Let’s say we were going to tell the story of a presidential election in the style of a synopsis of a Boom novel, with all its Gothic features, its psycho-sexual pimping to an orientalist gaze, and its focus on the cannibalistic dreamscapes of a few characters.
First off, the candidates.
The right-wing candidate and eventual victor is a nepotistic sociopath with an Oedpial complex, a former president of the country’s most popular soccer team, and a nauseating specimen of the new Latin American Right, which is more or less the old Right but with touches of a queer happiness aesthetic, a more open embrace of an electorate suffering from—in its half-justified opinion—an impoverished, vengeful, panoptic and self-policing Asperger’s affect (devoid of empathy or perceptual background, shorn of memory, because memory is branded as either no-longer-chic, like the working class, or terroristic, like the Montoneros), and a keener appreciation of exactly the kind of murderous doublespeak expected of it by the U.S. State Department (swastikas, gay-bashing, and dictatorship-nostalgia are officially out, though they appear frequently in the published and unpublished writing of the candidate’s supporters: what’s in is dancing, talk of “investment” and “the international community” and “decent citizens,” and cynical posturing). In his early thirties, the candidate was abducted by mercenaries or gangsters and kept confined in a coffin over a period of days, until his construction magnate father, who has always harbored a passionate if thinly veiled hatred of his son, paid a multimillion dollar ransom for the future candidate´s life. Though there was very little life left after that, since we’re talking about a vampire story here, about the story of a poor rich kid who became a bloodsucker. That was his first near-death encounter. The second was during one of his multiple weddings to a silicon-pumped Galatea (though, once again, not much life was injected into her, the sexual tastes and sexual fluids of vampires are notoriously limited, etiolated). What happened was that the candidate, who used to sport a mustache, decided to wear a fake mustache for his wedding. At some point—presumably during one of his notorious binges of karaoke sadism, during which the entire audience, as at Mr. Burns’ parties, are subjected to his vulgar, philistine exhibitionism—he began to choke on the fake mustache, so that his future health minister (and we’re talking about a government that is openly hostile to all manifestations of a socially just public health system) had to perform a Heimlich maneuver on him. Which reminds me of a song by Chain and the Gang, in which Ian Svenonius talks about encountering a “distinguished-looking guy” choking to death who refuses any kind of emergency response, and instead prefers to narrate, in his asphyxiating last moments, the various conspiracy-theory, crypto-imperialist, and deep-state crimes for which he has been responsible: these crimes are not limited to the systematic targeted assassination of black liberation activists (MLK, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Fred Hampton, Bobby Hunt, and Patrice Lumumba) but also include the Pope’s election (presumably John Paul II) and most importantly the sci-fi-Gnostic harvesting of Hitler’s brain, which remains in a bunker in Argentina: an asset the United States government has a “national security interest” in protecting, but which, like every objet petit a, ultimately controls the United States government.
Speaking of the Nazi United States—Jeb Bush’s United States, Jeb Bush who claimed, in his BuzzFeed or Vox-level of dilettante moral philosophy, that he would go back in time and commit infanticide against Baby Adolf Hitler, with all that baby’s distorted libidinality vis-à-vis his mother’s healthy Volkisch porno-tit, but would never have gone back to kill his own grandfather who not only openly funded and profited off the Nazi regime but who, like the vast majority of his ruling-class peers, sincerely believed that Nazism, give or take a few local color excesses, was a just order and a valiant vanguard exercise against creeping Bolshevism, the hope of the world, etc.—…
The new president is a sincere believer in the American way. According to WikiLeaks (and this was known before the election!), he had begged State Department officials to “punish” and “be harder” with his country, his poor fairy country that had been taken over by an overly indulgent refrigerator mother, an absentee helicopter mother filled with social programs in lieu of real love (which is to say punishment).
