Had Screwtape been given the dubious honour of presently being hosted in this fair land he would have been flattered no end. He would immediately recognise that his counsels too, among others, Wormwood, are being put to good use during the electoral campaign.
It is close to impossible to access a website without having Joseph Muscat beaming his smile on you
I have no idea where Screwtape is currently stationed. He may be in Malta for all I know. The last time he was seen in public was as the guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Tempters’ Training College for young devils.
After the principal, Dr Slubgob, toasted the health of the guests, Screwtape, a very experienced retired devil, rose to reply. His speech is faithfully recorded in C. S. Lewis’s monograph Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1959).
A few years earlier Lewis had also recorded the letters of Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter.
The uncle was tasked with training his nephew for securing the damnation of a British man known only as “the Patient”. Screwtape’s 31 letters are faithfully recorded in The Screwtape Letters (1942).
In these letters and during his proposed toast, Screwtape ingeniously unfolds the various weapons at the disposal of all tempters. Lust, anger, avarice, passion… The list goes on and on, but the coup de grâce was his unveiling of the mother of all weapons: the corruption of the human language.
One should avail oneself of the ambiguity of words, he exhorts his disciple. The infernal Screwtape warns that words should be used as incantations, purely for their selling power without allowing a clear and definable meaning. The aim very clearly is to create confusion. Jargon should take the place of argument, he insists. A modern version of Screwtape would probably refer to jargon as spin.
An electoral campaign is euphemistically called a communications campaign, but no true or real communication can happen when the meaning of words is corrupted and bifurcation in speech continuously usurps the place of clarity. Electoral campaigns are a black and white period in the democratic life of a country.
In the age of the carefully selected sound bites, who dares to nuance one’s statement? In such an environment, slogans uttered dogmatically take the place of reasoned arguments. Doctored sound bites have harmed many politicians who sincerely wanted to illustrate that there are different shades of grey, not just 50.
Electoral campaigns are not a period when different shades of meaning are calmly discussed or analysed. Things are normally either totally good or totally bad. Pretending to be transparent when one is opaque or pretending to be inclusive when one is really excluding is one of the worst things that can happen. Such is the case when one’s true and real face is obscured behind a beautiful mask cosmetically fashioned for the occasion.
Screwtape refers to something similar when he exhorts Wormwood to get people to express themselves by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow to the face. This is not an easy task, so much so that Screwtape counsels Wormwood to enlist the services of fellow devil Glubose to manage well this attitude of double standards.
Wormwood can benefit from a few tutorials by those among us for whom this duplicity has become second nature. The attitude of top brass pretending to be virginal in speech and attitude and then to unleash their feral media to finish the job is also very instructive.
A potent infernal weapon bears the name of Envy. Screwtape says it has been known to humans for thousands of years and has been regarded as the most odious or the most comical of vices. The crafty devil, though, notices a subtle, albeit devastating development. “The delightful novelty of the present situation is that you can sanction it – make it respectable and even laudable – by the incantatory use of the word democratic.”
The inadequate always thirst for an excuse to justify their incompetence. If this excuse can be sublimated by reference to lofty ideals, the better it is.
I have always said that ours is a republic based on envy. Anyone who manages to turn envy into energy would save the country the millions that will be spent on the interconnector, the gas pipeline, another power station and gargantuan gas tanks.
There is a ploy which does not seem to be part of Screwtape’s arsenal. But experience shows that this tactic is both effused and presumably effective during electoral campaigns. It goes by the name of buying insurance. Most of those who do so feel ashamed to appear to be too pecuniary. Once more, lofty ideals are resorted to even if these turn out to provide less cover than that provided by Adam’s proverbial fig leaf.
Will Screwtape be tempted (pun intended) to adapt this ploy to his own campaigning? Or is the practice so pathetically odious that even he considers it to be infra dig?
• Everyone knows that the Labour Party campaign is slicker and much more on the ball than the campaign of the Nationalist Party.
But there is a line which one should not cross unless one wants to elicit displeasure more than support. That line was probably crossed with the Labour Party’s cinema adverts. People go to the cinema to relax and many complain that this oasis of entertainment was so ungraciously invaded.
Last week, cyber warfare was the name of the game. It is close to impossible to access a website without having Joseph Muscat beaming his smile on you or having a variety of sayings illuminating one’s brain. While researching for this piece, for example, the words of the infernal Screwtape to the wannabe Wormwood were being interspersed with the electoral promises of the josephmuscat.com.
Worse still was the experience recounted by a colleague about a friend of his who was researching the history of female lingerie. Regaling you with the entanglement of the political slogans with the test and pictures accessed becomes a bit embarrassing and too rude for a family paper, and some might get their knickers in a twist!
Isn’t there a more dignified way to market Malta’s next Prime Minister?
joseph.borg@um.edu.mt