.

T: That was the custom everywhere in olden times. In small societies, sparselypopulated, people knew just about everyone on personal terms. Surnames wereof little relevance. That is still the case in local Micronesian communities.

S: Is the leading syllable «Te» in your family’s names important?

T: No. That is due to personal choices in naming. Kiribati names make ampleuse of all thirteen letters of our alphabet.

S: Thirteen letters!

T: A remarkably efficient abecedarium, I’ve heard say. One must embrace therigours of efficiency to traverse the Pacific in outrigger canoes. That indeliblymarks a people’s world view. The Romans, on the other hand, with their punyMare Nostrum conceit, never got a handle on optimization. Hard to visualizewith their unwieldy numerals, I must say, but their reliance on smiting to solveevery problem made things worse. As a result, Rome wound up with a largeralphabet than necessary along with a culture prone to profligacy and bullying,leading to a haughty and decadent mindset. Everything was done on a gaudy,monumental scale. Ostentatious Rome: self-indulgent, vainglorious, avaricious,gladiatorial, unsustainable. The fall was only a matter of time.

S: Is the collapse of civilizations inevitable, in your view?

T: Under conditions of systemic suboptimality in a dynamic environment, it isa mathematical certainty, yes. Survival is reserved for the fittest. Beware thevanity of exceptionalism, for arrogance breeds delusion which brings downfall.


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S: It appears that the Romans staved off downfall by some twelve centuries byappropriating what the Greeks had finely wrought: their entire culture.

T: The Greeks were no better, though. They snatched their alphabet from thePhoenicians instead of designing their own. Mesopotamians had done just finewith their wedged cuneiform script. Egyptians did so as well with magnificentnative hieroglyphs. But not the Greeks. No originality. Just grab what you can.Europeans are the pits. Terrible mentality. What they did develop on their ownand knew perfectly well how to do was wage brutal wars and plunder.

S: But the Greeks were no Vikings. They gave the world Western philosophy.

T: Certain Greeks conceived Western philosophy, a select few, working purelyas individuals. Collectively, however —as societies— the Greeks were just asinsufferable as any other Eurotroglodyte scoundrel. See what the rascals did toSocrates. And those were the supposedly enlightened Athenians!

S: Are we not being a tad too harsh on the Europeans?

T: Was Leopold not a “tad too harsh” on the Congolese? To name but one ofcountless instances strewn about throughout European history. And that from atame and militarily insignificant country, no less. The answer to your questionis no, not at all. History shows that Europeans have grown abominably worsein their belligerence through the ages. They —and here I include their overseasprogeny— kill, maim, ravage, and subjugate far more people now, in moderntimes, than they ever did in the past. Often for no apparent reason. “Collateraldamage”, they call it, that barbarous euphemism in vogue nowadays. Rubbish!Innocent civilians have always been considered perfectly acceptable targets inwhat these murderers callously refer to as “psychological warfare”, aggressionconducted not for purposes of defence but for the projection of brutish power.They may call it psychological but psychopathic is the correct term. Attila wasbut a babe in comparison with these Euroterrorist nation-states. These are thecruel savages who decimated the indigenous Americans of two continents andinstituted inhumane slavery based on race, far and away the two gravest crimesagainst humanity ever. No other people have wreaked so much torment, death,


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and destruction on their fellow man. The Anglo-led Europeans —the West—are the scourge of humanity, Shahrazad, the Black Plague of the Earth. Ordersof magnitude worse than Daesh.

S: Goodness!

T: No, badness. No other coalition of ethnicities has racked up such a vicious,bloodthirsty record. Ten to fifteen million souls slaughtered by the Butcher ofCongo; four million Vietnamese annihilated simply for seeking their nationalindependence; six million, fellow-neighbour, European Jews—

S: That was Hitler.

T: What was he, Chinese? What about the rabid collaborators who carried outthe ghastly work of the SS throughout the continent? Europeans attribute thoseatrocities to their forebears, but their evil cultural outlook remains unchanged.

S: Let’s talk about space for a while. How large is Kiribati?

