Freddie saves the world
Wednesday Ramblings
Stabroek News
November 27, 2002
Letters have been pouring into the WR mailbox in response to last week’s column on Freddie “The CIA Drone” Kissoon. Meanwhile the Nutty Professor has apologised for his reference to “sweetboy expatriates”. You will recall that Freddie had only just finished saying sorry to the Professor Thomas and his whole family over whether Thomas spoke/attended or slept through a WPA meeting in Linden donkey years ago. Let us not accuse Freddie of being a serial apologist but more a gracious debater with the humility to know when he has screwed up.
His account on Friday of his attempts to stop a gardener from throwing grass clippings over the seawall was a satirical masterpiece and something one would never dare to spoof at the risk of sounding serious. What is clear from this opus is that Freddie simply has too much time on his hands. While Guyana’s Don Quixote passed the time entangled in grass clippings and red cake when exactly was he working?
Freddie does not attract trouble but rather unearths it like a Tuscan farmer hunting for truffles or Angela Lansbury bumping into murder mysteries every week. Wherever there’s an injustice be assured Freddie will be on his way. Somehow if Freddie could travel back in time history might have been far different and not always for the better. Imagine if he had been on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama on the day Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. There is no way he would have stood by and allowed that injustice to continue. He would have jumped into the driver’s seat and attempted to make it to the nearest sympathetic media house just over the Mason-Dixon line. Unfortunately the bus would have probably crashed into a crowd of commuters and Rosa Parks would have simply been a footnote at the bottom of an article headlined “Man hijacks downtown bus - kills three.”
Just as his good intentions almost had the gardener arrested so he would have set back the cause of civil rights for a decade or so.
Further back in time Freddie travels to Holland and spies the Little Dutch Boy his finger stuck in a dyke. What a grave injustice! Child labour in a so-called developed country! He scoops up the child and goes looking for his mother as Holland is engulfed in a tidal wave. A nation, a civilisation wiped out.
Fast forward to the night of August 31, 1997 and the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Sitting at the hotel bar is a round looking gentleman Henri Paul, sipping scotch and looking decidedly inebriated. Freddie’s Time Machine lands in the lobby and he sees Paul jiggling his car keys. He is worried the chauffeur is in no fit state to drive. Paul is called away and Freddie gives chase on a motorcycle waving frantically at the black Mercedes sedan with a vaguely familiar couple in the back seat. He weaves in and out of traffic waving at Paul to slow down. But alas too late, all are killed as the chauffeur is temporarily blinded by a thesis which flies out of Freddie’s pocket. The only survivor is a British bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones who dimly recalls a deranged-looking man with long hair.
Now to the letters page
Dear WR,
I too like Ravi Dev ran into Freddie Kissoon the other day. Literally. I was walking on the seawall and he ran right into me while reading a thesis on Dr Cheddi Jagan. He asked if I had attended a recent meeting of the PPP and when I replied in the affirmative he called me a “Commie dog”, stamped on my toe and ran off.
Dear WR,
I am the little boy who Freddie asked if I was being brought up multi-racially while in Fogarty’s. My dad said some very unkind words about him which I am too young to write but I could whisper them in your ear. What I can say is that man frightens the hell out of me and if he is “multi-racial” I don’t want to grow up like that. Waaaaaaaaa!
Ravi Dev Junior
Peace in Buxton at last
The visit of Dr Roger Luncheon to Buxton over the weekend has finally brought peace to the troubled village.
Criminals could be seen laying down their arms as he passed by their homes, housewives stopped in mid-sentence mouths ajar as if a prophet of peace had come into their midst. Young girls rushed out with offerings of flowers and pastries.
Many journalists did not know why a sudden tranquility came over the village but saw a miracle before their own eyes as families fell asleep on verandahs, cows stopped chewing in mid-cud and dropped heavily to the verge.
Dr Luncheon was later asked about his historic visit.
“It is indeed true, that at approximately 1200 hours on Sunday I in my capacity as Cabinet secretary and having nothing better to do that afternoon, accompanied by senior military officers and other disciplined services personnel proceeded into the area commonly known - and what I verily believe to be called since childhood days - as the Buxton/ Friendship community.
I can report with a certain measure of certainty that the visit was greeted with a degree of what one could only call amazement intermingled with trepidation culminating in deep somnolence. While I am not at liberty to delineate my conversations with residential inhabitants, there was a suggestion that if the criminal activities did not abate to a manageable level my weekly press conference would be broadcast into the village through loudspeakers 24 hours a day.”
