I HAVE four reactions to negative criticisms of me in the past 35 years of my presence in the newspapers. One – I must be of interest and influence for others to want to denigrate me. Two `- I assume people look for me in the newspaper apart from their choice of the particular newspaper because over those 35 years I have written for all the major newspapers in this country, changing from one to the other. Three – this is a spinoff from number two; I am assisting in the marketability of the newspaper I write for.

Four – it is important to reply to select castigations because they provide an opportunity to educate people; bring things to them that they did not know about; help to raise their awareness level and provide them with research material that they may find useful someday and it exposes the infantile, depraved or non-existent minds of some people.

A signature appeared below a letter carried in the Friday last edition of the Stabroek News attacking me for a recent article of mine in the Chronicle; yes in the Chronicle. I would not even offer a glimpse of what that letter is about because as I stated several times in the past – I will not reply to people who hide under their mother’s dress. This is a type of human I hate with all the mental energy I can conjure up.

The anonymous letter-writer was joined by someone who was in journalism many moons ago in this country and has left this country many, many moons ago. With racial orientations and anti-PPP hate permeating his letters over the past years, Mr. Emile Mervin chose me to make his subject. As soon as I read his comments, I went to my keyboard immediately because his anti-Kissoon ranting offers a huge opportunity for me to address readers so they can be familiar with the kind of minds the press puts on display.

Nothing about me from Mr. Mervin offered a logical, reasonable assessment. In fact, the gentleman opens himself to ridicule with his hateful description of me. He juxtaposes his take on the waste of my writing with the positive role of two private newspapers. This is the kind of stuff that those who live and see things unfolding in Guyana would find both irritating and comical.
Let’s expose Mervin’s merulius. He argues that the fact that I have written for all the major newspapers proves that I just want to vent (his word). I thank him for assigning the colossal capacity of mine to influence every newspaper to just provide me with the ability to vent and allowed me to do that for 35 years.

I am not going to lecture Mervin on what marketability means, suffice it to say that if he was marketable in his journalistic days he would not have worked at one media house only and had to migrate. Next, Mervin describes me as a person of no national consequence in Guyana. Does that warrant a rejoinder? I leave it to people to decide that. When you go on to read what he pens then you see the valuable avenue he presents to me to address Guyanese on the hate that people write.

He praises other writers who he says have dedicated columns (I don’t know what a dedicated column is but for Mervin it is when the content is anti-government) and goes on to thank the two private newspapers for helping to educate and inform readers. Someone by the name of Surujpaul Rampersaud offered a devastating reply to this part of Mervin’s derogation of me. I quote part of his rebuttal: “Help to educate and inform only if they are non-partisan. Most of those who are attempting to do so have their own agenda and axe to grind.”

It has to be bordering on asininity for someone to say that two private newspapers in Guyana are educating and informing people in the context that we have always used that term. In Guyana, you have to ask – educating and informing the people of what? A good example is an anonymous letter-writer in Stabroek News that wrote that after addressing the nation, the President went back to his bake and salt fish. For Mervin, that is the private newspapers educating the nation.

I close with a beat of my own drum. If you don’t beat your drum in this country, no one will do it for you. So forgive my immodesty. But if I was not marketable in my own country then I would have to migrate and become a tenth rate citizen with no national consequence that would have had to live and die in obscurity in a foreign land.