The grandchildren, the kids, the ones who speak pretty, speak like the TV.
* * *
Peter Menzel and other photographers compiled a book of families from all over the planet. Their portraits of family intimacy in England and Kuwait, Italy and Japan, Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, Albania, Thailand, and South Africa are quite different. But all these families have something in common and that something is television. There are 1.2 billion TV sets in the world. Recent surveys in the Americas, from north to south, reveal the omnipresence and omnipotence of the small screen:
• in four out of ten homes in Canada, parents are unable to recall a single family meal eaten without the TV on
• tied to the electronic leash, children in the United States spend forty times as many hours watching TV as talking to their parents
• in most homes in Mexico, the furniture is arranged around the television
• in Brazil, one-fourth of the population admits they would not know what to do with their lives if television did not exist.
Working, sleeping, and watching television are the three activities that eat up most of people’s time in today’s world—something politicians are well aware of. This electronic network, which brings the pulpit into millions and millions of homes, delivers an audience bigger than any ever dreamed of by the many preachers the world has produced. The power of persuasion depends not on content—the greater or lesser truth of the message—but rather on imagery and the efficacy of the ad blitz to sell the product. Detergents are pushed at shoppers the same way presidents are pushed at the public. Ronald Reagan was the first telepresident in history, a mediocre actor who, in his long years in Hollywood, learned how to lie with sincerity before the camera’s eye and whose velvet voice won him a job as spokesperson for General Electric. In the era of television, Reagan needed nothing else to have a political career. His ideas, not very numerous, came from Reader’s Digest. (Writer Gore Vidal observes that the complete set of Reader’s Digest was as important to Reagan as the collected works of Montesquieu were for Jefferson.) With the help of the small screen, President Reagan was able to convince the U.S. public that Nicaragua was a threat. Standing in front of a map of North America with a red stain slowly spreading up from the south, Reagan demonstrated that Nicaragua was planning to invade the United States through Texas.
After Reagan, other telepoliticians started winning. Fernando Collor, once a model for Christian Dior, became the president of Brazil in 1990 thanks to television. The same TV that produced him and blocked a victory of the left overthrew him a couple of years later. The rise of Silvio Berlusconi to the summit of political power in Italy in 1994 would be inexplicable without television. Berlusconi exercised influence over a vast TV audience after he obtained, in the name of democratic diversity, a monopoly on private television. It was that monopoly, along with his success as the owner of the Milan soccer club, that provided an effective catapult for his political ambitions.
In every country, politicians fear being punished or shut out by television. On the news and on the soap operas, there are heroes and villains, victims and executioners. No politician likes to play the bad guy, but bad guys at least get covered. It’s far worse to be ignored. Politicians are terrified that television will fail to notice them, condemning them to civic death. Whoever does not appear on TV does not exist in reality; whoever disappears from TV leaves the world. To have a presence on the political stage, you have to appear with a certain regularity on the small screen, and that regularity, not easily achieved, does not tend to come free. The owners of television offer politicians a platform, and the politicians return the favor by offering the owners impunity; without fear of retribution, they can continue placing a public service at the service of their private pocketbooks.
Politicians are not unaware, can’t afford the luxury of being unaware, of the low standing of their profession and the magical, seductive power that television, and to a much lesser degree radio and the press, exercise over the multitudes. A poll taken in several Latin American countries in 1996 confirmed what you hear in the streets: nine out of ten Guatemalans and Ecuadorians have a poor opinion or worse of their parliamentarians, and nine out of ten Peruvians and Bolivians do not trust political parties. In contrast, two out of three Latin Americans believe what they see and hear in the media. José Ignacio López Vigil, an activist in alternative media, summed it up well: “In Latin America, if you want a political career, your best option is to become a TV anchor, a radio host, or a singer.”
To win and consolidate popular legitimacy, some politicians take direct control of television. The most powerful and conservative of Brazilian politicians, for example, Antonio Carlos Magalhães, graciously received a concession for private TV in the state of Bahía, and in his fiefdom he runs a virtual monopoly in association with Rede Globo, the Brazilian television giant. Lidice da Mata, the mayor of Bahía, was elected by the voters of the Workers Party, a powerful force that is a party of the left and, what’s worse, is proud of it. In 1994, the mayor complained that she was never able to get on Magalhães’s stations, not even with paid ads or when there were floods, mud slides, strikes, or other emergency situations that required urgent communication with the public. Bahía’s television, a magic mirror, reflected only the face of its owner.
