LISTENINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 15

LISTENINGS

Perpetrated and illustrated by

KEN.

ALEXANDER

The Ghost Walks!

NEW "ghost" broadcaster has arisen to put a spoke in the Nazi propaganda wheel and make the Axis squeak louder than ever. It must be discouraging for Goebbels to have his flights of fallacy brought to earth by the flack of truth. It’s enough

to put any artist off his stroke. Just imagine one of us on the ’phone putting over a batch of swift ones, either for business or pleasure, and someone who knows us, not wisely but too well, butting in with illuminating tit-bits of © truth calculated to queer the whole box of. bunk, Just when we are protesting our love and affection for our listener a voice shouts "Don’t believe him! He told me he hates the sight of you!" Or, in the middle of a spot of subtle bargaining he tunes in with the old song "Do not trust him, gentle maiden!" I mean, it’s not helpful. Looking at it this way, one can understand why Goebbels who, after all, is a maestro of mendacity, gets palpitation of the propa-

ganda when the voice of truth ties knots in his tale. It must cost him much time and energy to produce his bad-time stories and fricassied fallacies. The world is inclined to under-rate lying as an easy way out; but, actually, it is one of the hardest. The boomer of to-day can so easily be the boomerang of tomorrow. Goebbels must be a mass of boomerang bruises. It is a risk even super-liars must take, But when some person or persons unknown haven’t the decency to await the morrow but drop bricks directly into the well of untruthwell, it’s enough to make the most persistent prevaricator put the lid on the well, Not that this could happen to Goebbels, He is so deep in the well, that he can’t see daylight. But Goebbels possesses a rodent-like ingenuity, In the midst of the "ghost’s" interruption the other night he introduced a loud shriek which was slowly throttled off and died in one of those guggley gurgles you hear in "Blood on the door knob" and "The woman without a head." The idea behind the gurgle was that the ghost who had necked in had been necked out. But the ghost walked the next night. As a ghost-breaker Goebbels is a better

liar. It is difficult to discover the haunts of a radio ghost, You can’t give it the air; it just takes it. Goebbels’s best bunkum is being ruined nightly by the voice that voices the feelings of ten million silent souls, with the German equivalent of "Sez You!" Goebbels’s broadcasts must resemble a married man trying to explain where he has been until two in the morning. Something like this: "People of the Reich! The victorious German armies still surge on to victory shouting ‘ death or glory’ "Cut the cackle, you perfidious little windbag! The victorious German armies will soon surge back for vengeance shouting eae Cee

‘Death to the rats of the Reich’--*" "Excuse the interruption, ladies and gentlemen! It’s only a ghost-a skeleton escaped from one of the cupboards! The Gestapo is making bonedust of it. As I was saying, as soon as we have won in the East we will go West-_-_" -_--_" Too right you will! And it won’t be the golden west, either, You'll need asbestos tickets----" "Er, that will be all for this evening, ladies and gentlemen ¢: "And more than enough, you pocket Ananias! You én "Quick, Herr operator! Tannhauser by the massed bands, and make it fore tississimo and hullaballoo! Phew! I’m all of a dither, I feel as though I had seen a ghost."