…nadir
They say a snake can’t sink lower than the ground…since obviously it can only slither on its belly, bereft of any extremities to elevate it. Quite a lot of folks have wondered how low Nagamootoo – whose name is etymologically derived from the Tamil word for “snake” – could sink, after he joined the PNC. Especially since he was always bereft of any moral scruples that would elevate himself off the quotidian depravities of the PNC?
Remember his first demand to Granger wasn’t that the latter keep their Manifesto promise to give Public Servants a “substantial salary increase” – but after pocketing his own mammoth 50 per cent increase, insisted that his Prime Ministerial home on Main Street be completely air-conditioned!! When Granger reneged on the promise to have him chair Cabinet meetings, he shrugged and demanded extra outriders to herald the movements of his convoy on the streets!!
Now that the noose is tightening – with the US starting the ball rolling with visa sanctions and more drastic ones in the offing if they keep up this charade in the courts to deny “the will of the people” – your Eyewitness checked out the fella’s “My Turn” column in the Chronic rag to see how he was slithering. As he is wont to show he can read, after bitching about the inequity of the sanctions, he concluded, “Today, we have returned to the past, or what V.S. Naipaul described as “the bend in the river”. All this “literary” allusion did was to prove once again that he never reads books – just their titles!!
Or else, why would he mention this particular book of Naipaul, which was based as much on Idi Amin as on Burnham as the classic Third World despot who’d destroy his country so irretrievably it might never ever be fixed!! Or was he subliminally telling us that Granger has today brought us back to the cusp of the depravities of the Burnham regime? Which we all know all began with the blatant elections rigging of 1968, when horses in England voted. But was still a bit slicker than having Mingo fudge the numbers in front of the entire diplomatic corps!!
But if Nagamootoo had read “A Bend in the River”, he’d know that the opening line pretty much described his own life with the PNC: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
Moses Nagamootoo is nothing because he’s allowed himself to become nothing.
And there will be no place for him in the world that is what it is.
…prediction
While your Eyewitness isn’t given to much of the Freudian psychobabble that dominates the chatterati, he does think there’s something to the notion of a “Freudian Slip”. Nothing fancy…we have thoughts that we try to bury and they slip out unexpectedly. The “Bend in the River” was about the emergence of the “Big Man” who makes himself president for life and rules by rhetoric, guile, sorcery, and a strong helping of terror. Burnham, eh? Granger tried the rhetoric and guile and we’re seeing the “sorcery” at Cuffy Square and Seven Ponds. The terror is on the way.
The story was about Salim, who’d been kicked out once before, but returns to set up a shop at “a bend in the river”. His property is again expropriated and is imprisoned. He’s rescued, however, by the Commissioner, to whom he’d once been kind. The fella offers the epitaph to where Guyana’s headed if Granger is allowed to get away with his rigging.
“We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning.
But the breeze blowing from up north will make Granger the historian into history.
…heresy
Seems Nagamootoo doesn’t bother to read the Bible. He referred to the Hollywood production of “The Ten Commandments” to insist sanctions will pass.
Did he hear about, “the day of their calamity is at hand?”
