I HAVE been reading with some amusement the various letters by Mr. Ruel Johnson to the media. It seems that he has a fatal attraction to Minister Frank Anthony. Many of his letters seem to bemoan the fact that the Minister has ignored him. So to get the minister’s attention, he seems to be writing the most outlandish things hoping to provoke a response.
He wrote a libellous letter, the Minister’s lawyer responded and Stabroek News apologised. He of course is too arrogant to admit that he was wrong.

His political affiliation is well known as he was the Alliance For Change consultant on cultural matters. He apparently used his political connections to further his personal vindictiveness against the Minister by getting the Alliance For Change to cut the Culture Ministry’s budget. The AFC duly put in a motion to cut the budget. Fortunately, when the matter was debated, the Minister answered all of the questions posed by the opposition members. The AFC parliamentarians seemed satisfied and they opted to support the budget. This action invoked the wrath of Mr. Johnson who wrote in the newspapers saying, “AFC needs to provide clear answers on why it allowed the Sports and Arts Fund allocation to go through.” The AFC leader then wrote a letter pointing out that the Minister had satisfactory answered all their questions.
Mr. Johnson is not a quitter. He has used his talents as a Guyana Prize winning writer not to write another prize-winning book, but to write weekly letters to attack Minister Anthony. This strange behaviour is not new, not so long ago he was using his writing skills to attack Al Creighton on the Guyana Prize for Literature. Not much has changed with the management of the prize. Yet Mr. Johnson’s attacks ceased as suddenly as they had started. One is left to wonder, why? Is it because the Guyana Prize for Literature employs Mr. Johnson to conduct workshops? Or is it that he is trying to curry favour with the judges in the hope of winning another Guyana Prize. But if the doggerel that is written in Frictions is anything to go by, then readers should not be too surprised if he did submit work to the Guyana Prize for Literature and loses. We would expect from him the usual diatribe of cussing the government and scolding the judges.
It seems that Ruel Johnson has some method to the irrationality, that is, by harassing individuals, cussing out the programmes and policies and then offers himself as the solution to fix them. This is apparently what he did to Al Creighton and this is what he is trying to do with the Caribbean Press.  He has tried to tarnish the individuals involved, criticised the policies and now he is offering himself a job to run the press. This must be the weirdest application for a job; it is a glaring example of how Johnson wants the rules bent to serve him.
I hope that Minister Anthony and his team continue to ignore him. Without Johnson and the people of his ilk, the Caribbean Press has done well in producing more than 60 books, a list that I found at wwwcaribbeanpress.org. This is a commendable effort in such a short period of time.
I wonder what the Caribbean Press would have produced if Johnson was running it. I am willing to take a wager that it would not be much, given his track record as a writer. For a man with so little to show whether by the books he wrote or his academic qualifications, he surely has a bloated ego.
I guess Professor Dabydeen, doggerel and puppyerel comments were a reality check, and should have reminded him that he is still a non-entity in the world of literature. No amount of letters will change that sad fact.