TEÓDULO LÓPEZ MELÉNDEZ, Writer and Journalist - Caracas, Venezuela
This country has become a swamp of the laugh. This is a desvergüenza. The absolute fall of the public life in the puddle is evident and pathetic. The things that are said overcome the impudicity to collapse in the marsh of the most absolute scorn for people. Any thing, any atrocity, any absurdity is thrown before the public opinion with a self-confidence characteristic of the ignorance and of the effrontery.
What we have to hear to newspaper lines with the obscene thing, with the unheard thing, with the barbarism. The public life of Venezuela is equal to the total loss of the sindéresis, of the balance, of the decency. The most unusual outrages are said as if the country was a cage of monkeys. The irrespeto for the population has arrived to proporciones canivalescas. In Venezuela they were dissolved the limits, any thing is already possible, any disheveled declaration is pronounceable, any atrocity you can utter to knit an unsubstantial debate, maniac, depressing.
Here ideas don't circulate, only escupitajos. The country has been transformed into a box of resonance of the unusual thing. It is impossible to interweave a debate on the national destinations. Here there is not space for the serenity and the deep thing, here only there is space for the rash accusation, for the grandiloquent horseplay, for the total disarmament of all ethics crack. They have devaluated the public life, they have muddied the word until making it lose any effect, they have transformed to the country into the Kingdom of that devaluated, they have transformed the necessary debate of the public thing into a vulgarity paralizante.
The words that rise are buried by the daily avalanche of the incongruity. The words that try to ascend are rolled by a tsunami of manure. Any effort to reflect on the future of the nation receives to newspaper the camionadas of incongruities that rush wrapped in the paper of sound declarations peripatéticas and mad.
Here one can say any thing, you can utter any lie, you can distort to will, one can declare what is. It no longer cares, concepts like those really and decency has been cremated in the oven of the absolute spoil of all reason. Everything is muddied with meticulous rhythm. The sensible declarations, the medullary analyses, the intents to outline everything are thrown to the deposits of garbage because what it cares is the last madness uttered by some appeared that that is invented that him of the desire.
To say that the country has become a circus carp would be to exaggerate. In the circus there are discipline, effort and organization, and until the clown's art it deserves all respect. This is not a circus, this is a total devaluation where it is not a principle in foot. The actors that we visualize cause laugh. And when they speak we don't leave our astonishment. And when they write they sink us in the sickness of the peripatético. And when they act we find to live in an astonishing world created by an imaginative mind that well could call of ridiculous-fiction.
Here it is played with all the values, inclusive with those of the life. The talent that the country has guard silence and he sleeps. That talent doesn't have connections with what we will call the properly political thing. To request that we were quiet and leaves everything in the humorists' hands it would be an offense to the humorists that are very serious people. In our daily public life there is not humor (of any color), there is not irony (because to exercise it intelligence it is required), there is not sarcasm (because to have it reservations they are required). Here what there is in our public life is rottenness, degeneration and harassing of imbecilities.
Until the makers of dirty war and of curtains of smoke they give sample of mental retard. Until to exercise these two activities a minimum of knowledge it is required, he/she gives talent, of imagination. Until the opinion manipulators they teach a dangerous imbalance. Our public life has you desleído, it has been raveled, it has been faded; it is hardly a dirty cloth that the anarchical winds rush of tierral in tierral, of puddle in puddle, of detritus in detritus.
This cannot call you mediocrity because this word implies half quality or throwing to bad. Any intelligent observation that a reasonable leader utters is ignored immediately because the hearings are already habituated only to the pichaque. The daily load of foolishness, of estupideces, de bothers is overwhelming, paralizante, estrujadora.
It is necessary to run off with above the puddle, it is necessary to rescue the language, it is necessary to make reappear the seriousness, it is necessary to make that the dignity was repatriated, it is necessary to make everything again, because the Venezuelans don't make another thing that to begin and to restart, always, like in a deformed biblical punishment, like in a curse of some wicked and caricatural prophet. This that we call country is in the puddle. To take out it of there it will only be a task emprendible for which is left of demagoguery and say the truth: to reconstruct it will cost us blood, perspiration and tears.
