Sadly, the level by which getting people to cozy up to your side of the fence and eventually vote for you has appeared to have gotten so incredibly low these days, it’s almost as if one would think people are either generally very easily convinced or they are really a little slow in the head.
While the latter may not at all be too far-fetched once you look at it, one need not be reminded that the concept of “selling” a particular candidate is really no different from that of selling candy or an ordinary bar of soap. With that as the case, the earliest known occurrence of hoodwinking may have been when brother Cain supposedly coaxed Abel into never suspecting a thing until he received that fatal lump on his head. Alas, that has been the way of the world since, and it we don’t watch out, in this year’s presidential race and national elections, a lump on the head might as well be written in the cards for us, as well.
For those movie fanatics out there, the 1997 American political satire black comedy film, Wag the Dog may prove to be a good reference for today’s real time circus-like affair. For one, it shows that truly, it has not been that long when scenarios, through the aid of movie-making tricks, could easily be staged as if they really happened, just as effortlessly as making thousands of people on television (and now social media outlets) appear like millions via the gift of photoshop and other related apps. Gad, even skyscrapers have become color-coded! This old-school tactic of using Argumentum Ad Populum, which affirms that just because the majority of people endorses something or someone, it or that person is therefore better than the rest, insults us like the herd of cattle that they think we are.
At once, I am reminded of that pop-sheet in college, ‘How not to be bamboozled’, which also talks about these commonly-used sleigh-of-hand tactics being used by spin doctors in all our electoral exercises. The fact that these tactics never go out of style could be credited to the years of refinement being done by these election think tanks and experts.
However, those methods of foolery are only made more effective because throughout the years also, we the electorate as a collective whole, have remained easily forgetful, easily fooled and manipulated, to the point that we’re even so easily baited to turn against each other at a given signal. A classmate once joked, “white man fool Indian once, white man bad, white man fool Indian twice, Indian bad.” If that even applied to us, all chickens in the country would be featherless.
Which reminds me, try to look beyond the projected image of candidates, people. If they were your friends, and they posted “I woke like this”, chances are, things are not what they seem.
