…the (fictional) past
For a man who supposedly dabbled in journalism – he spent the 1995–1996 academic year, when he was already fifty years old, as a Hubert H. Humphrey/Fulbright Fellow at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland – David Granger has been quite leery of journalists. In the five years he’s been at the helm in Guyana, he faced, at the most, 4 open press Conferences; and those were all before our anaemic press corps received their shots of testosterone since the March 2 elections!!
But when you think about it, his aversion makes sense. He’s really trained as a historian, where he could just conveniently choose whatever “facts” he wanted to pick, and string them into his preconceived narrative. This went all the way back to his youth, when he put together the early history of the Guyana Defence Force.
Starting with that, we can see that he was really good at fiction, since he played so fast and loose with the “facts” that you wondered whether he didn’t worry about being contradicted.
But then he was writing in the age of his mentor, the dictator Burnham, who taught him the Humpty Dumpty doctrine on “facts”. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” For instance, reviewing the sordid history of Burnham rigging the 1973 elections by using the GDF soldiers to collect all ballot boxes and bring them back to Camp Ayanganna to “count”, Granger said one unit behaved “splendidly” when they killed two young men on the Corentyne who were tried to accompany the boxes as the law allowed.
Not surprisingly, he was in charge of politicising those same soldiers with the philosophy of Burnham – who insisted that all officers swore personal loyalty to him and the PNC’s Biennial Congresses.
But reporters are different: they deal with the present in which they’re all living, like other citizens. So, when Granger comes out with his oleaginous platitudes on the burning issues of the day, if they are worth their salt, they’d come back with the facts that are out in the public, even affecting them. For this reason, he avoided the free press like the COVID-19!! And played it safe with his sycophantic trained seals from the state media and their affiliates.
Like, for instance, when his pet Benschop asked his about the recount, and he claimed – unchallenged! – that it started after “anomalies were discovered!! An impossibility, since the said “anomalies” could only be invented by his agents DURING the recount!!
The free press woulda skinned him up!! Hence his living in his bunker!
…la la land
Just when your eyewitness thought Ramjattan had disappeared – along with those two Russian pencil hackers – the man surfaced in the Chronic!! Could it be that he’s being forced to do penance for destroying the PNC’s trump card, for pinning their present claims of more than half of the ballots being fiddled for the PPP??!! After all, most folks aren’t swallowing that tall tale – which would’ve been easier if he’d held the two Russians as evidence of the PPP’s hacking!!
Anyhow, he took over his colleague Nagamootoo’s day job with the latter’s column in the Chronic, but you could see his prolonged absence from the public eye has dulled his wit. The old bar crawler didn’t even offer his cautions on the 2am curfew – his greatest legacy as Public Security Minister – which is most relevant in this age of COVID-19!!
He offered a pained interpretation of Art 177 to claim that the party with the largest number of votes doesn’t get the presidency!!
Math was never the AFC’s strong point!!
…Samurai code?
Did Granger instil into old soldiers like Major Lowenfield the Samurai code of Bushido, that included seppuku – falling on one’s sword – to save face??
Will he follow suit when Claudette announces his defeat??
