DELIVER us from the cliché mongers. Deliver us from those who believe the repeated blunt-trauma impact of platitudinous marketing strategies and PR-Speak sales pitches on our collective crania will eventually bludgeon the island into submission. Or simply exhaust us to the point no one bothers to ask the questions that need asking.

Given a Premier with a personal style that hovers uneasily between that of a Sunday morning televangelist and an overcaffeinated used car salesman and you have a leadership that's already predisposed to package Government policy as Epically Scaled Entertainment.

Then factor American boxing promoter turned Bermuda Music Festival impressario and part-time political image consultant Rock Newman into the equation, an old school friend of the Premier's and now part of the influential "Howard Mafia" that surrounds him. Newman casts an increasingly long shadow over Bermudian public affairs and the way they are marketed, so the selling of Government policy as a neverending succession of giftwrapped and beribboned half-truths is probably altogether unavoidable.

But even those with the barest illusions about how our political system really operates, those who would no sooner put faith in this degraded process than they would chow down on a hot dog once aware of the conditions under which it's manufactured, are growing frustrated at the news black-out being so cynically manufactured by the Premier and his handlers.

This Premier has always avoided substantive interviews with the media, opting instead for press conferences where prepared statements are delivered with undeniable panache. But he will no more submit himself to journalistic cross-examination at these stage-managed affairs than Dick Cheney would allow himself to be scrutinised by members of a gun safety programme.

The Press, for the most part, are treated like members of a secretarial pool: they are regarded as little more than human tape recorders, summoned to the Cabinet Office to take verbatim dictation and never to seriously second-guess the boss.

When he feels it is necessary for an occasional broadcast interview, the result is a silken monologue rather than a give-and-take dialogue with his hosts. He invariably selects as his interlocutors either timid souls who normally have executives of the Garden Club on their shows or party hacks masquerading as reporters. In both instances he is allowed to give his tried-and-half-true performances without any serious questioning.

All of that stuff about transparency, accountability and the sunshine of public scrutiny is fine for the Premier's election literature. But he would welcome them as much in reality as he would waking up to find the shark from Jaws doing laps in his pool.

The end product of all this is a Government that substitutes cheap spectacle for any substantive dialogue with the Bermudian people on the issues of the day. It's a Government that's in the process of creating an environment in which officially sanctioned myth risks becoming indistinguishable from fact, an environment in which the governed become conditioned (or simply resigned) to accept unquestioningly the Government's Official Version of Events instead of trying to discover the underlying realities.

What used to be known in advertising circles as the "expedient exagerration" has become the driving force in this Government's communication policy. It's a policy that discourages critical thought, fostering an atmosphere of flash and flamboyance in which the public's critical faculties go so long unused they become petrified. And that's the goal, folks. To encourage a wholesale and persistent refusal among Bermudians to analyse the root causes of what's occurring here, to promote the placid acceptance of whatever officially-sanctioned and publicly-financed idiocy happens to be taking place at the moment.

What we are in fact dealing with could be termed The Politics of Hype. It's a low-road political brand, one of the lowest imaginable in fact with an unwavering emphasis on living in the eternally elastic moment, living in the Now. The past is walled off, deemed a grim and toxic place: it's a Plantation of the Soul we are trying to escape from with absolutely no lessons to teach us on how we should conduct business today. The future is painted in lurid Day-Glo hues, a radiant Fatherland of the Imagination. All you have to do is believe - believe completely - that every new initiative, every patently crankish or foredoomed scheme, is a critical step on the road to that future no matter how dubious it might appear to be in isolation. Embrace that, believe that, and everything falls into place: the Big Picture instantly becomes as clear as a photographic image that suddenly appears on a piece of paper dipped into a tray of developing solution. At least that's the idea. And while the idea may hold a strong emotional appeal for some people, most of the rest of us can smell the sharp scent of fertiliser in the air. Probably enough fertiliser to allow the island to re-launch its onion industry. Which might not be a bad thing if it turns out we need an economic fallback position. Because the grinding, unrelenting emphasis on the sideshows of public life - pop concerts, kick-ass Ninja SWAT teams, the unveiling of plan after plan for gaudy pleasure palaces that never quite seem to get built (has anyone actually done the sums to see how many condominiums have been constructed under the auspices of the Hotels Concession Act as opposed to actual hotel rooms?) - is occuring at the expense of news about the main event: quite how we will sustain the island's economic and social stability in the face of a worldwide financial meltdown. This treacherous situation is being made more treacherous still by ongoing head-butting between Government and the financial services sector, the single, indispensible bulwark of our economy but an industry that increasingly feels itself as warmly regarded by Bermuda's Government as Godzilla is by the Tokyo city fathers.

Would somebody please alert this Premier to the fact that image-building isn't, in fact, everything. - Tim Hodgson