On Power and its Trivialization

              

             Some days ago, in another one of his inspired moments of high rhetoric, the President of Portugal Cavaco Silva said that he was partaking in the terrible sacrifices the Portuguese are enduring in these times of economic hardships. To prove it he added that his pensions (note the plural) “won’t almost certainly be enough to pay for his expenses”. Our president is known (among other things, of course) for his lack of verbal skills and during his long public life has already got us used to these amazing utterances. In spite of all that there’s a general feeling here that this time he has crossed the limits, not the least because he earns more than € 10.000 a month. I know it’s not that much if one compares him to his peers (the only possible comparison in this situation): but it was him who decided to compare himself with the average Portuguese pensioner, who earns some € 300. Given the current touchy disposition of our impoverished country the event immediately caused a wave of outrage: mostly facebook-based (as outrage almost always is these days), with one or another more or less humorous initiative of the “a coin to help the President” sort. I won’t join the chorus, really. I won’t even speculate about why he may have said such a thing, even conceding that it is all the more surprising given the fact that he is usually discrete and habitually measures very well what he says. My point here is that this sort of pseudo-events illustrates quite well some of the basic malfunctions of our contemporary political systems as far as the symbolic construction of the notion of power is concerned.

               It is now commonplace to complain about the feebleness of today’s European political leaderships and to contrast them with the authority and vision of a Churchill, a de Gaulle or a Jack Delors. In Portugal the most prominent spokesmen of this point of view is Mário Soares (who obviously includes himself in the lot of great, charismatic past leaders). But the point is that no one will let anybody be a charismatic leader nowadays. Charisma has a remarkably low life-expectancy these days: usually it dies after facing the press and the public opinion for a few weeks. The democratic demand for transparency as a necessary pre-requisite for consent has in contemporary society degenerated into the idea that politicians have to be permanently justifying everything they do. Finally, television turned it all into a masquerade. Politics is today little more than a half-serious reality show, in which everybody tries to play his part with the sole aim of gaining more popularity. Cavaco, for example, has always played the part of the poor, humble and honest average rural Portuguese, a common man, even if he is one of the richest men in the country. What’s the problem, one could ask: after all, there’s an obvious difference between actuality and representation and the Portuguese media has always been obedient to the established power in favouring the latter over the former. The problem is when the masquerade falters, either because of the music that stops playing, or because the mask itself becomes grotesque (or both, as is the case with Cavaco).

              I want to make something clear: I obviously believe that politicians have to justify what they do to the citizens: they just don’t have to do it constantly and not in such subservient terms. Political power has degenerated into political marketing; charisma has wrongly been assumed to be something one can buy from some image consultancy agency. Trust, the essential constituent of democracy, has vanished and left in its place an all-too-ready disposition to run after public opinion, to try to please the common people who always criticize without bothering trying to understand, who talk about everything without an overall vocabulary of about... 500 words. Really, democracy is something suitable for enlightened societies, but where are they now? The Enlightenment has been so long ago... This paradoxical dark age of ready-made communication and superficial commentaries doesn’t look like a particularly fertile soil for democracy to flourish. When we measure a man’s political worth not by what he says, thinks or does but solely by the number of times he appears on TV, something must be terribly wrong. When power succumbs to mundane trivialization and authority is sought on the basis of emotional iterations such as Cavaco’s, then there’s no possibility of leadership. It should moreover be noted that the Portuguese word for leadership, liderança, is a neologism, a rather recent one, hastily borrowed from English. We’re playing with new toys, here: it’s a pity we haven’t read the instructions manual.