Culture of Dependency: Arts and Political Ethos

Abstract

[…] Political crises are moral crises. […]. Those years [the 1940s] saw the beginnings of the third period of our contemporary history, a stage that the North American historian Stanley R. Ross has called the Mexican Thermidor: ideas were transformed into formulas and the formulas into masks. Although moralists are scan-dalized by the fortunes amassed by the old revolutionaries, they have failed to observe that this material flowering has a verbal parallel: oratory has become the favorite literary genre of the pros-perous. More than a style, it is a stamp, a class distinction. And alongside oratory, with its plastic flowers, there is the barbarous syntax of our newspapers, the foolishness of North American television programs with the Spanish dubbed in by persons who know neither English nor Spanish, the daily dishonoring of the language on loudspeakers and the radio, the loathsome vulgarities of advertising—all that asphyxiating rhetoric, that sugary, nauseating rhetoric, of satisfied people whose gluttony has made them lethargic. Seated at Mexico, the new lords and their courtesans and parasites lick their lips over a gigantic platter of choice garbage. When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings. This is what has happened in Mexico.