Smell of cheap wine, scent of cheap perfume. They linger

Jan 23, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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One of the unrelenting derogations made against the PPP Government from day one in office is that its leading cadres, both women and men, are people whose appreciation for aesthetic values are totally absent.
This had led to widespread ridicule of all PPP leaders, even from those who are not essentially anti-government critics. Guyanese and those in the Diaspora snicker about the cultural and aesthetic crudities and unrefined displays of all the major and minor players that come from the PPP.
This condemnation ranges from sartorial choices to music, art, literature and even the landscape – parks, gardens etc.
No one in this world, save for European aristocratic snubs, would want to be condescending to people who are not schooled in good manners, good breeding, etiquettes and urbaneness. We understand each other’s limitations and with time, people learn.
We may not like the music of Mozart. Why should Third World people crave for Mozart? I agree. Non-Western civilizations may not find many of the top songs, novels and movies of the West worthwhile pursuing. In Pakistan, Stephen King may not be sought after.
On the average, however, most human beings should appreciate good aesthetic traditions of human civilization. Shakespeare is phenomenal. You don’t have to like English culture to appreciate him. Shakespeare transcends national boundaries. It is the same with art. Some European cathedrals are breathtaking. The Taj Mahal in India is fantastic.
Oriental art is yet to find a permanent place in the western psyche but it can compete with Europe. Sadly the United States is poor in good art and good poetry. Even in film making, the US lacks that esoteric touch of the French and Italians.
You don’t have to be a Christian to admire the “Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. It is a fantastic work. There are poetry, art, music and buildings that though they have territorial origins, their inner beauty transcends national cultures. Human beings were born to have an aesthetic instinct, the lack of which in the PPP I know countless Guyanese find extremely unnerving.
It has to do with the communist culture that they were indoctrinated in. I have always argued on this page that communism and fascism are totalitarian ideologies that overlap and intertwine (see the works of Hannah Arendt). But given fascist Germany’s deep admiration for its genius philosophers (Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel) and its music (Strauss, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Beethoven), fascism in Germany took on a more sophisticated role in society than communism in Russia.
The Bolsheviks and people like Lenin and Stalin were crude human beings that were contemptuous of the aesthetic dimensions of life. Communists like Marx, Engels, Gramsci and Rosa Luxemberg were also people of letters but the bastardization and vulgarization of communism came with the Russians.
While in fascist Germany elegant poetry, arts, music and literature were embraced, in communist Russia, these forms of life were destroyed. While the German fascists stole Jewish art, in Russia, the communists saw such aesthetic values as subversive.
To this day, communists wherever you find them, are people without an appreciation for the aesthetic nuances of life; maybe with the exception, of all people, the omnipotent, infallible leader of North Korea. The man likes the music of Eric Clapton as the Wikileaks cables revealed. Not a bad choice. After Jimi Hendriks, many experts put Clapton as the next best guitarist of contemporary pop music. I would place Santana in front of him.
After the 1968 elections, Cheddi Jagan lost the educated people he had around him. He brought a school of young rural cadres without any exposure to tertiary education and the modern zeitgeist. Clement Rohee was from Georgetown but his exposure was even more limited than his rustic colleagues. Jagan saturated these “children” with communist culture. Aesthetic values along with tertiary education were frowned upon.
These were regarded as bourgeois things that instill false consciousness in humans and distract them from the revolution. Today all Guyana is paying a tragic price for this de-culturization of PPP leaders.
The zoo, Botanical Gardens, National Park, Promenade Gardens, Square of the Revolution Monument, Non-Aligned Monument, Mahatma Gandhi statue are all left to rot; left in a derelict state by unrefined men and crude women without good manners, social grace and who have an ongoing contempt for the finer things in life.
They took the Castellani lawns and erected a concrete carbuncle on it. I came from dirt poverty in Wortmanville with no breakfast or dinner. Just one meal a day. And hey man! I grew up to appreciate that life is also about parks, gardens, poetry, music, art, the beach and alfresco romance. So why can’t PPP leaders too?

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