"Upside Down" by Eduardo Galeano
The author of "Memory of Fire" delivers a scathing, mischievous indictment
of North America's hypocrisy and consumer culture.
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By Greg Villepique
Oct. 12, 2000 | Thinking of voting for Ralph Nader but wondering what the
point is beyond keeping your conscience clean? To galvanize your disgust
with the Establishment, you could do no better than to read "Upside Down: A
Primer for the Looking-Glass World," Eduardo Galeano's ferocious, poetic,
mischievous and chilling survey of political and economic systems of
control around the world. The eminent Uruguayan author's anecdotes and
parables address globally rampant pollution, poverty, vice and violence;
the ever vaster gap between the powerful and powerless; and, above all, the
tortuous public rhetoric that fails to disguise governmental and corporate
culpability for these crises.
"Twin totalitarianisms plague the world," Galeano writes balefully, "the
dictatorships of consumer society and obligatory injustice." Morality and
memory have been displaced by misery and the palliative of TV:
"Consumer culture, a culture of disconnectedness, trains us to believe
things just happen. Incapable of recalling its origins, the present paints
the future as a repetition of itself; tomorrow is just another name for
today. The unequal organization of the world, which beggars the human
condition, is part of eternity, and injustice is a fact of life we have no
choice but to accept."
Galeano discusses patterns of abuse, not only of the poor by the rich
within individual countries but of "developing" countries (in Galeano's
shorthand, the South) by the industrial powers (the North) -- the same
issue that drew angry thousands into the streets in Seattle and Prague.
Although as many economic statistics can be brandished to support
globalization as to condemn it, Galeano's dire analysis of specific large
problems is still scarily persuasive.
Take the environment: "Each inhabitant of the North consumes ten times as
much energy, nineteen times as much aluminum, fourteen times as much paper,
and thirteen times as much iron and steel as someone in the South." But the
United States assumes no responsibility for the environmental disasters
wrought by all that consumption. "Explaining why the United States refused
to sign the Convention on Biodiversity at the Rio summit in 1992," Galeano
writes, "President George Bush was unequivocal: 'It is important to protect
our rights, our business rights.'" In short, Galeano asserts with fitting
exasperation, the chemical companies, oil companies and car companies
dictate U.S. environmental policy. Of course, this is a truism that remains
too subtle for the American masses, like the notion that wrecking nature is
not just an accidental side effect of these industries but central to their
interdependent existences.
Galeano makes a similar point about international peacekeeping initiatives
and the arms trade:
"Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies
show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few
places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the
very ones that can exercise vetoes in the U.N. Security Council ... In
other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit
most from the big business of war."
And who are we arming? "The armed forces that most systematically violate
human rights, like Colombia's, are those that receive the most U.S. aid in
weapons and technical support."
"Upside Down" isn't anti-American per se; what it rails against is
hypocrisy, showing by reams of interwoven examples that governments in
general, in the first world and the third, are not in the business of
ethical integrity. Galeano focuses on corruption, human rights abuses and
exploding poverty in Latin America: Police death squads in Brazil and
Argentina, for instance, gun down homeless children by the hundreds each
year. He makes me feel very, very lucky to live on the fat side of the Rio
Grande -- not proud but lucky, and profoundly depressed.
Analyzing the global free market by its effects on the global populace,
most of whom, Galeano says, keep getting poorer and more desperate ("Every
year poverty kills more people than the entire Second World War, which
killed quite a few"), the author offers little hope for change, though he
does support those who challenge the intolerable status quo, like the
Indians of Chiapas, Mexico. He writes as neither oracle nor guide, but as
furious witness:
"There are successful countries and people and there are failed countries
and people because the efficient deserve rewards and the useless deserve
punishment. To turn infamies into feats, the memory of the North is
divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is detached from
despoliation, opulence has nothing to do with plunder. Broken memory leads
us to believe that wealth is innocent of poverty. Wealth and poverty emerge
from eternity and toward eternity they march, and that's the way things are
because God or custom prefers it that way."
Mark Fried, the translator of "Upside Down," has rendered Galeano's acidly
humorous text into exceptionally graceful English, and the accompanying
century-old engravings by Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada -- lots of
shrieking skeletons and bloodthirsty goblins -- provide exactly the right
macabre ambience. The lesson of this primer? Galeano's excoriating vision
might make the most cynical realpolitiko wonder whether the strength of the
dollar is, in the end, worth our racing the world to hell.
salon.com | Oct. 12, 2000
Louis Proyect
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