The “airs” of the city called Buenos Aires grow more poisonous year by year, keeping pace with the vehicles, which increase by half a million every twelve months. In 1996, sixteen neighborhoods already suffered “very dangerous” noise levels, a perpetual racket that the World Health Organization says “can produce irreversible damage to human health.” Charlie Chaplin liked to say that silence is the gold of the poor. Years have passed and silence is ever more the privilege of the few who can afford it.
* * *
It’s a Joke/1
On a large avenue in a large Latin American city, a man is waiting to cross. He stands at the curb, trapped by the incessant flow of cars. The pedestrian waits ten minutes, twenty minutes, an hour. Then he turns his head and spies a man leaning against a wall, smoking. And he asks, “Tell me, how do I cross to the other side?”
“I don’t know,” the man responds. “I was born over here.”
* * *
Consumer society imposes its own symbolism of power and its own mythology of social progress. Advertising sends out invitations to join the ruling class; all it takes is a magic little ignition key. “Have it your way!” thunders the voice that gives the orders in the market. “You are in charge!” “Strut your stuff!” And if you put a tiger in your tank, according to the billboards I recall from my childhood, you’ll be quicker and stronger than anyone else, crushing whoever blocks your path to success. Language creates a reality that advertising depends on, but real reality isn’t at all like the spells of commercial witchcraft.
For every two children born into the world a car is born, and the automotive birthrate is gaining on the human one. Every child wants to own a car, two cars, a thousand cars. How many adults will be able to realize their childhood fantasies? The numbers show cars to be a privilege, not a right. One-fifth of humanity owns four-fifths of the cars, even though all five-fifths of humanity have to breathe the poisoned air that results. Like so many other symbols of consumer society, cars belong to a minority whose habits are parlayed into universal truths, obliging the rest of us to see cars as the only possible extension of the human body.
* * *
It’s No Joke/1
Managua, Las Colinas neighborhood, 1996. It’s a night for celebrating: Cardinal Obando, the U.S. ambassador, several government ministers, and the cream of local society attend the inauguration. They raise their glasses to toast Nicaragua’s prosperity. Music and speeches resound.
“This is how you create jobs,” declares the ambassador. “This is how you build progress.”
“It’s just like being in Miami,” gushes Cardinal Obando. Smiling for the TV cameras, His Eminence cuts the red ribbon on the new Texaco station. The company announces that it will build more service stations in the near future.
* * *
The number of cars in Latin America’s Babylons keeps swelling but it’s nothing compared with that in the centers of world prosperity. In 1995, the United States and Canada had more motor vehicles than the rest of the world combined, Europe aside. Germany that year had as many cars, trucks, pickups, mobile homes, and motorcycles as all of Latin America and Africa. Yet it’s in the cities of the South where three out of every four deaths by car occur. And of the three who die, two are pedestrians. Brazil has a third as many cars as Germany but three times as many victims. Every year Colombia suffers six thousand homicides politely called “traffic accidents.”
Advertisements like to promote new cars as if they were weapons. At least that’s one way ads aren’t lying. Accelerating is like firing a gun; it offers the same pleasure and the same power. Every year cars kill as many people as were killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1990, they caused many more deaths or disabilities than wars or AIDS. According to World Health Organization projections, in the year 2020 cars will be the third-largest cause of death or disability. Wars will be eighth, AIDS tenth.
Hunting down pedestrians is part of daily routine in big Latin American cities, where four-wheeled corsairs encourage the traditional arrogance of those who rule and those who act as if they did. A driver’s license is equivalent to a gun permit, and it gives you license to kill. Ever more demons are ready to run down anyone who crosses their path. On top of the traditional thuggery, hysteria about robberies and kidnappings has made it more and more dangerous, and less and less common, to stop at red lights. In some cities stoplights mean, Speed up. Privileged minorities, condemned to perpetual fear, step on the accelerator to flee reality, that dangerous thing lurking on the other side of the car’s tightly closed windows.
