Because You Never Asked

(6/04)

     Reading is a vice whose seeds were perhaps planted when my parents signed me on to a Landmark series of children's books when I was still a pre-pubic lad. Books of this nature are generally excellent devices for the cultural inculcation of a mind in ebullient youthful formation. There is one title in particular --- "Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys" --- that stays with me to this day. Regardless of its attempts at socio-political indoctrination, if these early forays into the written word were the embryonic spark that led to the literary junky this writer has become, I can only thank my parents for providing it.

     But the gestation period was longer than it should have been. The embryo was not born to the light until I'd finished my university days. It is ironic that my years of higher education did not provide this birth, but I'd consider myself the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps there is too much hormonal effervescence bubbling about in these campus environments for there to be much room for anything else.

     Two years removed from the artificial landscape of college life, I found myself sharing a large apartment with a man ten years my senior. He was an avid reader who would loan me some of his favorite titles. This is when I began to read. This is when I discovered the novel. This is when I began to realize that the written experience could be just as entertaining as the visual experience.

     I recently read a blurb by one Alvaro Pomba, a Spanish writer who's had a long and distinguished career. Pomba believes that of all the written arts, it is the novel that embodies the most truth, while poetry embodies the least. My solidarity with the initial premise could not be greater. I have learned more about the human condition through the novel than any text or scholarly non-fiction has ever taught me. My substantially less acute expertise with regard to poetry might lessen my opinion's weight on the latter statement, but I will take the liberty to doubt its veracity anyway. Perhaps Pomba sees an excessive romantization of reality in poetry, but if I had to choose which of the written arts is most lacking in truth, I would choose daily journalism.

     Before getting back to that last remark, I beg the reader to take a short detour in allowing me to explain the following: my reading habits are eternal in that I am always involved with a book of some kind. It is like a nicotine habit or an eating disorder. On those rare instances when I don't have a book ready to go upon the completion of another, I feel incomplete, edgy, as if there were a void in my life. Perhaps, as stated above, this should be referred to as a vice, but I'll take it over Marlboros or pro football and be thankful for it.

     What does change, depending on what I am doing with my life, is the rate at which I read. The two months I spend by the Roman Sea, which are gloriously unencumbered with obligations, are my most fecund moments for literary consumption.

     Pepin Mari, cultured Catalan gentleman, has appeared in these pages before. He is responsible for the books I read while living by the Roman Sea. His good taste in literature is beyond dispute, a trait with which I enrich myself every year. One title --- "Un Ensayo Sobre Lucidez" (An Essay on Lucidity), by Jose Saramago --- compelled me to write this essay because it is so relevant to the current global situation suffering the lashes of Bush misgovernance.

     The book cannot be discussed without first discussing its creator, Jose Saramago. Saramago is remarkable in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. Let's start with the fact that he is from Portugal, a small country whose protagonism in the world has been almost negligible since the 16^th century. His importance as a stylist cannot be overrated. He has created a new form of prose that has changed the ideas of punctuation and written rhythm to such an extent, that it could be considered a bold new creation in much the same way jazz or rock were in music. Coupled with the brilliance of his presentation is a remarkable intellect whose understanding of the fraudulent burlesque of today's nation state-global economy is unsurpassed. The wit and irony with which he undresses the status quo is so genial that it not only makes one laugh, but think deep within as well. He could be the finest writer on the planet, a possibility that has been rewarded with a Nobel Prize for literature when Saramago was already in his late 70s. If anyone thinks this was some kind of belated gesture for his earlier work, guess again. His recently finished novel, now under discussion, was completed in his 82^nd year. He not only shows no signs of literary decay, he seems to be getting better.

     Are there also steroids for writers?

     "An Essay on Lucidity" is a stinging satirical attack on the insincere subterfuges of real power in the so-called democratic regimes of the Euro-Anglo style of political-commercial power brokering. It could be considered an elegant unveiling of the "Big Lie". The Big Lie is so vast, so complicated, so camouflaged in the battle fatigues of global economy warfare that it is virtually impossible to attack with any kind of specificity. (For more, see essay "The Real World Order Revisited".) When you dig too deep, or get too close, the Big Lie only seems to cloak its malfeasance beneath more and more layers of deceit. Once you are in the maze, it is impossible to make any sense of it. But if one can step back far enough so that it can be seen in its entirety, perhaps, for those with the most piercing intellectual vision, it can all start to fall in place.

