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The Sermon and the Bravado

Jesús Silva-Herzog Marquez

When a politician loses his sense of ridicule, he has lost contact with reality. I can’t find another word to describe the new pearl of presidential wisdom. For times of extreme urgency, ridiculousness. A message that moves to laughter, mockery. An involuntary parody of the tales of self-help and magical thinking. Given the virus that has stopped the world, the President of Mexico recommends that we be happy. In the hour of greatest health danger in our country, a call to smile and be optimistic. Eat vegetables, be good and pray to some saint. In the face of the most severe economic crisis in several generations, a sentence of detachment.

He calls it that, “decalogue”, not only because there are ten proposals. It is a decalogue because it seems worthy of memorization to the palace preacher. The confidence with which he reads the sentences, the priestly tone of the message, even the repetition of some phrases that seem especially deep and imaginative, reveal that, in fact, he thinks that his writing is a verse for the present. The wisdom of emergence, compressed into ten immortal capsules. Like when he improvised that offensive decalogue against women’s violence, his subordinates were quick to publicize it with illustrations. There are little hands that pray, smiling faces, clocks that wake us up to wake up happily. At the revelation of the ten precepts, the loyalists applaud in simulation of enthusiasm for the new epistle. The curator of scientific nationalism quickly resolved that the reflection that the President has generously shared is free of any neoliberal contagion and that Our Science fully supports it.

Equally ridiculous, though much more damaging, was the document that was read on a recent matinee. The Presidency does not know where it came from, nor who wrote it, but it makes it known. It does not give clues about the reliability of the writing, but it does expose it anyway. The event is downright ominous. From the government palace, a document is read as if it were the display of a terrible conspiracy and the suspects are promptly pointed out. Critical journalists and intellectuals are named from the seat of political power, alluded to academic institutions, business organizations, the media and even state organs as part of a conspiracy. No illegality is discovered, but it doesn’t matter. The apocrypha is used to throw trash. It is not worth stopping at the nonsense of the document. What counts is that the Presidency of the Republic uses its rostrum to launch vague accusations, to insinuate that its critics are disloyal to democracy, to insist on the story that its opponents are, in fact, coup plotters.

No serious newspaper, no newscast would have given room to that paper that the President asks to be read to the press as if it were relevant to the national discussion in times of emergency. The President is amused. Confess the pleasure caused by provocation. He is glad in the morning to imagine the effect that gossip will have on those who are named as his enemies. No one can believe that the reading of the document is an act of transparency. It is simply a show of power. The President reads a document that does not deserve the least confidence because he can do it. That is the crude message that it projects: the National Palace can be used to decree enmity.

Yesterday, Sunday, very much against what the undersecretary of Health maintains and what the official data would advise, the President gave a message in which he implicitly ignored his government from the health crisis. Each one to take care of themselves. This is no longer a matter of public policy, it is a matter of individual responsibility. We already learned how to take care of ourselves. It is time to go out and regain freedom! And each one, who assumes their risk. The role the President imagines for himself in the emergency is surprising. It is not a President who decides, who organizes, who directs. He is a President who, while evading government responsibilities, lectures and intimidates. We need a President and we have a pastor.