The man of many faces

Jul 18, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

Kaieteur News – The party man is a party animal.  He is on the hunt, a prowler and stalker, I can’t help but think of a serial killer suspect.  Operating from the shadows and secretive, aggressive as a barracuda and thorough as a piranha.  Opponents are targeted with missile-like precision, and repeated puffs of radioactive breath incinerate and evaporate, with few, if any, left standing.  Those who are standing are reeling, usually not left in one piece.  This is the face of the People’s Progressive Party.  It is beady-eyed.  It is white knuckled.  And thin-lipped: snarling, spitting, shouting, and most often ‘cussin’ and carrying on in the best personification of a raving, ahem, beautiful mind gone to pot.

Twisted and degraded, like someone caught in the torments of some mania, or a vast combination of such.  If anyone knows anyone in the upper echelons of the PPP suffering from such awful convulsions, please call 1-800-DIAL OP.  There used to be a place in Jolly Olde England called Bethlehem, perhaps that is the better recommended step.  A goddamn bedlam it is, if not daily, then whenever some demented spirit takes full control.  I used to be appalled and even pugnacious.  Now I admit to my mistake: compassion, the milk of human kindness, and pity are the best medicines.  If this is what Guyana has deteriorated to, then it is time for my ticket to Baluchistan.

In the greatest of mysteries, the party man is also Guyana’s oilman.  Say that again, please.  Somebody put the citizens of this country out of their misery, and say that no it is not so, it is a slip of the tongue, a mistake of unpardonable proportions.  But it is.  The irony and tragedy of the party man being the nation’s majestic oilman.  If this is the best that Guyana can dig up and deliver, then all the oil in the world and with all the highest prices and all the benefits from that sacred product of this rich virginal and nubile soil is not going to make one damned difference.  Can a poisoned tree bear healthy fruit?  Economics, not ecclesiastics, good folks of Guyana.  Politics at its most gnarled, its most rotted, its most demented, and not an all-inclusive demographics and who could get and does, and who shouldn’t and does not.  The party man is loud and raucous and brawling, a face contorted by hate and impatience and arrogance for not being allowed to have his way and sow his fakeries, quackeries, and grotesqueries.  It is not that familiar one about what looks like a duck and walks like a duck.  It is a duck that mutated into a fearsome demon from which even the gospel miracle worker would have second thoughts about confronting and casting out.

Ah ha, those whom the gods wish to terrorize, they first get them to do the twist.  On this oil, this most bountiful if national patrimonies, it has been a jiggle and a swivel and a whole world of drivel.  The party man who screams at earsplitting volume against political competitors and media contributors, inclusive of the worst lyrics that the ‘baddest’ rapper homey could come up with is thunderstruck, dumbstruck, and struck by some strange stroke of lightning when it comes the time to say something about Guyana’s oil.  Just a little something on oil that is clean and clear, untarnished by the underhanded and what is undermining to Guyana’s interests.  Just any littler something that is contributory to the upward spiral of Guyanese hopes, and not what decimates their dreams.

The contrast between the party man and the oilman cannot be more glaring: the former is all thunder; the latter is one blasted blunder after another.  How many failures is a man allowed, regardless of his elevation, without consideration of his field of activity?  The man from Galilee, the carpenter’s son, said seven times seven, and then that slate must be tossed aside, and a harder line taken.  Guyanese have lost count of the weaknesses, farces, and falls of their national oil saviour.  If he is a saviour, then the gates of hell are preferred by me.  What a character!  What a babbler and bluffer, and I was about to share my thinking about buffoon, then the godly in me came back.

In the local arena with domestic matters, the party man is a warrior.  In the external arena with foreign oil movers and shakers, he shakes in his boots, with lips trembling and the whites of his eyes showing.  There is a suspicious pool of liquid by his shoes, and something insists that it is neither water nor sweat.  The badman and bully in the local village now runs for cover behind his well-constructed barricades.  He can’t stand the heat of battle.  He will not fight.  When he should steel himself for a showdown at the OK Corral, there is skulking around and jumping on the fastest horse to rush out of town. When every day in Guyana should be a moment of courageous, unflinching High Noon confrontation with those seeking to conquer this country, all that the party man and oilman has inside is groveling and quivering.  He is still classless and careless enough to show his face around here.  This is the many-faced man of Guyana, only three iterations.  There shouldn’t be any surprise about why Guyana is where it is, and how it is.

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

---

• 1-800-DIAL OP, animal, Bethlehem, Jolly Olde England, opponents

---