In this, my inaugural campaign speech, I should begin by thanking you for coming here to the Plaza del Orden to listen to me. And then introduce myself as your humble servant, whose only desire is to exercise authority for your benefit. Through you. For you, the residents of Villa Miserias. According to custom, I should explain that from a very young age I’ve felt indignant about the injustice doled out to those who have the least. I should talk of how I felt indignant as I watched my nanny on her feet, working long hours, like someone suffering a punishment in classical mythology, consumed by the need to clean, wash, mop up, cook, make the beds, and all the rest of it, from dawn to dusk, so that we could then dirty everything, leave plates of uneaten food around, throw clothes on the floor, and complain, again and again, if we found a single one of her hairs in the soup, or the food wasn’t spicy enough. All this for a miserable wage. And no health insurance. No old age pension. Obliged to wear a humiliating uniform. Conversations in another language under her very nose when we didn’t want her to know what we were saying. And the moment I felt that indignation, I should tell you, was when I decided to prepare myself to help all the nannies in Villa Miserias. To put an end to injustice! That became for me a moral imperative. A mandate coming from somewhere outside me. I, Max Michels, would play an active role in politics to take personal responsibility for things changing.
Once the purity of my vocation had been established, I should launch into an attack on the most recent administration. Whether from their ineptitude, ignorance, corruption, affiliation to a conspiratorial elite, heartlessness, or the many other repugnant characteristics, I would explain, they are to blame for the ills we suffer. We need change. Grassroots change, not just a pretense of it. With dramatic intonation, a frown on my brow and an accusing finger, it would be my job to tell you that I am that change, that my opponent represents the continuity of the present state of affairs. You know this. You don’t want the same any longer. You want something different. Something better. In short, I should tell you that you want me.
Finally, I should lash you with a hurricane of vague, nonsensical policies aimed at the core of your well-intentioned beings. No more half-eaten quesadillas for the workers! I’ll bring in reforms that will make your dreams of luxury a reality! I’ll put an end to the chronic body odor of the Black Paunches! Free cosmetic surgery for all! Our children will be learning four languages from the age of six months! I’ll do away with drug dealing without affecting consumption levels! I’ll listen to and do something about all the needs and worries of the hundreds of residents of Villa Miserias! Because my sacrifice is for you! I won’t let you down! Just put a cross against my name in ten days’ time and your new lives will be wonderful. Lives worthy of the unique being each of you is. Thank you for your attention. You can now applaud and shout slogans.
I am, however, not going to do any of the above. My campaign isn’t aimed at tricking you into electing me, and then later hating me until you become enraptured by the next snake charmer who really is going to pull you out of the mire. I offer you nothing more than my vision of things. I intend to show you the leeway for real action, and the obstacles in its way. You will see that we have those obstacles embedded in our deepest selves. I’ll shed my light on all those corners. And I can warn you that you won’t like what you see. Some of you will long for the return of darkness. To those who do, I recommend you vote for my opponent. Those of you who decide to follow me should have three central points clear:
ONE. I’m not participating in this election for you. My motivations for becoming president of the board are selfish. In that respect, I’m no different from anyone else. Not even the self-sacrificing altruists. The fact that their pleasure is based on a consciousness of their goodness, the delight engendered by the notion of saving lives, doesn’t make them any less egoistical. I too have a hole inside me that needs to be filled. And what can fill it is the power to make decisions about matters that concern everyone. There is no addiction that enslaves humans more strongly than the addiction to power. Strictly speaking, all politicians are megalomaniacs. The lives of many of them show the inverse relationship between the external mask and internal self-esteem. The cruelest dictators feel themselves to be the dregs of humanity. Their worst atrocities deepen the abyss they were called to fill.
What I will say to you is that my ghosts are not the horrific kind. My ambitions can be classed as mediocre. This is good news for you, because statesmanlike characteristics are a thing of the past. We live in the managerial era. The color gray has never before shined so brightly.
It’s not true that ideology has died. Quite the reverse. The dominant ideology has settled into structures that are no longer even questioned. It’s not even necessary to express it. If it’s not visible, that’s because it’s everywhere. There’s no need for justification, it simply is. Denouncement of its very horrors is an essential part of the ideology of the times. The honor of doing this is reserved for a tiny, illustrious elite. The most committed go on demonstrations and shout slogans. There are even some who sign letters in the centerfolds of newspapers. It’s part of the system.
Far from living in a post-ideological era, we are witnessing the empire of a flattened vision of the world, an empire that is proclaiming the end of all other epochs. It’s announcing that after centuries of barbarism, we are finally reaching our goal. Luckily, history buried its capital H along the road. There are no more agitators to question the foundations. The new overlords are very nervous, given to flight when the panic starts. That’s why they need only administrators to make sure the bonds are never tied too tight. I have no problem with being an administrator. It’s important you know that.
