1. Iron Guard
Pope Francis—that piece of fascist shit masquerading as a koan-dispensing liberal anti-capitalist bacillus—recently appeared on a private Chilean television station, denouncing a group of lay Catholics, based in the southern city of Osorno, as “tontos” and“zurdos,” which is to say idiot, faggot, Marxist-Leninists. In Latin America, in his sister nation, in the Third World, Bergoglio doesn’t fuck around: he reverts to form. His anathema was directed against an organized and militant (though non-violent, naturally) attempt on the part of the Church’s sexual/political victims to block the appointment of Juan Barros as the Bishop of Osorno. Barros played a leading role in covering up the gargantuan pedophilic crimes of Fernando Karadima, a priest who, in addition to systematically raping the boys and young men in his care, led a so-called paraiglegsia (a parachurch, which is to say the real Church, but with its face turned jeeringly inwards, excreting its violence through the colonic vessel of the State) in Santiago, which united crypto-operatives of the CIA and Opus Dei in unfathomable but well-documented atrocities. Karadima’s church was used as a military base for Jaime Guzmán, the founding (second-rate Falangist man of letters) father of the Chilean Catholic Right during the Allende years, and was almost certainly the foco for the CIA-sponsored assassination of General René Schneider, who advanced the quaint notion that the military should not overthrow elected presidents and torture and kill citizens and for that was the victim of Nixon/Kissinger’s first coup attempt.
1.1. The Vestiges of an Oepidal Conflict Among the Upper Petty-Bourgeoisie
Mario’s testimony (his mother is a leader in the Osorno protests): In the seventies, my mother was a mirista and my father was a truck driver, but not a fascist truck driver (later he was a fascist, but by then he’d ceased to be a truck driver). My mother escaped on horseback, dressed in a nun’s habit, from Pinochet’s goons while her friends were being abducted and killed, a ridiculous sight, a leftist student dressed as a nun, riding like a figure out of Neruda through the rainy South, why are we Chileans condemned to the same cheap apparitions?, the same revolting disguises?, why don’t we know how to read Nicanor Parra?, or Neruda for that matter (though now they say he was a rapist, which, to be fair, Neruda also said he was)?, to really read them, and she lived in a nunnery near Valdivia for a year until one day she took off her nun’s habit and went home to Temuco, not on a horse but on a bus this time, and she met my father, who had never risked anything, not even in fucking (let alone in love), because the truth is that Chilean men are bad in bed, my father the famed seducer, with his three families, is in fact an eternal cuckold, and he continued to earn money while my mother studied theology (a New Age Buddhist-inflected liberation theology), and he continued to fuck around after my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and he continued to go out and get drunk with his friends and to watch soccer teams that never win or win but in the end disappoint or get disqualified for cheating or for other crimes, while my mother recovered from breast cancer (as much as one can recover), and then they split up, not physically but spiritually, I’m not sure when, little by little, but at the same time all at once, and my mother became the daft left-wing Catholic that she is, healer of the sick and friend of the poor, who glares at priests, whose glare turns the priests into the eunuchs that they already are, whom all the priests tremble before, and my father went back to his grim and drawn-out provincial masochism and the only difference between their deaths, their anonymities, is that when they (their deaths) arrive one will arrive with their children’s spit and contempt and the other with their children’s tears and remorse: liquid emotions that harden little by little into the tomb of forgetting, and finally into forgetting itself, because even the tomb is born and fades away, etc.
2, The Scribbling Clerks
At one point, I had two books that I’d bought from book vendors in Santiago (one still sees traces in their wares of the sad archaism of literary or non-literary pornography, but more and more now they sell new editions of Isabel Allende, Paulo Coehlo, and Pilar Sordo, the last of whom is a kind of Oprah Winfrey/Sheryl Sandberg hybrid on Lacanian steroids).
2.1. The Prophetic Postmortem of Popular Unity
The first book was called The Chilean Road to Socialism and it was edited by a U.S. professor named Dale L. Johnson, who, in spite of his name, is not a NASCAR driver but in fact a seemingly brilliant and humane college professor who went on to have a career in advocacy for the rights of the mentally ill, and a private life of mountaineering, but who initially, as far as I can tell, was a wide-seeing (but ultimately myopic, as was everyone) advocate of Latin American emancipation, and who compiled a tremendous wealth of academic, militant, industrial, peasant, and corporate-reactionary documents on the conditions of Allende’s government up until half way through 1973. A book that adumbrates disaster with all the dutiful and deontic application of old-school leftist academia, a book that is still more worth reading than all the falsifying articles one can find about Chile in the respectable contemporary media (and even the leftist media, if that still exists).
2.2. Infantile Sexuality Confesses
The second book was written by a doctor, a noble-minded if latently sadistic reformist and friend of Allende. It was called something like The Sexual Customs of the Chileans and it documented, with a panoptic level of surveillance that would have horrified Foucault (though, in the end, I side with the doctor), all the various feudal, pre-feudal (undifferentiatedly orgasmic, stupidly but revolutionarily pre-revolutionary), capitalist-bourgeois, theological-bourgeois, Popular Front disciplinarian, neurotically Catholic, incestuously confused, indigenously haunted, slum-ridden, angry, howling, abusive, sexual practices of the so-called Chilean people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was as if, in the same way that Allende refused to arm the people, his anthropologist/doctor friend looked upon the sexuality of his countrymen with sympathy, with understanding, but ultimately decided to send it to a concentration camp.
