2016 was the year of Trump and Jagdeo

Jan 19, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Each one of us says after each year passes, the following words; “I will never forget that year.” And when we reach the end of the new year, we repeat that mantra. The reason is because life has uncertainties that not even the widest and wildest imagination can see. When these unbelievable things touch the world and we see them, they leave their mark on us. The cycle goes on.
I said to myself at the end of 2015 that I will always remember 2015. It was the year that showed where a person can vote outside the box of ethnicity to change the course of Guyanese history. History was indeed made. People thought the PPP would rule Guyana forever and the PNC would never see a return to administering the State of Guyana. 2015 is gone; 2016 too, and I confess, “I will never forget that year.”
That year showed me how unfortunate and luckless this country is. We found a golden opportunity to work on the endeavour of diluting (not removing, that will take a long time) social negatives like race suspicion, injustice against the poor, economic de-recognition of the disadvantaged classes, colour and class discrimination, persistence of colonial values, etc. We lifted that endeavour like a heavy carton of discarded items and threw it in the yard bin.
The past year will always be remembered by me, because a brand new PNC outfit (minus a few older folks from the eighties) and a brand new, third party, AFC, displayed thoughts and actions of mediocrity, that for me, was a misdirected journey I could never have imagined after I heard the election results in May 2015. I would go as far as, and I mean far, to say that I don’t think these two partners will change Guyana even in small, meaningful ways. It was an acerbic disappointment.
2016 was a year I will never forget for another reason – this time personal. What I am made of was disdainfully tossed aside in a little incident that will form the core of another column. Wherever you were in 2016, you had to know the year belonged to Donald Trump. Philosophy had no right to propel such a personality into the power room of the most powerful country in the world.
Was it philosophy? The answer is yes. It was the thinking, the thoughts – in short, the ontology of human society – that brought Trump to power. Humans voted for this man in large numbers, even though what he represents is what humans should never embrace.
Over here in Guyana, we have a rampaging Donald Trump on our hands – Bharrat Jagdeo.
Every moment of the year 2016, in Guyana, proved that there is something deeply troubling about the human psyche. For me it is best described by the European philosophical writer, Arthur Koestler. If you read Koestler, you will see that Trump and Jagdeo are not mistakes that come infrequently, but a natural process of the working out of the inherent flaws of Homo sapiens.
It was a year of triumph for Bharrat Jagdeo. In what could only be described as a pyrotechnic explosion of bizarre sadism, Mr. Jagdeo in 2016 strode the land of Guyana with smiles as large as the three great rivers of this country, and walked tall as if he was the Prodigal Son. He was no son. He was no ordinary man. He was a former dictator that so abused his rule of a small, helpless, hapless nation that the embrace he got in 2016, and still gets, must be described as the largest moment of accepted sadism by a post-colonial country.
What is wrong with men and women in the 21st century that they could pick the sweetest of roses to garland a former president whose corruptibility rivals the tallest building in the world in Dubai?
Trump is yet to be seen. We may feel trepidation about his footsteps, but he hasn’t walked as yet. Maybe he will surprise us and turn to God and the angels. Jagdeo walked. We saw his footsteps. We saw his moving hands. He opened the door to state criminality, the stables of corruption, the cupboards of incestuousness and nepotism, and the closets of ethnic ghosts.
If we anticipate the wrong moves by Trump, then how do we deal with the wrong moves that Jagdeo made for fifteen consecutive years? We have dealt with it. We have done nothing. Jagdeo still smiles. Jagdeo still perambulates. Jagdeo still preaches. And so do his underlings.

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2016 was the year of Trump and Jagdeo

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