Propaganda did not start as something undesirable or downright evil. In fact, it had its origins in what many of us would consider the holiest of causes. Almost four centuries ago, in 1622, Pope Gregory XV was confronted with a twin-horned problem: heathens were fiercely resisting Christianity in the new lands that the papacy wanted to evangelize, and where the faith had already made a beachhead, heretics were attacking its very genuineness and patrimony.

Alarmed, the 68-year-old pope, once a fiery and outspoken doctor of laws but now afflicted by a dreadful bladder stone barely two years into the papacy (he died of the illness a year later), decided to form a special task force. He called it the Congregatio de propaganda fide, or “the Congregation for propagating the faith,” and gave it the task of putting more teeth to the worldwide missionary activities of the Roman Catholic Church.

That congregation’s successes and failures are today firmly etched both in the world’s religious geography and in the inscrutable, sometimes shockingly irrational ways that people on both sides of the great religious divide view that world. That, of course, is a fascinating subject crying for an intelligent discussion, but at this time, we will limit ourselves to how the entirely new word “propaganda” crept into the language, first into Latin and later into English, and how its practice evolved into a deadlier hydra than the twin-horned devil it was originally meant to vanquish.

Today, as most of us know, the word “propaganda” has become a noun that means “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” In plain and simple English, it is a one-sided form or persuasion seeking to make people decide and act without thinking. This blight on the logical thought process becomes virulent when serious clashes in religious, political, and ideological beliefs become inevitable. And what makes the once pious word and activity even more unchristian and linguistically anomalous is that it is waged as fanatically by the really bad guys as by the presumably good guys on our side.

The essential problem with propaganda, of course, is its single-minded goal of short-circuiting rational thought. As practiced in the Philippine election campaign, for instance, it is excessively bigoted in agitating our emotions, in exploiting our insecurities and ignorance, in taking advantage of the ambiguities and vulnerabilities of the language, and in bending the rules of logic whenever convenient or expedient. Propaganda can delude both the ignorant and intelligent alike, and the even greater danger is that even astute people could become its victims and crazed believers, as we are witnessing right now.

To fortify our defenses against political propaganda, we have to do two crucial things ourselves: (1) know at least the most basic tricks used by political propagandists to subvert rational thinking, and (2) cultivate an open and objective mind to counter their deceptions and sleighs of the mind.

A practical first step for this propaganda-defusing process is to critically scrutinize those aspiring for the top national positions. For our own and this country’s sake, and no matter what the poll surveys and the TV or radio commercials say, we must cut the candidates down to size. We must for decision-making purposes think of them simply as applicants for a specific job, or consider them as nothing more than branded products on the supermarket shelf.

By looking at a candidate as just another job applicant, we can greatly loosen the grip of his or her propaganda on our senses. That will allow us to dispassionately go over his or her application and résumé and make a reasonably sound judgment on the following basics: (1) communication and writing skills, (2) quality of mind and self-appraisal, and (3) qualifications and job-related work experience. Anybody who skips this elementary procedure for hiring entry-level stock clerks and senior corporate executives alike is obviously an incompetent, irresponsible fool who deserves to be fired outright. And yet, as we can all see, skipping this very basic process is what many propagandists of national candidates would like the Filipino electorate to do.

It would be even more instructive to treat the candidates simply as products on a supermarket shelf. We can then proceed to mercilessly strip them of their elaborate branding and packaging to see the intrinsic worth of the actual product inside. It would shock many people to know that the cost of the packaging of certain shampoos in glitzy sachets can run to as much as 85 percent of their total selling price. How much more profound their shock would be to find that some highly touted candidates, when stripped of their glitzy imaging and positioning, have less probative value for the national positions they are seeking than the paper their faces and names are printed on. (March 29, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 29, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

----

Click here to discuss/comment

We all know that when a sentence uses a transitive verb as the operative verb, it is absolutely necessary for the verb to have a direct object and to act on it: “The woman spurned her suitor last week.” “Her suitor found a better woman yesterday.” Nothing really happens when there’s no direct object to take the action: “The woman spurned last week.” “Her suitor found yesterday.” When a transitive verb can’t act on anything, in fact, expect the sentence to make no sense at all.

A direct object, however, need not always be someone or something other than the subject itself. Indeed, in grammar as in real life, there are many situations in which the subject can perform actions to or for itself as the direct object. The transitive verb therefore still functions in such cases even in the absence of an external object or receiver.

The grammar device used in English to indicate such situations is the reflexive pronoun. Recall now that each of the personal pronouns has a reflexive form that ends with the suffix “self”: “myself” for “I,” the singular “yourself” for the singular “you,” the plural “yourselves” for the plural “you,” “himself” for “he,” “herself “ for “she,” “ourselves” for “we,” “themselves” for “they,” “oneself” for “one,” and “itself” for “it.” The suffix “self” works to pass back the verb’s action to the subject performing that action.

Let’s refresh our memory about the most common applications of reflexive pronouns:

When the subject and direct object are one and the same. A reflexive pronoun is called for when (1) the subject acts on itself, or (2) describes a state, condition, or fact about itself. Acting on oneself: “I restrained myself to avoid getting into trouble.” “The long-distance runner paced herself to conserve her energy.” “They fooled themselves into believing that the pyramid company would make them rich.” Describing one’s own situation: “She considered herself qualified for the post.” “Don’t blame us; we were victimized ourselves.”

In imperative sentences, of course, the reflexive expresses an action that someone expects another or others to do to themselves: “You behave yourself.” “You bring yourselves here at once!” The pronoun “you,” however, is often dropped from such constructions for greater immediacy: “Behave yourself.” “Bring yourselves here at once!”

When the subject itself is the indirect object (usually the object of a preposition). The reflexive works to establish the idea that the subject is not the verb’s direct object but simply an indirect object or intermediate receiver of the action: “I picked some books for myself.” “She is eating lunch all by herself.” “The thieves divided the loot among themselves.”

When the subject needs to be emphasized to make the context clearer. The reflexive can emphasize a particular action as solely the doing of the subject (to the exclusion of everybody else): “I’ll do it myself since nobody wants to help.” “She drove to the city herself because her chauffeur called in sick.” “They drank all the water themselves so we went thirsty.”

We must remember, though, that another type of pronouns, the intensive pronouns, has exactly the same grammatical forms as those of the reflexives. The intensive pronouns, we will recall, function solely to emphasize their antecedent subject, not to act on it in any way: “I myself found the hotel substandard.” “The general manager himself convinced the strikers to return to work.” “They themselves suffered an ignominious defeat at the polls.” What intensive pronouns do is to draw stronger attention to the subject as doer or receiver of the action.

A final point about the behavior of verbs before we close: although as a rule, intransitive verbs can’t take a direct object and act on it, a few intransitive verbs are able to do that. This is when such a verb, to reinforce meaning in a sentence, takes its noun equivalent as a cognate object, or an object represented by a word very close to the verb in form: “Although born rich, he lived the life of a bum.” “We dreamed a dream that couldn’t come true.” “They scrupulously speak the speech of New Yorkers down to the slightest twang.” (December 13, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 13, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment