The Land of Wow!

Jan 21, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

---

 

By Dennis Nichols

You’re going to America? Wow! It once was a crowning achievement. Across the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea from Guyana lies the land of (almost) every opportunity – a country of immigrants. From around the world, humanity’s ‘huddled masses’ have streamed in for centuries, past Ellis Island’s beacon of hope, to the continent named after Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, who corrected another Italian’s belief that he had reached the East Indies in 1492.
The feminised form of Vespucci’s first name, America, proposed by a German clergyman and endorsed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, stuck. Soon the immigrant flow started, and it hasn’t stopped since. Ask the nearly 300,000 Guyanese living there – or its first black president.
On January 20, 2009, exactly nine years ago, the world watched as a 47 year-old former senator with strong African ties, born in Hawaii just two years after the island-chain gained American statehood, became the 44th President of the United States. I watched on live TV, from the staffroom of the Central Andros High School in The Bahamas along with the other teachers, having earlier taken the initiative of asking the principal to let us witness history-in-the-making.
I haven’t forgotten, and will never forget, the moment when Barack Hussein Obama, born outside mainland America to interracial parents, took the presidential oath, fumble and all. The pride was vicarious; the tears were real, and we were Americans that day. My ‘Guyanese’ great-nephew in Florida could one day become the American president!
It’s different now. Mr. Obama, despite his eloquence and vision, has not had the kind of powerful and positive impact many hoped he would have had on minority groups in the US and on the nations in its Caribbean backyard, even though he visited no less than 11 countries in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean during his presidency. (I had actually thought, in an imaginative burst, that he would be the first sitting US president to visit Guyana, after having visited Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba and Jamaica; even Suriname had been honoured when President Lyndon Johnson’s plane made a refueling stop there in 1967)
It may be a while before America sees another black president, and we know it. However, we expected another first; we just knew that the Land of Wow would give us its first female president. It was a foregone conclusion, because Hillary Clinton’s opponent was Donald Trump. Then came the truly wow moment just after midnight on November 9, 2016. The man who had thumbed his nose at the political establishment, continually mocking his opponents and the polls, had pulled off an upset the likes of which we may not see for a long time to come.
One year earlier as the US election campaign began to gain steam, some persons wondered about what others saw as the GOP’s Trump card, when Republicans began to outpace Democrats in registering new voters. But others saw Donald Trump himself as the joker in the Republican pack, and relatively few felt he had any chance of gaining the nomination, much less the presidency. His bombast, lack of presidential credentials, belittling of President Obama, ridiculing of fellow Republicans, mimicking of a journalist’s disability, fear-inducing references to radical Islamist terrorists, and ‘Hilarious’ jibes tagged him as a boor.
But voters in a number of states including the mid-west ‘rust-belt’ were listening, and they liked what they saw and heard. Jobs would come back to what one journalist called ‘hollowed-out, old industrial cities’. A wall was going to be built to keep the bad guys down south from crossing over into the Promised Land. Interlopers and alien hopers were going to be ‘shocked out’ of the American dream, and those low-life who were living off government social services including ‘Obamacare’ were going to be dealt a Tysonic knockout punch, as the new administration scaled down on government overreach. And to that mostly white, middle-class demographic, it probably wouldn’t have escaped them that many of the folks Trump was going after didn’t look much like them.
Now, switch back to the present for the latest and most uncouth wow moment, as from here in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean, America’s beacon light grows dimmer. No one thinks Mr. Trump’s recent filth reference to certain countries was a Freudian or any other kind of slip. And if Haiti and El Salvador are ‘shithole’ nations, what about Guyana and other regional territories, especially when we have local commentators who view our country in a similar light?
Over the past two years, there have been other words and gestures from Mr. Trump that link the path he is taking with the aspirations of some alt-right and extremist groups. And few would deny that there are intolerant and racist elements in them. Should we be trembling? Were it possible to read the minds and hearts of visitors and would-be immigrants from this part of the world to the United States, what would we now find? Increased apprehension, nervousness and fear? Or determination to somehow make it in what is still for many a land of fortune and material success.
Some will no doubt find solace in the fact that many Americans do not like the current president, his policies, and the path he appears to be taking their country along. And of course, good and great things will continue to happen in America for both its citizens and immigrants. That is why there are still hundreds of inspiring stories, like that of Guyanese acid-burn victim Shondell Williamson whose reconstructive surgery in the US, facilitated by a humanitarian organization with local roots, (SHEA) remind us that America is much more than the words and actions of its leaders and ‘protectors’.
The point has been made repeatedly that America has been built on the backs of immigrant and slave labour; the hopes and dreams of pioneering spirits. These have included its original ‘Indian’ inhabitants, founding fathers, and the shapers of industry and technology. While Mr. Trump’s mother was born in Scotland, his paternal ancestry dates back to 18th century Germany, a fact largely hidden by his father Fred Trump, and himself, for decades. One wonders what he thought of the atrocities committed in his ancestral homeland during the Nazi era, and the reason why his grandfather Friedrich Trump emigrated to America and anglicized his name when he became a US citizen in 1892.
Much of this doesn’t matter now, but the irony of associating immigrants with excrement stinks. Why would the son and grandson of immigrants imply that people from a part of the world that gave us the words barbarian and vandal (originally foreigner and wanderer) are innately superior to those from a country which has the distinction of being the only one established from a successful slave revolt?
And what about the denigration of an entire continent? No wonder he felt that if he could prove Obama was born in Kenya he could somehow invalidate his presidency. Well, the validity of his own White House occupancy is being questioned as the first overtly bigoted president.
I close with a last wow moment as recalled in a Time Magazine article shortly after the 2016 elections. “Trump’s favorite bets are on himself … Who but Trump would have mentioned on the very day the Twin Towers were destroyed, that he now owned the tallest building in Lower Manhattan.”
With such a monumental ego, it is somehow more understandable that certain insecurities the US president harbours could be projected onto others, like ‘Mexican criminals’, Haitians, and Africans. If so, how far behind could Guyanese and West Indians be?

---

---