Suddenly, one unexpected day the Berlin Wall fell without any political analyst having foreseen it even a couple of days in advance and, with that disaster, on November 9, 1989, the 20th century ended. Finally, capitalism had won and the troops of the Warsaw Pact were scattered throughout Europe in the form of mendicant battalions. As a result of this invasion the workers of the West were condemned to exploit themselves. Taller, stronger, faster, is the triple motto of athletics. Now, in front of the boss, each worker had a row of workers and employees behind his back willing to do the same job faster, more submissive and cheaper. Fukuyama said that this was the end of the story. He was the author read by all intellectuals, who on the other hand used to quote Karl Popper at least once a week.
Given the effect of the digit change of the year 2000, the doomsayers predicted that the computer system would enter into total chaos and that would be the form that the terror of the new millenarianism would take, but far from carrying out processions with flagellants as in the Middle Ages, the new prophets of the Seventh Day were the interior designers, the window dressers, the designers, the photographers, the couturiers, and under his dictatorship the essence of culture consisted of seeing and being seen, since everything, even terror, had become a spectacle. This is what postmodernism was all about, being on the ball, not missing a party, being in the right place to be in the picture. Some artists knew how to do it and others didn’t, but once your image was projected in the other’s mirror, one was famous just because he was famous.
And on September 11, 2001, the 21st century began with a grand spectacle. The terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers knew that the essence of the coup was that it open all the news on the planet live at the same time. The attack occurred at nine in the morning in New York, at three in the afternoon in Europe and at nine at night in Asia. It was terrorism live and direct, which was presented in society, in a cinematographic way, to the point that the show humiliated Hollywood, since in some movie this apocalyptic scene had been shot, as a display of special effects, on a papier mâché mockup.
When Miguel saw the Twin Towers burning on the three o’clock news, driven by paranoia, he remembered that a year before this New York catastrophe happened, an arms dealer had assured him that the invasion of Iraq was being prepared. He claimed to know from a good source for reasons of his trade that in Kuwait there were hundreds of millions of yogurts, hamburgers, frozen sandwiches ready to feed an army of 150,000 US soldiers for months. Quartermaster always precedes combat. Miguel became part of the universal conspiratorial order and was one of those who believed that the war had already been programmed long before the Twin Towers fell. The feeling that far away there is a black hand that rocks the cradle began to take over the planetary system to the point that the suspicion that someone is deceiving us has always become the basic pillar of society.
That times were changing was more than a sensation and Miguel, now 60 years old, was experiencing it firsthand. Some of his left-wing friends spoke as if they were right-wing; they were ashamed of their past and the word good or equidistant was pronounced contemptuously as an insult. The ideology had become cane smoke. Rising to the occasion, seeing life as it really is, was a height that intellectuals had to reach. It was one of the effects of globalization. Indeed, Miguel was an equidistant, exactly like Euclides, a good supporter of that equidistance that serves so that buildings, including that of democracy, do not collapse.
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Terror as a spectacle was repeated again with the attack on the Atocha station. On March 11, 2004, the four commuter trains loaded with explosive backpacks had replaced the four planes of the jihadist attack in North America. The occult powers, the black hands, came into action again, but the solution was very simple. If Aznar had read any navigation manual he would have learned that in a storm the entire crew, even the most rebellious sailors, blindly obeys the skipper with an instinct for salvation. If after the Atocha attack he had called the opposition, he would not have lost the elections. He got scared. He lied. He showed that he did not know how to pilot the ship. And with that the Socialists returned to the Government and Spanish politics entered a phase of slaughter. Miguel began to see life from the height of 60 years, an age in which one begins to make a fool of himself if one is surprised by any news on the news.
Will continue.
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