Living in a Potemkin village

BETTER late than even later, the government decided to vacate the billboards whose owners and advertisers complained that their publicity spots were forcibly taken to promote political messages. In a nutshell, this is the story of the billboard blitzkrieg, which was devised to salvage the sinking popularity of this government. Instead it backfired and dragged the government deeper into the political hot water. The poet inside me howls how stained teeth have ruined a beautiful smile.
It could have been a perfect stroke of genius only if the planning exuberance was tempered with more cautious execution. If billboards were borrowed at the rate of 10,000 taka per week, roughly 2000 billboards would have cost the government 200 million taka for one week. Many of the billboard owners and their advertisers would have accepted the deal, though a few oinkers would have still oinked. That way at least what looked like a propaganda putsch would have been masked with some amount of legitimacy. The government could avoid the embarrassment that upended an ambitious campaign.
The mastermind(s) of this publicity campaign may have stretched it too thin, but the messages were mostly statements of facts. If this government has occasionally failed, it also occasionally succeeded. The billboard tunnels were created in the city to tell us that compelling truth. But the messengers drilled into our minds more than the messages, their tunnel mission making us wary of the pitfalls in their tunnel vision.
There is an informal fallacy in logic, which is called "Proof by assertion." It means that a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of obvious contradictions. The billboards were installed to hit us in the face with the success stories of this government. They were to remind us of how much this government has achieved during its tenure and convince us at the same time that, if re-elected, this government would do no less if not more.
But the biggest damper in this heartful drive has been its harebrained implementation. A reverse spin on the Goebbelsian doctrine, it showed that truth can be rendered dubious by repeating it too many times. In the run up to the elections as and when they happen, the voters are going to grapple with their confusion. Which one should they remember more between the botched up billboards and the blighted messages written on them?
We don't know whose idea it was to go for this publicity overkill. We don't know if the government carried out any scientific study as to how they should have spaced out the billboards or worded the stories. What was the thought behind burying an entire city under the creaking burden of those billboards? Who figured it out that people were like raisins that soaked in propaganda water they should get plumper, juicier and softer with confidence and sympathy to vote for this government next time around?
The concept goes back more than two hundred years. In 1787 when Russian Empress Catherine II went to visit Crimea, her minister Grigory Potemkin tried to impress her by erecting fake settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River. The most recent example is when, in preparation for hosting the G8 summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland last July, large photographs were put up in the windows of closed shops in the town to give the appearance of thriving businesses for visitors driving past them.
The main purpose of a Potemkin village is to use an impressive façade to hide an undesirable fact or condition. The billboard campaign of this government did the opposite; the façade couldn't hide anything but only made its embarrassment more pronounced. It must be said again that a well-meaning opportunity has been lost because some people in the government failed to think.
By pulling down its advertisements the government has partly controlled the damage. It would have been more effective if those billboards were cleared on the day after those advertisements went up. By allowing people to see the messages for a longer time, the government upped the ante of having more people to remember its silly mistake.
The next best thing for the government is to identify those within its own ranks, those who are responsible for this futile propaganda stunt. Someone should pry into their skulls to understand how they believed that such a callow attempt to build popularity was going to work, when it was bound offend some people from the start! The success story, if anything, has only told a story of excess.
General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez was the president of El Salvador between 1931 and 1944. Once he had streetlamps draped in red paper to defeat an epidemic of scarlet fever. Ten days at least we lived in a Potemkin village draped in political slogans. Worked to a fever pitch, it expectedly defeated itself.

The writer is the Editor of weekly First Week and an opinion writer for
The Daily Star. E-mail: [email protected]