THE museum of memory is now closed in Bermuda. By order of the Cabinet Office. The gate is chained and padlocked. The windows are shuttered. The whole edifice is fenced off and scheduled for demolition. Soon it will disappear in a plume of rubble and dust like the old Club Med.

In our Attention Deficit Disorder society, one with only the most casual interest in any event pre-dating the latest batch of party photos uploaded to Facebook, the thinking is its loss will go as unnoticed - and unmourned - as that of Alexandrina Hall. Or Trimingham's. Or even, say, the ethics, common sense and rational decison-making that once featured in Bermudian public life.

Perhaps those who have condemned the museum are correct. Perhaps razing everything that connects us with our collective past, a relatively commonsensical, cautious and progressive past, will draw little comment from a community that now subsists on an endless series of quick sensations delivered in quick-fire succession.

Following the demolition the rubble will be sorted and sifted and some of the scorched material, blasted from its proper context, will be recycled into propaganda by the Premier and his handlers.

For they plan to erect on the site of the museum the political equivalent of a multi-media conglomorate specialising in iron-jawed, empty-headed propaganda, one of those octopus-armed operations that puts a suffocating chokehold on both the dissemination and interpretation of news. Conformity of opinion is the end goal. Accentuating the positive (even if it has to be invented) and completely prohibiting the negative is the mission statement.

The process is already underway - on the radio, on television, on-line. Soon it will be found in print as well if a new daily newspaper cum Government mouthpiece is launched.

These various streams will converge into a single, sluggish river of propaganda comprised of non-events, half-truths and outright untruths. All delivered with the same battering-ram subtlety and bemused disregard for the genuine issues of the day that marked the Premier's election campaign.

In fact, what we are now witnessing is a Government that's effectively putting itself on a permanent campaign footing in terms of its communications strategy.

The thinking behind this development is as straightforward as it is cynically self-serving: to drown out contrary, dissenting or, God forbid, questioning voices. To substitute infotainment for journalism. To not so much blur the line between news and misinformation as to obliterate it completely.

Frankly, this was a natural progression for a leadership that has repeatedly demonstrated it will deal with any unhelpful but incontestable objective facts in much the same pitiless manner that wolf packs cull themselves of runts and the infirm.

Routine attempts to pass off the counterfeit as genuine, the manufactured outrage which holds that any informed opinion going against the party-line of the moment is indistinguishable from the most hateful bigotry, the wholesale mobilisation of fantasy to combat a vast army of problematic truths - this is what the future holds for the Bermuda media.

Racial chauvinism and xenophobia will, of course, colour the bulletins of fabricated news about record-breaking tourism arrival figures and public school graduation figures. And glowing reports on the personal initiatives of the Glorious Leader, on Music Festivals and Tourism Ministry tie-ins with the New York Mets and long-legged catwalk models sporting Versace-designed Bermuda shorts, will doubtless dominate every day's news cycle.

A steady diet of such frivolous material would certainly be distracting. But distractions are not the same things as solutions although those making decisions in Bermuda today clearly believe they are a perfectly suitable substitute.

Take, as a recent case in point, the breathless announcement that Government plans to turn the heavy firepower of a Special Weapons & Tactics Unit on Bermuda's largely unarmed, largely non-violent petty criminal community. This was a typically grandiose exercise in the empty spectacle favoured by this Premier, the type of spectacle he believes can always stand in for well-crafted, well thought-out plans of attack.

Bombastic announcements explode like heat lightning on a summer evening, briefly and vividly illuminating whatever problem he happens to be addressing. Then the abrupt flare of light dissipates in the blink of an eye. The whole scene is plunged back into darkness. Nothing is resolved.

It's all about stagecraft, not statecraft, with this Premier. It's all about bombarding the public with non-stop - and frequently nonsensical - public relations initiatives fabricated by hucksters in the media or on the public payroll (or both, in some instances).

The intent, such as it is, is to position the Premier as the barrel-chested, square-jawed mock-hero of some ridiculous and neverending mock-epic they have concocted. It's one intended to keep Bermudians so preoccupied with the staged photo opportunities and guest star appearances by various celebrity has-beens they don't have time to ponder the real problems they are contending with. But, God knows, in this age of almost universal credulity it's a strategy that just might work. At least in the short term.

The long-term prospects are more problematic. Propaganda only works on a consistent basis when it's in keeping with the prevailing popular mood.

But in this instance the Premier and his inner-circle are clumsily attempting to force-fit a distorted view of reality on people rather than shaping their stratagems to conform with the way most Bermudians see the world.

The Government doesn't want Bermudians to dwell on the past because they are intent on securing more power for themselves, not empowering those they claim to represent. The leadership wants you to exist in what amounts to a continuous present, routinely purging your memory banks of any information or news that could come back to haunt them, for entirely selfish reasons. The Government doesn't want past promises being used to highight current inaction on any number of policy fronts. It certainly doesn't want its absurd mismangement in some areas being compared and contrasted with a past when Bermuda enjoyed generally solid stewardship and an untainted international reputation. The Government simply doesn't want to face any annoying questions on, say, the Workplace Equity Act, Goodwill Plus, the raft of unbuilt luxury hotels. Or how $850,000 in taxpayer funds earmarked for bricks-and-mortar solutions to Bermudian housing problems ended up in the coffers of the Boston mob. And one day Bermudians will no longer be satisfied with an official conspiracy of silence masquerading as a flashy communications operation. They will want what Government has never been inclined to give them. Answers. - Tim Hodgson