T: Kiribati is an island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, straddlingthe equator and the antimeridian, the longitudinal marker for the InternationalDate Line. It comprises 33 islands —32 atolls and one raised coral isle— witha total land area of 726 square kilometres scattered across 3.5 million squarekilometres of open ocean. To put that in perspective, the breadth of Kiribati iscomparable to that of the continental United States.

S: Not the typical geography of your everyday country.

T: A tad different, yes. I come from Christmas Island, in Kiribati, Kiritimati.Sounds almost the same as in English.

S: Sure does indeed.

T: Kiritimati has only 388 square kilometres of land, lagoons excluded. Yetthat is enough to make it the largest atoll in the world in terms of land area.Kiritimati has over half of the land area of the entire nation of Kiribati.

S: That puts Kiritimati in a position of prominence, does it not?


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T: Surprisingly, no. The prominent place is South Tarawa, the capital. Theyhave nine times the population we do on not quite sixteen square kilometres ofland. Kiritimati did enjoy certain prominence for some time. Thankfully, thosedays of dubious prominence are over.

S: When were those days, World War II?

T: No, Tarawa suffered the agonies of World War II, first under the Japaneseoccupation and later with the apocalyptic American invasion. A horrific battletook place there, with further encounters in Makin, Butaritari, and Abemamaatolls, all in the Gilbert Islands. Then came the nuclear bombs tests, initially bythe British, followed by the Americans. Kiritimati was occupied twice by theirmilitaries. But we, the native inhabitants, were not always evacuated when testswere conducted. That was the case with the so-called low-power bombs.

S: Were those bombs any safer?

T: As safe as any other thermonuclear weapon. They were hydrogen bombs.

S: Oh, my! But they dropped those bombs on far-off islands, right?

T: No. They were detonated high above Kiritimati or darn close to shore.

S: What!

T: The nearest islands, Tabuaeran and Malden, which are actually hundreds ofkilometres away, served as recording stations. Three bombs were first testedaround Malden but Kiritimati saw the rest of the action. You would think theywould have kept bombing at Malden. The isle is uninhabited. Think again.

S: Don’t tell me they wanted to test the effects of the bombs on people.

T: Very well, I shall not. I remember the terrifying flashes; the thermal wavesrushing over your back as you lay prone, cleaving to dear ground, followed bythe thunderous blast waves; then looking up at the roiling mushroom clouds,potently billowing towards the stratosphere. Great fun for a kid, must admit.

S: They didn’t take special precautions with the children?


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T: Well, first they had to catch you. I knew the terrain well.

S: But … didn’t they realise the dangers to the population?

T: Of course they did. By then ―the late fifties and early sixties― everybodyknew of the dangers involved. Everybody except us islanders. But that is whythe Anglos occupied our peaceful paradise, to avoid contaminating their landsand exposing their populations to the radiation. Do you think they would havedone this on the English countryside or over Long Island?

S: How could they possibly do this?

T: Europeans, Shahrazad. The Americans invented a fabulous excuse for thesethings: national security. It’s a licence to do whatever you want with no risk of«post-traumatic moral qualms» to haunt you. Works like a charm. Essentially,it serves as a political deity, a golden calf. “Obey, minions!” Terribly effective.Things individuals would never do on their own are dutifully carried out whenordered by the «State». And what is the state, but a clique of amoral politicos?Correction, a stream of amoral politicos, for the state has temporal continuity.Stanley Milgram examined this authority-figure psychological phenomenon inthe laboratory and obtained the same shocking results. Pardon the pun.

S: Might this be the domestic counterpart of psychological warfare?

T: Definitely, indoctrinating your minions and conditioning them to obey yourcommands, whether dictated or implied. It’s a Skinnerian scheme used by thesinister warmongers to maintain the hyper-bloated military-industrial complexhyper-bloated in an era when otherwise there would be world peace.

S: It always boils down to money.

T: Blood money for the purveyors, but bloody power for the acquisitors. Moreso in the Anglo-European domain. Non-Westerners tend to consider additionalcriteria in their political decision making, in varying degrees. Not the Euros,much less the Anglos. Strictly one-track minds. Power is the sole objective.

S: But that contravenes their liberal principles and much touted values.


