I continue to believe in Senator Obama, notwithstanding his apparent turnabout on presidential elections spending, deferring agreement on a ceiling of $84.1 million for each candidate. Should he hold the course and deal manfully with the storms, he will prevail and displace the current “dead duck” US Executive and its policies which threaten to end this civilisation or at the least, lead us into an interminable and unwinnable conflict with Muslims that could reduce America to a pauper. This would be extraordinarily stupid even though only about 1% of Muslims are inclined to wage religious war, but that militant 1% is a pool of 12 million people which can supply several million activists.

The promise Obama offers for a fresh look at the world, if it holds true, will bring enormous good to humanity, if only by placing a more benign face on US interventions in others’ affairs. We have no illusions that interventions will continue, since the nation is run by business for business.
Much mud is slung at Obama because of his name and a remote grandparental connection with Islam suggesting that his victory would bring the enemy into the White House. His African grandfather converted to Islam a century ago, taking the name Hussein, but followed the religion half-heartedly; his son, Obama’s father, became an atheist. It’s ironic that Barrack is the same Jewish name better known as Baruch. Yet no slur or allegiance attaches to that. His name and upbringing in fact make him an ecumenical Jewish–Muslim-Christian! What could be better for the nation? However, narrow-minded Americans, poorly-educated in the ways of the world, prefer to heed vicious rumours which the Obama camp had earlier on ignored. Moved by their widespread fury and potential for harm his campaign has counterattacked with facts on a website called fight the smears.com
Comedians, who today outrank other media people as sources of news, have difficulty finding or making good jokes about Obama. The more sophisticated New Yorker magazine has, however, just printed a cover cartoon showing Obama and wife in the Oval Office, he dressed in African Muslim garb, she as a rebel, bumping fists, Minnesota style, with a picture of Bin Laden on the wall and the fireplace burning an American flag. The deep satire of popular paranoia concerning Obama is obvious. But only if one knows the philosophy and style of the New Yorker, not one of your regular newsstand trash. Unfortunately, the cartoon is available on the internet which every one can see and my guess is that most Americans will miss the satire and embed the image to feed the fabrications first introduced by Hillary Clinton. For this reason the cartoon has rightly been condemned by most thinking people as poorly conceived and a misfire of grave proportions. If the New Yorker wished to bury Obama - which I doubt very much, judging by its other writings - it could not have begun with a bigger shovelful of dirt. McCain thankfully condemned the cartoon.
The stakes are really high; conservatives, rich and poor, wish to pursue what Bush and Cheney started in the mistaken notion that they are defending America from enemies that seek her destruction. If this thesis is correct perhaps US leaders would do well to review why their country is so disliked. There is no shortage of books explaining why, yet each administration - republican and democrat - has so far continued to ignore the evidence that includes thoughtless and aggressive US foreign policies, protectionism, political patronages and alliances, American financial domination, corruption and business hegemony - particularly galling when pushed by narrow-minded and visionless corporate chiefs unaware of their limitations and insensitive to the social, cultural and religious norms of their markets. Americans speak grandly of freedom, but its businesspeople see this as merely the freedom to exploit others in every corner or the globe and expropriate others’ assets, not freedom for others to think, innovate, associate and safeguard their resources.
I do not expect drastic change in an Obama administration but I anticipate improved international relations, constructive dialogue to ease tensions and to replace chicane diatribe. Some of the evidence is even now being collected as Obama travels from Afghanistan to the Middle East and Europe and should become aware of extant needs and concerns as he meets national leaders. Positive response from his hosts will undoubtedly help him at home, as he addresses his policy emphases: ending engagement in Iraq, lessening dependence on foreign oil, curbing influence of lobbyists and promoting a national healthcare plan, all eminently desirable.

The world I grew up in was an old place fixed in its way by the time I began to appreciate the confining spaces around me. Where I grew up was dominated by the whistle of the sugar factory at 7 a.m. The shrill call was an air blast and could be heard for miles – the sound traveled over the red galvanised roof of the factory itself, across the sickly-sweet stink of the muck from the grinding of the sugar canes, across the brown, fibrous debris, called baggasse, from the crushed canes, through the corridors of the whitewashed administration buildings, over their sandy-red roofs, and then across the acres and acres of fields verdant in the growing humidity of the morning.

The morning’s whistle had meaning for the clusters of houses huddled in the middle of the fields. Here unpaved roads snaked through villages where a few houses were built with coarse, red bricks, the mortar that glued it all together rough and sandy. But it was mostly shacks put together with mismatched pieces of wood, tree branches - at times, rusted and dented corrugated galvanise for roofs, but mostly thatch from the carat palm. There was a hovel or two, merely a lean-to against a tree, for the more indigent. The whistle cut though these houses, its edge rapidly exiting the empty rooms where brown crocus bags were beds and blackened-bent nails driven into walls held few items of clothing; it caused the children to lift their heads towards the two massive chimney stacks that were constantly belching black smoke like the fires of Mordor. The blast of sound would cause wives left behind each morning to pause and hope that husbands had made it to the factory on time, most of the men trudging the graveled distance without shoes, taking with them humble meals wrapped in leaves, rain water stored in a hollowed-out gourd, called a boley. They would have to make it to the factory before the whistle blew because to be late meant being “docked” half an hour out of their pay, which itself was barely enough to stretch from the two-week cycle between what was called “pay-day”. In fact, for the lives lived by the people around me, the two-week cycle always overlapped, and eventually grew as an exponential into unwieldy debt with the shopkeepers and storeowners, the days of the lives of sugar workers measured by pencilled entries on brown shop paper spiked on a nail driven completely through a piece of wood. Eventually this spike would be driven through the heart.
I recall the hushed whispers around me by neighbours when these debts came due, and the forceful collectors who arrived out of a world that even then was so aged and unforgiving, their steps arrogant and unimpeded into front yards where thin, half-starved men sat waiting with heads in hands, the lines of worry on foreheads etched alongside the throbbing knots fear, the veins thickened with stress, this surge a delirium against the unknowing innocence of children huddled and laughing as they picked the the legs off butterflies.
This space had its moments of cruelty – indeed, there was always a bitter side to the sugar cane harvest. I witnessed the episodes without knowing that something within me was being wounded – but in a place where fresh wounds are cut each day, sometimes upon each other, it is understandable why the screams were merely frightening, just a temporary zone of discomfort. Looking back at the scars within, I understand fully now that wife-beatings around me were horrific, the episodes sometimes tumbling down the front steps, dragged by the hair through the noisome muck of drains, and viciously kicked onto and abandoned kneeling and humiliated on the sharp stones on the road.
There were suicides too, the methods brutal, committed either by hanging or with sharp instruments. I lived through these childhood agonies, standing barefoot among the gathered adults, my face streaked with an uncomprehending daze while wives bawled hoarsely as detached neighbours cut the rope and others steadied their legs to catch the stiffened body. I stood in the half-opened world of a Demerara window to watch the rain come down and wash the spilled blood off the unrelenting blades of razor grass.
I began to understand that the world I came into had already been fixed in place. There was an unpalatable bitterness at the core of each stalk of sugar cane. And there, in an oasis within the bitter canes, I could see the men who made the rules leaving white bungalows, putting golf bags into the trunks of luxury cars, and making the short trip to a well-maintained golf course not far from where they lived. They were the privileged, living apart from the horrors I saw around me each day.
Within me the wounds have healed enough to have brought me to a point of rest that whenever I golf, I do so with the memory of lost lives in what is thankfully now a changed world.

Guyana >