You must have listened lots of statements and arguments which sound so cock sure of their own authenticity and correctness that their entire lexicon try to establish nothing but an extreme sense of validity and accuracy. These self-proclaimed authenticated articulations often wonderfully stanched all the existing contrary and alternative discourses, or usually ignore them altogether. Above all, these hammered down statements lead to the manufacturing of ideological toothpaste. Any brand of an ideological toothpaste may have lots of ingredients just like other regular toothpaste ingredients such as calcium, fluoride, chloride, mint etc, but in an ideological toothpaste ingredients would be named as historical narrative, world view, goals, ambitions, factual information, FAQs, rebuttals; all sorted out perfectly and compressed with the glistening shinning brightness of truth and only truth, nothing more or nothing less. It is a common belief that two contrary truth values can never exist, so if you use to squeeze, brush and gurgle out one ideological toothpaste you may find yourself in a strong conflict with a person who uses a different brand of the toothpaste. But in all these conflicts and clashes we forget that the actual value of these argumentation and fire backs is nothing but a childish stubbornness and fight between two kids on whether Colgate is better than Pepsodent or not.
From the recent history of past few decades to the contemporary situation of our country; whenever leaders or public representatives try to build a mutual consensus through public opinion, they usually straightaway import the different ideological toothpastes which have been evolved and developed or rather manufactured and packed in other parts of the world under totally different context and historical backgrounds. Our inability to understand that nothing is universal and cannot be generalized and implemented in every context sometimes lead us to heavily waste our own resources on the wrong brands. Our apathetic attitudes always tend towards adopting readymade ideological brands and then in the process of making any head and tail out of them we lose their primary essence. We start advocating and advertising them so religiously as if there is no other way out; but in reality we forget that it is just another set of farfetched ideologies which we use just for the sake of our convenience. This unnecessary and invalid rigidity in our stance lead us to develop non-adaptive attitudes and behaviors. Basically the root cause of the lack of any ideational consensus among us is due to our habit of always squeezing foreign toothpaste tubes.
Sometimes I also wonder why collectively we got such a bad sense of humor. Those of us who always come up with the paranoiac tubes of “war with the West” and slogans like “Western hypocrisy and prejudice and just recently one of my friend thought it is cool to propagate another brand of ideology called “Arab Imperialism” and keep on ranting against it; they clearly indicate a very bad indeed, a spoiled sense of humor. To reduce down such big phenomenon just to reaffirm our beliefs and show them off in public is kind of a pathetic ideological nuisance. Being human is such a messed up state that claiming that people got one-point agenda or a single streamline of thought on such a large scale is ridiculous at the very core. One of the hazard of brushing with the ideological toothpastes is that people forget to use their own sense of critique and keep on using ready-made slogans inherited just to reaffirm that we are good Muslims, Pakistanis or whatever the heck one may think of his/herself. This is lame and a height of hypocrisy and this is what I also call a BAD SENSE OF HUMOR!!!
I guess the greatest tragedy which happened to us is that we really do not know how to deal with the diversity and how to enfold it in few basics unifying streams which do not intend to enforce one-dimensional way of thinking rather appreciating the multiplicity of human conditions and thoughts. This thing is really acting as a real malaise for our country on the ideological ground which also shows our apathy and useless efficiencies for myopic ideologies.
Above all whatever has been said above is nothing but my childish temptation to show off whatever the pseudo ideological stuff I somehow don’t know. God gave us such long nights to play around that one really can’t resist! But having said all this I really want to admit that this ideological toothpaste model is just another kind of toothpasting; though just for the sake variety and appreciating multi-dimensional frameworks we can replace toothpastes with chewing gums and if I rephrase a quotation of Ayn Rand then we can have an excellent model for the dissemination of ideologies, she said in her wonderful novel The Fountainhead that:
“Sentences have been used like chewing gum, chewed and re-chewed, spat out and picked up again, passing from mouth to mouth to pavement to shoe sole to mouth to brain…”
So here I overruled the assumption that toothpaste paste model is just another reduced version of toothpasting, rather it can support chewing gum model on the communicative grounds. Chewing gums comes with this extra metaphorical specialty that the more you keep on chewing; more they get harder which is also the case with ideologies. Again just for the sake of eliminating doubts on the indigenousness of chewing gum we can think of Paan-supaari as well and not only go into the munching and chewing metaphors but also the splashing red abstractions which they often leave behind.