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T: In politics, at the nation-state level, principles and values are but diversions,cheap rhetoric to beguile the populace. Nothing overrides power. Machiavellialready pointed that out. But that insatiable lust for power is an Achilles heel,for it renders the Anglo-Europeans’ behaviour predictable. An astute adversarywill take that into account when formulating strategy. As General Võ NguyênGiáp did when defending his small, colonially victimized country. Twice.

S: Strategies to wage still more wars?

T: Not necessarily. Preponderance can be achieved by other means. One canbring down a goliath financially, say, or outperform the standard-bearer with abetter educated citizenry. The key is to choose the right goal, not the one beingsought by the hegemon. For if the hare is in a frenzy beating ploughshares intoswords, the tortoise is bound to win any other race of her choosing.

S: Will the minions and the hyper-bloated ever learn?

T: No. Minions care not a whit, and the hyper-bloated, being ideology-bound,can’t think rationally. History confirms this for both the military and civilians.Militarists are political incompetents in civil life: mulish, rigid, and autocratic.They cannot internalize democratic values and principles. Behold Caesar.

S: Destroyed himself and the republic.

T: Exactly. The same holds for civilian ideologues. Ideology fanatics. Or as Icall them, idiots. The bastards are not worth more than two syllables.

S: So there is no hope then?

T: That depends on the size of the fraction of the population that still thinks,that can exercise sound judgement. When confronting adverse circumstances,that fraction can grow to be quite large. Ordinarily, it’s much too small. If thisportion of the population can attain critical mass —obtain sufficient influenceover the political power apparatus, as the business oligarchs have done— thenthere is the possibility of achieving systemic change in the culture, of makingtrue societal progress, advances that benefit all humanity. Which is the way to


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protect civilizations from internal collapse. But if the necessary changes to thecultural framework are not worked out and implemented, that culture is on itsway to its downfall. Possibly accompanied by fallout, in exceptional cases.

S: You put it in so studiously precise terms.

T: Systems are conceptually precise; that is why they are useful. They allow usto see farther clearly. However, systems can also be intrinsically complex; theintricacies of real-world problems are boundless. System complexity can easilyoverwhelm the intellect. The precision I refer to is that systems are logicallystructured. They are coherent and can be rationally understood even when theentities and processes they model are mathematically intractable.

S: What can be done when the mathematics become intractable?

T: Simulate the system on a computer with a model. The techniques of systemdynamics and agent-based simulation, to name only two methodologies, yieldexcellent prognoses of a modelled system’s behaviour. One may not find whatis called a “mathematically closed-form solution” to the problem —a definitiveanswer in the form of a set of analytical equations— but a picture of probablesystem behaviour can be highly illuminating. And with many a picture one canoften derive statistically valid conclusions. Good enough for government work.

S: What if the problem is not amenable to computation?

T: Mathematics is the science of patterns, not numbers, while computation isthe science of systematically manipulating symbols. Numbers are symbols andsymbols form patterns. If something instantiates a logical structure, then it canbe described by mathematics and manipulated by computers. Computers havecome up with original proofs for theorems in mathematics and have trouncedgrand masters in chess championships. Those are symbolic tasks, activities wedon’t usually think of as being numerical. Yet they were successfully executedby computers. If a task is logically grounded, a programmable computer canprocedurally simulate it. That, in a nutshell, is the Church-Turing Thesis.

S: Interesting. Please tell us more about your philosophy of systems.


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T: Sure. A system is a theoretical construct, an abstraction that allows one tograsp the structure and functions of a collection of interacting elements. Thereare two basic ways to do that: analysis and design. The key to superior systemsanalysis is the identification of feedback loops. This is when the outputs of asystem, both intended and inadvertent, affect its subsequent performance. Inconcrete terms, systems are a way of approaching a problem or phenomenonto better understand its dynamics. If you can isolate and analyze the feedbacksin a system, then you are in a position to control the system through improvedsystem design. Which is much better than having the system control you.

S: Point well taken. However —and correct me if I’m wrong— it seems thatsystems exist only in the mind.

