The milk train doesn’t stop here anymore: Gail Teixeira’s politics

Feb 27, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One would like to think that even in a place like Guyana, we will soon see one of Tennessee Williams’s fantastic plays put on by the Theatre Guild (have they been paid the $1.4 million owed to them by the CARIFESTA Secretariat?) now that the place has been refurbished.
The ontological message in Williams’ plays transcends race, culture and borders. And the Guyanese people should be given a taste of this literary genius. Such exposure may help to dilute the philistinism that is so buried in the psyche of those trusted in running this country. It may help. It should.
Given the curiously impertinent show Gail Teixeira put on at Linden two Wednesday ago (February 19), I would suggest, “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.” And we should urge Ms. Teixeira (and naturally Clement Rohee) to see it. We would hope this powerful apparatchik from the PPP’s Stalinist era of the seventies and eighties and now as powerful in the State as the President himself would try to grasp the meaning in the title of the play (for an analysis of the politics of Gail Teixeira, see my Feb 12, 2011, column, “Orpheus Descending,” the caption of which is the title of another superb Williams’s gem).
Ms. Teiexeira was as defiant as the old communist leaders when the Stalinist wall began crumbling all over Soviet Europe in 1992. She didn’t see that the milk train had stopped coming and she needed to be elsewhere, as Flora told Chris in Williams’ play. She intoned with a fierce, combative, demagogic delivery; “Some people feel that Linden is their territory like some warlord.”
She became agitated and an expressive emotion raged as she sang a song that has been sung out and rang a bell that has been rung out long, long ago; “The Government has decided that there is no place in Guyana that the President cannot go… there is no place in Guyana that the government cannot go…there is no place that the PPP as a party cannot go.”
Then defiance turned to hypocrisy and rudeness. Too poor in intellectual planning, Ms. Teixeira became a jaded, doomed figure the kind Williams wrote about when she told her audience, “You have a right to be heard…you have a right to air your views.”
The very people Ms.Teixeira spoke these words to have access to only one television frequency. It is the state owned NCN.
Ms. Teixeira was right; no one owns Linden, no one owns Berbice, no one owns Guyana, no one owns the East Indian Guyanese community, no one owns the resources of Guyana, no own owns the air waves of Guyana.
But the people in Linden cannot be that stupid not to know that there are powerful people who have been administering the nation’s business for twenty-one years now and their postures, attitudes, deportment and demagoguery, as Ms. Teixeira’s in Linden last Wednesday definitely give the graphic indication that they own Guyana.
But leaving aside the hypocritical moments of her speech, Ms. Teixeira was totally oblivious to the reality that the milk train stopped going to Freedom House a long time ago. Like her atavistic colleague, Clement Rohee, she lives in a warped timeframe that is so typical of the character in a Tennessee Williams’s play.
Some of her Orwellian colleagues at Freedom House are more willing to concede that life is about new realities replacing old ones.
In Marxist philosophy, this is called the, “dialectic.” How horrible that Marxism was stuffed down the throat of every protégés that Cheddi Jagan nurtured yet Ms. Teixeira doesn’t understand the iron law of dialectics.
Not only that the PPP and its Government may not be able to go where they want to in Guyana but the leaders admit that defeat awaits them in many areas of political life.
Mr. Jagdeo screamed out in front of his audience last year at the Convention Centre; “They killed hydro-power,” Then he named the killers – Dr. Clive Thomas, Ramon Gaskin and Chris Ram.
Doesn’t look from this admission by the Champion, that Ms. Teixeira’s party is still in control. Then El Presidente himself told a PPP rally in Port Mourant at the PPP Congress last year that the Jagdeo libel case brought against me hurt the PPP vote-getting capacity in the 2011 general elections (for more on this admission, see my column of August 16, 2013, “I am glad my libel defence reduced PPP votes in 2011”). The milk stopped going your way a long time, Mama Teixeira. Wake up!
Columnist’s note: A column on Ms. Teixeira’s common-law husband (deceased) and personal friend of mine, Fazal Khan, is forthcoming.

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The milk train doesn’t stop here anymore: Gail Teixeira’s politics

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