Latest update October 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 25, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column
Kaieteur News – I came back to this town determined to give everyone their due. A clean slate started from, and a fair shake as the standard. Bharrat Jagdeo was president when I had to leave. Afterwards, he became Opposition Leader, then appointed himself Vice President, General Secretary, and chief policymaker in rapid order, then all those caps at one time. The man had something in him: uncanny and unusual. Unsettling, it was and for many reasons, some of which were hard to pin down. But I was the odd man out in a country where such imperatives have little moral power, not a single banking component. I thought I saw the unhealthy early, only for him to prove it later.
Many a long day later and countless dollars done and gone, and some of the substances of Jagdeo take on brighter glow. The contradiction is that the brighter he became, the darker the shadow he cast. The eerie sense of the leader from before compounded exponentially. As a man, I am certain that he has some graces to recommend him. It is as a leader with a national cast that he has metamorphosed into this unbelievable nightmare. I knew that the man was capable of many things of a heinous nature before, for there is a trail of evidence as long as an overgrown Amazonian anaconda. But now, with oil in his hands, and power taking over his head, I think that even he cannot recognize himself, and in his many long-isolated moments shrink from himself. In brief, Bharrat Jagdeo, in the moment of his most arcing ascendancy, has become more than Guyana’s worst ever nightmare. He has become his own worst living, haunting, overpowering nightmare. There is something about whom the gods wish to deal with, they first do something to. I truly feel a profound sense of sorrow for the man. All this power, all this wealth, all of these caravans of comrades, and he is the loneliest man in the world, a man most useless to himself. One who exists in a self-made house of horrors. The words of the great Greek tragedian, Aeschylus in Agamemnon, come to mind: “Where have you brought me -and to what a house! The house of Atreus, a house God hates…!
I thought he knew some things, only to realise that he knows less, much less, but seeks to bluff his way with bulk. One of his attempts to conceal the deficits in knowledge is to engage in these elaborate dissertations that split apart at the seams from the pressures of reality, which slowly, inexorably, return he and his audience at the precise point where he started. His arguments have no merit, his citations nothing to recommend them. It is the hollow victory of a man of straw and chaff buying time, using up all the acreage of space, and gaining nothing. The more that Jagdeo takes the risks and opens his mouth, the more that the fever in his mind is exposed. A man constructed of tobacco leaves, one puff and they are off into the winds. When they do register, the poisons spread, have crippled many an honest man and woman. They, too, have no choice, so they cling to him in the hope that the ride on the back of an inferno will come to a cooling place.
But the worst instincts and impulses of Jagdeo flash in uncontrollable flame when he is cornered, the straightness of his story, his posture, his essence is stressed by the unforgiving scrutiny of the microscope. This is when Jagdeo does what comes to him automatically these days, in helpless displays of his natural substance. He becomes a bully trashing about and lashing about, a man driven to fits of fury by the futility of his farces. Go ahead and ask him: what is this? How can that be so? Why is this being stood for today, when something else was committed to the day before? When the curved and curly in Bharrat Jagdeo is subject to the purity of light, Guyanese recoil at the pungency in the man they call their own, but who they recoil from holding close anymore. There is no limit that cannot be breached, no depth too degraded, and what those do is to share the man inside, the tormented soul that would not rest. I have always said that as fallible and full of foibles as man is, there must be never less than that existential struggle to think straight, start out straight, continue along a straight road, no matter how difficult the one before is. Regardless of how tempting the other paths are. Begin with the twisted, and the curves must multiply and deepen. When an edifice is built on what is distorting (maybe even with shades of the demented), then there is no turning back. The only weapons left are those named bluster, lashing out, and seeking to intimidate others to fold in submission. One of the many unknowns in this brother’s makeup is that he has failed to grasp that adversity that makes some people stronger, even more determined. His fury is mocked as flea bites. A man and leader constricted by the neurotic and consumed by a paranoiac’s purgatory. Though as old as the sea, and just as mysterious, I share this nugget that never fails to sparkle, never ceases to inspire: “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” Sir Walter Scott, Marmion. Remember!
(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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