The way the Government of Guyana operates sometimes (one hopes, not all the time) not only defies logic, but imagination and rationality. When the Government of Guyana decided to implement the system of Value Added Tax (VAT), obviously it had to look for a house to put it. At the moment, the central operations of the Guyana Revenue Authority are carried on in a large structure on Main Street. Such a huge building should be commodious enough to accommodate the work that VAT entails.

Maybe for valid reasons, the Government decided that it needed more spacious outlets for the personnel that will be doing VAT tasks. The Government came up with a gargantuan warehouse situated a few blocks from where I live. One does not need to be familiar with the principles of architecture to know that designs are made according to the function of a building. For example, a school would carry more windows than say a military depot.

When the Government identified this warehouse at the corner of Albert and Charlotte Streets, it had to be aware that aesthetics should play a part in its decision. A warehouse does not carry the type of doors that a GRA office should have. The result is that the VAT head office looks inelegant. There you have these two metal doors that are controlled by chains that are used to open them. If there is any accusation that can be labeled against perhaps all of the leaders of the PPP, is their pathetic lack of appreciation for the aesthetic side of life.

There are two explanations that can be advanced for this cultural lapse. One comes precariously close to being racist. I am not happy with its essential points because I think aesthetical values are philosophically impossible to put in an absolute context. For this reason, I disagreed with the editorial chiefs of the Stabroek News while I was a columnist with that newspaper over its rejection of the colour of the building of Courts' Furniture Store.

The newspaper pointed to a law in colonial days that made it compulsory to use a light colour, presumably white, on the buildings of certain streets, including Main Street. My argument was based on aesthetic philosophy. I posit that there was no superior value in one colour over the other.

Why resort to what philosophy one can use to determine the correct value of a colour? The Stabroek News found Courts' bilious yellow incongruous with the prevailing style of Main Street.

Limited space prevents me from repeating my arguments against the Stabroek's rejection of Courts' choice of paint in this essay here, suffice it to say, I don't think the paper's argument was grounded in philosophy.

The Stabroek made the same mistake when it did an editorial entitled, “Concrete carbuncle” which took the position that a family house on Middle Street was an ugly piece of concrete architecture.

It is for this reason, I would warn readers to be careful how it accepts the first explanation of the PPP critics as to why PPP leaders are flippant about aesthetic values. I do believe these leaders are indeed dismissive of the aesthetic dimensions of life but the resort to the sociological explanation of rural culture to my mind needs more sophistication to it if it is to withstand scrutiny.

PPP critics postulate that rural people tend to be less developed in their appreciation for the aesthetic nuances of life, therefore because a majority of PPP leaders are from the countryside, they put less emphasis on these aspects of the human condition. I will leave it at that and move on to the second line of reasoning. Briefly, it has to do with communist ideology. Communism views aesthetic as a bourgeois invention.

Communist philosophy argues that capitalist society emphasizes non-material concepts like humanism, love, pulchritude, friendship, emotions, etc., to keep the working-class people obsessed with these esoteric motifs, so they will be distracted from revolutionary struggle. Communist countries after the Second World War paid little attention to the arts and the world of aesthetics.

This contempt for what communist leaders saw as bourgeois values led to mass terror in most communist countries where comrades who once fought together ended up executing each other. There was no room for sentiments and humanism. It is for this reason, many political philosophers, including the great Hannah Arendt, defended the theory that fascism and communism are intrinsically linked. I accept the logic behind that kind of theorizing.

Fidel Castro is a person devoid of emotions, and his quintessential character is made of fascist traits. It is accidental that, with the exception of Turkey and Rwanda, all the other episodes of genocide have occurred in countries that were either communist or fascist?

Look at them – USSR, Cambodia under the communist regime of Pol Pot, Yugoslavia, Nazi Germany. For all the communist denunciation of capitalist exploitation, capital punishment was first abolished by capitalist countries in Western Europe. Communist countries retained the death penalty even for corruption and drug trafficking. Communist leaders have absolute contempt for the concept of humanism.

I will end this long digression from my main point in this essay with a facetious example of communist disdain for aesthetic values. During the height of Michael Manley's socialist experiment in Jamaica, one of his ministers, DK Duncan, who was an avowed communist, was presiding over the proceeding of the opening of a governmental project. He told his workers to dirty up the school, where the event was housed, a bit so that it would not look like a bourgeois place.

I believe that it is this second theory that explains why the PPP leaders de-emphasize aesthetic values in the administration of government in Guyana. So they put the VAT head office in a warehouse.