“There’s nothing to freak out about...”

Maius noster / Oswaldo Barreto

Maius noster

Regarding what happened that spring of 1968, which we now designate with double metonymy as the French May, people speak “with anxieties and fears” – as Darío would say – not just in Paris and France but anywhere in the world. Before and after those events there were others identified or distinguished to the degree of the mood of whoever evokes or revives them. Sometimes we speak about May as a revolution and other times, we ourselves, each one and all of us, speak of a social explosion or the ephemeral realization of a utopia.

And yet, as soon as we stop at each of these comparisons, we find the historical figure of May is different from those other references in that it continues to be permanently discussed everywhere on Earth. It’s true this doesn’t happen with other events we’ve stumbled upon in our lives: insurrections, mutinies and revolutions; exoduses, discoveries and conquests; explosions of horror or of collective festivity, these are all events that present themselves (and represent us) at specific moments; always with the same traits: they’re documents and also monuments with the solemnity, the precision and the distance of what already happened and occurred in the way we tend to see it now, almost always with the same feelings. Alternately, the French May always comes back to anyone who lived it or stumbled upon it at some moment, with different faces and profiles that awaken within us again, within each one of us, anxieties and fears, but also always in a different manner.

The French May, more than any other genre of historical event most resembles those novels that fiction readers turn into “their novels,” those they’ve never been able to abandon because they’ve never been able to master them completely. Each moment provides an impulse to engage in a new reading and discover the possibility of reading. It’s a matter of seeing the entire work as one reads any work, that is, by discovering new themes and elements, as well as a new hierarchy based on interests and affections between those new elements we’ve just discovered.

May always offers the possibility of affirming today the exact opposite of what we negated yesterday and what we’ll be able to reaffirm tomorrow. Today, for example, I think May is the only revolution that remains alive, absolutely alive, precisely because it never triumphed, in the sense that those who rebelled never reached power. Other revolutions died and will be seen as cadavers, even if unburied, because those who took power made sure to murder them. We will continue to talk about May because each person has his own, Maius noster.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 9 May 2008 }

París, 1968 / Edgardo Mondolfi Gudat

Paris, 1968

Unlike the hippie movement, which left some curious relics along the way, such as the peace logo, the student protests of the French May haven’t bequeathed anything, not even those street slogans of the time, like “It is forbidden to forbid,” as if tangible proof of their nihilistic spirit. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that the substantial nucleus of what was the French 68 doesn’t live on in the direct assumption of the protests that continue to be incarnated by student movements anywhere on the planet. Simply because, where it fits and can be diagnosed, the explosion from Paris’s Latin Quarter signified a before and after in the denunciations of the university against authoritarian gestures.

The historic May that now celebrates its 40th anniversary had many exceptional witnesses, but there’s one in particular whose testimony has always fascinated me because what happened ended up splitting his world in two. I’m referring to the English historian Eric Hobsbawm, who by pure chance coincided with those events on the streets of Paris. Hobsbawm confesses that he was surprised by what was happening without being able to understand, from his classical Marxist pupil, the dimensions and implications of those student protests. I think few authors are capable of pouring forth such candor as he does when he invites us in his autobiography to accompany him as he confronts the events of the French May of 1968. The author shows how reality defied the traditional left of that moment: because, while Hobsbawm does warn us with a certain air of melancholy that plenty of water has passed under the bridge since then, he recognizes that his first reaction was to welcome that shuddering in the streets with open disdain, and to qualify it as a “psychodrama rebellion.” Maybe without realizing it at the time, his dismissive way of qualifying what was happening made him, as a representative of the old left, involuntarily join forces with people from the French right, such as Raymond Aron, who also qualified that protest as mere “street theater.”

The distance covered since those years has allowed Hobsbawm to take shelter in regret, with a great deal of honesty. But that stupefaction was normal for an old school Marxist who didn’t suspect that, in the future, he would cease to be one when faced with all the disillusions planted during the sixties. After all, as he himself points out, Lenin would have been equally disconcerted by another one of the memorable slogans of the French May, as vivid as “It is forbidden to forbid”: “The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love.”




{ Edgardo Mondolfi Gudat, El Nacional, 8 May 2008 }

“This is radio clash on pirate satellite...”

