…culture?
America’s inexorable spread of its culture across the world has earned the sobriquet “McDonaldization”; courtesy, of course, of those ubiquitous Golden Arches that have now served more than 15 billion burgers – double the population of the world! Excepting Guyana! Yet, ironically, your Eyewitness saw all kinds of ads in the papers advertising “Thanksgiving menus” in restaurants on that quintessentially American event!
Now, you’d have thought that Thanksgiving would be pretty tough to export. After all, it’s tied to a specific event in American history: the landing of their “Puritan Fathers” at Plymouth Rock in what is now Massachusetts. they were what we would nowadays call “Christian religious fundamentalists” fleeing a European backlash. They’d encountered the “Indigenous Peoples”, whom they dubbed “Red Indians”, and who generously offered them their native food – pumpkin, wild turkey, etc. This didn’t deter them from forcibly displacing the natives from their land, and even eventually exterminating them. But they started celebrated the occasion of their arrival as THANKSGIVING – feasting on the same food items the long-gone Indigenous Peoples had shared with them. And here we are in Guyana now celebrating “Thanksgiving”?!! Oh, the irony!!
Now, there’s nothing wrong in giving thanks, but your Eyewitness’s point is this: Can’t we do it in a way that comes out of OUR culture, especially since, from 1970, our governments have been trying to convince us that we’re doing this by celebrating Republic Day with Mashramani? What does this tell us about the success of our effort at “nation building” when, after 50 years, we so willingly accept instead the trademark “American” occasion? We might as well go along with those loonies who’re clamoring for us to become the 51st American State, shouldn’t we?
What makes the adoption of Thanksgiving even more cringeworthy is that it’s so contemptuous of the feelings of our own Indigenous brothers and sisters. The Americans have done a good job of hiding the origins of Thanksgiving, but shouldn’t we be a bit more sensitive? What’s especially egregious is the way the “woke” crowd in Georgetown have latched on to this latest import. What next? Raising the Conservative flag in the National Park?
C’mon people! We know that, in the grand scheme of things in the world at large, we might not matter much; but with oil scheduled to hit 1 million barrels production per day, shouldn’t we start showing at long last that we’re capable of not being blown over by even the slightest breeze that blows from the north?
But then, even Mashramani is a cheap imitation of Carnival, which we cogged from Trinidad, isn’t it?
…rigging?
Donald Trump and a significant number of Republicans are convinced that Biden and the Democrats have rigged their Nov 3 elections. In Guyana, this state of affairs has precipitated a most curious reaction. The PNC and their camp followers have uniformly mocked the moves by the President and Republican lawyers to move to the courts to prove their claim. Yet, here in Guyana, they’ve made the identical claim, and have made the identical move!
What gives? Is it that they’re still upset that the Trump administration was the one – along with the rest of the world! – that insisted democratic procedural norms be followed after our elections? And which saw the PPP assuming office? Well, there IS that…but there’s more in the mortar than the pestle can pound! The PNC knows they were “trying a thing” with the Mingo rigging; and after they were caught with their hands in the ballot boxes, so to speak, they switched gears and concocted the “voting anomalies” they’ve lodged in our courts.
Their ridiculing of Trump and the Republicans simply reveals their own guilty consciences at their brazen effort to once again cuckold the Guyanese people!
