Something Wicked This Way Comes
Esposito: Hear me. I am your new president. From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. (There's an anxious murmur from the Spanish-speaking crowd assembled in front of the South American country's Presidential palace). Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now . . . 16 years old!
Fielding Mellish: What's the Spanish word for straitjacket?
Rebel: The power has driven him mad. We must have a new leader. Another must represent the revolution immediately.
— Woody Allen/Mickey Rose, Bananas screenplay
"This means that the greenery will be incorporated into the design. You won't just walk up to the door and the green stops. It may go into the building. If there's a tree that needs sustaining, you may find that tree next to your hospital bed in the future."
— Alex Scott (with no apparent ghost-writing input from Mssrs. Allen and Rose)ANYONE who has ever come within forked tongue-distance of a politician understands it's not just power that corrupts — it's also the means used to acquire power. In most instances this includes the indiscriminate use of propaganda. Bermudians should not confuse the relatively mild and generally unconvincing advertising both major political parties have long used with the fiercely partisan propaganda that made its first appearance here at much the same time Trinidadian Rasputin-for-hire Roy Boyke did in 1998.
Although advertising and propaganda share a certain family resemblance, they are only distantly related. For even the very worst commercial advertising focuses on ballyhooing the real or invented virtues of whatever product is being pitched at a target audience. Political propaganda, in its most extreme form, is based almost entirely on magnifying the vices of the other guy — exaggerating the sins of the Designated Oppressor to such colossal proportions that you indirectly position your own creed as not just as a good alternative in a crowded marketplace but as the only alternative.
The voter is encouraged to believe he is faced not so much with a simple either-or choice between equally tawdry parties, essentially indistinguishable except for the packaging. Rather he is told he has the opportunity of helping to fulfil destiny by embracing the One True Political Faith.
An election is coloured as the apocalyptic final confrontation between Good and Evil that will usher in the secular answer to a "New" Jerusalem. Or in this instance, a "New" Bermuda.
"Make It Happen", Bermudians were told in 1998 in a Boyke-written commandment and they did. For the first time they voted the PLP into office. But what's happened since isn't exactly what they were expecting.
No one political philosophy can actually deliver the road map to a social Utopia. So those who fight their way to power using nothing but propagandistic blunt instruments are advised to hold some pragmatic policies in reserve: plans and programmes that, when implemented, will ensure a certain measure of social progress occurs while they shrug their shoulders, look at their feet and tacitly concede the final, promised destination cannot in fact be reached in this lifetime.
Expectations recklessly heightened by a constant drumbeat of propaganda need to be let down gingerly. For those who genuinely assumed they would wake up in the Promised Land in the weeks or months following what they had been assured was a watershed election were naturally disappointed. And disappointment can all too easily give rise to both disillusionment and a further disregard for the norms and values of society they already felt excluded from.
But the PLP had no such necessary fall-back plans in place.
The much talked about, never itemised "Social Agenda" was just an extension of its demonstrably hollow campaign propaganda, the non-existent blueprint for a "New" Bermuda that was never anything other than a election slogan. Then a stultifying Independence campaign was launched. Intended to energise supporters of the nationalist aspect of its dual socialist / nationalist agenda, the sovereignty campaign proved as convincing and enticing as a protracted lecture on the fulfilling pleasures of chastity delivered by Paris Hilton.
No wonder it's being said that given the disappointing results of the Progressive Labour Party's stop-start experiments in diluted socialism and nationalism, pessimism is now the only ism in widespread currency in Bermuda. Part of the problem results from the fact Government's two central tenets are inimical — socialism espouses equality and equality of opportunity for all while racial nationalism, by definition, is based on the power dynamics inherent in demographics. David Burch's credo — "Don't you get it? We don't care what you think" — bluntly speaks to the fact the racial exclusivity of the PLP's brand of nationalism can never peacefully co-exist with the inclusive nature of the socialist ideals it still occasionally pays lip-service to.
The sad reality is no methodical plans were ever drawn up for genuinely reforming Bermudian society. The "Social Agenda" was an endless Shaggy Dog of a political joke, the Independence initiative an attempted distraction from the fact there was no agenda for addressing social issues. Power was an end in itself, not a means to achieving positive social ends; the promise of reform was simply a propagandistic lure to secure power.
Historian Robert Conquest has said even when there's the best will in the world, the whole concept of attempting structural reform in a country is akin to re-equipping a ship at sea, in stormy waters, with a new engine; it's a dangerous, potentially hazardous undertaking because a state can never be put into dry dock and equipped with new institutions and social imperatives. The business of running the country has to carry on regardless of any complex procedures taking place below decks.
Such operations require diligence, intelligence and above all a fierce determination to see them through to a successful conclusion. But it can and does happen. Old political, social and economic infrastructures can be dismantled and replaced — but never by decree or, in the PLP's case, by sloganeering.
Rather much of the population has to be dragooned into action because institutional changes — in the political and economic and social realms — must be matched by necessary changes in habits and customs. And the population has to be continuously encouraged and, occasionally, spurred into making these changes by a political class it generally believes is pursuing an attainable and worthwhile vision for the future.
Such wholesale change happened in Bermuda in the 1960s and '70s when the worst manifestations of a racially-divided society were dismantled and discarded in a generally peaceful, generally methodical manner. While the Bermuda the PLP inherited in 1998 was still very much a socio-political work in progress, few could deny that progress had in fact been made.
The fact is that an increasing (and increasingly volatile) mass of socially alienated Bermudians exists, cut off from the values, ideals and goals of mainstream society.
In Bermuda there's been a tendency to believe that if the wolf is at some people's door, it's of the tame variety, licks their hands and enjoys having its tummy rubbed. That's simply not so. While there was a time when it could be joked that Bermuda was a society of the haves and have lots, today the economically dispossessed — the have nots — constitute a growing percentage of the population.
Recent figures collated by the Coalition for the Protection of Children underscore this fact. The gulf between the wealthiest 20 per cent of Bermuda's population and the poorest 20 per cent had reached $200,000 annually by 2004 and has doubtless increased since then.
And although housing costs have risen by 90 fully per cent since 1993, the corresponding increase in weekly take-home pay for middle-income Bermudians has only risen by 62 per cent. Bermuda already has the lowest home ownership statistics in the Developed World — scarcely 40 per cent.
The reality is that a Government as overly dependent on slogans, labels and evasions as this one is will never restores equilibrium to this increasingly unbalanced community. Gang violence — unknown here a decade ago — is an increasing problem. So is the drug-driven crime that's an adjunct of gang activity. Then assess all of the collateral damage being caused to the Bermudian infrastructure by a shrinking middle class, Government waste, a lack of economic diversification and a public education system that is not so much failing as it is flat-lining.
Yet Government continues to address this vast compost heap of decaying socio-economic indicators and institutions with propaganda rather than plans of action.
The tolerance of the economically and socially marginalised is wearing thin — witness the threatening, xenophobic leaflets that have papered Hamilton in recent days. Madcap pledges from the Premier that wards in the grandiose new hospital he proposes to construct in the Botanical Gardens will be housed in greenhouses are unlikely to alleviate their mounting anger. But indulging in the type of fantastic propaganda that Woody Allen would have rejected as too outlandish when he was scripting Bananas remains the favourite refuge of a Premier who persists in viewing dishonesty as not just the best policy but seemingly the only policy. Maybe he should think about delivering future "addresses to the nation" in Swedish. He'd upset far fewer people with the delirious content that way. And learning to get his forked-tongue around complex Scandinavian pronounciations might serve to keep him out of trouble in other areas.