Speaking of public health, the president announced before his election (this was known before the election!) that he wanted to appoint to his government a nutrition expert, colorfully named Abel Albino—which is to say a white murderer who thinks he’s a victim of those bearing the mark of Cain—who publicly professed the following opinions (many of which were broached in his reactionary-bordering-on-whimsically-anachronistic book of eugenics, To Govern is to Populate: Responsible Paternity or Assisted Fornication, the latter term a crude and racist pun on Reproducción Asistida, a maternal health program launched by the outgoing government, which prompted a social media barrage of right-wing memes featuring swollen-bellied, dark-skinned teenage girls, lasciviously and innocently grinning, thanking da gubmint): that sex is a miracle intended to contribute to the creative work of God, and not to enjoy oneself, that condoms don’t prevent AIDS, that it’s necessary for the government to combat promiscuity, pornography, autoeroticism, contraceptives, infidelity, and cohabitation, that there exist people who masturbate and never have a normal relationship, that masturbation is an addiction, like a drug, that homosexuality is “not an illness but rather a problem,” and that oral and anal sex violate the natural order, particularly because the anus is an organ of excretion, not absorption.
There’s no point in talking about the losing candidate, except to say that he was a security-obsessed neoliberal Clintonian provincial governor—also the son of wealthy parents, but less wealthy and certainly less worldly, for instance he sported an extreme Cosa Nostra tan, as opposed to his pale, vampiric opponent—who had once been a world-champion powerboat racer, which was the unfortunate source of his missing right arm. Arrivist that he was, he only married one model (according to the reactionary jargon of the U.S. alt-right, that makes him a “cuckservative”)
As we know from the Boom novelists, when a dictator succeeds on this sad, dark continent, there is always a chorus of women (whores and others) to chime in.
For instance, a cleaning woman who commutes two hours every day (each way!) into the capital on a deteriorating transportation system and who suffers from various occupational health problems claims that the new president, whose economic policies amount to class warfare against her, will put an end to this gang of criminals, welfare queens, shitheads, and freeloaders. She’s right that the outgoing government is a gang of criminals (criminality being an inherent element in every government that’s not an official manager for Capital), and yet she looks for her country’s salvation in the Right. But she never admits that it’s the Right, compulsively. She only talks about honesty, decency, and working people: when she talks about the United States, she accuses it, correctly, of vast criminal enterprises, and she has no illusions about what’s going on in France.
The night before the election, an elderly woman in a middle-class suburb of Buenos Aires has an asado for her son and her son’s friends. She absolutely refuses to mention the name of the candidate that she’s going to vote for, because she knows on some level it’s shameful, but at the same time she can’t stop talking about the election, she talks about honesty, decency, and the working people, the ones who have been fucked over by the nameless passionate hordes, the Left, the masses. She talks about the need to restore order, the need to cut certain people down to size, about the fact that there’s a conspiracy of Cthulhuian proportions out there to give power to them, the others. And then she talks about the worms in her garden, about how she knows how to communicate with them, and about her illnesses, which, it comes out, are all due to childbirth (certain strained discs leading to circulation problems and eventually to heart disease), but she doesn’t blame her son, naturally. Her son is also reticent to name the guy he’s going to vote for, but there’s a keenness in his conversation, he’s clearly excited about what’s going to happen. We’ll see what happens, he says, but it’s going to be good. Then he starts to talk about how he sometimes goes to Amerika, a popular gay bar in Palermo, with his friends, because it has the best music and the cheapest drinks, naturally, and how the gays are okay, thrilling even, but there’s nothing to be done with the travestis, the transvestites or transgenders, who in his telling are insatiable victimizers, rapists, and vultures.
Carla was a pretty girl from an evangelical family. She was in love with the son who went to gay bars, but she didn’t like that he went to gay bars. Nor did she like that he was also dating a married woman. Nor did she like that he had been married before (did his marriage fail because he was a crypto-gay?, as the international best-seller Chilean authoress Pilar Sordo would say). Nor did she like when he talked about pornography, which he talked about often, though he always disavowed any firsthand familiarity, saying that a friend had told him the scenes he was about to describe. They liked to dance salsa together and they blamed all the city’s traffic on piquetero strikes. She believed that boys were cads but could be converted, whereas girls never sexually experimented.
