{"id":32339,"date":"2014-02-28T15:09:59","date_gmt":"2014-02-28T19:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/?p=32339"},"modified":"2014-02-28T15:09:59","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T19:09:59","slug":"the-forest-and-the-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/the-forest-and-the-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"The forest and the trees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Satiricus was ecstatic. As he\u2019s confessed before, when he was a small boy, he\u2019d always hoped to be a lawyer. Using all those fancy words, like \u201csine die\u201d, and \u201csine qua non\u201d; jumping up and shouting \u201cincompetent, irrelevant, immaterial!!\u201d (Young Satiricus had seen Perry Mason on TV) \u2026and more to the point, earning the big bucks, had made lawyering his lodestar.<\/p>\n<p>Only his miserable grades at CSEC had stood in his way. So he\u2019d done the next best thing \u2013 become a news hack where his editor could yell how \u201cincompetent, irrelevant and immaterial\u201d his articles were. But now hope beat anew in the breast of Satiricus. It didn\u2019t matter he couldn\u2019t make it through the door of the law school at UG \u2013 much less Hugh Wooding: anybody could now practise law!<\/p>\n<p>And not only ordinary law. Like finding out whether a fowl thief of his mother\u2019s fowl also had rights over the fowl and so could not be charged for larceny \u2013 whether petty or grand. Now ordinary folks could even argue Constitutional Law! All you needed was to have an opinion on something and you could tell even Senior Counsels they are \u201cincompetent, irrelevant and immaterial!\u201d It helped too, if you were part of the Opposition.<\/p>\n<p>Take this lady Jam-it Bull-Can. For years Satiricus has seen her long \u2013 very long \u2013 letters in the press about our trees. Satiricus had never read any of them \u2013 there was only so many hours of the day, after all \u2013 but he\u2019d figured she certainly knew a lot about trees. Satiricus had this mental image of Bull-Can always hugging one tree or another.<\/p>\n<p>Occasionally, however, Satiricus wondered if Bull-Can could see the forest for the trees. Not least because that\u2019s tough when you\u2019re clinging on to a trunk for dear life. But here it was Bull-Can had solved \u2013 just like that! \u2013 a legal conundrum that had divided Courts, the Attorney General, the Ex and Present -Speakers of Parliament and every lawyer in town!<\/p>\n<p>The legal issue had to do with a similar problem that\u2019d confronted Hamlet hundreds of years ago: to cut or not to cut, that is the question. Like the little boy who told the Emperor he had no clothes, Bull-Can cut the legal Gordian knot by ruling \u201ccut!\u201d Why? Well\u2026 \u201cDuh\u201d she retorted: didn\u2019t everyone see \u201cthe importance of the budget as the ultimate lever of control of the legislature over the executive in tripartite Jeffersonian government\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Now Satiricus hazily remembered from his news backgrounding grunge work that in the U.S., the Legislature has been explicitly given \u201cthe spending power\u201d, and the same wasn\u2019t true for Guyana. But what did poor, unlettered Satiricus know? He could only see the forest, not the trees.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Satiricus was ecstatic. As he\u2019s confessed before, when he was a small boy, he\u2019d always hoped to be a lawyer. Using all those fancy words, like \u201csine die\u201d, and \u201csine qua non\u201d; jumping up and shouting \u201cincompetent, irrelevant, immaterial!!\u201d (Young Satiricus had seen Perry Mason on TV) \u2026and more to the point, earning the big bucks, had made lawyering his lodestar. Only his miserable grades at CSEC had stood in his way. So he\u2019d done the next best thing \u2013 become a news hack where his editor could yell how&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satiricus"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"gutentor_comment":0,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32339"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32340,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32339\/revisions\/32340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.guyanatimesinternational.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}