A blinkered view of the reality

Mar 18, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
While trolling the Internet for anything entertaining to counter a bout of boredom that had enveloped me, I came across and was immediately cured by an article in the February, 2013 edition of a newspapers whose owner(s) impudently monikered it The Beacon of Truth.
The article, captioned “Revisionist piffle”, went after me for unapologetically arguing in a February 4, Kaieteur News letter, that other named Guyanese are worthier political heroes than Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham. This temerity on my part was obviously enough for the widely-ignored Beacon of Truth, in defence of Cheddi Jagan, to choose me to share in the obscurity to which it has been relegated by Guyanese, who prefer to get their truth from newspapers such as Kaieteur News.
Well, I never would have known of my dishonor, accorded more than a month ago, if I weren’t bored.
In my letter, I mentioned the names of several individuals, including Mark Benschop and Kaieteur News publisher Glenn Lall, who I believe are worthier political heroes than Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham.
Not being ones to miss an opportunity to attempt to negate any positive reference to those who expose the barefaced and incestuous corruption of the PPP dictatorship, the people at Bobby Ramroop’s transparent-challenged Beacon of Truth went after Mark Benschop and Glenn Lall. These two men are more than capable of defending themselves against the spiteful character assassination that Guyana Times often offers as truth, so my response is not in defence of them.
I write to unapologetically stand by my position and to show that the Guyana Times is The Smokestack of Untruth rather than The Beacon of Truth.
In reviewing and attempting to refute my arguments and conclusion that others are worthier political heroes than Jagan and Burnham, the Times correctly reported what it called my “peculiar definition” of the word “heroes”. It said: “….Lowe is no ‘master’. He rates his ‘heroes’ thusly: ‘What wrongs did they right? How many lives did they save? How many Guyanese regardless of race, religion, or creed looked forward to their appearances and speeches, hoping that they’d live forever? And what joys and glory did they bring to our nation? How much deprivation did they suffer?’”
But the Times, knowing that it is unable to provide any credible or satisfactory answers from the life of Jagan, whom it chose to defend, and forgetting that it has no monopoly on access to dictionaries, countered with its own self-serving definition of the word “heroes”.
It insults women by relying on one dictionary that offers the unmodern, sexist male-oriented view that a hero is to be seen as  “a man of distinguished courage or ability, admired for his brave deeds and noble qualities.”
The Smokestack then falsely ascribes the definition to me by thereafter asserting: “Let’s take Jagan by Lowe’s definition. Who was braver and more noble than this son of a canecutter from Port Mourant who refused the middle-class comforts of a dentist’s life in Guyana circa 1943 but chose to take on the might of an empire on whose dominions “the sun never set”?
“And yes, he suffered deprivation: he spent his time, like all anti-colonial heroes, in a British jail.”
While I did address and trivialize the relatively benign deprivations suffered by Jagan and Burnham, it is a demonstrated fact that my definition makes no mention of “brave(r)” or “noble” (because of the partisan views of these qualities in our country). So The Smokestack engaged in false attribution and even defeated its own boast of Jagan’s supposed unique nobleness and bravery by admitting that “all anti-colonial heroes” suffered deprivation by being jailed. Additionally, I fail to see the bravery and nobleness in allegedly turning down the assumed “middle-class comforts of a dentist’s life” in favour of pursuing an exciting political life that promised more financial security than the stressful uncertainty of waiting for the dentist-averse and dirt poor Guyanese masses of 1943 to visit a dentist for tooth extraction, for that’s what dentists did 99.99 per cent of the time in 1943.
No Guyanese dentist now, let alone then, could live a middle-class life just extracting teeth.
Cheddi Jagan left these shores as an impressionable 18-year-old schoolboy in 1936 and came back in 1943 as a 25-year-old dentist who was impressed by and enamoured with the Marxist ideology that preached solutions to problems that arise from conditions that are only now beginning to proliferate in Guyana.
So analogically-speaking, Cheddi was from 1943 attempting to administer treatments for HIV which only now plagues our society.
The truth is that Cheddi Jagan had no deep intellectual understanding of the Marxist ideology that captured his imagination or of the consequences that would flow from his romantic adherence to it.
Twenty-eight years of retributive absence from power finally caused him to see the light, and he quickly abandoned most of his ideological blindness in favor of the light of harsh reality.
Thus it was no surprise that he, a man that reportedly felt the pain of the common people, chose to breathe his last breath in the United States, the capital of capitalism, rather than in Moscow, Havana, or the Georgetown Hospital. At least Forbes Burnham chose to take his chances in the Georgetown Hospital, where the common people go to have their ailments treated.
In the meantime I’ll continue, from here in Brooklyn, New York, to fight to bring our nation back from the brink. I’m sure that the Smokestack paper will feel proud to know that I’m emulating Cheddi, who fought the PNC using operatives in every capitalist country— from London, England to Brooklyn, New York.
The Smokestack paper was livid because I asked: “How many Guyanese regardless of race, religion, or creed looked forward to the appearances and speeches…” of Jagan and Burnham?
Rather than wisely avoid offering any response but the obvious answer to the question, The Smokestack paper departed from reality and the truth by asking: “People are looking forward to hear Glenn Lall speak? Get serious.”
I’d wager a bet that the publisher and editors of Guyana Times know that more people buy Glenn Lall’s Kaieteur News on its worst two circulation days than buy The Smokestack paper on its best seven circulation days. Yet they have the nerve to try to seriously question if anyone is looking forward to hear Glenn Lall speak.
Lionel Lowe

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