There are channels that claim to be public in many Latin American countries, but that’s just one of the things states do to run down the reputation of the state. With a few heroic exceptions, state programming goes over like a lead balloon; thanks to Paleolithic equipment and ridiculous salaries, the picture is often fuzzy. Only private television has the means to capture a mass audience. Throughout Latin America, this prodigious source of money and votes lies in a few hands. In Uruguay, three families own all private TV. This family oligolopoly swallows money and spits out advertisements, buys canned programming from other countries for a pittance, and rarely gives work to local artists or runs the risk of producing a quality program of its own; when that miracle occurs, theologians claim it as proof of the existence of God. Two big multimedia conglomerates control the lion’s share of Argentina’s television. In Colombia two groups hold television and most other important media in their hands. Televisa of Mexico and Rede Globo of Brazil are absolute monarchies barely disguised by the existence of other minor kingdoms.
* * *
Praise for Imagination
A few years ago, the BBC asked British children if they preferred television or radio. Nearly all favored TV, a finding on the order of saying that cats meow or that dead bodies don’t breathe. But among the few children who chose radio, there was one who explained, “I like radio better, because I see prettier pictures.”
* * *
Latin America is a very lucrative market for the U.S. image industry. It consumes a lot of television and produces little other than a few news shows and successful soap operas. Soap operas, which the Brazilians do wonderfully, are Latin America’s only TV export. Once in a while they take up topics from this world, like political corruption, drug trafficking, street children, or landless peasants, but the president of Mexico’s Televisa put his finger on what makes soap operas so big when he explained at the beginning of 1998: “We sell dreams. We have no intention of reflecting reality. We sell dreams like Cinderella’s.”
A hit soap opera is generally the only place in the world where Cinderella marries the prince, evil is punished and good rewarded, the blind recover their sight, and the poorest of the poor receive an inheritance that turns them into the richest of the rich. These “big snakes,” as they are called because of their many episodes, create an illusory space where social contradictions dissolve in tears or honey. Religious faith promises you a ticket to paradise in the afterlife, but even atheists can get into the soap at the end of a workday. This other reality, that of the characters, takes the place of ordinary reality for as long as each episode lasts, and during that magical time television is a portable temple that offers escape, redemption, and
salvation to souls without shelter. Someone, I don’t know who, once said, “The poor adore luxury. Only intellectuals like to see poverty.” All poor people, no matter how poor, are invited into the sumptuous settings of the soaps, becoming intimates of the rich in their moments of pleasure as well as their bouts of misfortune and tears: one of the most popular Latin American soap operas of all time was called The Rich Cry Too.
The intrigues of millionaires constitute the usual plots. For weeks, months, years, or centuries, the people in the telebalconies bite their nails, waiting for the mistreated young servant girl to learn that she is really the daughter of the company president and to beat out the nasty rich girl for the hand of the handsome young man of the house. The poor girl’s endless suffering, her unrequited love, her lonely tears in her servant’s room are interspersed with entanglements on the tennis court, at pool parties, on the stock exchange, and in the company boardroom, where other characters also suffer, and sometimes kill, to gain a controlling share. It’s Cinderella in the time of neoliberal passion.
God is dead. Marx is dead.
And I don’t feel so well myself.
—WOODY ALLEN
THE COUNTERSCHOOL
■ The End of the Millennium as Promise and Betrayal
■ The Right to Rave
THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM AS PROMISE AND BETRAYAL
In 1902, the Rationalist Press Association of London published a New Catechism in which the twentieth century was baptized with the names Peace, Freedom, and Progress. Its godparents predicted that the newborn would liberate the world from superstition, materialism, misery, and war.
Years have passed, the century has turned. What world has it left us? A desolate, de-souled world that practices the superstitious worship of machines and the idolatry of arms, an upside-down world with its left on its right, its belly button on its backside, and its head where its feet should be.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS THAT POSE MORE QUESTIONS
Faith in the powers of science and technology fed expectations of progress throughout the twentieth century. When the century was halfway through its journey, several international organizations were promoting the development of the underdeveloped by handing out powdered milk for babies and spraying fields with DDT. Later we learned that when powdered milk replaces breast milk it helps babies die young and that DDT causes cancer. At the turn of the century, it’s the same story: in the name of science, technicians write prescriptions for curing underdevelopment that tend to be worse than the disease, and in the process they humiliate people and annihilate nature.
Perhaps the best symbol of the epoch is the neutron bomb, the one that burns people to a crisp and leaves objects untouched. A sad fate for the human condition, this time of empty plates and emptier words. Science and technology, placed at the service of war and the market, put us at their service: we have become the instruments of our instruments. Sorcerer’s apprentices have unleashed forces they can neither comprehend nor contain. The world, that centerless labyrinth, is breaking apart, and even the sky is cracking. Over the course of the century, means have been divorced from ends by the same system of power that divorces the human hand from the fruit of its labor, that enforces the perpetual separation of words and deeds, that drains reality of memory, and that turns everyone into the opponent of everyone else.