TWO. The other great lie has to do with you. Your awareness of periodically taking part in making the decision about who will be the next president of this colony has an important psychological function. Above all, it allows for a return to the everyday bubble of real worries, the ones that eat away at our existence. Why rack your brains trying to understand complex, abstract, sometimes indecipherable social norms? It’s such a bore…What’s the use of stopping to think about anything below the surface? Voting for the most convincing slogan does away with all that. The messiah Ponce has demonstrated that 94% of voters wouldn’t be able to complete the most basic questionnaire about the platform of their candidate of choice. And those levels of ignorance aren’t related to social class, they are very similar for both rich and poor. It’s completely natural for the latter not to care a fig. The rich, on the other hand, put themselves forward as having most interest in public participation: but their commitment to democracy is nothing more than a mechanism for diverting attention from their terrifying concentration of wealth.
Despite all this, when there are elections, no one talks about anything else. The vote is a great social insignia for a gathering of the clans. Putting a cross on a ballot paper allows one to give up any idea of personal coherence. Political creeds are just that, political creeds, without practical implications for life. The idea of living the way you vote is as absurd as asking a girl to practice a religion that decrees she must still be a virgin when she marries. In both cases there’s a tacit understanding that they are not the sorts of rules that have to be observed.
It’s not uncommon to see those who have the whip hand voting for those who, at least in their speeches, defend the people who suffer the lashes. Or for people on the margins of society to vote for politicians who talk about marginalizing those who don’t fit the norm. You almost certainly know young people earning a fortune in companies that utilize highly dubious business practices, who nevertheless support candidates decrying those same companies and their highly dubious business practices. Or women who turn up to vote in chauffeur-driven cars, who are strongly in favor of greater social equality. You must have heard of cases of manual laborers supporting anti-union platforms. Of women who vote for conservative candidates who set limits on the choices available to their gender. I could go on all night.
What’s h
appening in those cases? Are those people really voting against their own interests? No way. At some level, it’s common knowledge that the basic inertias don’t come into play at the ballot. Voting has become a more social than political affair. There was a reason why the apostle of the noble savage postulated that the only way for the communal will to be expressed was for voters not to communicate with each other, not to influence each other. Can you imagine what he would think of the dictatorship of opinion polls? Is there any point in going along like sheep to validate what statistics have already predicted with scientific precision?
Let’s dispose, once and for all, of the illusion that voters decide anything relevant. So, just what is it they do decide? Which of the handful of options they don’t really understand is best for making decisions about the options they have no idea at all about? On a future occasion, I’ll address the topic of how prospective candidates are filtered out. But let me offer one fact now: in the entire history of Villa Miserias, there has never been a candidate who did not own an apartment. All of them, without exception, have been homeowners. That simple fact locates them in a different class than the vast majority of those they pretend to represent. Can you call being obliged to choose between hunger or thirst an election? The only possible democracy would have, as a fundamental point of departure, voters with full stomachs. It seems to me crueler still to saddle them with the blame for always having made the wrong decision. If I haven’t been indulgent with my own motivations, neither will I be with the level of participation you actually have under the current model. Voting for me, as for any other candidate, is voting for a specific way of thinking that, even if unwillingly, corresponds to the interests of those who are like me, and not like the majority of you.
THREE. So, we’re all complicit in this tragedy. But that doesn’t mean we’re all equally responsible for it. It can’t, however, be denied that every vote, regardless of which box is checked, is a vote in favor of the existing order. You might object, citing examples of extreme regimes—well- or ill-intentioned—that have transformed things after gaining power through the ballot. For some time now, that is exactly what money has taken upon itself to prevent. Nowadays, the armor plating protecting money from the ascent to power of anyone who goes against its interests is invincible. The beardies who took to the hills with a few rifles had an infinitely greater chance of success than any contemporary Quixote who defies capital. Anybody whose name appears on the ballot slip has already made an unspoken pact with the owners of wealth.
I think I can guess what some of you are thinking. If the ballot box isn’t the right way, the modern equivalent of the beardies with their rifles seems the only other option. Am I right? Yes, but the Black Paunches are already heavily armed, you might object. Subtlety isn’t their strong point, as they have demonstrated on the various occasions that have acted as effective warnings. I’m deeply sorry, but I don’t intend to offer you an easy way out.
Big Brother once explained that the word sabotage derives from the wooden shoes known as sabots. A group of workers in an occupied country wrecked an armaments factory, used to supply the army of the crooked cross, by jamming the machinery with their clogs. According to Big Brother, this demonstrated the capacity of the ordinary man to derail the train of the most effective death squad ever created.
Nevertheless, I can assure you that nothing like that will happen. Being part of a community involves not wearing sabots. Inequality rests on the small strikebreaker we all carry within us. That’s why the usual, worn-out forms of protest are just grist to the mill. They allow those with the power to say, “See? We tolerate dissidence here. Right boys, your moms are waiting for you at home. It’s time for things to go on as normal.”