T: Absolutely. Systems are purely cognitive devices, epistemic filters, ways oflooking at the world. There are no systems “out there” in the physical world.There exist only matter and energy in a variety of combinations subject to fourforces manifested through fields. And even that is a systemic representation ofreality. There’s also some people talking a lot of nonsense. Politicians, mostly.

S: Who by and large do not think in terms of systems.

T: Precisely. They think in terms of politics, which means they are hopelesslystuck in the past. Like the Greeks and Romans, doing all sorts of dumb stuff.A forward-looking politician is a rarity. That is why your ordinary politicianmust be managed. Politicians are the people’s agents, not their bosses. Theyare elected to work on behalf of the people, to promote the commonweal, notthe special interests of the privileged. That is the cornerstone of democracy.

S: It remains a radical principle. How can people manage their politicians?

T: By means of citizen initiatives: plebiscites and referenda. In particular, byrecall elections. The people must be able to throw the bums out at any time,including bureaucratic appointees of every stripe. Having to wait for scheduledelections is not a solution because of the long delays. Effective system controlis impossible with long delays, a fact well known to control engineers and wily


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politicos. If the citizenry cannot exert timely control over their political affairs,they simply don’t have a democracy. Note that citizen initiatives are the crucialfeedback mechanism missing in national political systems almost everywhere.No wonder there is so much sleaze, corruption, and incompetence in politics.Not to mention abuse of power and despotism. Perhaps we should bring backthe guillotine. Dang! My bad. Apologies. History shows that such quickie fixesfail to work in the long run. Besides, they are awfully messy.

S: What if the despot murders his people?

T: Then they should blow his brains out. There are limits, you know.

S: Not very Christianlike.

T: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.

S: I’m not so sure that’s what he meant.

T: The statement is internally consistent and logically complete.

S: You have applied systems concepts to the analysis of intercultural problemsfor transnational corporations, national governments, and a number of UnitedNations organisms. How did you break into the field of cultural systems? Is itsomething one picks up when propelling outrigger canoes?

T: Good one! No, unfortunately, nothing that dashing. In essence, you just sitdown and read and get some practice solving problems. Just like anything else,really. Doing so in a formal academic programme makes it more efficient, forsure. Problem is, there are exceedingly few programmes in systems science.

S: They had such a programme in Kiritimati?

T: In the fifties? No way! We didn’t even have a schoolhouse. Not all thatmany kids then. Nor funds for education. No funds for anything. The entirepopulation was some three hundred-odd islanders and four thousand military.A British chaplain took to teaching the locals English in a mess tent. We allknew a little already, but I learned a great deal.


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S: How old were you then?

T: Mm, six. Six to eight. You pick up languages fast when young.

S: Tell me about it. What else did the chaplain teach?

T: Arithmetic, up to multiplication and division.

S: The works. Did you like arithmetic?

T: Loved it. Perfectly straightforward. I was the top student.

S: I can imagine.

T: Noticing my interest, the chaplain took me to the comms centre, anotherrather large tent. Knowing the officer in charge, he arranged for me to listen inon nonclassified communications: weather reports, routine messages, news andsport summaries from Britain… I was delighted with the transmissions and itevidently showed, for the officer assigned me to monitor civilian broadcasts ona standby shortwave receiver they hardly ever used. I was overjoyed with my“assignment” and spent all of my free time listening to international radio.

S: What competing activities limited your free time?

T: Helping out with domestic chores, such as cleaning and sun-drying fish andgathering coconuts to make copra. I was too young to row out and fish withmy father so I spent mornings working at home, when needed, then afternoonsand evenings on the radio. I monitored the BBC, Radio Nederland, Australiaand New Zealand radio, Radio Moscow, the French Radio Outre-Mer, and thelow-powered “tropicals” from Latin America: local stations that at night camein clearly. Honolulu also came in crisply at night on the medium-wave band.Even Alaska, occasionally. Through shortwave listening I not only polished myEnglish but learned French, Spanish, and some Dutch and Indonesian as well.

S: Amazing. All that on your own?

T: Mostly. The chaplain tutored me in reading and writing —in English, ofcourse— but the other languages I learned on my own. When the bombs tests


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were over and the British were about to decamp, the officer declared the radioset, the headphones I’d used, and a hand-crank generator with attached batterypack, obsolete equipment and released them to me for disposal.