Labor / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Labor

One moment I felt the notion of peaks. I have possessed like
a melody. They assured me, before my trip, I wasn’t made to
scale the height. I came like a client, passing through. Now I
have company at my disposal, the season benefits us. We cross
seas when the full moon appears. Whoever’s watching knows
we work with our nails. Among beggars, the lousy, we are
the ultimate in poverty.

With sun we would see our exact shadow in the lake.

Whoever’s watching should love us, and be less aloof about
our thickets burned by clusters of ice.




Filiación oscura (1966)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Lumen, 2004 }

Albert Hofmann (1906-2008)

“As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security.”

The New York Times
The Times
The Guardian
The Independent

*

“And the more you observe the synchronous, animal, sentient details around you, the more your realize that everything is alive. You become aware that there’s a plant with giant cellular leaves hanging over the fireplace, like a huge unnoticed creature, and you might feel a sudden, sympathetic and intimate relationship with that poor big leaf, wondering: What kind of an experience of bending and falling down over the fireplace has that stalk-blossom been having for several weeks now? And you realize that everything alive is experiencing on its own level a suchness existence as enormous to it as your existence is to you. Suddenly you get sympathetic, and feel a dear brotherly-sisterly relationship to all these selves. And humorous, for your own life experiences are no more or less absurd or weird than the life experience of that plant; you realize that you and plant are both here together in this strange existence where trees in the sunroom are blossoming and pawing toward the sky.” (Allen Ginsberg)

“Walking on water wasn’t built in a day.” (Jack Kerouac)


[Photo by Israel Centeno]

Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (fin) / Oswaldo Barreto

Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (Conclusion)

The fact that these days people all over the world are talking about the death of Aimé Césaire as an event that has repercussions on the political and cultural actions now taking place in almost every corner of the planet, this is related to the way that man linked his life with those of all black people and, through them, with that of all the earth’s pariahs.

We want to say that what a young colonized man of the Antilles, educated in the European metropolis, forged as a personal project continues to be a program for a struggle that belongs to millions simultaneously grouped together and spread all over the world. And this project, that Césaire forged during the years preceding the explosion of the First World War and that he himself baptized as “negritude,” is an endeavor that involves “assuming the social and cultural consequences of being from black Africa or a descendant of black Africans.” And assuming that modality of “being in the world” – as was already said in that era – meant for the artist and politician with a vast knowledge and a stubborn will to autonomy that Césaire already was, giving himself over to a search for the paths of liberty, lost liberty or a liberty yet to be reached.

To seek liberty, as with the search for independence, is relatively easy. What is costly, as we well know, is to maintain them, to avoid above all that they be confiscated from us precisely in the name of liberty and independence. And Aimé Césaire, as an artist and politician, regardless of the genre in which he worked within both fields (poetry, drama or essays, as an artist; mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of his island, for over 50 years, or member of the French Parliament during numerous periods, as a politician; and promoter of innumerable forums, encounters, congresses and publications, where he tended to fuse his aptitudes for accomplishment in both), was always willing to pay the necessary price for maintaining the search for liberty. In this way he adhered to the communist movement when it seemed like the only true path toward achieving the emancipation of mankind. And when it became evident that actually existing communism had become the complete opposite: the path toward the dominance of a single man over masses that are submissive to him, Césaire publicly renounced his condition as a member of the French Communist Party (“I don’t betray or deny, I want doctrines and political parties to be built to serve mankind, not for mankind to serve doctrines or political parties.” Letter of Resignation from the CP) and formed a political party in his native country and for his native country, with no pretensions other than to undertake a “Copernican revolution against that entrenched custom of political parties on the left and right, of acting for us, planning for us, thinking for us (and in this way seizing from us) the initiative in everything, which is a primary condition for exercising liberty.”




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 28 April 2008 }

Derrotar una involución histórica / Pompeyo Márquez

To Defeat an Historic Involution

Throughout my life I have learned that each society establishes for itself the tasks that its development and progress demand. The current regime has become a shackle for that evolution. This is precisely where we find the truly revolutionary content. Humanity marches toward the liquidation of poverty, toward the equality of the sexes (it was marching with only one foot, the incorporation of women accelerates its social development); toward the defense of the environment, among other major goals for the millennium outlined by the United Nations.

