My article re “Damaging article about Grand Cayman” received a reply from Steven Knipp. Mr. Knipp is the journalist who wrote “The Story of the Rise and Fall of the Cayman Islands” in Highbrow Magazine. He didn’t like my piece because it was a response to his. I cannot publish his whole reply because it wasn’t addressed to me but to one of my colleagues who knows Mr. Knipp and (I will say this very quietly) is a friend of his. However, I am so delighted that he took time to tear me apart. I have permission to publish the parts of his letter that pertain to my article. Please read on.

STEVE: Amazingly – nearly half her copy is just very long excerpts from my piece! [Remember in junior high school, when you suddenly remembered on Sunday that you had to turn an 800 word book review in on Monday, what you did? You used 680 words quoted from the book.]

GEORGINA: As I was reporting on your article, of course I would quote a lot of words verbatim. I wanted to let our readers read for themselves exactly what you said and where the emphasis was.

STEVE: She writes rather like an angry 14 year old schoolgirl, but has no key point in the story, except to merely announce that the story is negative [duh!]. Interestingly, neither she, nor the guy who wrote the editorial, could come up with one single statement, or one single fact, or single quote, or single stat that was incorrect. That’s because there were none.

GEORGINA: I actually like being called a 14 year old schoolgirl, angry or not, especially at my age. So 14 year olds all write like me or only angry ones? Is that you being rude to 14 year olds or are you paying them a compliment? As for me and ‘the guy’ who wrote the editorial not saying any of your facts were incorrect it is impossible to check some of them when you name no names even to the persons who don’t live here anymore. ‘The guy’ is actually the Editor-in-Chief and the co-owner of iNews Cayman.

STEVE: But I did enjoy that old technique often used by lazy people who, if they can’t attack the logic and soundness of someone’s case they attack the person who makes it, or where the case is made.

GEORGINA: Ooh, Steve, you called me ‘lazy.’ I’ve been called worse so I’ll let that pass. So I write like a 14 year old but I use an ‘old’ technique? Hmm. As I said in my article I was attacking the one sided bias of yours.

STEVE: Since this article is not good PR for Cayman’s hedge fund industry, the writer must surely hate Cayman, yada, yada. I’ve been hearing this style of ** from the GOP since the 1970s: “Love it – unquestioningly — or leave it! As an American, I love America and think it is one of the best countries in the world, but it has serious problems, too, like racism and growing crony-capitalism. So by Georgina’s logic I should never write about this, exposing it so that it can be fixed? Grow up kid!

GEORGINA: Now I’m a kid again! I don’t know you Steve. I know you worked for another media house for just over a year here in Cayman. When I write an article I try to keep it balanced. Your article was slanted one way and one way only. To do as much damage as you could to our tiny Country when we are already trying to recover from a beating. We have no natural resources like most other countries and banking and tourism is our life blood. Bad press in a country like the USA doesn’t matter a jot. Bad press to us can affect every single person who resides here. When someone who has only lived here for twelve months (and has left), says he loves ‘almost everything about the place’ and quote: “except the sad refusal of so many people there to just simply admit that Cayman’s income was/is largely derived from very wealthy tax cheats, and the [highly paid] sycophants who serve them” that tells me you know absolutely nothing about the Cayman Islands and your ‘love’ should be left in the cupboard (or closet). You wasted your twelve months here, Steve. I have lived here almost half my life and I am the wrong side of sixty. I have family and friends here. I work with Caymanians, even the ones that you say “can continue trotting to church every Sunday”; and the “expat staffers from Maples, Citibank, et al, [who] can spend a Sunday afternoon painting the play room at the old folks home. You know, to show how decent they are, and how concerned they are for other people.”

I will not bother with the rest of the reply as it is more dull rhetoric of the same but Mr. Knipp does say he wrote a recent story that appeared in the inflight magazine of CAAC [Civil Aviation Administration of China] saying that “Cayman was a fabulous place to vacation, with great beaches, lovely climate and friendly people.” Has anyone read anything bad about a destination in an inflight magazine? Steve, darling, the CAAC want you to fly to the Cayman Islands. It wouldn’t have been published and you wouldn’t have received your pay cheque either.

I leave you with Steve’s final words of wisdom, but just to let him know: I don’t like eating cheesecake. They make me fat.

“CAAC magazine’s readership is 40 million. Yes, that’s 40 million. So if say, one percent of that readership someday decides to visit Cayman with their family, that will bring in more dollars to Cayman than Ms. Wilcox will have eaten cheese cakes in her life.”

If that happens we know who to thank. Aren’t the Chinese going to build our cruise ship terminal? Or is that on hold?