"How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the Party was trying to achieve ... The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering - a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons - a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting - three hundred million people all with the same face. The reality was decaying, dingy cities where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses that smelt always of cabbage and bad lavatories." - George Orwell

IT was a triumph of indecisiveness with characteristic Bermudian vacillation emerging as the indisputable winner on Tuesday night. The Don't-Put-Off-Until-Tomorrow-What-You-Can-Put-Off-'Til-The-Day-After-Tomorrow Mentality was the unexpected but victorious dark horse in what had been considered a two-horse race between the Progressive Labour Party and the United Bermuda Party.

While the PLP garlands and backslaps and fetes Dr. Ewart Brown at an endless round of celebratory events and the UBP buries another leader, slips on its black arm-bands and embarks on a further period of mourning, it's clear Bermudians put off any real decisions on their political and cultural future to another day. And yet another election.

Viewed dispassionately, the dirtiest and most deliriously demented election campaign in Bermuda's history produced a result that simply sanctioned the increasingly untenable status quo.

Dr. Brown got his mandate - but only just. This was a tepid-to-lukewarm endorsement of his divisive and fractious leadership style. The reality is that neither party gained any momentum or new adherents, neither party gained or lost more than a few yards of ground. Consequently Bermuda will see a continuation of the political trench warfare this island has undergone for the last five years - the island remains mired in a bloody and entirely unsatisfactory stalemate.

While a handful of Parliamentary seats did change hands, there is almost no material difference between the results of this week's election and the outcome of the 2003 poll - the same virtual 50-50 split in the popular vote, the same lopsided 22/14 apportionment of Parliamentary seats which makes a mockery of the oft-repeated contention that all votes are now of equal value in Bermuda.

But then given so much of what was said on the campaign trail this year made a mockery of voters' reasoning abilities, this self-evident fallacy concerning Bermuda's redrawn and supposedly reformed electoral system is likely to be overlooked by those who have demonstrated they are perfectly happy to deny the evidence of their own eyes in favour of whatever cheerful but misleading myths are handed down from on high.

While the UBP pursued its uninspiring but not unintelligent issues-oriented canvassing to the very end, the closing days of the PLP campaign was less an exercise in mobilising mass political support than it was a clinical study in mass hysteria, an island-wide religious revival session.

Given it's a party born out of a genuine sense of idealism and the struggle for social justice, a party that has attracted what amounts to an almost faith-based support, it's not surprising that a cynical leadership which can still expect a certain degree of unquestioning loyalty from PLP voters - but which shows them increasingly little loyalty in return - opted for desperation- and adrenaline-fuelled strategy.

And it worked to the degree that an island which frog marches its Auditor General off to the stockade for doing his job too well has returned one of the subjects of his investigations to Parliament.

That the almost professionally insalubrious Zane DeSilva is now a Member of Parliament underscores precisely why no useful purpose is served attempting to discuss the finer points of politics with those who make decisions based on faith rather than logic.

To challenge such decisions on any rational basis is, of course, to challenge the very underpinnings of their belief system. It's to embark on what amounts to a struggle for their very soul rather than a straighforward give-and-take political discussion.

The limitations in his character and business practices may be all too conspicuous to those who are conscientious objectors against the spiritual - and logical - subjugation demanded by a religious dogma that has been successfully passed off to some voters as a secular political philosophy.

But such objections are dismissed as non-conformist cussedness by those who are only too willing to follow the dictates of a political Papacy unquestioningly.

For them the Gospel According To Dr. Brown is a compelling, self-contained creed that seems to present all of the final answers to questions of social and racial injustice. Never mind that Mr. DeSilva may not, on paper, represent the most ideal sort of disciple. The fact is he is a loyal and passionate disciple. And that's all that matters. So they make a total committment of faith, placing their better instincts under house arrest.

To press the issue with the faithful is to be met by both anger and an overwhelming sense of pity for a lost soul clearly guided by a fallible and recklessly inquiring mind, and not by the unfailing inner light of Belief.

That Dr. Brown emerged from this election with only a paper-slim popular majority rather than the landslide he anticipated underscores the fact there are more and more Bermudians who are discerning and independent-minded in their political choices, who wholeheartedly reject the notion of Cabinet Office infallibility and put their faith in their own judgement and value systems.

That he somehow managed to get his crony Mr. DeSilva elected underscores the fact not enough such voters live in Southampton. - Tim Hodgson