H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – From One American to Another

Apr 16, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – On this Sunday, the handshake I extend is gentle, but of unmistakable granite.  It is from a simple American to another American with the great call of crucial duties, to the one nestled on pinnacles.  I write these words from a soul that is famished, a vision that is troubled.  To my fellow American, Ambassador Sarah Ann Lynch, I remind of the common bond, what separates us from the rest of the world, what makes us different, and why we are the faithful flag carriers, despite the haze and terrors of battle, potency of enemy.  As a courtesy, this is also addressed to Mr. Alistair Routledge, Exxon’s Guyana Country Head.

Because I spent half of the prime years of my life in America as a toiler and contributor, I think I have paid my dues, earned the right to speak frankly, and let matters unravel, however they do.  It is the American Way.  America is extraordinary in that it believes in fairness, fair play, and a contest fairly fought.  It has given the blood of its sons and daughters in settlement of those most honorable of virtues.  It has been hesitantly and tremulously, at times, but never less than heroically.  America is about what is right, and this is never more shimmering than when it has taken the side of the weak, the underdog, the disadvantaged.  It is the America that I cherish, and this is but a snapshot.  Yes, there is the dark side, but the bad is absorbed with the good; the good usually triumphs.

Ambassador, good should be interpreted as the principled, the honorable, which are attributes that the rest of the world does not identify with as much.  The influential in this Guyana of mine stands as an example.  Indeed, I serve two masters, two mothers, and it can be a line honed to the point of inseparable distinction, but one always embraced, hewed to, in the most human manner possible.  There is soaring, there is crumbling.

What we have here in Guyana today Ambassador Lynch (and Mr. Routledge) is not fairness, but darkness of the grimmest lethalness.  It is of that legal instrument now weaponized by its maker into a nuclear option, one only held in check by thathair-trigger word named sanctity.  It is a diabolical construct won in the blood of the ambushed, one now worshipped by the weak and fearful.  This American is neither.  I am one Guyanese that will not prostrate myself before the shrine of what has been held as sacrosanct.  Call me an infidel, or pariah, or villainous, in this instance, and all three fit perfectly.  Label with the worst, and the heart is as unchanging as the tides cycle.  It is at times like these that American sits uneasily, disturbingly.  Excellency Lynch, this is not the hallowed American Way.  And on this occasion, there is no separation of State and private commerce.  Though different in priorities, the interests are one, ultimately.  American economics, American security.

To Mr. Routledge, I understand better than most that business is business, and there is no place for a pact that is less than the best that the circumstances afford.  Looking at Guyana, and the war that was waged here with pens for guns, and ink for poisoned gas, and a little, vulnerable hamlet in Vietnam stains memory.  It is my hard, unwelcome duty to refresh Mr. Routledge’s memory of history with the name My Lai, and another Captain Ernest Medina, and one more Lt. William Calley. Guyana is My Lai, and those two fine young men soldiering for American ideals in the wretched jungles of Southeast Asia have come to represent Exxon, and its Guyana Country Heads of before, and the present one.  General Darren Woods is the man left with the PR, the happy talking; putting the brightest face on what can’t be covered up.

Ambassador Lynch and Country Head Routledge: an American injustice of the rankest, most repugnant, kind was conceived and given birth to and is perpetuated through its monstrous lifeform and lifespan in Guyana.  For clarity, Madame Ambassador: an abominable and unimaginable American injustice was wreaked on Guyana, and left the detritus of an annihilated and shattered people in its trail of havoc.  Yes, business is bloodless, godless, and can be the cruelest, at its worse.  What Guyanese live with are all of those and then some more.

Guyana received a shield from America against Venezuela, but it also received something else: one dagger in both eyes, and a goring in the groin.  It is why top Guyanese, notorious for their truculence, their volcanic vehemence, have been reduced to whimpering, piteous, frailness.  Their castrated natures speak of men without masculinity, of a country laid out on the dissecting table.  It is not the prettiest of American pictures.

I am thinking that for a few billions more, there can be rewarding, reciprocally respectful, Guyanese and American coexistence.  Everybody gains something; all parties win the face-saving, the uplifting.  Doing what is right in the toughest, most challenging and insurmountable of circumstances is part of the inspiring nobility of the American character, an inestimable aspect of the American tradition.  It is why I distance from the Chinese, the Russian, even the storied British traditions.  I have learned along the way about these glorious, providential American virtues.  Where are these virtues in the immaculacy of their practices in Guyana, Madam Ambassador? How can they be, Mr. Routledge, when there are all these corporate vices erected brick by brick, and by American hands?

Ambassador Lynch: I have spoken; may there be wise, the fairest of actual hearings, please.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• American, GHK Lall, Guyana, H@rd Truths, terrors

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