Within that perspective of development, it’s an extremely grave error to want to build the future on a base of the destruction of everything now in existence. That constitutes a reversal. What experience teaches is to conserve those advances that have been made and to project them toward new stages of development. For instance, wanting to ignore that Venezuelan society was advancing and wanting to erase all of it is primitivism, it’s an involution.

Let’s check several facts: the progress in education, the productive apparatus that was being developed, the advances in farming, the leap away from centralization and caudillismo represented by the process of decentralization, the election of governors, mayors and neighborhood associations. There were new demands that went beyond the so-called partyocracy, corruption, bureaucracy, and matters relating to Judicial Power and jails. And so on, successively.

What was needed were new advances, the correction of vices and solutions for the new problems that the combination of misery and poverty presented. That’s what Chávez offered. But now we see the opposite: a militaristic autocracy, the desire to squash pluralism and decentralization. In the name of a “21st century socialism” that’s a near carbon copy reproduction of the monstrous mistakes of the cult of personality, of centralization and wanting to sweep away everything from the past. In sum, a copy of so-called “actually existing socialism,” whose remains are to be found in Cuba and North Korea.

None of what’s happening in India, in China, in Vietnam; none of what’s occurring in Latin America (Brazil, Mexico, Chile) is being acknowledged. They are read in a backwards manner. To say that advances happen without national and foreign investment, while simultaneously fighting savage capitalism, is to place oneself outside reality.

Alright, I’ll finish this commentary by pointing out with necessary emphasis that it’s indispensable we defeat this historic involution. And this must be done at the same time we prepare ourselves for the November elections, when we have to present the best candidates, ones who can create consensus and who have proposals that pay attention to the central necessities of regional and local communities.




{ Pompeyo Márquez, Tal Cual, 25 April 2008 }

Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (II) / Oswaldo Barreto

Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (II)

With Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Aimé Césaire went back to the communitarian life of Martinique and entered the Parnassus of French poetry, with André Breton as his godfather (though not his discoverer), one of the founders of surrealism as we all know. That double condition already made him an important black man and even a guide for the black community of Martinique, as well as for black poets writing in French. But Césaire started to become the Fundamental Black Man and the great creator and attendant of liberties after his encounter with Haiti during World War II, the only independent black nation at the time.

“Haiti is the first black colony to have fought for its independence and, once that independence was achieved, to have adopted a republican regime. That happened at the end of the 18th century and yet the Haitian people are one of the most dissatisfied. Haiti fascinated me because it’s a magnifying glass through which we can view the entire Antilles as well as Africa, and if we study Haiti’s history we can become aware of all the problems of the Third World.

The fight for independence is glorious, it costs a great deal of blood and tears. It is an epic. But I would say that independence is relatively easy. After independence comes tragedy, since it is at that moment – people should already realize this – when the difficult struggle begins and the struggle for liberty takes on its true meaning. And there’s no possible alibi, since independent man has to work things out with himself alone.” (Interview with Jalid Chrabi, 1961)

At the beginning of the 1940s, during his first stay in Haiti, the Martinican poet became aware that his problem as a black man and as a poet was also the fundamental problem of all those who struggle or had struggled for independence: what to do with the liberty conquered, how to consolidate and maintain it within artistic creation and community-based life.

From that moment of consciousness – as people tended to say in the realms of the Left during those 1960s we evoke so often – Césaire dedicated himself to a major struggle, on the political plane as well as on the plane of artistic creation, in order to affirm that each man, no matter his color, faith or ideology, is responsible for conquering and affirming the liberty he seeks. With his actions and his verb, Césaire dedicated himself to showing that the right to liberty is a matter of personal struggle for each individual and not something given by leaders, parties or doctrines. That one has to mistrust all of them, especially because they often stifle liberties under the well-worn pretext of defending them. Starting from these coordinates of personal responsibility and a search for liberty, we will see how Césaire built his life, his work and those of millions and millions of his contemporaries.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 24 April 2008 }

Aimé Césaire, creador de libertades (I) / Oswaldo Barreto

Aimé Césaire, Creator of Liberties (I)

Aimé Fernand David Césaire, one of the great contemporary French poets, politician and playwright, tenacious anti-colonial fighter, born on June 26, 1913 in Basse Pointe on the northeastern end of Martinique, died on April 17 in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France.

