Don’t Dream

In many places around the world right now, there are people dreaming of lies which, when they wake up, they will see as ideals, challenges and values.

When your dreams are a lie, then you really do have to start to worry. Correcting yourself, abandoning self-delusion and accepting your mistakes are ultimately ways of making a strong commitment to living in reality. But in your dreams, you trust a false perception: fantasy. I suppose that when so many Americans buy into the idea that their president, Donald Trump, is going to restore past glory, they look away from the TV that shows him shaking hands with President Vladimir Putin with a look of silent assent. We just witnessed a World Cup played under military-level security measures, without the least mention of the murderers who smeared a London house with nerve gas to punish dissidence, or of the Russian-made missile proven to have brought down the Dutch plane flying over Ukraine that was full of doctors who specialized in searching for a cure for AIDS. If this was considered greatness, it’s not surprising that Trump, a “small fish in a big pond,” would be proud of separating families at the border. Being tough on the poor and weak with the powerful says a lot about his character.

You don’t have to look too hard to see that U.S. power owes everything to names like Albert Einstein, Ernst Lubitsch, Mark Rothko, Enrico Caruso or Vladimir Nabokov. Immigrants all of them, who came to the U.S. when its strength lay in welcoming people. America is not the only country where the national flag has been used to blind people to reality. At the political convention of Spain’s most popular party, there was an abundance of patriotic symbols, perhaps to cover up the fact that the party is not doing anything about all its rigged contests, corruption and academic shortcuts.* If everyone who insists that they’re going to make Spain great again could at least just try not to diminish it, we’d have half of our future battles won.

Ah, the future. We have the right to be futuristic. That’s why every day they try to sell us on the idea that Amazon is going to deliver packages by drones, when in reality they use temp workers’ cars, and the strike held by their employees reveals that we’re in for more of the same. While Daniel Ortega destroys the memory of Sandinismo, and Benjamin Netanyahu squanders the hard work put into the creation of the State of Israel over the plain atrocity of not respecting democratic principles, we see the establishment of the lie as a historic tradition. In many places around the world right now, there are people dreaming of lies that, when they wake up, they will see as ideals, challenges and values. It would be better if they were insomniacs.

*Translator’s note: Spain’s People’s Party, ousted from government in June, recently held primaries to elect its new leader in a two-part process. Ordinary citizens belonging to the party voted in the first round, and “compromisarios,” similar to electors in the American electoral college system, voted in the second round, which was held as part of a party convention. The party is plagued by various scandals related to corruption schemes and the possibly fraudulent acquisition of master’s degrees by some of its leaders.