     Nobody has seen this totality with more minute insight than Jose Saramago.

     In reading "Lucidity", it doesn't take long to realize it was inspired by the machinations unleashed by the Bush government in response to 9/11. (There is even a reference to a "code yellow" security condition.) But it would be cerebrally stingy to say that it only satirizes the current government of the United States. The work is far more universal in its scope. Everything in the book is generic. The characters are well developed, but nobody actually has a name. Their identities are etched in our minds by the positions they hold, jobs we are all familiar with, jobs that are interchangeable from one country to the next. The scene of the action is an anonymous country, a country like any other country in the Euro-Anglo scheme of things. Even the political parties used in the story are generic: The Democratic Party of the Right (DPR), The Democratic Party of the Center (DPC), and The Democratic Party of the Left (DPL). "Democracy" is the key word here, used like a Nike-McDonald's advertising slogan, as if it were a marketing tool for the political power structures of these countries.

     Unlike 9/11, which was a violent act of commission, the event that sets off the governmental reaction in "Lucidity" is a passive act of omission by the citizenry. The book begins with our typical country going to the polls for a typical national election. The voters turn out, the votes are cast . routine. A glorious democracy is once again rendering its quota of civic responsibility . except for one thing: over 80% of the ballots cast are blank. The people are rejecting the system, its candidates, its political agrupations. They are saying, in the great tradition of the landmark film "Network", "we're sick and tired of it and we're not going to take it anymore."

     It is worth noting how Saramago distributes the votes of those who actually choose a candidate. The DPR (Republicans, Tories, Christian Democrats in the real world) and the DPC (Democrats, Labor, Social Democrats in the real world), as usual, get almost all the votes divided fairly equally, while the DPL (Nader, Greens, Euro-Socialist and Communist remnants in the real world) get their usual 1 to 2%. This is not how the commercial media conglomerates of today refer to this political panorama. The DPR would be considered "center-right", the DPC "center-left", and the DPL as the radical or extreme left. Saramago has correctly noted that the "left" has just about been pushed off the political map while the so-called "center-left" has lost almost all of its "left". Following Saramago's logic, the "right" has pretty much lost all of its "center", a valuation I've noted before in these pages. To call governments run by Bush-Berlusconi & Co. anything but "neo-right" could be considered a softening of reality. Today's  "Big Media", allied with the status quo Saramago is attacking, prefers to have a "left" and a "right". It's far more "democratic".

     The DPR and the DPC --- the two parties that monopolize the power --- are outraged, considering this participatory non-participation a subversive act instigated by well-organized radical agitators in their nefarious attempts to undermine an exemplary democracy that has functioned for generations. The DPL, ostracized, discredited and shunned to the side for so long by mainstream press and politics, sides with the abstentionists, whose actions they claim as a sign of solidarity.

     But the DPR is in power and it is their mechanisms of control that must resolve the situation. This is an act of civil disobedience that threatens their cozy little "democracy" even more than an outside act of terror. The state security apparatus is immediately unleashed, directed by the book's most villainous character (though not by much), the Minister of the Interior (Ashcroft-like). The mainstream media viciously scolds the citizens for their cavalier attitude, for their lack of respect for the free and glorious institutions that have made the nation a model of democratic principles for generations. The insinuation of a subversive plot by dangerous radical elements is the prime strategy to discredit what has happened. Constitutional rights are suspended. The secret police are sent out. The conspirators will be found. The country will be saved.

     There is one problem: there is no conspiracy.

     The government decides to do what any contemporary, forthright, democratic government would do: they will create one! Along the way there are political defections a la Richard Clark and Paul O'Neill, a "terrorist" attack that kills more people than it was intended to (9/11 may have been a bit more than the Bush Gang had bargained for as well), the ruthless, Maquiavellian pragmatism of a small group of Cheney-Rumsfeld-Ashcroft-like henchmen, a vilified suspect is found, a media establishment dutifully staging the "crisis", and much more . all choreographed to the lyrical beat of Saramago's avant-garde prose.

     Jose Saramago has managed to see the game in its integral whole: the two "opposing" parties that monopolize the terrain of government; the media apparatus that stages the operetta; the ghostly security force that imposes it.

     The critical thing is how well Saramago can be translated into non-Latino tongues. It would be very helpful for all my compatriots to read "An Essay on Lucidity".