Those words, which we find with little variation among the infinity of obituaries published in European and American newspapers, themselves justify these other words we find on the Web page: www.cesaire.org, dedicated to the funeral rites celebrated in Fort-de-France:


Le negre fondamentale s’en est allé
La Martinique et tous les damnés de la terre lui rendent hommage
(The fundamental black man has left us
Martinique and all the wretched of the earth pay homage to him)


No, the former speak of someone who has already died while the latter words, which could serve as an epitaph, speak of what Aimé Césaire was as a man and of the world he desired for his fellow humans. The Fundamental Black Man, among all the black people of the earth, those in Africa, in the United States and those belonging to the diaspora dispersed throughout the other Americas. All of them belonging to the wretched, to the condemned of the earth.

But just as not all the wretched are black, neither was Aimé Césaire just a fundamental black man. Césaire, a member of a “subaltern” race, has been what Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was, a member of a ruling and hegemonic race for his time, the fundamental man. Simply and proudly, the man, without distinguishing between races, cultures or credos. Just as Goethe was fated to live through the vicissitudes that were imposed on liberty, that is, on the liberties of all men, by the French Revolution, and the actions of its defenders and its gravediggers, in this manner Césaire lived in order to face similar vicissitudes, the ones that were imposed on the liberties of the entire planet by the communist and Marxist revolutions that began in 1917, when our poet was beginning his life.

And this movement in search of the paths of liberty begins right at the start of a small book: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939):


As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be
a Jew-man
a Kaffir-man
a Hindu-man-from-Calcutta
a Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote


It was a colonized black man who began this search in a world where all black people were still colonized. Despite Haiti, as we shall see.




{ Oswaldo Barreto, Tal Cual, 23 April 2008 }

Drive Inn El Flamingo / Jacinta Escudos

Drive Inn El Flamingo

In San Salvador, very close to the Salvador del Mundo monument, where today there’s a little mall whose most prominent locale is a fast food restaurant (I can’t remember if it’s hamburgers or pizzas), there used to be a place in the late 60s called Drive Inn El Flamingo.

The parking lot was huge and in the center of the lot stood the establishment with many giant windows. There were a few trees and very tall palms and a large sign with a flamingo made out of pink neon tubes. Back then, the schedule for classes at school (which was a few blocks away) ran almost the entire day. Classes started at 7 in the morning and finished at 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon. I was on the half boarding plan, in other words, I had lunch at school because it was too hard for my parents to take me there and pick me up at noon.

Being a half boarder turned me into a “strange creature” of sorts, because almost none of my classmates stayed that long. And I would eat lunch with the boarders, those who slept at school all week and went home on Friday afternoons, returning on Monday mornings. Almost all the boarders were in high school.

Sometimes, for reasons I can’t remember now, afternoon classes were canceled. When that happened I had to borrow the phone and call my father at his office. The number, I still remember it, was 21-4827 and the office was in Pasaje Montalvo, right in the center of the city. It was much easier to call my father on the phone than my mother, because in order to call Los Planes de Rendero in those years you had to dial a central office from where they gave you an extension. But there were few lines, and Los Planes was basically “wilderness,” getting through wasn’t always simple or quick. So the best bet was to call my father.


Then he would arrive to pick me up at school. He’d get there a bit late, at about one, when he was finished with his work and school was already empty and silent. I waited in the front office, with my book bag and one or two other girls who had also been left behind. The buzzer rang from the street, a nun would go open the door and, well, they already knew my dad and I was so happy to be out of there.

He was never effusive, never smiled, never made jokes. He was always a profoundly reserved man and he usually walked with the same expression on his face. Whoever didn’t know him well could have thought he was angry or bitter, because the expression lines (that phrase was never more accurate) had marked his face with deep furrows, the result of ancient sufferings whose cause I would learn about years later. We’d get into the car in silence and then he would ask me if I’d had lunch already. But no, I hadn’t gone up to the cafeteria because I’d been waiting for him. Since he hadn’t eaten either, he’d ask if I wanted a hamburger and I answered, “Yes!” enthusiastically, because that was the “secret password” that would take us to the Flamingo.

