Quoting Shakespeare to despair of the PPP’s return

Jun 28, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The business people who supported those PPP leaders that ruled this country from August 1999 to May 2015 should buy copies of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and compel these fallen mandarins that they once embraced when they were as powerful as the Roman senators to read select passages. These include – “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves”; “The evil that men do lives after them”; “Oh judgement, thou art fled to brutish beast and men have lost their reason; “There is a tide in the affairs of men, all the voyages of their life is bound in shallows and miseries.”
The one that I really like when I analyze these jaded, faded, hated, mandarins is taken from Act 5, Scene 1 – “The end of this day’s business, ere it comes; it sufficeth that the day will end; and then the end is known.” I think any quotation from any wise poet, writer or philosopher will not match the relevant poignancy of the last quote here in the context of the PPP dissipated omnipotence.
Cheddi Jagan left his underlings with the messianic mantra of invincibility. They internalized it and it became second nature because God, the world, the Americans and global democracy were on the side of the PPP – once there were free elections and once Indians were in the majority the invincibility of inevitable power was greater and longer than time itself.
The writing was on the wall in 2011 election results. But men and women who have lost their reason, and men and women who see human faults as written in the fading clouds and not in human themselves, and men and women who believe power will never have an ending behaved like the gods in Greek mythology where the stars, the oceans and the universe could be bent and shaped as a toy in their hand.
The local Roman senators told themselves that 2011 was not the fault in their own despoiled souls but a random act of wild wind that created an ephemeral mistake. Power can never be fleeting once power sits on a fulcrum of invincibility.
I remember seeing the “Goat Man” and “the Champion of Dirt” pushing out their chests with unrestrained pomposity echoing the banality of self-deception with the jovial utterance that PPP supporters were so convinced that the PPP was unbeatable and would win that they didn’t bother to go out and vote.
Then the end came in May. Maybe it should have been in March so we analysts could have written about the Ides of March from Julius Caesar. It was on May 15 that the nation learnt that the PPP was finally out of power. In assessing the legacy of the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabals we should turn March into May and refer to the Ides of May.
In Act 1, Scene 2, the soothsayer told Caesar; “Beware the Ides of March.” One will never know if a lugubrious whisper came silently in the night from Cheddi Jagan traveling over the tempestuous wave of the Atlantic Ocean from the foreshore of Babu Jaan to the sprawling lawns of State House and entered the very room that Varshnie Singh was expelled from by her common-law husband, President Bharrat Jagdeo. And it settled in the ear of President Ramotar with the maudlin tone, “Beware the Ides of May.”
The Ides of March was Caesar’s last fling with power. One hopes the Ides of May was the PPP’s last flirtation with unbridled, unhindered, unlimited, unlearned, unlicensed, unmarketable authority in this nation whose subjects’ lonely eyes cry out for hope and a moment of soulful enjoyment, a glimpse of bless the country never had.
Can the return happen? In life anything is possible and with a jinxed land that Guyana is, anything and everything in the world of the bizarre is possible.
But it was the great French philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre who once observed that as the dialectics make man, man also makes the dialectics. We can stop the PPP’s return by the courage to do what right-thinking people the world over have been doing – judge people not by who they say they are, not by the similarity of their hair and yours, not by the cultural affinity you have with them, not by religious ties.
But by what they really are, the substance that man and woman are made of. PPP leaders used this country as if it was their private playground. No West Indian government has been as evil and depraved. Judge for yourself! Look at the accumulation of stolen wealth, wealth that belongs to the people of Guyana.

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Quoting Shakespeare to despair of the PPP’s return

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