Peeping Tom – Freddie is losing his groove

Jun 11, 2008 Peeping Tom

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Freddie Kissoon is falling apart. Confronted by his own intellectual fragility, contradictions within his writings and the contrasting and often febrile positions he has taken on issues, the professor has found himself boxed into a corner.

He has literally been cornered by Ravi Dev and is unable to manoeuver himself in order to achieve, even reply with any degree of conviction. His entire thesis of an elected dictatorship is now crumbling and he faces academic humiliation unable to sustain what he has been peddling for months now: that the Jagdeo administration is worse than the rule of Forbes Burnham.

Initially he thought he could wriggle himself out of the contextual stranglehold in which he had become mired. But he could not defend himself adequately because in the past he had written things quite opposite to what he is now contending; he had described the Burnham regime as totalitarian.

When Dev exposed his intellectual opportunism and more importantly, the dangers inherent in his recent argument about an elected dictatorship, Freddie had no answer; he was left stuttering for answers and this has been reflected in the exchanges between himself and Dev.

Freddie has now so confounded himself that he has had to do an about turn and is now forced to concede that what he really means is that aspects of the present administration’s behaviour are worse than what took place under Burnham but Burnham was still the worse of the two.

After all he has been saying about the PPP under President Bharrat Jagdeo, Freddie is unable to sustain the thesis that he has been pursuing for months, and this retreat is all because of a few columns and letters from Ravi Dev. Freddie has been dropped for the full count by a thunderous series of jabs from the former leader of ROAR; Freddie is tottering to get on his feet and seems now certainly to be on the verge of being counted out.

It is ironic, of course, that for all the big academics the PPP has, it could not find a single person capable of countering Freddie and his constant philosophizing about the alleged authoritarianism of the Jagdeo administration.

The PPP is so intellectually bankrupt that all the party could have mustered in its defence was a few obscure commentaries which lacked focus and punch and of course a few letters in the letter pages of the newspapers which lacked substance.

Freddie became bolder because of the feeble response of the PPP and opted to go after Ravi Dev in a brief but arrogant and cocky digression from his central thesis. He walked straight into a stone wall and with each passing day Freddie lacks coherence and logic in his arguments. Even his well-patented trick of misrepresentation has failed him.

His most serious flaw however is his personal obsession with the President.
I wish to advise him that he cannot expect to be taken seriously as an analyst, if he continues to allow his dislike for President Jagdeo to colour his analysis.

For months now, you can without reading any of his columns know that regardless of what he is writing, President Jagdeo will come under fire.

He wants the entire country to believe, as he said yesterday, that the President lacks this quality and the President lacks that quality. Yet subconsciously Freddie obviously admires the man, for why else would he be so obsessed with the President if he believed half the things he writes about him.

Freddie is best when it comes to exposing corruption and poor governance. And if in that he sees a problem with leadership, then he has a legitimate right to call a spade a spade.

No one is denying him his opinion about the President but surely, he has to be able to put some distance between his own personal feelings and what his analysis is because with each day what is coming over in his columns is as if there are personal issues between himself and the President.

This will confound his analysis. For example he is now positing that the President is totally dominating the leadership of the PPP. He sees the PPP leadership as weak because of that.

But does it not also say something positive about the ability of the President who sixteen years ago was an obscure figure in the government and yet today, as Freddie himself says, is the maximum figure in government? Surely, the man has to be astute to have done what no PPP leader has been able to achieve. That has to take some amount of political ability.

For years, persons, including Freddie, have been urging the President to distance himself from the party because it was said that it is really the party that runs the government. Now, according to Freddie, the President is in total command. Is this not what he was calling for all these years and therefore should now support President Jagdeo if indeed it is true that the party is being marginalized, a view which of course I do not share?

If Freddie expects to be taken seriously he should for a few weeks see if he can stop this obsessive commentary about the President and see if things in Guyana cannot be analyzed without the President being the central figure.

And please Freddie stay within your league. You are no match for Ravi Dev. None whatsoever.

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