12 March 1999, 963 words
The ideological proclivity of the incumbent regime, even if it transpires to be mere velleity, makes pellucid prose, to put it succinctly, in partibus.
That is, it's dangerous to write clearly these days. In fact, if Clause Seven of the Equal Opportunities Bill becomes law, I won't even be able to write about the danger it poses. Not in easy-to-understand prose, anyway. Instead, I'll have to say something like, "The immanent passage of the Equal Opportunities Bill may well effloresce into a fascistic entelechy wherein any manifestly translucent intercourse would be contrary to law."
Which means: if the Equal Opportunities Bill becomes law, clarity of expression would become illegal . Right now, I am allowed to write that just hoping the UNC will preserve democratic practice is useless; that the danger signals are flashing bright red; and that people who argue that Clause Seven isn't fishier than a dead salmon are lying through their rotten teeth in order to gain political advantage.
After the Bill becomes law, though, I'd instead have to say that faced with legalistic invagination of totalitarianism into the body politic, it is useless to merely chant an absit omen. The portents around us are visibly ingravescent, and those pyorrhoeaic prevaricators who define Clause Seven as inodorous are obviously eristic.
Speaking of whom, Prime Minister Basdeo Panday in March last year said that this Bill "prohibits offensive behaviour in public which offends or insults another person or group on the grounds of race, origin or religion." But you can't offend anyone if they don't understand what you're saying. So, inasmuch as racists and the faithful both tend to be pretty illiterate, Clause Seven may allow me to write that "what has so far been velitation within our mainly copacetic democracy may escalate into an apocalyptic sociopolitical denouement within which only nabobs would thrive."
But if instead I wrote "that what has so far been mere controversy within our democracy might degenerate into a total collapse of the country within which only people like Ish Galbaransingh and Vasant Bharath would thrive", I could find myself in hot water. Indeed, within the Bill's new zeitgeist, incarceration would surely be consequential for an apolaustic malapert such as myself. (In other words, someone like me who enjoys mocking the powers-that-be would surely be jailed under the new dispensation.)
Mind you, Clause Seven might still let me criticize religious fundamentalism and conventional attitudes, which to me are the basic causes of our society's problems. But I couldn't write that. Instead, I'd have to write that I could inculpate the anagoges of claustral ontologies and indulge in epater les bougeois in order to elucidate the causal nexus of our sociocultural quandaries.
As you can tell, my future prose style would have to so heavily employ syntactical hendiadys and grammatical convolution that semantic anagnorisis would be difficult, if not impossible. In other words, I would have to write like Lloyd Best.
This would result in nobody understanding what I meant. But even when I write like that, I still actually say something. But, as you have probably figured out by now, I've been doing a close study of Best's and Burton Sankeralli's articles in order to break this habit.
You see, the predicative clauses of the Bill necessitate the conditionality of offence. Given the anserine arguments of those who support Clause Seven - especially one henotheistic woman whose frustrations spring entirely from being rebarbative (and hence non-parti) and who has forced me to continually relate human beings' cognate evolutionary history ab oro - semantic mystification through faisande verbosity may be my sole viable alternative. Fortuitously, this is not onerous given my opponents' neophyte scholarship which is exacerbated by their neurological paralysis.
Which is to say, I can avoid offending those who support Clause Seven only by making sure they can't understand me. Luckily, this isn't hard to do, since they are all unread morons.
With Clause Seven, it may soon be incumbent upon all argute writers to imitate the stylistic modalities of Lloyd Best, like I'm doing now. One difficulty, ideological rather than epistemological, presents itself, however. To cater to linguistic hermeneutics is, to me, merely the device of glossators. But meretricious prose - which is really intrinsically incondite - often results in the individuals who practise it becoming facile princeps in the academic milieu. Ergo, I must logically invoke the Law of Identity - A=A.
In other words, I believe obscure writing to be the technique of people who really have nothing to say. But I've noticed that those who write in a pompous style are often hailed as leading intellectuals. So who is me?
Actually, though, writing like this is pretty easy once you get the hang of it. It is no wonder that Best can turn out those convoluted columns every week. My only reservation resides in my fundamental conviction that to be purposely recondite is nothing but a trahison des clercs. Individuals who favour semantic inscrutability, far from being metaphysically or even intuitively cogent are, I am convinced, intellectually malafide. They do not indulge in intension nor is eudomonism through epistemological democracy even partible in their philosophy (or else semantic limpidity would be their prevailing ethos.)
Now doesn't that sound a lot more impressive than saying: Deliberate obscurity is nothing but a betrayal of intellectual standards. People who do that are intellectually false. They do not do hard thinking nor is enlightenment of others part of their goal (or else they would write and speak clearly)?
It would be tempting, therefore, to eschew epexegesis or even adopt the argumentum e silentio. I must, however, nuncupate otherwise. My inclination towards floccinaucinihillipilification of the hypocritical fools precludes facile, sycophantic alternatives.
(I'll let you figure out that last one yourselves.)
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh