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So Brooke, played by an actress named Katherine Kelly Lang, is trying to reconcile with a character whose life she had been repeatedly screwing up since whenever. Lacy, apparently the name of the other character, is having none of it. Much tension ensues, stretched across a number of commercial breaks. Now this other character is in a coma. I'm getting some of this from my uncle's maid, a young Jamaican woman in he early twenties who watches the Bold and the Beautiful with the faithfulness and careful attention of the drama-starved. I didn't mention that Brooke/ Katherine Kelly Lang is a white woman somewhere in her forties nor that my uncle's domestic engineer is not alone, that the Bold and the Beautiful commands enough of a slave-audience to be put up in our prime time, against the other TV station's evening news.

There are four daily soap operas on Jamaican TV. Three American daytime soaps that are shown at least five days a week, two of them twice a day, and one South African soap shown four times a week. Having the South African show in there at all reeks of "black roots" political correctness, sort of a counter-balance to all the pale-skin and straight hair, the way you eat your liver so that you'll get some Jell-O for dessert. The people in the mixed-but-mostly-black South African soap (called "Generations") are not good-looking for the most part and there is almost no sex.

So what is it about blond actresses and American money that so enthralls Jamaicans of all ages? Yes, it's a stupid question, but it shouldn't be. You can buy imported hair in the supermarket now, straight hair. Skin bleaching creams are sold openly in every market I've been in (I can get some for you nest Tuesday).

Yes, it's true that Jamaicans now dress like African-Americans in that Hip-Hoppery is everywhere, nearly every man under thirty has cornrows (canerows down here) and some manifestation of bling on his person. Low-income Jamaicans (most of us) are very conscious of skin color and eager, perhaps even desperate, to identify with apparently successful working-class and sub-working-class African-Americana But there's something that 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, and Nas can't do, they can't make us feel empathy. They can make us feel comfortable with our own lust and greed and desire for (violent) revenge, but they can't touch us, make us feel pity or triumph because we think we know everything about them and have invested our own identities in theirs. Okay, yes, maybe for the fans who fight over hotel garbage bags for possible treasures of used condoms or half-eaten food, but not for the rest of us.

The kind of emotional expression to be found in American soap operas, crying, anguish, weakness, doesn't exist in a culturally acceptable form for Jamaicans. Banal American TV drama is both intellectually and culturally easy to swallow here because the weepy people are all white and appeal to us, the way cute children from next door seem preferable to our own even if they are worse behaved. That kind of thing is acceptable for white people. If 50 Cent told us how he wept when his baby-mother left him and took their five kids, he would get slapped and called a bitch, it doesn't matter if we know what he's talking about.

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