Latest update March 28th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 12, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists
By Dennis Nichols
Guyana, like I’ve suggested before, is one huge, seriously-funny paradox – greatly-resourced but pettily managed; rich yet poor; a tourist paradise but tourist-desolate; a da Vinci masterpiece layered over with tarnished gloss and grime, beautiful, and bestial. This description is at once the truth, and a lie. This is how we have made it; more so the colonizers, politicians, and other leaders who have helped shape our destiny for close to 200 years on both sides of the independence watershed.
A lot of Guyanese I know have a love/hate relationship with our country. We are intermittently swayed one way or the other in alternating reaction to perceived advances, atrocities, progress and backwardness. One of the reasons is that we are confused over what is happening in our country, especially the political and economic intrigue, and in the face of wildly-conflicting declarations and denials, we are left to pick our way through a vague collage of shadows and shapes. Nothing, it seems, is ever what it seems.
Americans have the same problem; it’s one of the reasons Donald Trump is president. Trying to figure out the maze of amorphous shapes and shadows, or even fairly well-defined ones, leads to the kind of thinking that is linked to apprehension, anger, and fear. Into the midst of this arena of unsureness are thrown declarations, claims, facts, statistics, enticements; even threats, all wrapped in the clever semantics of the deceiver and the manipulator, who make us think our welfare is their concern.
Machiavelli knew it, as did multitudes of orators, politicians, businessmen, and lawyers before and after him. Colonial governors of British Guiana knew it, as I guess did leaders like Burnham and Jagdeo. Thus a culture of carefully-crafted guile and fraud grows on us, sometimes so subtly, often so compellingly that we of a gentler spirit are caught in its web. And many of us who aren’t, run the risk of becoming apathetic, because we find it hard to fight or to fathom the true nature of the political and economic beasts.
By the way there’s a catch – a big one. For some of us grow in our own cunning, and we discern the artifice. After several ‘aha’ moments, we become less naïve, more cynical, and may even feel we have to get in on the action. You could call it trickle-down corruption.
So the arena gets bigger and even more confusing because everyone is playing the one-upmanship game. I remember a local playwright telling me 30 years ago that we had developed a rip-off culture, even when it was totally unnecessary. It had become a natural part of survival, and of ‘the system’, good, bad, or expedient.
A sneaky aspect in all of this is the Big Lie – assertions made so grandly, so outrageously, or so diplomatically, and by such prominent personalities, that people find themselves accepting them and doubting simple, straightforward evidence to the contrary. The phrase is generally attributed to Adolf Hitler and his Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, and some say its use in Nazi Germany helped transform anti-Semitism into mass murder. Interestingly, holocaust deniers say the six million figure representing Jews exterminated between 1941 and 1945 is itself a Big Lie.
The Big Lie is based on the fact that generally, since people engage in small lies and minor deceptions and expect others to do the same, when the clever whopper is told it does not fit this accepted pattern, so they feel it must be true. We can’t believe that anyone would have the audacity to distort truth so blatantly, especially when they add agreement inducers like ‘as you know’ or ‘everyone knows’. The biggest problem, however, may not be the lie itself, but trying to determine which bold assertions are true and which are not, and even then many truths may be largely relative.
For example as I asked in an earlier piece, ‘Is Guyana a breadbasket or a basket case’? Did the previous government turn Guyana into the region’s most corrupt state or did it restore democracy and integrity to an almost failed state? Who is the ‘father’ of our nation – Burnham or Jagan? Did a sector of our population engage in ethnic cleansing of East Indians? Were more than 400 mainly Black people murdered by a government-supported Phantom Death Squad? And of late, are those parking meters a boon, or bane?
Elsewhere in the region and to the north, the issues and the stakes are bigger; global. Inter-nation ‘agreements’ like Caricom, NAFTA, and the European Union have been praised and pilloried. Obama and ‘Obamabare’ were great for America. No, they were terrible. Islam is a religion of peace; Islam is a religion of violence. Climate change is a real and growing danger; climate change is essentially bull***t. All of the above are historicized as relative facts. Will the history books tell schoolchildren a balanced tale 100 years from now?
The Big Lie may hide behind euphemisms, and one quickly becoming a buzz phrase is Alternative Facts, which a respected periodical calls pointless falsehoods – that which is told so openly, so blatantly, and can be so easily disproved, that it just has to be true, except that it’s not.
Two recent examples will suffice. Donald Trump said he saw with his own eyes ‘thousands and thousands’ of people in New Jersey cheering as the twin towers fell on 9/11/2001. His buddy Rudy Giuliani, N.Y. City Mayor on 9/11 declared that ‘before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terror attack in the United States’. These should be easily debunked, except maybe in the minds of fanatic followers.
More alternative Trump facts include having the biggest inauguration day crowd ever, stating that the murder rate in the United States is the highest it’s been in 47 years, and declaring that the media is engaged in deliberately false reporting on him. Fact-check please! To be fair though, politicians have over the years made similar boasts and allegations; Trump is simply making a habit out of it. Add the quirky facial expressions, the smirk, the finger-flicking, and you have almost a political caricature.
So America has Donald Trump, and we have our own cohort of somewhat less colourful politicians with their own peculiar brand of alternative facts, a few of which I alluded to earlier. I like to think, though, that our boys (and girls) have less of the braggadocio and more of the covertness than the current U.S. president has, the Big Lie notwithstanding.
I don’t care much for shenanigans but I do appreciate the subtle flavour of the diplomatic ‘lie’ so I’ll end with this tasteful bit of humour.
The late Winston Churchill, no slouch with words and wit, was quoted as saying that diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions; tact ensures that they look forward to the trip.
Maybe we should lay some ‘diplomacy’ and ‘tact’ on Donald Trump and on our own politicians, if not to send them to the underworld, at least to help them cushion the Big Lie.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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