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The Sonic Architects of a New Babel 143

the people shitting on the country, and the prime minister screwing the
working-class, the cabinet lays fast asleep, so the country has nowhere to
turn to. That, Francio, is politics on this island.
The Shadow feeds upon these sentiments on and off the air. Five days a
week on the popular PJD2 radio station he informs SXMers that they
should understand themselves as Rastafari individuals, meaning persons
containing a relatively independent Self and a personal God and Devil.
These two opposed forces—a brilliant illustration of the panhuman ten-
dency of articulating personal identity to transcendental cosmologies—are
reconfigured as our inner guides that we can’t control and who we should
listen to in order to be successful in life. Sometimes our personal God is
right, but at other times we should heed the advice of our Devil and employ
cunning against our fellow human beings. If everyone were to pay atten-
tion to these inner guides, political and religious leaders who cause us to
misrecognize our common human identity would not dupe us. The
Shadow believes in universality, and reminiscent of Bernard de Mandeville’s
(1924[1732]) grumbling beehive metaphor, he avers that if everyone lives
his or her individuality to the fullest SXM would be a sound society.
Private vices, public virtues.
Revolution against Babylon, the Rastafari term for global capitalism,
was an internal one. It did not entail dismantling the capitalist system or
redistributing wealth. Neither did it entail having a strong state regulate
the movement of capital. All it entailed was recognizing one’s personal
God and Devil, what tonight the Shadow synthesizes as Conscience. All
the rest are abstractions that “the One Love People” who reside on the
island have no time for.

How Christ and Capital Met and
Together Created Babel

This is the image of SXM the tourists came looking for, and also the way
SXMers like to see themselves. CNN events—men and women killing
men and women in the name of a Holy Nation and a Holy Book, or fight-
ing against the injustices brought on by big business—takes place else-
where. Not here. Not on SXM. Here tourists come face to face with, and
aurally encounter a symbolic tower of Babel.
Now according to Jewish-Christian lore, as creolized in the Caribbean
setting, the world became multilingual and multicultural after Babel. Babel
signaled the wars and misrecognitions of common humanity recorded in