Time and tide, it is said, wait for no man. But that was said as far back as 1225. Nowadays, the tides are rising due to global warming. But it would seem that time, like Ol’ Man River, just keeps flowing along, as if ignoring Albert Einstein’s confirmed prediction that its flow should also change with our speed of movement. And we are moving much more rapidly, in this new millennium.
Take information. Undersea fibre-optic cables and satellites have combined to allow us to be in instantaneous direct communication with persons in any part of the globe. Our terrestrial distances are too puny to matter to the speed of digital electromagnetic pulses.
This synchronous communication then cascades into every facet of our lives. We know instantaneously that our cricket team has been ignominiously defeated “Down Under” and can go to sleep without agonising all night about what “might be happening to our boys”.
Over Skype, we can eat along with our relatives over in New York or Toronto and even comment on the black cake we sent them, and not wait for the now snidely described “snail mail” to arrive with the news. But the effects of simultaneity go far beyond the personal.
In business and finance, billions of dollars are made in “arbitrage” each day by individuals who are able to utilise knowledge of simultaneous fluctuations of values of an item in different markets. Electronic transfers of money in banks now bypass the days that businesses had to wait for “cheques to clear”. Money can now earn more interest or can be invested to deliver additional returns. It is a fast, fast (monetised) world.
Even wars are now also being waged at a faster pace. The first U.S. invasion of Iraq – “the Gulf War” – began on August 2, 1990 and ended on February 28, 1991, a mere six months, which is not long for a whole war. But the second Iraq war in 2003 only lasted from March 19, 2003 to May 1, 2003 – an amazing month and a half.
By the end of the decade, wars actually happened in “no time”: technicians sitting in caves in Nevada simply guide drones 10,000 miles away in Pakistan and fire away at targets they could see in real time. There is no need to “invade” or even declare a “war”.
In Guyana, however, events do appear to be stuck in a time warp. Take our politics, for instance. Fifty years ago, almost to the day, the U.S. decided that democracy did not really mean “rule by the people” through their representatives – the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) – as chosen by free and fair elections.
Democracy really meant rule by representatives chosen by the U.S. for their fealty to the “American way” and “elected” to office through whatever mechanism that would deliver their desired outcome. Guyana got the People’s National Congress (PNC) regime that destroyed our country between 1964 and 1992.
And here we are, 50 years later chronologically, and the Americans are again convinced that our democracy needs “improving”. Maybe it is a pure coincidence or serendipity, but the government once again has been formed by the PPP.
It is clear that the PPP does not appear to understand the American variant of English, especially their meaning of the term “democracy”. Back in the 1960s, the Americans had secretly poured money and training first into the labour movement and then the opposition political parties that understood their intonation.
This time around, the old labour groups have faltered, but in compensation, the political parties have literally gone for the gold. Like the PNC of yore, they have accepted the U.S.’s traducing of Guyana’s sovereignty in order to fund their “training” into the latest U.S.-prescribed democratic mores. Their end game, of course, is to become ensconced in power, for another 28 years.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
