If we had a aplausometro Like the TV competitions, the Pope would have won Vargas Llosa. Discount before the Vatican pomp: even in its most austere version, it is so overwhelming that no lay lady can match a bishop of Rome. Maybe a beatle, for what were more famous than Christ, but no one else. In strict terms of official and popular dismay, Francisco has won: reproaches have been very marginal compared to dititambos. Instead, the writer’s necrological came mostly nuanced, with certain butt and not obschern. Even the most enthusiastic had a reproach, even a pinch. In general, The memory has been much harder with Vargas Llosa than with the Pope. Above all, from the sectors identified with a left that has not had repairs to openly hostile with the Nobel memory, while celebrating the goodness of the pontiff.
That a current of opinion that supposedly defends democracy, civil rights, minorities and equality is more supporter of a medieval authority than a novelist He expresses rawly to what extent that left has fallen into authoritarian temptation and has been unmarked from the republican values that supposedly make it up. This confusion is feeding from afar and transcends the speeches of part to soak the total spirit of the times. It is no longer a matter of militants or very ideologized individuals with a propaganda agenda: I think there is a social majority that feels closer to a Pope than a writer.
He Disredige of intellectuals It is both a fact and a topic where prejudices and resentments are mixed that I cannot crumble now. On its own, that discredit (Pulse catches in part, I do not deny it) does not explain the hostility that literary intelligence causes. The famous writer is perceived as a suspicious authority in the service of dark interests, while the real authority of an absolutist sovereign at the head of an opaque and vertical world organization is perceived as a friendly compassionate company.
There is a social majority that feels closer to a Pope than a writer
However famous and influential, a writer is a fragile and inconsequential thing. Its power can only be understood in generously metaphorical terms. Even those that, like Vargas Llosa, frequent true powerful, They are still gentlemen and ladies who say things. Things that many people may read, but that are not dogmas of faith or twist anyone’s will. They do not even become municipal ordinances. They are things that will be nodded or dissent, and will end up being lost in the noise of that eternal debate that, in its best version, is called democracy.
I am not going to get epic, but for this trade a minimum dose of courage is needed that not everyone demonstrates. The writer only has himself. It holds with its name in the air, before the willingness of the public, without police or armies at your service nor more power to read and hear that his own voice and his talent for persuasion. It can be easily ignored. In fact, they are constantly ignored, and the best are the ones who know that everything is provisional, a mess of hazards, and that life begins again every day.
They will say that the unionism clouds, and maybe it clouds a little, but just because I know what the cloth is about. The writers – even the very millionaires, even those who have won everything and no longer know what to do with so much money and so much prize – give me more grief than anger. Even the most negligible author, whom I hate, the one with whom I have had direct clashes or that other who has behaved as a miserable son of a bitch with me (they know who they are if they read me), they have my compassion. Like me, they are unfortunate who are alone and unarmed by a world that does not understand how alone and helpless they are.
For this trade, a minimum dose of courage is needed that not everyone demonstrates
The world not only does not understand it, but (we) attributes fantastic privileges and is increasingly convinced with more force that you have to put a preserve. The freedom of wordthe only thing a writer uses is an outdated luxury that urgently urges. There are plenty of examples of censor will.
-In the case of the death of the Pope, I was surprised how little that Francisco’s words were remembered about the slaughter of Charlie Hebdo In January 2015. The Pope understood the perpetrators and abroncted the victims: if you make fun of faith, you expose yourself to the fury of believers. That monstrosity did not give an invoice or diminished a gram the devotion that many supposedly left -wing politicians lent him in life and squandered in death. Nor was there a very noisy scandal. Few we get our hands to our heads. Few we feel angry at that way of despising some cartoonists and writers whose unforgivable crime was to publish a handful of jokes.
Today I think there was no scandal and that this episode has not been remembered either because the Pope expressed an opinion that in 2015 was extended in Western society, and ten years later it may be majority. I believe with pain that a considerable part of my neighbors, of the people with whom I cross daily and even some of my friends is that the victims of Charlie Hebdo They deserved what happened to them, that they had looked for him. They may not be enunciated with that brutality, but deep down. And if I went to me tomorrow, they would think about it as they pronounce my wife’s words of comfort and my son. In the best case, they would see it as a natural catastrophe or an accident work: Doesn’t the bullfighter risk the horns? Well that.
A generalized contempt for the trade that the workers of Charlie Hebdo They represented. It is in the air, to the right already, it has grown exponentially with social networks, it is expressed with brutality and without euphemisms and is in the heart of authoritarian political projects such as Trumpism or Lepenism, eager to tighten the nuts to all intellectuals.
A brutal symptom of this is the ease with which the silence verb appears in political discussions. The adversary does not be rebuilt. The first impulse is to silence it: be quiet. The reflection act of the hearing before the defenders of the readers or spectators is to claim censorship. That everything that bothers me or disagreed disappears. It is not enough to turn off the TV or read another book. It is not enough to oppose freedom of reading to freedom of expression. The outburst is purely censor: the contents that are considered harmful must be eliminated.
The outburst is purely censor: you have to eliminate the contents that are considered harmful
Vargas Llosa represented, apart from his opinions, the resounding freedom to express them without taking into account anything that was not the freedom of individual expression, taken as an end in itself and not only as a means. His world was democratic, of confrontation, debate and plurality. Not only did he never join that censor spirit, but used his influence and prestige to help colleagues suffering attacks, regardless of what they said. There was nothing indecent, contrary to his ideas, of bad taste or atrocious that his defense did not deserve. Freedom of expression was above all.
Today, freedom of expression is below. In the last scandals, as in the case of Luisgé Martín with his book not born Hateabout José Bretón, it was clearly stated that free expression should not only be a fundamental right in litigation with other rights, but in reality it is a privilege of lords who have taken it too far and those that must be put in a sidewalk. He was openly advocated by censorship, and the cowardice of the publisher was celebrated, terrified of the virulent reaction of a mass of censors.
No censor has seen himself as perfidious or evil. At any time, in no way. The censor exercises his trade to improve the world. His work is a service to society, a contribution to the common good, sajing the roña and the dirt that the depraved intend to spread. That is why a censor or a supporter of censorship is not redeemed by adducing his good intentions. That serves both for today’s tweeters who cry out for the boycott of a book and for the priest of the Ministry of Information that put scissors to kisses with the tongue of the cinema of the 50s. The tweeters and the priest are known on the side of the good, arms of truth and justice.
It will be coincidence, pure chronology. Maybe I do unfounded deductions, but it seems very revealing to me than the applause gives more points to a Pope than a writer. Explain very well the times we live.