Neither had seen an Almodóvar film, though if they had, they either would have denounced it as obscene (though secretly sympathizing with the depicted libidinal freedom, post-Franco NATO Spain being a metaphor for post-Kirchner NATO Argentina) or would have realized that they were both repressed faggots.
The Landlady She (the property speculator, the aesthete) returned to Buenos Aires from her self-imposed European exile in the midst of a sadico-anal orgasm about the impending devaluation, her eyes glazing over as she recounted to herself the various episodes of mass starvation and unemployment suffered by her countrymen as if they were zeniths in the firmament of Argentinian history. You should have been here in 2002, she told me, it was fabulous, I went out all the time! Now she rarely went out, it’s true, she was getting older, the world was too much with her. We’re going to throw the old bitch Kirchner in jail!, she told me. Do you think she’s a psycho?, she asked me. And then a seeming non sequitur: I’m praying, praying for Janet. I looked at her dumbfoundedly until I realized she was talking about Janet Yellen and that she was salivating over the prospect of a Fed interest rate hike. I never thought it was possible to stuff the ideological pith of the “buitre” or “rentier capitalist” into a grotesque carnal receptacle, outfitted with its own warped fantasmatic content (the supposedly schizophrenogenic and unloving mother, Kirchner) and middle-brow aesthetics (the latest Woody Allen films). An aside: in the company of Jews, she suffered a curious compulsion or pathological tic. She couldn’t help but remind them, at least once every encounter, that they were Jews, as if she were polylingually prodding a dental abscess or as if she were Goebbels dreamily crushing a cockroach. Nevertheless, she admired Jews, warily, as one would admire something sinister but attractive. She considered Jews a necessary cosmopolitan-priestly caste (they were after all the highest specimens in the highest stage of Civilization, which is to say American Civilization). Nevertheless, the only Jews she could truly abide were either Wall Street overlords or metaphysically tormented artists with sexually predatory instincts (Woody Allen, Polanski, Freud, etc.). Speaking of Freud, the case of the landlady and of ultra-Right neoliberal economics in Argentina sheds a new light on the Freudian theory of anality and bourgeois stinginess. Perhaps in the mythical Golden Age of Capitalism, in whose moral universe Freud was more or less at home, the bourgeois could be seen as some kind of repressed hoarder, haunted by a nebulous guilt over his earnings, which he believed to be always on the verge of alchemizing into feces. However, in actually existing capitalism, it is not only the philanthropy-billionaires like Gates and Soros who can be understood psychoanalytically as auto-coprophagiacs (shitting out their various foundations, which they pretend to associate with their guiltless guilt, their right to atone, but at the same time profiting obscenely and carnivorously off the very immiseration their foundations actually cause). One can also understood contemporary bourgeois anality in terms of the crossroads or the hybrid between the Keynesian nation state and the international financial institutions. The landlady, who exists entirely without the super ego that Freud thought inveterate to every bourgeois, associates the lower classes with shit, with feces, and associates any tentative reformism, any half-hearted developmentalist or redistributionist fiscal-monetary program with dirtiness, with unlicensed luxury, with unbridled proletarian sexuality. For her, austerity and its Third World counterpart, devaluation, represent the restoration of the Law (i.e, “responsible monetary policy,” IMF-compliance, or as they call it on CNN and Fox, “fiscal sanity”). But the Law, of course, is not the point, is a mere pretext for the obscene supplement to the Law, which is speculation, interest, exploitation, “investment.” Which is to say the freedom to wallow in one’s own shit, to hypertrophy off one’s own shit, and to shove that shit down the throats of the exploited classes. And of course, as Beckett taught us (those who read Beckett correctly, which is to say dialectically, and not as some kind of liberal-aristocratic abstractionist of the bare life and throbbing instincts beneath the supposedly superfluous veneer of history, culture, and values), there’s no such thing as jouissance without the suffering of others.