2.2.1. The Unsatisfactory Hygiene of the People
I recently saw the perverse afterlife of this book on Chilean television, on a prolonged news segment, in which two or three dozen working-class Chilean couples were interviewed about the difficulties of sexual intimacy in the confines of the crowded Chilean public housing system, which incarcerates people into dangerous, cheaply constructed apartments, to the immense benefit of real estate developers who are subsidized by the socially entrepreneurial State. Most of the couples claimed they were incapable of having sex. A few of them admitted, bashfully or with a forced impudence, to not giving a fuck (about sex, or about the social reproduction of sex). The reward for their pornographic honesty was one night of romance in a love motel. All spiffed up, after a makeover, they went off presumably to have sex for the prudishly turned off cameras, only to return to their supposedly chaste existences, bathed in the haloed memory of their state-sanctioned conjugal union. In fact, despite the overly stressed modesty of the television guests, I think it’s more than likely that they left immense quantities of semen, vaginal fluids, feces, blood, and other pathogenic proletarian material behind them, returning to their children with complicitly smiling faces. As if to say that in the same way that the early-twentieth century, itinerant copper miners were forced—by the State, the big North American mining companies, and the petty-bourgeois stratum of social reformers—to go from a polyamorous, savage, primordially undifferentiated, bacchic sexual situation to a supposedly monogamous, decent, hygienic situation (with the slag of surplus prostitutes still available as a release valve), these humble couples were now being forced into sexual contortions, exhibitionism, moral jouissance, when in fact all along they knew the score, their fucking had never been subjugated to the ideas and strictures of the ruling class. Then again, that kind of Italian sexual autonomism, with its Pasolinian pessimism, is at best a speculation, at worst a stupefying masturbation.
2.3. The Literary Tastes of Gorillas
One travels, still, and one loses books, in the same way one lapses into lyricism. The Department of Homeland Security, at U.S. airports, still takes an interest in books, and its thugs even confiscate books with the word “socialism” in them, even if it’s just a book of Vallejo’s essays.
3. Don’t be Deceived by the Ideological Necrosis of a Dead Society
The Santiago municipal government has launched what can either be described, euphemistically, as an anti-littering campaign, or, more accurately, as a eugenical psy-op aimed at the subliminal sowing of class and race loathing (couched in the liberal-Christian facade of “good neighborliness”). It’s installed, in vertiginous numbers (at least one every block), glossy street signs featuring a recurrent Sambo-like villain, a kind anal expulsive, naively psychopathic lumpen, whose name may or may not be Humberto. Humberto has dark skin, a wide toothy grin, and the protuberant insatiable autistic eyes associated with crackheads in the 1990s suburban imagination. He’s dressed, more or less, as a construction worker, and on his head he wears what is either a hardhat, a hybrid rastacap/Peruvian chullo, a toilet bowl, or, most surreally, a tea cup. In one iteration, he’s gleefully throwing a maelstrom of trash over his head: no seas basuriento (don’t be a litterer, or a piece of trash). In another, he’s gleefully spray-painting a wall: no seas rayuo (don’t be a graffitier, and the small print admonishes people not to stick posters in public places, which is not only a common method for leftist parties to conduct propaganda but also for the extremely poor to earn a subsistence living, often working at the behest of the same leftist parties or for organized prostitution rings). In yet another, he’s pissing (presumably gleefully, but his face is hidden) against a wall, the shameless drops of his urine painstakingly redoubled in silhouette, the urine itself progressing from a solar yellow to a cheese-like puddle of orange on the ground. And in Humberto’s last iteration, he’s hauling away his filthy mattress, presumably to abandon it on the street: no seas Humbertedero (as far as I can tell, per Google, a hapax legomenon, which leads me to believe that the character’s name is Humbert, which in turn makes me think of Humbert Humbert, and another, theoretical iteration of his tragifarcical story, with a Chilean Lolita on his lap and book of Lord Byron’s poetry in his hands: no seas pedófilo-anglófilo). The large-print anthem of the campaign, which appears on every poster, reads: quiero mi ciudad sin tu suciedad (I want my city without your filth). To which every totally developed, revolutionary human being, or every malformed and shattered human being who one day hopes to be developed and revolutionary, replies: quiero mi comunidad sin tu sociedad.
