ISLAND life frequently resembles being aboard a permamently becalmed vessel. Progress is minimal. Sun-blistered ennui becomes all pervasive. The hours don't so much rush by as dawdle wearily toward the future with all of the exhausted enthusiasm of an AIG investor opening a dividend cheque. There's so little forward momentum there are times when Bermuda indeed appears as motionless as what the poet called a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

In an outrageous piece of symbolism no writer would dare employ, the Victorian lolliop of a freestanding clock outside the Phoenix, the clock all Bermudians consult to see what appointments they are late for in Hamilton, is broken. Again.

The clock's frozen hands are a too-pointed reminder that in Bermuda time sometimes appears to come to a complete standstill. All sense of urgency is lost. "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow" becomes a perfectly acceptable free translation of the island's motto Quo Fata Ferunt,

Placidity. Timidity. Expediency. All inform our reluctance to advance as a society at a pace any faster than that of an asthmatic Mobylette trying to negotiate Gibbs Hill. We lag behind on all manner of fronts where speed genuinely is of the essence. Or should be.

We shy away from reminding our Government of its duties and responsibilities to the people who empowered it even when its behaviour is manifestly corrupt, disingenous and out of control.

Pause for a moment and consider the increasingly tawdry scene. A politician's word is now deemed to be about as reliable as a fishnet condom in Bermuda; the current leadership delights in inciting racial division from above in the most transparently cynical and calculating fashion; the two-party Westminster political system we cling to, with its unyielding emphasis on irreconcilable strife, further Balkanises the population of this bi-racial community along ethnic lines.

Clearly a system so very open to abuse, so easily exploited as a wedge to prise Bermudians apart, so custom-tooled to foster excessive identification with a racial group rather than the community as a whole, is as superfluous and destructive to our needs in this dollhouse community as an encore appearance by Hurricane Fabian.

Yet those who make sensible appeals to both our common sense and sense of self-preservation go entirely ignored.

In recent weeks Michael Winfield, Julian Hall and Dr. Eva Hodgson have have all labelled the two-party system as a politicised form of ethnic gang warfare. They've all pointed out its inapplicability in the Bermuda context, the fact it acts like sand, not oil, in the workings of this island's socio-political machinery.

While providing a facade of democratic governance in Bermuda, in fact it reinforces in our institutions, our reflexes and our mentalities all of the worst tribalistic, absolutist and dogmatic impulses that divide the island's two communities.

It encourages both parties - and the communities they represent - to believe they have a monopoly on the truth, aggravating racial and social tensions and encouraging scornful intolerance for political adversaries and the views they advocate (even when said views happen to be dead right).

Look no further than poor John Barritt for a case in point.

The United Bermuda Party MP has spent years compiling to-do lists of sensible and pragmatic Parliamentary reforms. If introduced here they would make the two-party system somewhat more palatable by vastly reducing friction in the mechanisms of Bermudian politics, requiring the Government and Opposition to work more closely together.

His recommendations, well-intended, workable, capable of fostering interdependence and mutual tolerance even while reducing the polarising "we" and "they" tensions that currently divide us politically and as communities, have all been ignored.

They haven't been the subjects of critical scrutiny in Parliamentary debate. They haven't been discussed and then rejected in the arena of public opinion. They have simply been ignored.

Which is the way the two parties much prefer it.

The UBP and the Progressive Labour Party are the only beneficiaries of Bermudians' ongoing inability to transcend their politically primitive gang loyalties.

Keeping Bermudians enslaved to dogmas and party affiliations that go largely unquestioned keeps both of them in business. Encouraging the notion that irreconcilable strife is a permanent feature in our society - even though to argue that case straight-faced requires a fair degree of barrel-scraping and fantasising - is the chief self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating obstacle to bringing about meaningful change in our corrupt political institutions.

Chiefly concerned with trolling for the spoils of office rather than discharging their responsibilities, fostering more cooperative working arrangements in Parliament tops no politician's agenda except for Mr. Barritt's.

And while the system might be more perfect if Mr. Barritt's recommendations were adopted, it would still remain very far from perfect.

Mr. Barritt operates on the assumption that modifying the Westminster system as currently constituted in Bermuda is sufficient for our requirements. It isn't. The two-party system is only ever going to exacerbate fissures in our society.

It should be scrapped and replaced by the sort of power-sharing arrangement that tamped down 400-year-old sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland in less than a decade.

By ensuring the two communities administer that British province together in a permanent coalition arrangement rather than remain at permanent political cross-purposes as is the essential prerequisite of the Westminster system, the guns finally fell silent and conciliation based on consensus replaced conflict.

The ramifications of our mental laziness, of the fact our survival instincts sometimes seem to be as quick-frozen as those of millennia-old mammoths dug up from the Alaskan tundra, are evident not just in our political arrangements but across the community.

We hesitate to diversify our economic base even though our decades'-long dependence on the financial services sector increasingly resembles Horseshoe Bay when the first high tide comes in after the annual sandcastle exhibition: all of those impossibly graceful, intricately sculpted structures that looked like permanent additions to our foreshore are disintegrating, being swept away right before our eyes.

We fail to absorb the disiherited, the alienated and the injured into the broader community and add to their numbers every year by maintaining schools that clearly do not provide all Bermudians with equality of opportunity.

Bermuda, a supposedly sophisticated jursidiction that loudly trumpets its commitment to the theory of equality before the law repeatedly backslides when it comes to ensuring equal opportunity in practice. We have passed legislation prohibiting discrimination in every imaginable aspect of daily life and enshrined the full panoply of human rights rights in our laws - except as they might apply to those apparently sub-human gays in our midst.

There's a particularly picturesque term coroners sometimes still employ on death certificates. A severe insult to the brain refers to a death brought on as a consequence of an alcohol-induced coma. It's only a short metaphorical stagger from there to the ongoing self-destructive patterns of behaviour that continue to inflict severe insults on the entire Bermudian body. Insults that may soon make it immaterial if the Reid Street clock is ever fixed. After all, a community that has finally succumbed to its self-inflicted injuries has no more interest in the passage of time than a dead man. - Tim Hodgson