S: Aww!

T: Very fine fellows, Lieutenant Marley and Chaplain Watson.

S: How did you learn to read and write in the other languages?

T: That happened during the American occupation. And only for Spanish andFrench. The stroke of good fortune was that the Americans had brought alonga couple of hefty dictionaries: an English-Spanish/Spanish-English volume andan English-French/French-English tome. Each dictionary featured front matterthat covered their respective foreign-language grammars and some usage. Thatand a shortwave receiver can turn a kid into a polyglot.

S: A bright kid into a polyglot.

T: Well, a determined kid.

S: Fair enough. No written Dutch or Indonesian?

T: Alas, no, much to my chagrin and loss. Zo is het leven. Sialan!

S: So you had no formal schooling.

T: Not until university. In 1968, the University of the South Pacific opened inFiji. I was admitted to the first class. I said goodbye to my family with muchsadness because I knew it would be years before I saw them again. Fiji is about3500 kilometres distant from Kiritimati. There is now a weekly flight betweenthe islands. Progress.

S: Indeed. Was this your first experience away from home?

T: Yes. I was short of eighteen when admitted, but still a kid at heart.

S: Tell us about USP.


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T: A most wonderful experience, totally new to me. But I ran smack into awall with mathematics, the powerful, advanced kind. The professor started outby talking about the different classes of numbers. I had always been under theimpression that there were only plain old numbers, just one kind. Not so. Theodd numbers caused my first trauma. I racked my brains trying to figure outwhat was odd about certain numbers. They all seemed perfectly normal to me.A bit later he mentioned the real numbers. Weren’t they all real? I fretted. Ah,maybe the unreal ones were the “odd” kind. To illustrate the need for the realnumbers, the professor went on, we need only consider the irrational numbers.The what? For example, he said, take the square root of two, which pops up inthe hypotenuse of the isosceles right triangle with sides of length one. Whatthe hell is this guy talking about? I had no idea that geometry even existed, soyou can imagine my predicament.

S: Sorry to laugh, but that anecdote was marvellously humorous. You neededto take remedial maths.

T: That was remedial maths. Needless to say, I had to drop the course right atthe start. Fortunately, I was able to add an introductory survey course in socialscience. The professor was a cultural anthropologist and although she coveredall fields as required, her exposition of anthropology was absolutely brilliant.That set my academic compass at the get-go.

S: So your subject was anthropology.

T: No. Anthro was not offered as a subject. The uni was brand new. I took ageneral education degree, without “major”, which, believe me, I sorely needed.

S: How did you resolve your impasse with maths?

T: I fell back on what had worked for me before: self-reliance. I scurried tothe library to check out some books on the subject. The inchoate library hadvery few books. But I found two, donated by faculty members, that turned outto be heaven-sent. One was Mathematician’s Delight by W.W. Sawyer. Thatwonderful book taught me what maths is really all about. It should be read by


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anyone who finds maths impenetrable. The other book opened up a whole newpanorama for me: Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. It was there that I discoveredsystems and feedback, along with information, communication, and systemscontrol. With that book it became clear that I had quite a bit of maths ahead ofme to learn. But that came later.

S: How did that come about?

T: On my last semester, I interviewed with a consultancy that had come toUSP to recruit graduates for several cultural assessment research studies theywere doing in Oceania on behalf of the United Nations Committee of 24, alsoknown as the Special Committee on Decolonization. The firm was British butstationed in Hong Kong. For a kid from Kiritimati, Hong Kong was a veritableLondon, Paris or New York: the big time! I got the job and soon was on boarda couple of BOAC jetliners on my way to the Fragrant Harbour. My first timeflying. An unforgettable experience. Took two Vickers VC10s, one from Fijito Sydney and another one to Hong Kong via Darwin. I was most impressed.That was a very fine aircraft, smooth in flight and incredibly quiet: the fourengines were mounted on the tail.

S: A fitting graduation present. What did your job entail?