Stripped of roots and links, reality becomes a kingdom of count and discount, where price determines the value of things, of people, and of countries. The ones who count arouse desire and envy among those of us the market discounts, in a world where respect is measured by the number of credit cards you carry. The ideologues of fog, the pontificators of the obscurantism now in fashion, tell us reality can’t be deciphered, which really means reality can’t be changed. Globalization reduces international relations to a series of humiliations, while model citizens live reality as fatality: if that’s how it is, it’s because that’s how it was; if that’s how it was, it’s because that’s how it will be. The twentieth century was born under a sign of hope for change and soon was shaken by the hurricanes of social revolution. Discouragement and resignation marked its final days.
Injustice, engine of all the rebellions that ever were, is not only undiminished but has reached extremes that would seem incredible if we weren’t so accustomed to accepting them as normal and deferring to them as destiny. The powerful are not unaware that injustice is becoming more and more unjust, and danger more and more dangerous. When the Berlin Wall fell and the so-called Communist regimes collapsed or changed beyond recognition, capitalism lost its pretext. During the Cold War, each half of the world could find in the other an alibi for its crimes and a justification for its horrors. Each claimed to be better because the other was worse. Orphaned of its enemy, capitalism can celebrate its unhampered hegemony to use and abuse, but certain signs betray a rising fear of what it has wrought. As if wishing to exorcise the demons of people’s anger, capitalism, calling itself “the market economy,” now suddenly discovers its “social” dimension and travels to poor countries on a passport that features its new full name, “the social market economy.”
* * *
For a Course on the History of Ideas
“Manolo, how you’ve changed your thinking!”
“No, Pepe, not at all.”
“Yes, you have, Manny. You used to be a monarchist. Then you supported the Falange. Then you backed Franco. After that, you were a democrat. Not long ago you were with the socialists and now you’re on the right. And you say you haven’t changed your thinking?”
“Not at all, Pepe. My thinking has always been the same: to be mayor of this town.”
* * *
* * *
The Stadium and the Boxes
In the eighties, the Nicaraguan people were sentenced to war for believing that national dignity and social justice were luxuries to which a poor little country could aspire.
In 1996, Félix Zurita interviewed General Humberto Ortega, who had been a revolutionary. How quickly times have changed. Humiliation? Injustice? That’s human nature, said the general. No one is ever satisfied with what he gets.
“There’s a hierarchy,” he said. And he explained that society is like a soccer stadium: “A hundred thousand people can squeeze into the stadium, but only five hundred can sit in the boxes. No matter how much you love the people, you can’t fit them all in the boxes.”
* * *
A McDonald’s ad shows a boy eating a hamburger. “I don’t share,” he says. This dummy hasn’t learned that now we’re supposed to give away our leftovers instead of tossing them in the garbage. Solidarity is still considered a useless waste of energy and critical consciousness is but a passing phase of stupidity in human life, but the powers that be have decided to alternate the carrot with the stick. Now they preach social assistance, which is the only form of social justice allowed. Argentine philosopher Tato Bores, who worked as a comedian, knew all about this doctrine years before ideologues started promoting it, technocrats started implementing it, and governments started adopting it in what some call the Third World. “You ought to give crumbs to the elderly,” Don Tato counseled, “instead of to the pigeons.”
* * *
The Field
Do people watch the game or do they play it?
When a democracy is real, shouldn’t people be on the field? Is democracy exercised only every four, five, or six years, when you cast your vote? Or is it exercised every day of every year?
A Latin American experiment in daily democracy is under way in the Brazilian city of Pôrto Alegre. There residents debate and decide what to do with the municipal funds available for each neighborhood, and they approve, amend, or quash proposals from the local government. Staff and politicians propose, but it’s the people who dispose.
* * *
The most mourned saint of the end of the century, Princess Diana, having been abandoned by her mother, tormented by her mother-in-law, cheated on by her husband, and betrayed by her lovers, fo
und her vocation in charity. When she died, Diana was the head of eighty-one public charities. If she were still alive, she would make a great minister of the economy in any government of the South. After all, charity consoles but does not question. “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint,” said Brazilian bishop Helder Cámara. “And when I ask why they have no food, they call me a Communist.”
Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations. In the best of cases, there will be justice someday, high in heaven. Here on earth, charity doesn’t worry injustice, it just tries to hide it.
The twentieth century was born under the sign of revolution, but the adventurous attempts to build societies based on solidarity were shipwrecked, leaving us to suffer a universal crisis of faith in the human capacity to change history. Stop the world, I want to get off. In these days of collapse, the number of penitents—repenters of political passion or of all passion—multiplies. More than a few fighting cocks have become hens a-laying, while dogmatists, who thought they were safe from doubt and discouragement, either take refuge in nostalgia for nostalgia that evokes more nostalgia or simply lie frozen in a stupor. “When we had all the answers, they changed the questions,” wrote an anonymous hand on a wall in the city of Quito.