The Poseur

The Poseur Freddie Kissoon’s “Goodbye, Mr Hitchens. You were a big influence on me” was the most maudlin and mawkish piece of piffle sighted in a decade. Here’s a grown man (got to be pushing 60) whining about how Fitzpatrick hates him. Hey, whatever Fitzpatrick did to you, that was over two decades ago. Get a grip. Get a life. Move on! But guess what? After going on at a rate about some others that couldn’t give a damn about him, Kissoon declares that he doesn’t “give a damn” about what others say about him. Really? Hmmmm. One would never guess.

But what takes the cake is Kissoon’s comparison of himself with “the Hitch”. Now we glimpse the genesis of Kissoon’s life as a poseur. Yes, with the French inflexion, as the Hitch would have it. You know, one of those pitiful human wrecks, wracked with insecurity, that “affect a particular attribute, attitude, or identity to impress or influence others.” Seems that Kissoon encountered the Hitch in the late seventies and claims he found a soulmate after whom he patterned his enfant terrible technique. But what exactly of the Hitch’s attributes did Kissoon emulate? Certainly not the biting wit and erudition that the Hitch always deployed to skewer his targets. Sarcasm and “cuss down” are not satire and irony.

Hitchens was against all forms of hypocrisy, he was not a hypocrite like Kissoon. He displayed the courage of his convictions. He accepted that he was a “man- kisser” and more, and only stopped when “he was attractive only to women”. Hey, you are what you are.

Hitchens admitted that he was bullied in school both for his size and class background, but he didn’t obsess over it into his dotage like Kissoon.

The WPA

You have to hand it to the WPA posse. What they couldn’t achieve umpteenth times at the polls, even with multiple partners, they’ve done with the PNC. Is it a case of soulmates finding each other? Here is a party that at best couldn’t scrape together two per cent of the votes and now have four parliamentarians – Roopnaraine, Hinds, Trotman (the one with hair; white hair) and Bulkan. And if you consider that Keith Scott came out of their camp, they actually have five.

What’s going on? Well, we could stick with the “soulmate” theory: these fellows had been just upset with Burnham’s wrecking the country. Substantively, they had no fundamental problems with the raison d’être of the PNC.

Then again, there’s the Hoyte post-1985 manoeuvre that Granger may be imitating. He was there, you know. Bring in individuals with no independent base of their own (like Aubrey Norton) and, voila, they’re now beholden to you! But we wondered what happened to Rishee Thakur, APNU’s poor man’s Berbician answer to Nagamootoo.

APNU didn’t do too badly – they’re only a few hundred behind the much heralded effect delivered by Nagamootoo. And Nagamootoo is going to Parliament. We believe that Rishee should do a “Norton”. Have a few supporters from # 67 village picket APNU headquarters and demand he go to Parliament.