Politics

With the upcoming elections for the Mayor here in Venice the “political weather” is cloudy with the chance of shit-storms (to paraphrase a recent movie).
The problem is, though, that everyone seems to focus on the actual height of one of the candidates than actually focusing on the fact that he is going to be guilty of the exact thing he claims he's trying to fight as Minister for Public Administration and Innovation: absenteeism.
And, nation-wide, he is one of the good ones: and for “good” I mean “with no criminal records”.
The fact that there's a good chance that this power-addicted little Minister (and by “little” I mean he is the head of a secondary Ministry, and not that he's ridiculously tiny) is going to be elected doesn't really bother me for one reason: I've lost my faith in politics when I started thinking with my own mind and found out what politics actually is.
Politics is, with whoring, the most ancient trade of the so called “civilized world”.
Remember Athens from the history books?
Remember how democracy started there?
It started when a guy called Cleisthenes decided to overthrow Hippias the Tyrant, son of Peisistratus (the man who said “let's write this down” while pointing at a guy who was chanting the Odissey in a tavern), and to acomplish that he did what in my opinion is the very foundation of modern politics: he bribed the high Priestess of Delphi to “persuade” (read: “do it or the gods will smack your silly arse from here to eternity”...) the Spartans to help him in his campaign.
Little detail: Cleisthenes's daddy built the new temple of Delphi...how fortunate for Cleisthenes, right?...
With this I'm not saying a tyrant is better than a thousands corrupted politicians, even though we must keep in mind that the concept of tyranny in those days was very different from the one we have nowadays.
All I'm saying is that politicians were a bunch of power-seeking dogs since the beginning of modern times and it shouldn't surprise anyone if the system is corrupted to the extent that nothing we can do or no one we can vote for would ever be able to change anything.
Not even the impending climatic doomsday is good enough a reason for them to sit and talk solutions: they are just too much worried for their own dirty interests to do shit about it.
They are actually waiting for the oil supply to run off because that's the only way they can squeeze every last penny out of it.
So, at this point, one can argue: what kind of stupid man would just stand up and say “politics is shit, the system has not worked since the beginning and our way of life and our very own lives are in jeopardy because the ruling class is actually far from interested in the greater good” without presenting a solution?
Well, I am.
And you know why?
Because there is no solution.
The human race has taken the wrong turn far too many centuries ago to be able to take the right exit now: politics, religions, wars and racial hatred fucked us up for good, all of us, in a way that goes way more deeper than our rationality and we can not come up with a solution simply because we are way too deep in the mud of our history.
And, let's face it, we have a pretty messed up history.
There was some good, but obviously not enough.
So what I'm saying is very radical and maybe a little crazy but bear with me, I'm almost finished. Next time you go express your preference for an election think about this: what would YOU do (and I mean REALLY do, not just some hypocritical bullshit like “if I was in charge I would clean up this town”) if you were to be elected?
I think that deep inside, when you have really thought it through you would realize that we are at this juncture in history just because we deserved it.
We deserved Bush, we deserved Berlusconi, we deserved Sarkozy.
Why?
Because, as Aristotle once wrote, man is “zoòn politicòn”, a political animal: I really believe that he was right and if I was an animal I would be so fucking offended by it.
We invented politics, but politics also reinvented our kind and now we have to deal with the consequences of our creation.
The shit-storm is always up ahead...