Whoever wrote that editorial is smoking konga pump

Oct 03, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I guess for all humans, without exception, when a certain friend’s name is mentioned, immediately coming to mind is a certain song, expression, incident, event etc. Let’s say your friend had a beer in his hand and is gyrating madly to a certain song, and up comes the police, assaulted him and in the process of coming to his rescue, you got arrested, went to court for the first time and was convicted.
Every time, you hear that friend’s name, it reminds you of the song and the song reminds you of the event. I was in the courtyard of Channel 9 waiting for the start of a panel discussion. A car drove up, dropped off a person, then the driver walked up to me, introduced himself, and informed me that he reads my columns. He then said that he was in the first batch of about five persons that graduated with the joint UG/UWI law degree. He was therefore a few years ahead of me at UG in our student days. I called some famous names at UG at the time and asked if he knew them. He asked me if I knew Theo Morris.
Of course I did. Theo was one of my good friends. We studied together at UG then moved on together at the University of Toronto. Each time the name Theo Morris comes up, two things always spring into my consciousness – the superb Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci and the darkness over Guyana as the plane lands at the airport. Theo was fascinated by Gramsci and spent countless hours with me discussing Gramsci’s excellent contribution to philosophy. But at times it was too much. There were times I didn’t want to hear about Gramsci when Theo and I were hanging out.
But it was his darkness statement over the Timehri airport that I always will remember Theo for (he is deceased). Theo said he was returning from Guyana from the Bahamas one night and no one knew that they were over Guyana because everything was completely dark. He said the contrast over the Bahamas was amazingly stark.
I brought this darkness statement of Theo up after I read an editorial in the Guyana Chronicle that was irritating. Here is what the editorial observed; “A country’s protocol defines it in the image of self and others.” l never heard about that before. A country’s image is always judged and embraced or rejected by its physical (some would prefer the word, ‘infrastructural) development and physical assets. Take the United States. Essentially, the mentality and behaviour of Americans are no different from Third World countries. Sport personalities misbehave on the field, sporting fans are ignorant in their anger, shoppers descend to semi-civilised behaviour at Black Friday shopping, racist violence against other humans is ubiquitous, sexist behaviour is commonplace, the media is elitist and biased. But the world embraces the US. Why?
Because when you see it or read about it, you know it is a post-modern country that is phenomenally developed and rich. You want to see a movie superstar, you go there. You want to be a model superstar you go there. You want to be sporting superstar, you go there. You want to research how the nervous system operates, then, you study in the US university system. People choose the US and the West not because of protocol but by the awesome physical modern landscape. Japan began to rival the US. Now China is its competitor. It has nothing to do with image based on protocol.
You can have impeccable protocol in Guyana but here is how a country’s image is shaped. When people see a city where 99 percent of the streets do not have lights; where police cannot transmit your license plate to a central office to ascertain if it is bogus, where traffic signals function only three days out of the week; where the windows of the High Court are rotten and falling down; where in any commercial bank, old people cannot use a washroom because there is none; where no one answers an emergency 911 call; where the country’s only university does not have even one modern laboratory in science or technology; where students have to go to a commercial bank and wait four hours to get a manager’s cheque to pay their university fees; where the university since the past forty years hasn’t had a book store; where water into your home doesn’t reach the second level if it is ten feet; where blackouts occur daily. This is how people judge a country; not by the protocol it uses. What is that anyway?

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Whoever wrote that editorial is smoking konga pump

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Whoever wrote that editorial is smoking konga pump

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