Hypocrisy is a national past-time

Dec 08, 2019 Editorial

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Amidst the electoral sparring, there is this constant ingredient, now such a vital aspect, an entrenched feature, of Guyana. In the matter of responsibility for, and failure in the deaths of men hailed as political martyrs, there is hypocrisy, taken to incredible heights, of leading men dancing around truth. What was true long ago, and recently, is reborn again in the armour of continuing deceptions and careful tiptoeing around that which continues to be distanced from, to haunt, and to be disputed.
As much as those matter, the concentration, today, is not about who have blood on their hands, or who have used bombings and arsons and murders as rallying political causes celebre, but which then petered out in the convenient obscurity of yet more Guyanese criminal (political) mysteries.
Rather, today is about how we make the biggest fools of ourselves at the highest levels in this society, through ongoing hypocrisies.
When citizens of character are alive and doing well, we can scarcely say anything good about them. Yet, when citizens pass on from natural causes-especially, not so clean or commendable ones–there is rushing from across the political spectrum to outdo the other, through the most blatant of hypocrisies, be it a brother comrade, a police officer, a jurist, or a public servant.
Instead of keeping mouth shut solemnly, there is painting with the brightest, nicest sheen through the uninterrupted falsehoods that saturate this land.
The Romans left us a phrase that glitters: de mortuis, nil nisi bonum, which translates splendidly into the English equivalent that is: of the dead speak no ill. Our living leaders and practitioners of their own patented impiousness and deceits have made this into an art form with rhetorical flourishes that merely compound our local miseries.
It is the death of truth, when evidenced in hypocrisies of the highest order and at the highest levels, which drags along the rest of this society into the graveyard of moral and ethical desolation now so heavily inhabited, for man died the other day-a ranking man-and a show occurred.
This is what happens when local political leaders take to the podium, and whose followers slavishly imitate. During the lifetimes of foes, they question, then condemn, and last crucify. But they reserve the best for last -they cry.
They–leaders and followers–cry the loudest, mourn the longest, and grieve the deepest, through the tributes that pour perennially from lips mummified with the waxiness of the worst putridity imaginable. They do it over corruption, over the memories of men (from all walks) who helped in the plundering of this country, over who is responsible for the way we are.
There is not a single word that speaks to, even hints of, the human frailties of those, who had died by their orders, at their hands, through their orchestration, or the underhanded official existences lived. There is not one even a hair of a phrase that strays out of place.
At this, we have become so good, that we may now be unequalled. The internal resentments have been schooled by the fiercest of disciplined approaches: say only the positive, since none can dare challenge openly. It is better to let the competition tie itself into knots, in vain efforts at untangling the webs weaved, those deceptive webs now made perfect.
This is not of men like Rodney alone, or Crum-Ewing, or Sawh or Rose Hall or those at the hands of this domestic terrorist or that one. It is not about who were freelancing marauders or conscientious crime fighters or mercenary freedom fighters or simply regular convenient circumstantial criminals or, for at the pinnacle of the pyramid, there are the cerebral conspirators in their crooked corners.
It is of that and all of them, at the core, and then so much more than the aggregation of all of those. It is of the stories that we craft and perfect, and then sell either to a disbelieving or gullible national constituency of houses burned down, those run out of town, those that run the business of this town, and those grounded into silence.
Thus, we lie, we deny, and we die daily in some form, many times hourly from what sprawls in the disreputable and dishonoring. Those at the heights, and their armies of sycophants, are comfortable speaking well of the dead, their sanctimonious tributes that serve the moment.
In the interests of decency, such blatant hypocrisies are not challenged by contemporaries, for it is simply not done by the decent, no matter how roiled.
On the other hand, in this country, this land of the living dead, there is neither interest nor intent to speak well of the living, nor what they can do, are doing, to make this a better place to live for the warring tribes, a cleaner place for the children to follow.
There is no mileage in such, neither advantage nor return or comfort for the political clans. Those who are determined to blot out of the past, to not learn from the mistakes are doomed to repeat them. This is the dead end where Guyana finds itself, which promises to remain so indefinitely.
This publication is disturbed by this, and now asks: these scars on the nation’s conscience and honour should matter, but why don’t they?

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