Those were the days when absolutely no one worried about cholesterol, junk food, French fries and those things. People cooked and ate with pleasure and eating was an enjoyable act, without anguish, so that any food happily wolfed down was healthy food, even if it was made with lard (as tended to happen at my house), or if we ate at the open market (which was another one of our favorite places to eat), or stuffed ourselves with a good hamburger, one of those they used to make back then.

Even though it was a drive-in, we preferred to sit at the tables inside. And we went through the ritual of the menu even though we always ordered the same thing: a hamburger and a refresco de ensalada, because they made the best ones in the country. They served them in these huge glass cups, with a straw and spoon, with a whole bunch of mamey, pineapple, melon and cashew. The spoon was for eating the fruit that was abundantly served. And then it was time for that majestic hamburger, the best ones I’ve had in my life. As ever, my father and I would eat in complete silence. He wasn’t much of a talker, as I’ve said, but we didn’t have much room for conversation because the food was so good that we’d concentrate on eating.

He’d finish first and say, “ I was hungry.” And he would remain absorbed in his thoughts while I ate everything very slowly, to my father’s disbelief, thinking I’d never finish it all. It was really a lot of food for me, but the flavor imposed itself and I’d leave there with a big belly.

Afterwards he would take me to his office and I’d spend the afternoon there, playing imaginary races with the rolling office chairs, “writing” on a typewriter (I didn’t know how to write too well so I would just type out jumbled letters) and jumping all over my beloved uncle Ricardo, my father’s brother.

I don’t remember what year they closed the Drive Inn, but it was sometime in the 70s. And I can’t express how much it hurt when I saw them begin to knock down that solitary building, to cut the trees and giant palms and build that mall with zero architectural taste, where the hamburgers were McDonald’s and you could no longer find a refresco de ensalada, not even at gunpoint.

And that’s what they call “progress”…




{ Jacinta Escudos, Jacintario, 15 April 2008 }

Stalinismo tropical / Teodoro Petkoff

Tropical Stalinism

This year the government’s celebration of the events of April 2002
 had a precise objective: to destroy the figure of general Raúl Baduel. The vast amounts of hot air spent during those days, Yo El Supremo’s superfluous speeches broadcast on required TV and radio bulletins, the liturgy of Puente Llaguno and general García Carneiro’s intervention, all had a guiding thread: to demonstrate that Baduel had nothing to do with the president’s return to Miraflores Palace and that this “Hero of the Revolution” is actually nothing more than a traitor.

The procedure recalls the manipulations of history that took place in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s era and which always ended, after a certain amount of time, not only with the death but also the disappearance from history of the people Stalin condemned. It would begin with a campaign of insults against the “enemies” that covered them in mud, in order to then, once they were sufficiently destroyed politically and morally in the eyes of the citizenry, not only execute but also erase them from history with impunity. Stalin dedicated himself with zeal to destroying in this manner the entire Bolshevik elite who led the revolution of 1917. In this manner the great leaders of the Bolshevik assault, along with thousands of old revolutionary fighters, were erased from history, including Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin and finally Leon Trotsky himself. The slaughter had a quality that could seem comical if it hadn’t been such a tragedy: each time Stalin liquidated a member of the communist directorate of 1917, that individual was eliminated from the photographs where he appeared as a leader. So every year the official photographs had to be retouched.

Fidel Castro has also been given to these types of exercises, although with less amplitude than what was done in the USSR. There is a famous photograph of Castro with Carlos Franqui, the director of Radio Rebelde in the Sierra Maestra mountains and later one of the first dissidents, standing to his right. After Franqui left Cuba, he too was taken out of the photo.

This constitutes one of the profound differences between a democratic conception of life and a totalitarian one. A democratic vision of history assumes contradictions. No one would think of erasing general Manuel Piar from our history. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, is proud of projecting a monolithic image. Both the part relating to past history, of which it claims to be a descendant, as well its own, cannot present fissures or contradictions, and much less positions countering the leader.