In 1992, a referendum was held in Amsterdam. People voted to reduce by half the already restricted area where cars can circulate in that kingdom of cyclists and pedestrians. Three years later, Florence rebelled against auto-cracy, the dictatorship of cars, and banned private vehicles from its downtown core. The mayor announced that the prohibition would be extended gradually to the entire city as streetcar, subway, and bus lines and pedestrian walkways expanded. And bike paths, too: according to plans it will be possible to pedal anywhere in the city safely, on a means of transportation that is cheap, runs on nothing, and was invented five centuries ago by a Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci.
Modernization, motorization: the roar of traffic drowns out the chorus of voices denouncing civilization’s sleight of hand that steals our freedom, then sells it back to us, that cuts off our legs to make us buy running machines. Imposed on the world as the only possible way of life is a nightmare of cities governed by cars. Latin America’s cities dream of becoming like Los Angeles, with its eight million cars ordering people about. Trained for five centuries to copy instead of create, we Latin Americans aspire to become a grotesque imitation. If we are doomed to be copycats, couldn’t we at least be a little more careful about what we choose to copy?
At night, I turn on the light to keep from seeing.
—HEARD BY MERCEDES RAMÍREZ
A PEDAGOGY OF SOLITUDE
■ Lessons from Consumer Society
■ Crash Course on Incommunications
LESSONS FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY
The punishment of Tantalus is the fate that torments the poor. Condemned to hunger and thirst, they are condemned as well to contemplate the delights dangled before them by advertising. As they crane their necks and reach out, those marvels are snatched away. And if they manage to catch one and hold on tight, they end up in jail or in the cemetery.
Plastic delights, plastic dreams. In the paradise promised to all and reserved for a few, things are more and more important and people less and less so. The ends have been kidnapped by the means: things buy you, cars drive you, computers program you, television watches you.
GLOBALIZATION, GLOBALONEY
Until a few years ago, a man who had no debts was considered virtuous, honest, and hardworking. Today, he’s an extraterrestrial. Whoever does not owe, does not exist. I owe, therefore I am. Whoever is not credit-worthy deserves neither name nor face. The credit card is proof of the right to exist; debt, something even those who have nothing have. Every single person or country that belongs to this world has at least one foot caught in this trap.
The productive system, which has become the financial system, multiplies debtors to multiply consumers. Karl Marx, who saw this coming over a century ago, warned that the tendency of the profit rate to decline and the tendency of production to overproduce would oblige the system to seek limitless growth and to extend an insane degree of power to the parasites of the “modern bankocracy,” which he defined as a “gang” that “knows nothing about production and has nothing to do with it.”
Today’s explosion of consumption makes more noise than all the wars that ever were and causes a greater uproar than every Mardi Gras in the world happening at once. As the old Turkish proverb has it, he who drinks on credit gets twice as drunk. This fiesta, this great global binge, makes our heads spin and clouds our vision; it seems to have no limits in time or space. But consumer culture is like a drum: it resonates so loudly b
ecause it’s empty. At the moment of truth, when the clamor ceases and the party’s over, the drunk wakes up and finds himself alone, accompanied only by his shadow and the broken dishes for which he must pay. The system that drives demand and obliges it to expand also builds walls for it to crash into. While the system needs markets that are ever broader and more open, the way lungs need air, at the same time it requires raw materials and human labor that are cheaper and cheaper. This system speaks in the name of all, to all it directs its imperious orders to consume, among all it sows the buying fever. But it won’t do: for nearly everyone, this adventure starts and ends on the TV screen. Most people who go into debt in order to have things soon have nothing more than debts taken on to pay debts that lead to more debts, and they end up consuming fantasies that only come true by stealing.
* * *
Poverties
Truly poor people have no time to waste time.
Truly poor people have no silence and can’t buy it.
Truly poor people have legs that don’t remember how to walk any more than chicken wings remember how to fly.
