A President’s White Hair
By Jorge Majfud
20 January, 2007
Countercurrents.orgRecently, the president of Brazil, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, was honored by the magazine IstoÉ, which elected him Brazilian of the Year. Significantly, the magazine handed out other distinctions: IstoÉ Money and IstoÉ People, which placed in their proper context could represent two redundant prizes.
The AFP text, repeated by a dozen of the continent’s daily newspapers, states: “‘Things evolve according to the amount of white hair and responsibility that one has,’” said Lula, 61 years old, indicating his white hair in an impromptu speech.” And later: “‘If one meets a very old leftist it is because he must have problems,’ said the president, drawing laughter and applause from the audience of businessmen, politicians and artists.”
His words make a certain sense: old leftists like Mr. Luiz are no longer leftists because they have solved their problems. Nonetheless, even though it refutes itself, the message was read ambiguously by an entire continent and by the hilarious business people: the president, having come to his senses, referred to the psycological and ideological problems of those who no longer think like him. Which constitutes the central thesis and the only dialectical resource of books like Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot: the mere qualification of the mental faculties of the adversary.
Let’s analyze briefly the syllogism posited here.
In olden times, in order to command respect one alluded to the white chin whiskers. Mr. Luiz has a beard but the new ideological modesty bars him from alluding to his residual past and the dramatic ideological cross-dressing that the graying of those whiskers, soaked more than once, represents. The old aphorism that pretends to recall and confirm the wisdom – political wisdom – of men who comb gray hair only guarantees to us that said discourse comes from an old man. In this case from an old man in power. In Informe sobre ciegos (Report on the Blind, 1961), Ernesto Sábato commented, through the voice of a scoundrel: “before the noun ‘little old man’ they inevitably place the adjective ‘poor,’ as if we didn’t all know that just because a reprobate grows old he doesn’t cease to be a reprobate, but rather, on the contrary, refines his ill-will with the selfishness and rancor that he acquires or develops along with his gray hair.” A scoundrel, but irrefutable. Due to the fault of this kind of rabble, a “little old man” like the recently deceased General Augusto Pinochet had to be cremated so that his grave – according to his family – would not become a sanctuary for protests and profanations. In India cremation has a similar purpose: the continuation of the samsara, the undesireable reincarnation of the deceased, is thereby avoided.
Latin America possesses a long history of strongmen who ascend to power up the staircase of the left and then sustain themselves by clinging to the handrail of the right. Among the más frequently repeated narrative resources of those in power has always been the the false alternative of the “fair middle.” To the confessions applauded by businessmen in Sao Paulo, comrade Lula, now Mr. Luiz, added that, as in all human conduct, the ideal is “the middle road” and “balance.”
Between Mexico and Buenos Aires there exists a distance with an unequivocal middle point. The problem is calculating that middle point in a social or political order, where black and dark are disputed as if they were two radical options. What is the middle point when a child cries from hunger or doesn’t even have the strength to cry? What was the middle road when Hernán Cortés was burning entire cities and decapitating defenseless men and women? What was the middle road when until recently military dictators or smaller strongmen on our continent had at their disposal entire countries, like the large landowner has his cattle? Does a wise middle road exist between the violators of Human Rights and those radicals who for years demanded the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth when they thought they had recuperated democracy? Can one be half-way criminal, half-way rapist, half a hypocrite? What does balance mean for a society that produces palaces and favelas alike?
The dilemmas that are used in politics to establish a balance, a middle point, are almost always false; like the game of haggling in a market, which leaves the customer who overpays happy because he achieved a price somewhat lower than the initial one proposed by the vendor. Of course we all value the balance between human demands and achievements, but the problem arises when we take this precept and we generalize it across the board for reasons of personal or class or professional convenience: a balance between material possibilities and desire is not the same as the balance between justice and the violation of rights.
When president Lula himself rose to power with his utopian slogan Fome Zero (Zero Hunger), he was not proposing a middle road but a radical option. Radical and inexcusable in a country where the State invests millions to protect unproductive mansions while the number of children who die before the age of five is 35 in every thousand, much greater than that of countries like Panama (24 in every thousand) or Chile (9 in every thousand). The natural failure of a radical proposal like Fome Zero should not mean hypocritically switching sides but insisting to the death on a non-negotiable, honorably radical human right. In this case, defeat in the face of reality is not so shameful as the ideological discourse that attempts to justify it with phrases dictated by the builders and narrators of that same reality.
