Retail versus wholesale

Nov 09, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

…Hard Truths

by GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News- The outside world may only have some smidgen of an idea, but Guyanese truly find themselves caught between the devil and the deep, stormy sea.  The devil is a well-known commodity, the sea not as much and with more than its share of mysteries.  In the context of local politics, Guyanese have resigned themselves to talking, lamenting, about the lesser of two evils.  Evil is evil, so I am walking around unsteadily trying to interpret the difference between three-quarter evil versus three-fifth (or three-sixteenth) that is irreversibly committed to the side and forces of darkness.  The bright boys love to palaver about some Manichean construct, when the whole blasted place is tormented by men who would make Machiavelli look like a quaint, white aproned and blue bonneted milkmaid.  Something is wrong, and to an obscene degree, with this reality of citizens compelled to examine both sides of rancid bread and then pronounce on which side of the slice could be taken a risk with, in the hope of not contracting rabies or brain disease.

I find myself tossing this timebomb called the lesser of two evils from hand to hand and praying that I don’t blow myself up.  This is the grim choice that Guyana’s democracy delivers to its citizens.  Choose the red and get devoured in its monstrous suction.  Attach to the green and get ready for the tongue and flesh to turn the same pallid color.  Stretching the elastic to its limit and taking a chance on the lesser of evil is to call evil upon oneself.  Me worry about chalking up another enemy.  There are so many, yet there is still room for others who declare themselves to be in that category.  But who gets to decide which is lesser and which is greater?  By what criteria, from which source, and by what process?  Another evil resource from Guyana’s endless reservoir of such elements?

Let this fact be faced.  There are leaders who the Guyanese hold as heroes and superstars.  I feel tarnished just writing that sentence about them, and this is without calling them by name.  To cut a fine point on this, the preference is not to be in the same space with them, breathe the same air as them, or touch them with a 50-foot pole.  Not a 10-foot, but a 50-foot, pole, which is what swooning, drooling Guyanese should take note.  Translation: Guyanese leading political presences do not represent evil minus something, but evil multiplied by evil.  So, this pigwash about lesser should be cast out into one of those pit latrines, of which the Government of Guyana is the proud owner.  There is absolute evil, then there is that slighter consideration: shades of darkness.  Not as thick, but not thin.  The latter is what a fellow citizen went to the pains to point out.  Personally speaking, hobnobbing and partnering with the broad cast of characters in the local political zoo is the equivalent of immersing oneself in wholesale evil.  Wholesale means that a local Dr. Frankenstein or a man-eating Dr. Hannibal Lector, politically speaking in both instances, is beyond salvaging.  With those, there will be scant dealing to protect myself.  My challenge is that that doesn’t reconcile with my inner beliefs.  But I suspend judgment, take that under advisement, and move along to what is the next best bird in the hand.  It is civil society.

Though the widest net should be cast to capture those playing double games and double-crossing Guyanese (spiritual, commercial, environmental, and so on), the priority is on the professional, which is a vital presence in local civil society.  There is that presence, but there is a catch.  It is part of the human tragedy of Guyana.  There are those technical and professional members of civil society who mean better but are diminished by what drags them down.  They are in bad shape.  But they are not as bad as the deformed and disfigured evils in Guyana’s politicians.  The political players (most of them) operate on a wholesale scale of evils.  The civil society pros who wish to give their contributions have their distortions, but they are on a retail level.  The political consists of what is considered full-out men and women of evil origins, dispositions, and productions.  Whereas the political class is, with few exceptions, far gone, as in totally overboard, the societal cohort has some redeeming qualities about them.  Members want what is better for Guyana, want to bring about some measure of change, want to be rid of the plague of political evil that hangs like a shroud over the people of Guyana.  What to do?

Unfortunately, circumstances have propelled Guyanese to a hard and unyielding place: they don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing.  Guyana’s politics is not an auction house.  Guyana’s politics and the politicians in charge represent a slaughterhouse.  Take a card.  It is either that citizens suck up and get a grasp of what is before them (the unknown and the unnerving) or that they bow to the known evils they live with and surrender to their fate, whatever such brings them.  Oftentimes In the history of this materially rich but inhumanly impoverished country, the options have been a pack of piranhas and a swarm of barracudas.  Sink and it’s the end.  Swim and get skinned alive.   The first group is the people in red, green, and yellow.  The second has no color, which is what makes them marginally frightening.

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

(Retail versus wholesale)

---

• Guyana’s democracy, Guyanese, hard truths, Machiavelli, The devil

---