Truly poor people eat garbage as if it were food and pay for it.
Truly poor people have the right to breathe shit as if it were air and not pay for it.
Truly poor people have the freedom to choose—between one TV channel and another.
Truly poor people live passionate dramas with their machines.
Truly poor people are always cheek by jowl and always alone.
Truly poor people don’t know they are poor.
* * *
With the massive growth of credit, warns sociologist Tomás Moulian, Chile’s everyday culture has come to revolve around symbols of consumption: appearance as the essence of personality, artifice as a way of life, “utopia on the installment plan.” Consumerism has been imposed bit by bit, year by year, ever since Hawker Hunter jets bombed Salvador Allende’s presidential palace in 1973 and General Augusto Pinochet inaugurated the era of the miracle. A quarter of a century later, the New York Times explained that it was the “coup that began Chile’s transformation from a backwater banana republic to the economic star of Latin America.”
On how many Chileans does that star shine? One-fourth of the population lives in absolute poverty and, as Christian Democratic senator Jorge Lavandero has pointed out, the hundred richest Chileans earn more in a year than the entire state budget for social services. U.S. journalist Marc Cooper found quite a few impostors in the paradise of consumption: Chileans who roast in their cars rather than roll down the windows and reveal that they have no air-conditioning, or who talk on toy cellular phones, or who use credit cards to buy potatoes or a pair of pants in twelve monthly installments. Cooper also found several angry workers at the Jumbo supermarket chain. On Saturday mornings, there are people who fill their shopping carts to the brim with the costliest items, then stroll the aisles for a long while, showing off, before abandoning their carts and sneaking out a side door without buying so much as a stick of gum.
The right to waste, privilege of a few, masquerades as freedom for all. Tell me how much you consume and I’ll tell you what you’re worth. This civilization won’t let flowers or chickens or people sleep. In greenhouses, flowers are subjected to twenty-four-hour lighting so they’ll grow faster. In egg factories, night is denied to the hens. And people, too, are condemned to insomnia, kept up by the anxiety of buying and the anguish of paying.
* * *
A Martyr
In the fall of 1998, in the center of Buenos Aires, a distracted pedestrian got flattened by a city bus. The victim was crossing the street while talking on a cell phone. While talking? While pretending to talk: the phone was a toy.
* * *
* * *
Magic
In the barrio of Cerro Norte, a poor suburb of the city of Montevideo, a magician gave a street performance. With a touch of his wand, he made a dollar bill sprout from his fist, then from his hat.
When the show was over, the magic wand disappeared. The next day, neighbors saw a barefoot child walking the streets, magic wand in hand. He tapped the wand on everything he came across and stood waiting.
Like many other children in the neighborhood, that nine-year-old boy liked to sink his nose into a plastic bag filled with glue. Once he explained why: “It takes me to another country.”
* * *
This way of life may not be very healthy, but it’s great for the pharmaceutical industry. People in the United States consume half the sleeping pills, tranquilizers, and other legal drugs sold in the world, as well as half the illegal drugs, which ain’t chicken feed considering that the United States makes up only 5 percent of the world’s population.
“Unhappy people, who live comparing themselves with others,” laments a woman in Montevideo’s barrio of Buceo. The pain of no longer being, of which the tango once sang, has made way for the shame of not having. A poor man is an object of pity. “When you have nothing, you think you’re worth nothing,” says a young man in the barrio of Villa Fiorito in Buenos Aires. And another, in the Dominican town of San Francisco de Macorís, adds, “My brothers work for brand names. They live to buy labels, and they work from dawn to dusk to keep up with the payments.”
* * *
It’s a Joke/2
A car crashes on the outskirts of Moscow. The driver crawls out of the wreckage and moans: “My Mercedes … My Mercedes…”
Somebody says to him: “Buddy, who cares about the car! Don’t you see your arm is missing?”
One look at his bleeding stump, and the man cries: “My Rolex! My Rolex!”
