Middle-class shoplifters and the butthole of the world
Some notes on infantilism (and moderate hope)
Clowns who speak to dead dogs
It’s been a strange week.
One of those weeks in which the alienation of living in a foreign country is exacerbated by events that take place thousands of miles away. I refer specifically to the elections in my homeland, Argentina. The second round took place on Sunday 19 and Argentineans elected a libertarian clown who claims to speak to the spirit of his dog when there’s an important matter to decide. A dog named Conan, who he met two thousand years ago, when he was a gladiator in the Coliseum and Conan was a lion. A dog, it needs to be added, that he has had cloned and turned into other dogs — simulacra of the original canine, creatures that complicate the concept of aura as understood by Walter Benjamin: that unique presence and authenticity of an original. I wish I was making all of this up. I wish I was, because I find the situation terrifying. The madness of it all isn’t even the worst thing — his political and economic ideology are much worse. The man’s, not the dog’s.
Were I to write about this topic properly, here’s the part where I’d launch into a lengthy rant about how this dangerous situation is partly the result of years of progressive dereliction of duty in Argentina. I’m not talking about the Peronist centre-left party that has been in government for the past four years, the same folk who had the genius idea of presenting as candidate the uninspiring Minister of Economy of the actual government — the guy who ended up losing the second round to the clown. I mean the left: the ones supposedly tasked with making the world a better place. Argentina is a country with 40% of the population living in poverty, with 150% annual inflation, with brutal violence and crime. Our problems might be difficult to resolve but they are very concrete. But Argentine progressives have forgotten how to talk about concrete problems, embracing instead the same academic identitarian turn favoured by much of the global left1. The problem with identity politics in Argentina, and in much of the so-called developing world2, is that you can’t eat identity or discourse. So along comes a reactionary clown making concrete-sounding promises (that he’ll break) and he gets elected. Woof woof.
But like I said, I don’t want to write about this. All of this has been in my head for months, making me sicker and sicker every day. There’s no need to pass the bug to you, especially considering that you most likely don’t care one iota about what happens in Argentina. So instead of ranting I will close this section with a phrase that back home we use to describe our place in the world, geographically and culturally: “el culo del mundo”. That is “the butthole of the world”, in the language of the Bard. “We live in the butthole of the world,” we say, and sigh.
This phrase has been a lot in my head since Sunday. It’s a colourful phrase that speaks of a dark and lonely — and sometimes stinky — place. And it never felt more apt.
Thieves like us
Since I don’t want to write about Argentina, I’ll write about the UK, my adopted home. And I’ll write about an obsession that’s doing rounds in Britain right now: middle-class shoplifters.