Unsubful. Ungroupthink. Undoublespeak
We were woken from a dream…the golden wheat fields of the Ukraine stretched out across the steppe; we bumped along the rutted road, the family’s belongings lurching in the rickety cart. We were leaving. The Stalinist purges had begun.
Waking at 3 am after three weeks of hibernation like some mutant chrysalis, dangling from a branch of a tree in some jungle, bursting with mixed metaphors wondering whether we should, after all, not just go back to sleep and dangle some more.
Because even as the two massacres rapidly recede like roadkill in our collective rear view mirror, this so called War of the Flea is taking its toll. It’s the waiting. Amidst this lull, tedious questions encircle us. Where? When? Whom? How many? Each day of waiting we perspire a little more.
But wait we are told to look on the bright side because of the “awesome” co-operation among the stakeholders culminating in “the appointment of the six (6) Constitutional Commissions…within 90 days”. Those 24 victims did not die in vain. Four for each commission.
However, still infected by this threat to their authority, the body politic writhes and thrashes. Its feverish propaganda units are in overdrive, excreting torrents of bilious corrosive prolefeed onto the encrusted citizens. The Chronic letter pages are a simulacrum of George Orwell’s Two Minute Hate, a daily ritualized rage against an imaginary army of Emmanuel Goldsteins – anyone who does not agree, anyone who dares to question, anyone not for us – “a monstrous machine running without oil” that grinds away at good people’s reputations.
Meanwhile the people are served up cardboard hotels to be built on state land, whose investors they are not permitted to know; the new Guysuco plant is hailed by cane worker Comrade Rohan Singh who writes from Corriverton “to praise the government for its foresight in setting up this modern sugar factory.” Oh just say it, Worker No 34932 from the Ministry of Truth, the factory is doubleplusgood.
The Chronic editorials even presume to speak for the people: To wit Monday’s was fit to drone through the telescreens of grey London suburbia: “Guyanese view with satisfaction, efforts by the government to lower some food prices …The people have expressed delight …The people are satisfied…The people are aware.. Guyanese consumers have…welcomed…. Guyanese are satisfied that the government is doing all in its power to help in every way possible to lower the cost of living…” How Orwellian that last sentence given that the Ministry of Plenty managed to extract out of Guyanese an extra $11B in VAT than it projected for 2007. That is an extra $22,000 for each of the country’s 500,000 adults. The people are deeply satisfied.
Why, the Chronic can’t even get the weather right. Warned via the front page of “high intensity rainfall” last Wednesday, the people enjoyed glorious sunshine…but wait who are we to question? War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Sun is Rain. Comrades stand for the morning recital of the newspaper’s anthem:
Oh to work in the Land of the Chronic
Where facts are treated with fiction’s tonic
A utopian dystopia where every day
A new drainage project is underway
Sugar production is up 75 percent
(According to our measurements)
Invisible investors come and go
Talking about the wonders of Go
Invest; each ministry has achieved its goal
And every seminar a great success.
Where every child is improving
And if they aren’t, what a shame
It’s you bloody parents who are to blame
It’s a political Mills and Boon
Where the President speaks and the people swoon
And the PNCR is to blame
For
Absolutely
Every
Thing.
Except for the flooding.
According to the infallible Geena
That’s the old culprit La Nina
You can sit down now…The independent media furiously shakes its scrabble bag of words, hammering out shining, often breathtaking editorials, loaded with eloquent reason, but which cannot touch those they write of.
The unmentionable rag, the official pornographer of body parts, wallows in the blood of the ghetto and its own self love; the “anguished” letter writers exiled on Main Streets, shiver in their Richmond Hill/Brookyln/Toronto basements, peer through their computers/periscopes and tap, tap away about a country they would hardly recognize.
On sleepy Regent St the soft handed merchants carp of “the worst Easter ever” and staring from behind their gilded, grilled existences they scan the sleepy sidewalks with their defecating beggars and wonder whether they should move some more money overseas.
And then there’s the working poor, Orwell’s proles, “too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives”. They wake each morning in their assigned wards and villages to the rising cost of bread, chicken and greens, the very basics that sustain. Uncomprehending as we all are as to what is really happening here.
So now their acting out must reach fever pitch, every day another senseless killing: the schoolboys in a broken bottle fight; a sister stabbed for a lottery ticket – “imagine the feeling…rolling in blood”; the bulldogs sent to maul some children playing bat and ball; and a Linden school puts on a performance of “The Crucible”. Progress, schmogress. Every day’s paper brings another absurdity, another chance for those “who know better” to turn the page while wondering “who are these people?”
Couldn’t GWI just lace the tap water with a mild sedative to keep the proles calm? (We’ll survive on Perrier). We highly recommend one of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, Prozac, maybe. Imagine all the smiling faces, the productivity that would ensue. Guyana would become the Sweden of South America. And on the weekends, Herr Doctor Karran von Singh, Head of the Ministry of Happiness and Copulation could introduce a smidgeon of Viagra to maintain the optimum population rate.
Meanwhile the dusty law book is open to sedition, first introduced in England in the 1590s. Treason, sedition…evil spirits lurking in the schools, doublespeak…Hold on, it all makes sense… Forsooth Guyana is trapped in an Orwellian Elizabethan time warp, an Age of Disenlightenment, An Unplusgood Unutopia.
