Dear Editor,
This is an endlessly fascinating country. It perplexes, even as it intrigues. Are Guyanese really this gullible? This limited? This blind? This conforming?
A man (or woman) self-identifies as the saviour of this or that ethnicity, and it is all that matters. End of story. Yet close examination reveals that such embraces are as deep, or as shallow, as the tan. There is public declaration that is the equivalent of ‘I have your back.’ Except what is left unsaid is that the intention is to use those backs as a ladder to be politically upwardly mobile all the way to the top, and for personal self-aggrandizement and an unswerving obsession with total power. In any other part of the world, that would be termed crude using; blatant using. But who cares?
For these kinds of self-glorifying men tell the worried and besieged that the other people are only interested in putting them down, and keeping them down. Ironically, the record indicates that when such men were in charge, they dug deeper holes for their own, and cast them therein, without a second thought.
And yet, the trapped audience clings blindly, desperately to such political magicians, who con them out of vote, into believing, and on the way to continuing disappointment, damnation, and degradation.
Where is the thinking class? How about the educated ones? Those who reason and care enough to ponder deeply? Surely, they are not so devoid of intellect, so feeble of character, so lacking in vision that they barter for the ugliness of an exploited, unrewarding identity. But they do, don’t they? And never more so than when they respond favourably to this extraterrestrial hyperextended dirty joke; the high voltage ethnic one focused on electoral triumph. Whether dirty joke, or sick one, some are not joining in the nervous laughter. Or the creeping fear.
The cry is that there is no alternative; only history and memory. Both cripple. It is why there is this easy submission to cultists. There is this thriving on the apocalyptic so often exhumed and brandished menacingly, and so certain to provoke the desired sullenness and apprehensions and deliver the sought after result. Results that have been detrimental to all, except the vainglorious, and the slick professional political-mongers.
All things weighed, this is a sad place and sadder case. It is also a confirmed basket case, and a case of Götterdämmerung writ large, and that is poised and pulsating with peril. How can a vibrant society (or even a civilized one) be erected on such an unalloyed foundation, and with such nightmarish visions, such calculated deep-seated manipulations? How can things be otherwise when so many swoon in ethnic prostration to the ethnic subversives in excelis? And willingly succumb to those who have failed at standard domesticity, but who now grope through ethnicity by their insistence on a deformed nationality.
It is dispiriting to observe that the high road is rarely (perhaps never) taken in the sorry annals of this country’s political scheming. It seems to be always the low, cratered, sinister alleyways that are traversed, and which invariably always lead to the same irreversible dead end.
This is why Guyana will continue to be a place left behind by the press of civilization and modernity. It is contented with being small town, small minded, and of small dreams, and small movements. Here simple common sense is the most complex and most uncommon of all virtues, such as they exist. It is why crafty men are able to calculate and calibrate accordingly to capitalize. Trouble brews early.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
