A personal embarrassment should be a national one

Sep 30, 2024 News, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard truths…

Kaieteur News – Many Guyanese will have difficulty, take umbrage, at some of the Hard Truths shared today.  The dive has already started, can’t be turned back in midair.  It is to wherever the road leads, whatever the reaction(s).

By the evolutionary mystery of geology, Guyana finds itself endowed with one of the most prized commodities on earth.  It could be rare earths, but the great undersea pools of a product enjoying that rarest of standings: global demand, continuing worldwide dependency notwithstanding some intrusions from other forces of nature.  By the proximity of latitudes and longitudes, there are these lakes of the viscous black stuff in Guyana that many countries, most of them, in the world would relinquish lots of territory and more citizens to claim some fractional ownership.  It is there and, though some games are underway with the latest number, there is something on which there is universal national agreement.  No clamorous cacophonies.  No controversies from warring comrades.

The trouble begins, at least at this address, with how those who raise their hands to be stewards of this richest of national endowments.  The would-be stewards kowtow first, then all but collapse on themselves, in their efforts to represent some local substance and viability before those who have planted their corporate flag in this country.  Those who sail their oil boats over the lush patrimony of the Guyanese people.  The more that local political masters wiggle and worm their way for the favor of the likes of Mr. Darren Woods and Mr. Alistair Routledge, the more that there is significant stomach churning and skin crawling here.  Where are the Guyanese men (and their fawning supporters) who love to chatter about ‘are we not men to stand on our feet and not wastrels to live on our knees?’  If anybody could drop a line about what happened to those stalwarts, any clue about their current whereabouts, a huge debt would be due.  The first personal embarrassment registers sharply.  The feeling is not liked.  If this is occurring at the personal level, then one can only imagine the national humiliation.

The last comfort any Guyanese-fence sitter, partisan, cognoscenti, cheerleader, or simple hopeful-could ever wish for is for their political princes to be diminished and dumbed down into playthings for the cocktail hour pleasure of the Texas management elite now so firmly established here.  There is a cruel irony to this canvas about local men and women degraded into the infantilism and impotence of playthings by foreign corporate freebooters, American ones.  Guyana’s top political players have shuddered at the thought of transforming themselves into the model of servant leaders for their own who trusted them.

But here they are today, with the advent of this oil, all too ready, and very zealous, to be the court jesters of the powers that be from Spring, Texas.  Or Washington, DC.  What could be more embarrassingly knavish than such an expression of low self-esteem, willingly falling to such a low altitude?  But there they are, groveling in the pits, more like crabs in a barrel, seeking to nudge whoever is ahead aside, or clambering over the competition by any means.  If embarrassment has ever visited more heavily and lingered more immovably, the memory eludes.  Guyanese own political superstars refuse to be servants to their own people, but they gladly play the fool for the men who speak with forked tongues.  Thinking of the willing fool, echoes of Scotland’s Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie better known as Lulu, and as remade by American music legend Aretha Franklin with some more oomph, reach through the haze of years: “Oh me oh my (I’m a fool for you baby.)”  Those two female great made themselves into fools for the caress of love.

Over here in Guyana, big men are reduced to tots because of oil, and what they are told (or tell themselves) that they must do to stay in contention.  Somebody has got to hold the domestic house in one piece, a stable one.  If ever there was a bigger letdown, a greater embarrassment, it is still to be felt.  Surely, there must be many other Guyanese who cringe in disgust at how the cream of local manhood has been castrated.  Those who have been spared the role of political eunuch up to this point feel good about themselves in escaping with the lesser disgrace of consenting to being kicked about like a political football.

Study the local bigshots carefully and take notes.  Those Guyanese who use to rail against the injustices and inhumanities of slavery and indentureship have seen God.  He is American and his name is Alistair Routledge.  All the visceral raging about the CIA and imperialism and capitalism (among the dirtiest of local curse words) have now taken on a new gloss.  Yesterday’s poisons are today’s Viagra.  Look at them and listen to them.  Those who cannot speak a straight sentence anymore, have difficulty walking a straight line, when oil is the subject.  What is their priority, their primary objective, their first sweeping commitment are all shrouded in a granite sarcophagus of stony silence.  Is this a dumb-maan country?  There is no pride, zero self-respect, only the pitiful.  Oil does that to the natives, wherever it goes.  Embarrassment does not suffice anymore.  Evisceration is close, but too fancy.  Eureka!  Dead men walking fits.

 

 

 

 

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• American ones, endowments, Indentureship, The would-be stewards, turned back in midair

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