Yolanda and the little rocket
Little Rocket Man: "The man with the little rocket". This is what Donald Trump called Kim Jong-un from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, thinking that with such a comical description of the North Korean dictator he was demonstrating his insignificance as an international leader. Even if that sarcastic account of the atomic toy was in fact a smokescreen to disguise the real meaning of US foreign policy. Trump was then so focused on crafting new-fangled populist messages to make American history that he failed to consider the torturous consequences of his attempt to subvert the constitutional order of his country through a failed coup against the institutions of state.
Manipulation of opinion is a constant in the strategy of demagogues. They lose their sense of narrative proportion when disproportion in political action goes beyond the limits of legality. The acting vice-president, Yolanda Díaz, has used another galactic story, formerly planetary, to divert the attention of public opinion towards the holders of the great fortunes who, surprisingly, are going to use rockets, hypersonic (we assume), to leave the earth and thus avoid the devastation caused by climate change, which the evil rich know well, thanks to the privileged information they handle. Although, not all of them equally, because some of them will be sheltered in mega-protected mansions in New Zealand, or in the metaverse.
In Cold War times, Stanley Kubrick used a rocket-bomb to mount a deranged cowboy, symbol and image of atomic madness, and a comical, crippled scientist to weaken the effects of armament on a public opinion frightened by communist and populist propaganda. The filmmaker's genius has gone down in history because Kubrick was then on the side enlightened by reason, from where he constructed the story of "Dr. Strangelove": the possibility of making it plausible for a madman to ride an atomic bomb as if it were a mechanical bull had to be constructed as a cinematic fiction and not as a political discourse.
Today, the new narrative, also intellectually called "the mastery of storytelling", consists of the transfiguration of politics through the disorienting device of unreason. But politics cannot become a mere communication of a narrative, because in the hands of demagogy it becomes an absurdity, a fallacy and a lie. Since Homer and Virgil, metaphor and poetry have built politics. The heritage of their legacy does not include the papier-mâché phonies who exaggerate speeches and then tremble when they see that the deception hidden in their messages is taking shape to become crime and illegality. In the new populist era, while the great fortunes queue up to get their ticket to Mars, the middle classes wait attentively to see how the constitutional legality of democratic societies is broken. It has always been much more interesting to watch fiction becoming reality than to watch reality unravelling.