Yes, my birthday is indeed on December
9, but no, I swear I had nothing to do with the extravaganza that Argentina’s President
Cristina Kirchner and Company staged at the Pink House in Buenos Aires last
weekend. Though billed as ‘Democracy Day’, it more resembled a rock concert,
and as if to ensure that everyone knew precisely whose party it was, La Cris—still not abandoning her
mourning black, but wearing a shimmering body-clinging merry widow gown that
managed to belie any hint of sorrow—decided to do her impression of Tina Turner’s
‘hip grandma’ twist-and-shout dance steps (a spectacle that would have been embarrassingly
hard enough to watch, even if she hadn’t been the nation’s current
leader). Personal criticism aside, however, I hardly doubt the president would have ruled out standing on her head while smoking a cigarette held between the first two toes of her left foot if she’d thought it would better create the illusion of a relaxed, spontaneous outpouring of uncontrollable popular sentiment in favor of her administration, after the party she had planned for two days earlier fizzled, when Justice ruled she wasn’t allowed to dismantle the Clarín multimedia group just quite yet.
Oh, and she was so counting on it!
For weeks, she and her surrogates had
been gloating over the promulgation of the new Media Law that, among other
things, would swoop down on December 7 and chop Clarín off at the knees. The pro-K
camp was waiting with bated breath for that glorious 7D victory to rub it in
the faces of the million-strong anti-K protesters who had their own night in
the limelight on November 8.
In fact, slaying the Clarín dragon has practically become the
leitmotif of the president’s entire adminstration.
In the cartoon world where Cristina Kirchner lives, inflation doesn’t exist
(her pugnacious Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno has long since helped
foster that illusion—delusion?—by having his henchmen muscle the national
statistics bureau staff into only saying inflation is what he tells them it
is), social security pensioners are “vultures” who bellyache despite living in
the lap of luxury (with, on average, about USD 384 a month—that is, unless
you believe the official dollar rate, another mirror trick that makes 384 look
like 512, as long as you don’t actually try to buy that many dollars with the pesos they give you), the country is
self-sufficient in petroleum (which is why Argentina spends millions daily to
import crude from Cristina’s mentor, Hugo Chávez), there’s plenty of electricity
to go around (Clarín just pulls the
plug now and then to scare everybody and make the government look bad), the
national railroads aren’t in crisis (the disaster in which a commuter train
plowed into the Once Station in
Buenos Aires was just a quirk of fate), people aren’t starving to death in
Chaco and Formosa even if it looks that way (the pro-Clarín media mafia is probably
importing those horrid pictures of emaciated people from elsewhere with the aim
of fostering the idea that the Kirchner ‘progressive’ model isn’t working), the
Central Bank has plenty of reserves (as long as nobody tries to buy more than
twenty-five bucks to go on vacation to Disneyland), and the moon is made of
green cheese. The only imperfect thing in this perfect cartoon world, then, is the
Clarín Group, which used to be a
friend, and was okay then, but which is now an enemy and must be destroyed at
all costs.
And then, in a cruel anti-climax to such
a build-up, the Kirchner clan’s 7D didn’t happen. But Cristina wasn’t about to
go without her party, so 9D was born. And Cristina got her big-gun rocker
friends, Fito Paes and Charly García, to help her celebrate, so as to draw a
crowd. But wait! What were they going to celebrate? Clarín, if only for the moment, had won—at least the round if not
the match.
Why, they’d celebrate democracy, of course!
Telling signs of how the government’s
supporters feel about such democratic institutions as freedom of expression and
division of the three powers of government came earlier in the week, right
after the court decision was handed down, when clearly organized rioters
smashed windows and hurled red paint at the offices of Clarín Group holdings. And it seemed a bit ironic too, in the midst
of all the reveling, for the rock-queen-for-a-night president to be
celebrating ‘democracy’ at the same time that she was threatening to impeach the
judges who had ignored her desire (order) to make good on her vendetta against Clarín—especially since one of the
clearest signs that some vestige of democracy still exists in the country was
the independence with which the courts shot down the administration’s plan to
make what is basically an anti-trust suit into a popular conquest, and so sidestep
a few stages in the due process of law.
But then again, maybe that was no more
surreal than the 9D crowd’s being led in cheers and hurrahs for the ‘democracy’
of Castro’s Cuba and the ‘democracy’ of Chávez’s Venezuela. Nor was it any
stranger than the fact that the vast majority of the members of that “spontaneous
gathering” arrived pretty much all together on a veritable fleet of chartered
buses—that couldn’t be hidden despite being parked a few blocks away from
Government House—and carrying huge banners identifying their political and Kirchnerist
labor affiliations.
Perhaps it would be a good idea if this
were the last ‘spontaneous popular democratic outpouring’ for a while, in what
has basically come down to the case of a government that does little more than
spend the day plotting how to neutralize its enemies before its enemies
neutralize it. Argentina can’t afford any more such extravaganzas, and
neither can democracy. 