I once attended a lecture on social relationships in a center for people with Down’s Syndrome. The speaker, a handsome doctor with the bearing of a pelican, explained that, due to the immense range of possibilities of the syndrome, the patients created their own boundaries to distinguish themselves from those with lower levels of ability. The ones who could move around unaided didn’t want to be put in the same category as those who were wheelchair bound. The guys in the center with girlfriends laughed at those with no sexual experience. Far from forming a fellowship of disabled people united against a world that segregated them, they reproduced the hierarchical structure in which everyone has their correct place. I have never seen a better example of that base trait of our species.
What does all this have to do with my campaign, I hear you ask. The answer is that egalitarian discourse—the non-recognition of the barriers of blood, birth, mother tongue, strength, physical beauty, intelligence, and so on—is the great modern balm for perpetuating the worst inequalities ever seen. On positing that we are all equal, the responsibility for this failure is passed on to each individual. Not being like those who are equal has nothing to do with things decided before birth. No sir. Here among us we have the example of the darkest-skinned president of the board in our history to remind us that the only thing needed is sufficient effort.
Even the much-vaunted concept of being equal before the law isn’t as clear as it might seem. One of the few non-reactionary jurists once explained that equality before the law involves accepting the inequalities the law recognizes. A pregnant woman does not have the same rights as a convicted pedophile. Their equality before the law consists of being under the protection of different norms. We are not equal before the law precisely because the law recognizes the importance of us not being so. The juridical and social norms regulating social life are a reflection of our most deep-rooted prejudices. The fact that some cases seem positive and others abominable doesn’t change the basic fact one iota. We are a tribe whose social organization is based on the recognition that, in the view of that society, some members are more equal than others.
It’s no coincidence that an age notable for its enormous gap between haves and have-nots should be the first to posit, within its discourse, that each individual is equally important. Who among you here is ready to look in the mirror and accept himself as a bastard? Who is able to admit that she prefers to satisfy the insatiable before another’s hunger? Who can accept that horror is only worthy of being called by that name when it is experienced in one’s own flesh?
Allow me to end by paraphrasing an aphorism by the long-suffering man with black shadows under his eyes who understood better than anyone the prison of invisible bars that was constructed during his lifetime:
Not democracy, but the idea of democracy.
Thank you for being here tonight dear residents. We’ll see each other soon, at the next event.
Why can’t I see?
Who’s writing this?
Who’s asking who’s writing this?
What really drives me crazy isn’t even not seeing her. It’s realizing that, whatever I do, I’ll never see myself reflected in her eyes.
I had one eye fixed on her during that whole speech. What was she writing in her notebook? She didn’t even raise her head once. At times it seemed like she was drawing something. I’d rather not imagine what. And then there was the distance: Nelly was in one of the reserved seats in the first row, and I was trying to gauge the reaction of the crowd with my other eye.
Leaning over the empty seat separating them, Ponce and Orquídea were whispering together, satisfied. The chief was supposed to be arriving at any moment. But in the end, he didn’t turn up. My opponent was there, camouflaged by a string of former and present officials. When I said the part about drugs, Maso pointed his two-finger pistol at me, fired six times, blew on the smoking finger and practically dislocated Mascorro’s sternum with a slap celebrating his own joke. Taimado sniffed his armpit at the allusion to his hordes, and then an unpleasant expression broke out on his face as he nodded his head. Poor Candelario sat through the entire speech, as wooden as his impassive bench. I think he was afraid the saws would arrive; this time to cut me up. They’d left him useless for much less.
Behind the
m, the rows were arranged by coefficient. The strange thing was that the ushers didn’t have to guide people to their places. Everyone already knew where to sit. Waiters mingled among the front rows, offering drinks and snacks. The next tier could give their orders at a side bar erected for the occasion. Then, its territory marked by Juana Mecha’s broom, came the beige mass. The regulations permit them to attend political acts in exchange for just one thing: they cannot change out of their uniforms. Apparently this is for their own good. It’s a matter of saving them from the humiliating confusion of being mistaken for residents.
It was more like a communal meditation session than the opening of a campaign. If any single breath went astray, the others returned it calmly to the common rhythm. Sao and Pascual had helped me to lay a few bombs. They were all primed. I thought when I finished the plaza would empty, as if it were assembled from interlocking pieces that had been put back in their box.
When I’d thanked them, the members of the audience came out of their collective trance. Fists thumping the air, whistles swallowing, and spitting out confetti. I came down from the podium, looking for Nelly, and was swept away by a tidal wave of effusive backslaps. Among the shouts, I heard that it was about time, that someone had to say it, that they were with me all the way. Shit. The pink lipstick on my white shirt must have come from the usherettes asking for a photo. Ponce held out his hand to me before leaving with one of them. Nelly was nowhere to be seen.
Sao managed to extract me from the mob with a hug. We were supposed to meet up at our campaign headquarters for an analysis of the event. The thing is…it’s…I couldn’t articulate an objection. She understood immediately. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell Pascual my father isn’t well and I have to relieve him at the laundry. Get some rest.” I’ll never understand how she does it.
A Zero-Sum Game Page 27