Dear Editor,
It is either a sign of the times or a sign of the apocalypse. I start with the mighty United States, as I probe for any glimmer of sanity that is forthcoming amidst the strange new wisdoms of the hour. Unfortunately, I do not progress far in my quest for instead of sanity, I encounter more and more lunacy.
Here it is that the world is under siege from a pandemic, people are out of work by the tens of millions, and the leader of the free world is more occupied with boasting about how many tweets (many tens of thousands) he has obtained on the matter of bases named after Confederate army officers. Who is leading whom, and how free is this free world of ours? For here is a man at the dawn of the 21st century touting men who fought to maintain the abominable institution of slavery. I must wonder that if the clock was turned back whether this leader may not have also been an owner of human chattel; he certainly does everything to measure up to any such stereotype, benevolent or otherwise. Also, and not unreasonably, I am thinking that a nuclear button is involved somewhere in those hands, and despite checks and balances and the rest, a shiver follows.
There is some more shivering coming, for if Texas-based Dr. Stella Immanuel is to be believed demons do sleep with people. And as if that were not enough, I keep hearing from this leadership-touted (yeah, the same US leader) physician that hydroxychloroquine heals the COVID-19 virus. Houston, we have a problem and it’s with serious heart arrythmias. In fact, I think we have more of a problem with too much of this Donald duck driven expertise in politics and now medicine. I am sure that I also heard (I am beginning to fear my own shadow) that face masks are “unnecessary.” I need them if only to scare off the many spirits that prowl around Guyana. The one positive I read coming from the clairvoyant Dr. Immanuel was that Jesus was going to destroy Facebook if something did not happen. Whatever it was that offended, I do not need to know, that is good enough for me. Just get rid of that Satanic presence called Facebook (and Twitter and Instagram and the rest) that is killing us over here down south.
In terms of Guyana, everybody here is a highflier, including the ordinary man-in-the-street. By highflier, I mean a legal eagle with a keen eye for sophisticated interpretations of something called a constitution. New and callow legal men, who chase ambulances fancy themselves stalwarts in the law. And old timers, who barely made the grade out of any school, and spent their whole professional life following funeral processions in the hope of picking up a client now wax authoritatively about the majesty of the law and its finer points. It is as if Madonna starts lecturing nuns about celibacy and virtue. When I think of Guyanese practitioners, men who almost never won a case on skill or merit, but on tricks, the images that come are not of eagles but of carrions and crows. ‘Cannie-crow’, my people use to call them.
Oh, and here is one more from the good ole USA. The same lovely folks who were/are guiding this backward place and showing it the error of its ways on matters of elections, now have one of its own that just surfaced. No less than the freethinking, free-swinging, and freedom loving headman over there (the president, he is called) has stepped forward to claim that he has the authority under Article II of the US Constitution to delay the November election. I must say it is a nice try and representative of innovative thinking. I must also leave this closing note: I always suspected that the American chief was a Guyanese in disguise. How else could he arrive at such a bizarre electoral conclusion? Go figure what the world is coming to, if not an end. I would hope not, since it is so much fun, with all these kinds of hair-brained people running around free and creating much-needed entertainment.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