The False Consciousness of an Expat Poetess She was in the habit of publishing in second-rate (upper-second rate, even) Anglo-American publications various third-rate Borgesian, metaphysical musings about Buenos Aires, her adopted city, the city of her heart.
The key to the ideological swindle of her poems (any writer who doesn’t admit to ideological swindles succumbs to bad faith and therefore to bad poetry) is that she adopted the position of an ethereal and doll-like, but duende-haunted, leftist melancholic with a ravenous, though subtle, not to say sublimated, sexual appetite. She liked enjambments and short lines, such as “Mao’s/Red Book.” She liked Soviet futurism (Italian futurism was macho and fascistically taboo, though perhaps in another life she could have been both macho and fascist). She liked to cover her bases by alluding to the Palestinians and to the anti-apartheid struggle, without the least note of didacticism or vulgarizing political commitment, as if each instance of leftist struggle were a saint’s bone, or saint’s effluvium, in a reliquary in the darkest church of the end of history. She liked the decadent odor of Catholic words. She liked clarion calls for the new sincerity, tempered by the scruple of the knowing and unwitting nihilist. She liked the orgasm’s premonition or disappointment, but never, of course, the orgasm. Never did she hide nor repent for her being white, which she considered a scarlet letter, a suppurating wound of knowledge.
As for her prose: she wrote a tender tribute to Victor Jara and to all the forgotten and disappeared dreams of that noble but misguided generation, and a stark demand that his CIA-affiliated killer be brought to justice in a U.S. court. Victims are like grains of sand passing through the sieved ephemera of time, the clutching hand can only capture the rarest and most iridescent particles, the ones that stand out, the exceptional, the artists. But she didn’t stop there: her next piece was about Roque Dalton and the leftist thugs that killed him. And then she wrote about the new censorship, about Charlie Hebdo. And then she wrote about the Malvinas as the Lacanian objet petit a. And she kept getting published, and in no time the book deals would come through. Every writer is a social climber, she told herself, as a mantra. She managed to insert Proust’s “a work in which there are theories is like an article on which the price-tag has been left” into three separate essays denouncing dangerous, atavistic trends in Latin American literature, trends that aimed at imposing a cultural or regional or ideological identity on the mystic labyrinth of individual consciousness. She never hesitated to compare art to a commodity, or theory to an advertisement for surplus value
Though she wouldn’t admit it, what disturbed her about Donald Trump was that he seemed to enjoy his fascism, his militarism, his corporatism, his racism, etc., whereas she truly believed that one should only pursue those things in the name of profit. When the Right is profit-driven, it’s endearing, at home in my heart.
Which isn’t to say that she was profiting, financially at least, off her literary vocation. What’s funny about the end of history, in the opinion of the expat poetess, is that an intellectual can be corrupt without being in anyone’s pay (though we often are in someone’s pay). She found Borges’ diagnosis of Judas to be not only convincing but beautiful. She wrote sometimes in order to know the Gnostic and messianic thrill of betrayal, of corruption, of narrow self-interest, since the hell that she therefore inhabited was exquisite, decadent, and, above all, true.
And so, though she’d always tactically pretended to her Argentinian friends that she was a woman of the Left (the serious, the tragic, the aesthetic Left), she couldn’t help but feel a certain frisson upon the election of the new president. She sat down one summer December day in a café in Palermo Hollywood (ugh!, ya know?, but still), to write a kind of Zuckerbergian manifesto in the guise of a Weimar feuilliton about the city, filled with her usual mélange of boring pseudo-Cortázarian coincidences and pointless hipster hermeticism, in which she essentially said that capitalist time is destructive, slow-fast, inertial-Hegelian, and dirty-sublime. Our bodies and our industrial goods and our petty-bourgeois mores become etherealized. Our heavy revolutionary politics become obsolete, become the postmodern play of nymphs and sprites and their dark doubles.