We continue to be perplexed by the effort to copy practices that are not just aberrant but frankly stupid, such as the notion of writing history to please the chief. But, on the other hand, if this Stalinist campaign against him demonstrates anything, it’s the importance of having the name Raúl Baduel.




{ Teodoro Petkoff, Tal Cual, 21 April 2008 }

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

“To defend oneself against the social by the creation of a zone of incandescence, on this side of which, inside which flourishes in terrifying security the extraordinary flower of the “I.” ”


Aimé Césaire changed my life when I came across his work at the USF library in 1990. I felt an immediate kinship with his writing, probably even more so because I read it outside of any class, undiluted by commentary or formal introductions. Although I don’t read French, Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith’s versions managed to transmit the indelible magic of his work, a translation of energies that has remained with me continuously since that initial encounter.

When I found out last year that Juan Sánchez Peláez was an avid reader of Césaire, my instincts were confirmed. Poetry, as I understand it, truly helps us create that “zone of incandescence” Césaire identifies and enacts in all his writing. What I hear in poets such as Sánchez Peláez and Césaire is a lineage of furies, hallucinations, specters and blessings. They invoke transformations that teach us how to dissolve the self and understand words as vessels, a form of communion with our inner depths and the strange universe around us.

After his death yesterday, I think of Césaire as the teacher and comrade I encountered amidst the library stacks, whose poems immediately transfixed me, providing the freedom to choose this sacred endeavor whose initial breath is resistance, then love.


“My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against
the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earth’s
dead eye
my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.”

Anacronías / Antonio López Ortega

Anachronies

An implacable observer of Venezuelan reality – the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, who lived in Caracas for about ten years while editing the magazine Nueva Sociedad – used to tell me that our society, while seemingly modernized, thought of itself through a rural lens, as though it had no relationship to any new events. We have to recognize that in our speech, for instance, similes that have to do with flora and fauna are abundant, and we also have to remember that most Venezuelanisms, according to Ángel Rosenblat, originate in games and chance. The stamp of turning significant events into nature is so marked that even petroleum, perhaps the 20th century’s most influential milestone, rather than being seen as a rupture of the pastoral paradigm, is understood within the context of sowing it, that is, of returning it to the earth, as if a hundred years of extraction were not enough to speak to us of another reality.

This fixation could even be laughable if it didn’t mean, on the other hand, a true process of social immobilization. If everything is earth and its excretions, then cities, streets or aqueducts are third-rate solutions. Today’s urban impulse, of which the capital city is the best example, is non-existent. In this revived process of reconquering lands, even at the cost of invasions, the cities are abandoned: there is no one to theorize them, to reread them, to invest in their progress. A vegetal, heavy and preterite arcadia conquers the minds of our leaders while the cities rot. But the state of our cities is barely an example of what is actually an anti-modern thought that ends up opposing everything, instead of navigating these challenging times in order to opt for improvements and to correct excesses. And after so much excess, against any model, it ends up finding nothing.

Our civic images belong to the past, as though we had already lived them. And they belong to the past because that’s where we seemed to feel most comfortable, as if the uterus were enough shade rather than thinking of adolescence or adulthood. Seen from a psychotherapeutic angle, we prefer immaturity, inconsistency, instead of facing the challenges of later stages. Except that no responsibilities exist within immaturity, no life project, no vision for the future; nor is there any effort, tenacity or desire for improvement. Let the vegetal arcadia rule, we say to ourselves, with pastures moved by the wind and cows that graze with millenary chewing.

These ages of ours will have to be seen in a not too distant future as a true social reversal, as a fear of growth, as a rejection of the minimal modernizing impulse we harvested in previous decades. Under the narcotic spell of petroleum, betting as ever on a state economy, the sum of individual efforts evaporates without incurring in collective construction. We already know the brand: of a society that is its own prisoner, immobilized by its own lack, nostalgic for a lapsed imaginary, ignorant of the processes all modern societies set for themselves so as to be up to the task of global challenges, which translate every time into growth, as well as human development and environmental equilibrium.

To live in anachrony – that could be the slogan –, as though we were someone else’s dream, as if 25 million beings depended on the good or bad nights of a single dreamer.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 15 April 2008 }