* * *
The invisible violence of the market: diversity is the enemy of profitability, and uniformity rules. Mass production on a gigantic scale imposes its obligatory patterns of consumption everywhere. More devastating than any single-party dictatorship is the tyranny of forced uniformity. It imposes on the entire world a way of life that reproduces human beings as if they were photocopies of the consummate consumer.
The consummate consumer is a man who sits still. This civilization, which confuses quantity with quality, also confuses obesity with good nutrition. According to the British scientific journal the Lancet, over the past decade “severe obesity” has increased by nearly 30 percent among young people in the most-developed countries. Among U.S. children, obesity has increased 40 percent in the past sixteen years, according to a recent study by the Health Sciences Center of the University of Colorado. The country that invented “lite,” “diet,” and “fat-free” foods has the most fat people in the world. The consummate consumer gets out of his car only to work and to watch television. He spends four hours a day sitting in front of the small screen, devouring plastic.
* * *
It’s No Joke/2
In the spring of 1998 in Vienna, a newborn perfume is baptized. TV cameras record the ceremony, held in the vault of the Bank of Austria. The infant answers to the name “Cash” and she exudes the exciting fragrance of money. More baptismal parties are planned in Germany at the main offices of Deutsche Bank and in Switzerland at the Union des Banques Suisses.
“Cash” can be bought only on the Internet or in the most exclusive boutiques. “We’d like it to be the Ferrari of perfumes,” say the creators.
* * *
Garbage disguised as food is colonizing palates everywhere and annihilating local cooking traditions in the process. Fine dining, the joy of eating, cultivated and diversified over thousands of years in some countries, constitutes a collective patrimony that finds its way to everyone’s hearth, not only to the tables of the rich. Such traditions, such signs of cultural identity, such celebrations of life are being steamrollered by the globalization of hamburgers, the dictatorship of fast food. The worldwide Coca-Colonization of food, successfully imposed by McDonald’s, Burger King, and similar factories, violates cooking’s right to self-determination—a sacred right, since the mouth, as we know, is one of the doorways to the soul.
Th
e 1998 soccer World Cup confirmed, among other things, that MasterCard tones muscles, Coca-Cola offers eternal youth, and a good athlete can’t get by without a shot of McDonald’s fries. The golden arches were carried as a standard during the recent conquest of Eastern Europe. When the first McDonald’s opened with pomp and ceremony in Moscow in 1990, the line outside symbolized the victory of the West as eloquently as the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.
It is a sign of the times that this company, which embodies the virtues of the free world, denies its employees the freedom to join a union. McDonald’s thus violates a legally sanctioned right in many countries in which it operates. In 1997, a handful of workers, members of what the company calls the McFamily, tried to form a union in Montreal; the restaurant closed its doors. A year later, a group of employees in a small city near Vancouver actually succeeded, a feat worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.
In 1996, two British environmental activists, Helen Steel and David Morris, sued McDonald’s for mistreating its workers, destroying nature, and manipulating the emotions of children. The company’s employees are poorly paid, their working conditions are awful, and they can’t unionize. Tropical forests are razed and indigenous peoples are run off their lands to produce meat for its hamburgers. What’s more, its multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns threaten public health by enticing children to desire food of questionable nutritional value. The lawsuit, which at first seemed like a mosquito bite on an elephant’s back, had unexpected repercussions, helped inform public opinion, and is turning into a long and costly headache for a company accustomed to unchallenged power. After all, power is what all this is about. In the United States, McDonald’s employs more people than the steel industry, and in 1997 its sales were greater than the total exports of Argentina and Hungary combined. Its star product, the Big Mac, is so very important that in several countries its price is used as a unit of value for international financial transactions: virtual food orienting the virtual economy. According to McDonald’s advertising in Brazil, the Big Mac is like love. Two bodies, aroused by cheese and pickle, embrace and kiss, oozing special sauce, while their hearts of onion thrill to the green hope of lettuce.
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