Cassandra's Candid Corner
Stabroek News
April 22, 2001

By now, the general public must be sick of reading, viewing and hearing the same subject dished out in a myriad ways, each more boring than the other. You know, this column was originally created to poke innocuous fun at the pompous, gin-and-tonic crowd and to share with you the dotishness of the week. From time to time, we would inject some home-made, half-baked philosophy, and quote from the minds of great ones.

But in these trying times, fun has flown out of the window. Readers suddenly go selectively blind to the thousands of words hitherto written and zero in on one sentence they perceive to be offensive. Now, that would be fine, if they could make a point and then dun wid dat. But no. Invective is launched; attitudes and positions are taken that are appalling, if not downright racist.

Really, I don't know what to write. Actually I just don't want to write any more. The whole environment is depressing, stultifying and not lending to cerebral activity. The present scenario promotes defeatism and burn-out. I think I have reached just there.

I want so much to write about pie-in-the-sky intangibles like love, pleasure and commitment, and about more day-to-day, mundane issues - merchants and consumers, children's learning, divorce and even death. But I have been caught up (sucked into is perhaps the more apt term) in the political ground swell - and this disgusts me. So, unless something changes drastically and lifts my spirits, I'll just have to crawl into my cocoon and enjoy life less gregariously. However, I do have one last salvo that I'd like to pelt at the plethora of propagandists which have suddenly slithered out of the dungheaps of Guyana, like bugs after rain.

Now, notwithstanding the fact that not necessarily the best or the brightest migrate into politics, there should not be a constant and continuous barrage of slander and other unsubstantiated mess thrown at them. During my sojourns in so many countries around the globe and my association with the socioeconomic life of the peoples there, never have I found so much garbage heaped upon public figures as is the case in Guyana. Damn the 'political figures are fair game' principle!

The leaders of all the major parties in Parliament have had to endure (some more than others) the most revolting frontal and indirect attacks. President Jagdeo especially has endured the most reprehensible onslaught. To their credit, they seem to have all been pachyderm enough not to wilt under the pressure. Actually, for me it is quite incomprehensible why they or any decent 'public figure' - political or otherwise - would still continue to accept (and subject their families to) the malignant assaults on their competence, morality, family life and motives. Those hurling the putrescent and sordid sewerage have no shame. They go into people's bedrooms to find stories, and if nothing is unearthed, they are quite capable of inventing scurrilous misinformation on site. Their wretchedness moves easily from oblique innuendo to deprecatory fabrications to blatant character assassination. How can I ever forget the despicable depth into which some propagandists sunk, when the Hoyte family experienced an irreparable and indelible hurt some years ago.

What sort of people are these? They seem to think that at all costs and 'by any means necessary,' the populace must be kept alarmed; it must live in a constant state of crisis. In other words their credo is: if you menace the masses with an endless series of imaginary hobgoblins, they will need to be 'saved' and, according to H.L. Mencken, they will become clamourous to be led to safety.

In truth, though, I do recognise that the propagandists can only work with something that already exists; they can confirm people in the 'rightness' of their already firmly-held belief. Aldous Huxley once wrote that propagandists may give force and direction to a movement, but do not in fact create it. They canalise an already existing stream, but if there is no water they will dig in vain.

People want to have their prejudices confirmed. JAC Brown, writing four decades ago, postulated that people need to pinpoint an enemy to blame for their frustrations. This being the case, the propagandist, more often than not, will find that his rhetoric will fall on fertile soil, so long as he focuses on the existing attitudes and cerebral low level of the receptive audience. Hitler was more blunt. In Mein Kampf, he advised that the propagandist needs only confine himself to a few points... and repeat them over and over again. In view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, the masses more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. Let's face it, as crudely as Hitler made it sound, the masses in motion have a gregarious hard-sense which precludes them from logical thought.

Now, once they begin to act, a whole new ball game emerges. One Jacques Ellul, author of a book called Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962), points out that actions make propaganda's effect irreversible. This means that he who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is obliged to believe even more in that propaganda, because of his past action. He receives from it now justification, even authority (without which his actions would be clearly absurd and unjust). This is what Meyers and Whyllie (the two media consultants who were here recently) call necessary escalation, the imperative of upping the ante - until either explosion (of and by the masses) or implosion (of the propagandist) occurs.

So, from one day to another, the other party is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own party stands for everything that is good, decent and noble. Every action of the "enemy" is judged by one standard, and every action by oneself by another. Even good deeds by the "enemy" are considered a sign of particular cunning and devilishness, a symptom of a convoluted mind conjuring up devious motives and machinations, all with the objective of deceiving. The aim is to make the enemy appear so great a monster that he forfeits the rights of a human being.

Have we reached that stage? Recent headlines tend to make me believe this. And there is no letting up. It follows, therefore, that if I cannot enjoy the rights associated with my existence in a piece of space, what de mudder ass am I doing here? So many people/agencies have tried to talk sense into the thickheads of this nation, to no avail. Perhaps people like me should just move out and on, and leave national vileness alone, to suffocate in its own excrescence, like a bacteria colony on a petri dish. Goebbels boasted that hatred was his trade. He argued that it took him further than any other emotion. Well, hate on brothers and sisters - and end up like Goebbels.