A basically benign term, suggesting an intent to propagate ideas (propages, "a slip, a cutting of a vine", the gardener's practice of disseminate plants by planting shoots), the word propaganda has been tarred and distorted to the point where it has been replaced out of cruel necessity by such terms as "public relations" or "advocacy", and, still further, by simple disavowal of true intention to spread specific ideas coupled with insistent claims to impartiality. We do not live in a cynical age, but a contorted age, a headless age, where we live in constant fear, not of being misunderstood, as the song goes, but of being understood.