Imagine: the farmer, overwhelmed by the drama that is presented to him, listens, thanks to the TV or the radio, to the words of the President of the Generalitat or the President of the Central Government. They are serious, even solemn words, but they seem empty to him. They remind him of those kinds of sentences that doctors give us when we have to go through something unpleasant and there is no other way.
Pere Aragonès has declared that the drought “is the most serious and urgent problem we have as a country” and Pedro Sánchez has stated that actions on the drought must be a “State policy” because “they require participation and commitment not only verbal, but also economic and legislative of the set of institutions and public actors”.
Our friend, the farmer, does not understand exactly what those we have chosen to manage the general interest are trying to say. Just think of the harvest he will probably have to sacrifice to save the trees on which everything he owns rests.
The drought forces the ruler in turn to perform a circus number that he will have to perform without a network. The front of the knob interface. Accustomed to politics as a story that contains and delimits reality like a corset does to someone’s body, public leaders seem gruff, insecure and unconvincing when they cannot employ a clear narrative that makes sense (justify, explain, dilute or mask) certain facts. “Tell your story and you will win”, is something that any political advisor recommends to his client to move on the game board.
In the electoral campaign – we are already there, de facto –, each candidate places his story and this is how the game develops, with more or less talent, and with more or less naturalness. Faced with drought, there is no story to tell and the dictionary is useless. All the words disappear like a bolado when they collide with the imponderables that escape the control of the institutions, starting with the rain.
That the drought is related to climate change or that there are different policies on the management of water resources does not relativize the random background of a problem whose approach puts the structural limits of politics on the table. Remember: a councilor of the Generalitat, a few years ago, ended up praying to Our Lady of Montserrat for rain.
I feel empathy towards the farmer who sees the rulers as poor puppets who issue a prefabricated speech to calm spirits in the face of what is going very wrong. But I also feel empathy towards those rulers who, trusting in the magic of the story, see the impotence of their levers and pedestals when reality shatters all the predictions of their chiefs of staff, advisers and speech writers.
The drought has relentlessly overwhelmed the legislatures of Aragonès and Sánchez (and any head of government who has to fight with it) and the two leaders are dragged into a terrain in which their usual tools are of little use. To hear them talk about the measures against the drought is to rediscover the obvious: in the face of an emergency that generates various conflicts, the discourse becomes a crooked key, a nail without a point, a knife that does not cut. Official messages about the drought are blunt and public disbelief is growing. Politics fail. The farmer has gone offline, he passes Aragonès and Sánchez.
With the covid pandemic, the rulers were also overwhelmed by reality, but they sensed that the trick was to change the scale of the story. Faced with an exceptional problem, an also exceptional narrative: health above all else, we must avoid the collapse of health services, all of humanity is at risk, etc. Some went a little too far, like those military leaders who, in a press conference, loaded the interventions with so many warlike metaphors that they slipped and, finally, disappeared from the vignette of Dr. Fernando Simón, to avoid greater harm.
The theater of perceptions – which is typical of politics – is governed by verisimilitude rather than veracity. Good political stories create an effective artifice that manages to be considered authentic by the recipient-citizen. This is imposed as “what is real”. Fortunately, sometimes events break all the scripts and you have to improvise. We are at this point. It’s time for the truth, in its full literalness.
