There is heartbreak already; there will be crying in this land

Dear Editor,

I continue to observe our elections and confess to being awed. There is so much that is so smooth and slick, as we craft and then come up with one creation after another that tilts into a world of fictional fantasies. This is what is insisted, must be accepted as real, as the real truths of matters that help us to recognize the lies and the lying liars who tell them, who make cartoonish caricatures of them, and mockery of us all.

If this were jazz, I would laud the improvisations that surpass the cool genius of Miles Davis, that would shrivel him to crescendos of muteness. But this is not jazz, it is the blues of Guyanese elections. There is heartbreak already; there will be crying in this land. Our music sheets register notes and scales that soar with sourness and rancidness. Those archetypical musical sheets are our elections papers waved before the High Court by maestros lacking clothing, lacking authenticity, lacking integrity and one shred of credibility. It is the rhapsody of coalition’s imbecilic frivolities and unscrupulous ingenuities. Might have been the sublime if it was innovative music. But this is not music, but about a nation and its governance future, a set of diverse peoples and their individual and collective destinies.

Senior judges are trained by time and experience to recognize the execrably heinous nature of man in high criminal affairs. But even this from the realm of the electoral has to bring shrinking from the Chief Justice (ag). It is advocating the featherbrained and is most demeaning to coalition leadership. The opposition simply has to sit back and allow coalition leaders and defenders to self-destruct. At the higher level of the CCJ, the jurists uttered such studied insults that any civilized and educated figure would be determined to never get there again. At least, that would be the reaction of any legal agent of even the dimmest luminosity. Instead, another bite of the judicial apple is essayed in the hope of getting lucky, of finding favourable reception. Somebody has got to be kidding. Not me! but themselves and a whole lot of gullible and trusting people.

The other day, I left the vicinity of the cathedral and travelled with the first available taxi. As is my custom, and in an effort to get a sounding from the ground, I engaged. The driver was a mature man without any trace of an accent, who spoke in the tempered tones of civilized discourse. In response to my question of how he was doing, I received a live stream of the educational in a calm and lengthy delivery. His words were: I am looking on at what is our version of the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, Woodstock, and the Nobel Prize. Those are the highpoints of what I can remember, which he did begin with our own Order of Excellence. In other words, what this ordinary working citizen was articulating is the sum of the state of our national existence.

What we have here is one marvelous acting job after the other, in costumed staged performances on the world’s stage. The reception is not even lukewarm or cool; it is critical. I have read of a “long running soap opera” and to that I add that it comes from singing a song of sixpence. Talk about political machinations and legal imaginations. Whatever happened to being honest with clients, no matter how well rewarding the result, and telling them the finality embedded in the simplest of truths. They don’t have a case.

I close with the United States. At the height of its political pyramid, there is a virtuoso, who gets rid of those who do not endorse his ‘nancy stories’. He is the sole standing expert on things as far apart as climate change, and now COVID-19. He had used a vile expletive to describe a CARICOM member. Should have been Guyana. Power intoxicates and corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is what is before us right here right now. It is of men who make morons of themselves and seek to do the same with me and you, too.

Sincerely,
GHK Lall