4. Just As Today They Kill Gringas With Inhuman Instincts
In Temuco, the capital of the beleaguered Araucanía region, a bright-eyed Christian girl from Kentucky, who had taken a teaching job at a Baptist high school (the Chilean education system is a notorious state-subsidized religious-free market fraud) with Wendy Kopp’s Wehrmacht, “Teach for All,” was brutally bludgeoned to death and left in a bathtub in her campus apartment. The murder was met by the vast outrage of the Chilean corporate media, and the British tabloids (always ready to jump on lurid stories of innocent whites gone astray in the Third World abyss, not so much to discredit the Global South as to sermonize about the mutant gene of white lefty internationalism, which is to say, along with Ann Coulter, that those cocksucking Christians had it coming to them, those Christians who forgot that Christianity, or Christian pathos, should be subordinated to the Schmittian Leviathan, the State-Race Deity, the shitty U.S. Empire: it should be noted that the dead gringa, though humiliated by the press, was treated with considerable more tact and kindness than was Rachel Corrie, who had the temerity to be killed not by a psycho-killer but in defense of the Palestinians).
The young teacher from Kentucky was killed in a sensationalist fashion. A janitor/security guard was arrested for the murder and is currently standing trial. In fact, it’s an open secret in Temuco that the real killer was the wealthy son of a teacher at the high school. What happened was that the gringa had fallen in love with a young Chilean man, and that the two had dated for awhile, but the Chilean also had a boyfriend, which is to say he was gay or bisexual, or whatever, and this boyfriend was prone to homicidal jealousy, and when the gringa from Kentucky returned to Chile to be with her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s boyfriend decided to murder her, in a very clean and precise way (clean and precise from the forensic point of view, though not from the point of view of the dead gringa, or the janitor/security guard).
4.1. Piece of Schmitt
Speaking of Schmitt, who was not only the intellectual mentor of the assassinated fascist Jaime Guzmán but whom many so-called liberal humanists acknowledge as a major influence, including Hannah Arendt, who, in spite of her myriad worshippers in the hypocritical sphere known as the left-liberal U.S. intelligentsia (“the right to have rights,” or the right for Syria to have the shit bombed out of it), basically drew on Schmitt’s philosophy, in her characteristically confused and non-intelligible way, to oppose school desegregation in the South in the 1950s…A week or so ago, in Temuco, at the Universidad de la Frontera, a German-Chilean douchebag (of which there are legions in the south of Chile, where all the Freikorps freaks came to settle and be henchmen for British and U.S. capital) delivered a talk on his latest book. I don’t remember the particular name of this book, it’s something churned out of a Hayekian or Ordoliberal think tank, which is to say it’s forgettable, a torpid particle of an endless toxin. One of his books was called something like The Tyranny of Equality and another was called something like The Danger of Democracy. His talk, naturally, was about the incompatibility of democracy and freedom, a discourse which has only slowly percolated into the U.S. Right, but which is fairly commonplace elsewhere. Locke, the tutelary and diabolical spirit of the U.S. system, pretended that black slaves and white serfs were epiphenomenal matter, matter with contracts perhaps, whereas the Latin American liberal Right looks its human enemy right in the face, declares him an enemy in all his contours, desires, and spatial accident
5. Under the Volcano
In Pucón, where the president and ex-president (nominal political opponents) have neighboring villas, the volcano emits a kind of thermonuclear haze at night and the wind blowing in from the Cordillera—which has a name in Mapudungun that Dani told me but I’ve forgotten (the destiny of language is to be forgotten, says Beckett’s wind, just as the destiny of the human species is to be annihilated)—sounds like the wind blowing in from the ocean, and it’s supposed to harbinge, if it sounds for three days, a week of Arcadian weather. We stayed with Mario and Dani’s friend Victor, a lawyer with Jewish, Catalan, and Basque ancestry, in a cabin on the premises of a grand hotel which I never saw. The owner of the hotel was a multimillionaire octogenarian widow who was away in Dubai for the week, because it was the place she most wanted to see before she died, which tells you something about the attitudes and urban aesthetics of the propertied class in this town which is intolerable in the high season (which, were there any sense left to history, would be the target of mirista bombings, kidnappings, and guerilla campaigns from the surrounding mountains), but which is exhilarating in the rest of the year. Mario and Dani went to high school in the nearby town of Villarrica, on the other side of the lake. They pointed to the school on the way to Pucón: an Opus Dei institution that looks like a cross between a prison and a military barracks, and which is stationed across the street from a brothel (one of the many sources of Mario’s Buñuelian sensibility). Victor’s girlfriend is a veterinarian, five months pregnant, and she was off on a week-long expedition through the countryside of southern Chile, castrating cats and dogs. Victor’s boss is a lawyer who, according to Victor, is a fanatical pillager of state coffers (his official salary makes him the best-paid public employee in all of Chile, more or less) and who is also an Opus Dei supernumerary. One day he called Victor into his austere, blindingly white office (a hypertrophic crucifix on the wall above his desk) and with a look of profound solemnity in his eyes (a pseudo-profundity which is only a mask for a superficial sadism) asked Victor if he was married to the mother of his future child, to which Victor said no, that they had no plans to get married, and his boss said that Victor was a good employee, but that his soul was in a state of mortal peril.
We ate suicidal quantities of meat and drank suicidal quantities of wine and pisco. The next day we played a soccer match, gringos vs. chilenos, the gringos winning at the last moment and almost everyone puking afterwards.
End of Part I.