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EL ESPECTADOR

Why Aren't Politicians Listening To Our Anger?

Politicians are hiding behind complacent language instead of facing the challenges that their constituents are fired up about.

Comedian Keegan-Michael Key and U.S. President Barack Obama
Comedian Keegan-Michael Key and U.S. President Barack Obama
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — Only a politician could look at the state of the world — from Donald Trump to Brexit, from the Nice carnage to the coup attempt in Turkey — and say that everything is fine.

A day after Britons voted to leave the European Union, U.S. President Barack Obama addressed the Global Entrepreneurship Summit at Stanford University, and made a speech later described by TheGuardian columnist Thomas Frank as the "purest globaloney" with a "whiff of vintage dotcom ebullience."

In a recent article,Frank observed that members of the global elite were unable to see the seething discontent beneath them, and that their refusal to change their "venal and complacent" conduct could have dire results.

This complacency is evident in the type of language and the tone we are used to hearing from politicians like Obama, with his high-minded conversational style. It's mayhem out there, Frank suggests, but the key words in Obama's recent speech were "innovation" and "interconnection".

Another example of political complacency lies in the term "for now" (a día de hoy), as often uttered by Pedro Sánchez, the secretary-general of the Socialist Party in Spain, which hasn't had an effective government for months now thanks to a splintered parliament. Spanish commentator Álex Grijelmo says that politicians like the catchphrase because it can distract an audience. It helps the politician avoid saying what they specifically intend to do next.

When Sánchez says that, "for now, we're going to vote no" (to another austerity government led by Mariano Rajoy, for example), he is implying that tomorrow could be different. He avoids committing himself to a public position on a topic.

Nobody in the ruling class has the guts to tell us what will happen tomorrow because that would involve committing to reality or to institutional changes needed to give people hope for the future. The discourse of public figures reveals their complacency and lack of commitment in a society accustomed to spectacle.

By this I don't mean a society, as described by novelist and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, that is enthralled by entertainment. I'm talking instead about "spectacle" as understood by the Situationists of the 1960s, who viewed our advanced capitalist society as plagued by social alienation, with people alternately hooked on consumer commodities or beholden to innovation, interconnection and entrepreneurs.


That world of ideas is crumbling. How can we tell? Well, for one thing, we're facing the real possibility right now of a fascist becoming president of the United States of America.

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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