T: Research assistants did thorough fact checking of field reports; compilationof ethnographic and economic data; edited participant interviews, observationnotebooks, and field reports for overall consistency; validated conclusions; andlent strong credibility to the project by virtue of being native Pacific islanders:our names duly appeared on all client reports. I received a first-rate, hands-onlearning experience on cultural systems analysis through my work in the firm’smultiple engagements.

S: A substitute for an academic degree in anthropology, possibly?

T: A practical, hands-on complement. More like an internship. I remedied mylack of formal studies in anthropology by registering part-time for courses atthe University of Hong Kong. The firm paid for up to two regular courses per


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semester for each of us. “An educated assistant is a valuable assistant”, theyrighteously maintained. The expense was reimbursed by the UN, of course.

S: What courses did you take?

T: In anthro, one: Introduction to Anthropology. That’s what they had. I alsotook Culture and Society, but that was a hybrid of anthro and sociology. It wasa standard sociology department, so the offerings in anthro were minimal. Butthe department chair was Professor Murray Groves, a social anthropologist bytraining and an experienced researcher of the Motu of Papua New Guinea. Hewas my professor for both courses. Outstanding. I also read Marvin Harris’snow classic text, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, on my own.

S: Naturally.

T: To this day, that is the extent of my formal education in anthropology.

S: For you, that was more than enough. What other courses did you take?

T: The entire sequence of mathematics for engineering: college algebra andtrig, calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, probability, and statistics. Ialso took Fortran IV programming and formal and philosophical logic.

S: Good heavens! How were you able to deal with all that?

T: Oh, back at USP, after reading Sawyer, I repeated the maths course. Hadto drop it once more but this time I lasted longer. The professor suggested Iread An Introduction to Mathematics by A.N. Whitehead. He graciously lentme his copy. Did that and returned for a third attempt. This time I receivedpersonal coaching from Professor Gupta, who admired my tenacity, he oncesaid. Magnificent expositor. Passed the course with flying colours.

S: Admirable.

T: Thank you. To my surprise, I ran into a bit of trouble getting the first ofthe engineering maths courses approved. Our supervisor insisted all courseshad to be in anthropology. That is not what we were told in the interviews, I


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said; we can register for any courses we deem useful. The supervisor repliedthat the interviewers were mistaken. So I talked to the executive director. Hesaid it was fine for me to do maths and asked his secretary to sign off on theauthorization for HKU on his behalf. Man, was the supervisor ever crossed!

S: Uh-oh.

T: I could not understand at the time the supervisor’s attitude. And in part, Istill don’t. That was my first experience with bureaucratic intrigues. It was notthe last. People can be so inexplicably stupid in their organizational behaviour.The bloke was gone from the firm in a matter of months.

S: Maybe this is irrelevant, but was the supervisor a fellow Pacific islander?

T: No, he was Brit. But being British is no excuse for dishonesty.

S: I’m sorry?

T: A universal truism. Are you British?

S: Yes I am.

T: Good for you. Stiff upper lip.

S: Hmph! … Who took over the position of supervisor?

T: It was left vacant for some time. Eventually I was promoted to the slot.

S: I see. How long were you with the firm?

T: About three years. In 1975, I was invited to join the Committee of 24 atthe UN headquarters as a research associate. Hit the big time, momma! BigApple, here I come!

S: I can feel your thrill. Teriaki, I’m afraid we’ve run out of time, so we’ll haveto leave it there. However, our producer informs me that she would like tocontinue the interview at a later time, if that is all right with you.

T: Why, certainly. I’d be happy to do so.


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S: Wonderful. And to our listeners, thank you for joining us at Radio SistemaTropical. Cardinal Points will return next week at its regularly scheduled timeswith Mr Teriaki as your permanent host. Podcasts are, as always, available atSistema Tropical’s website. I am Shahrazad Boyko signing off and wishing youa pleasant morning, afternoon, evening or night, wherever in the world youmay happen to be.

This is Radio Sistema Tropical, the Antillean world broadcasting system.

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Radio Sistema Tropical Cardinal Pointsstories.diegoazeta.org/resources/PDF_files/Azeta-RST-CP-01-CP.pdfCardinal Points DiegoAzeta.org 2 case, the name is “Teriaki” while the second