Obviously, change is not bad. Quite the contrary. The history of religious, scientific, philosophical and political positions is rich in all kinds of changes, frequently dramatic changes. In the world of passions and thought these shifts are common and at times famous: such is the case of Jean-Paul Sarte or of Mario Vargas Llosa. Of the first, Octavio Paz said that so many changes made his life’s work ugly. Of the second, worse things were said, perhaps because, at least until recently, it was considered that culture was a battle field that either served or resisted the powers that be. To refuse or not take a position was a form of treason. In the case of Ernesto Sábato the changes and ruptures have been dramatic and abundant. In a strange way, all of these philosophical – so as not to call them political – contradictions were associated with an existential coherence and, in the end, with coherence, simply put.
Now, attributing changes to a greater wisdom is simply an illusion of the appearance of those who comb white hair. Einstein revolutionized the physical sciences when he was twenty five. Ten years later, in 1915, he accomplished one of his last intellectual feats: the generalization of his Theory of Relativity. From that point on until he died in 1955 he spent his entire life denying the possibilities of a great part of quantum physics, that theoretical physics which would have greater success than his frustrated search for a unifying and determinist theory, in the best style of 19th century science – with respect to determinism – and of the philosophy of the 5th century B.C., with respect to the epistemological precept of unitary truth. A common joke says: “If parents know more than children, why didn’t Edison’s father invent the light bulb?”
White hair, Mr. President, can indeed signify more experience. But it doesn’t guarantee much more than that. More experience can be a good basis for wisdom or for one of the forms of stupidity, like the belief that experience produces ideas. This superstition has been refuted in all of the laboratories of the world but remains alive thanks to the senile pride of those who no longer have ideas.
Mr. President, it is pathetic to justify one’s ideological cross-dressing with the ideas of Donald Duck at the same time that one indicates one’s own white hair as if they were the white hairs of Einstein – since they are no longer those of Marx. What new act of faith is necessary to believe your new opinions? What new act of hypocrisy is necessary to roar with laughter along with the guests of the Great Third World Business Class in another classic delusion of grandeur? Allowing one’s hair to grow white does not help much in comprehending the geodesic equation. It only makes you look even more like Benny Hill.
Sincerely, Mr. President, I am not interested in defending the left that brought you to power in your country. I am too skeptical and probably too cynical to believe in the speeches of the left, right or center. Perhaps I find less repugnant the demagoguery of a speech on the street than the hypocrisy of a dinner with champagne. But if we are going to analyze the profundity of the thoughts of that wisdom now incarnated in you, we might begin with the following conclusions: (1) that the men and women of the left habitually become old men and women of the right guarantees wisdom to nobody; rigorously, from the syllogism posited one can only deduce that (2) the right is, like any white haired little old man, closer to power and to death than the left. For which reason, one would have to congratulate the little old leftists for their youthful spirit.
Translated by Bruce Campbell
Jorge Majfud, Uruguayan writer, 1969. From an early age he read and wrote fictions, but he chose to major in architecture and graduated from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1996. He taught mathematics and art at the Universidad Hispanoamericana de Costa Rica and Escuela Técnica del Uruguay. He currently teaches Latin American literature at the University of Georgia. Hi has traveled to more than forty countries, whose impressions have become part of his novels and essays. His publications include Hacia qué patrias del silencio/memorias de un desaparecido (novel, 1996); Crítica de la pasión pura (essays, 1998); La reina de América (novel, 2001), El tiempo que me tocó vivir (essays, 2004) and La narración de lo invisible/Significados ideológicos de América Latina (essay, 2006). His stories and articles have been published in various newspapers, magazines, and readers, such as El País and La República of Uruguay, Milenio of México, Jornada of Bolivia, Tiempos del Mundo of Washingtonn, Monthly Review of New Yor, Resource Center of The Americas de Minnesota, Rebelión, and Hispanic Culture Review of George Mason University. He is a regular contributor to Bitácora, the weekly publication of La República. He is a member of the International Scientific Committee of the magazine Araucaria in Spain. He was distinguished with Mention Premio Casa de las Américas, in Habana, Cuba in 2001, for the novel La Reina de América and Excellence in Research Award, UGA, United States 2006. His essays and articles have been translated into Portuguese, French, English and German.
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