I HAVE this little satirical joke that I have episodically injected into my columns over my 36-year-old newspaper career. It goes like this. I would be reading the newspapers early in the morning while drinking my hot coffee.
I come across one of the most absurd expressions which is so alarming that the surprise would cause me to lurch forward, the coffee would spill on my leg, and the burn would be so extensive that off to hospital I go.
Here are the examples of extreme absurdities in 2024 that almost took my leg off. The Mulatto/Creole class personality, Dr. Nigel Westmaas that is a dye-in-the wool apologist for middle class superiority in Guyana, wrote (in the Stabroek News of course; which other paper would carry such a stupid opinion) that Martin Carter is arguably the deepest thinker Guyana has produced.
I have never read in any era gone by that a country’s deepest thinker was a poet. You can argue that a person was a phenomenal poet but to say that the poet was the nation’s most profound intellectual is bordering on irrationality. In fact, Carter was not a scholar at all. And one of his poems was a justification of CIA inspired violence against Indians in the 1962 violence against the Jagan government.
Here is that anti-Indian, anti-PPP, anti-progressive, pro-imperialist, poem from Carter titled “Black Friday, 1962,” taken from, “Martin Carter, University of Hunger: Poems and Prose” edited by Gemma Robinson:
Were some who ran one way.
Were some who ran another way.
Were some who did not run at all.
Were some who will not run again.
And I was with them all,
When the sun and the streets exploded,
And a city of clerks
Turned a city of men!
Was a day that had to come,
Ever since the whole of a morning sky,
Glowed red like glory,
Over the tops of houses.

I would never have believed it.
I would have made a telling repudiation.
But I saw it myself
And hair was a mass of fire!
So now obsessed I celebrate in words
All origins of creation, whores and virgins!
I do it with a hand upon a groin,
Swearing this way, since other ways are false
I could name at least 10 top Guyanese thinkers whose books on economics, politics and sociology would put them a million miles ahead of Carter. Carter did not pen any philosophical analysis of Guyana’s ontology.
But Westmaas felt he had to pay homage to one of the top names in the evolution of the Mulatto/Creole class in this country. Carter remains the second most opportunistic politician Guyana ever produced after Forbes Burnham, though I am inclined to put Carter ahead of Burnham.
Westmaas’ brother, Yuri, wrote last year (only in the Stabroek News of course) as a reaction to Mr. Jagdeo’s reference to Ms. Cathy Hughes as a low-life that Mr. Burnham would never have referred to anyone as a low-life.
When I read that massive expression of stupidity, the coffee did burn my leg. Yuri Westmaas has a cleaning business in New York where he is employed to do fumigation tasks. When I wrote in reaction to his angelic interpretation of Burnham, I urged that Westmaas clean his mind. Westmaas and the world know that Burnham did far, far worse types of name-calling.
Last year’s stupidities in Guyana had no parallel elsewhere in the world, maybe except in the US. There were two expressions by a well-known, anti-oil, anti-government personality, Malinda Janki. Here is the first one. She noted that well-known anti-PPP crusader, Ramon Gaskin, spat on the oil curse in Guyana.
With the exception of Janki, no one knows in this country what the oil curse is. What all Guyanese know is that more one-off payment is coming in 2025 from oil money. I am buying a bicycle when I get my $100,000. In another column, I will tell you why I am buying a bicycle.
Last year, Ms. Janki ridiculed the education shortfall of Guyanese politicians. She said all MPs must undergo an education examination including critical thinking. If there was ever someone in Guyana that lacked critical thinking in 2024 it is a real, known citizen named Malinda Janki.
At a Moray House presentation on oil, in 2022, Ms. Janki made Guyana laugh at her. The title of her lecture was: “Oil will make Guyana poorer not richer.” At Moray House that day, this country saw what a flawed mind can be like. Janki’s friend, Editor-in-Chief at the Stabroek News, Anand Persaud, last year, referred to me as the PPP’s latest hire. But I wonder if Mr. Persaud thinks that Ms. Janki may be a hire for those in the West who want Guyana to save Planet Earth while we get poorer and they get richer.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.