Transcript
Speaker: Welcome, welcome, welcome back to another episode of Death is a Photograph Culture at the End of History. I am your co-host Chase here with Sam. And Sam, you brought what I can only describe as a as a Pinochet movie to to the podcast this week. So yeah what is it and and why?
Speaker: I sort of suggested that we should watch No. It's just called No. A film from 2012 by the ah Chilean. He's Chilean, isn't he?
Speaker: Director Pablo Lorraine. He is indeed Chilean. It stars the ah the Mexican actor and i feel like Latin America's go-to guy. He's in every Latin American, Spanish language, art house film.
Speaker: It's like Javier Bardem and Gael Garcia Bernal. They're the two guys you need to know. um and he is he yeah He is in like literally every film of it. But he is a very good actor, so I don't blame directors for sort of picking him.
Speaker: I mean, in short, I sort of picked it because I lived in Chile for a year. I lived in Santiago de Chile in like 2018, 2019, just before the massive student protests.
Speaker: I literally left like a week before people started like burning shit down in Chile um over ah like a 4p hike in the metro. But while I was there, I paid a visit the Museo de la Memoria de los Derechos Humanos, which is basically the Museum of Memory and Human Rights. Most Latin American countries have one because most Latin American countries, there's a lot of disappearing of people.
Speaker: And while i was there, yeah, I just, I had no idea that effectively the Pinochet dictatorship ended around the same time as the Cold War ended. I think it was like a year before. And it was ended by a referendum, which to me, just is like kind of absurd. It's just so odd.
Speaker: You just sort of imagine most of these dictatorships end in like bloody coups or like revolutions or something, right? And i guess the model in Europe for the sort of end, I suppose it's why I picked it is because...
Speaker: As sort of Europeans, we see this period as the end of communist dictatorship, right? But it's actually also subsequently the end of anti-communist dictatorship across a lot of the world. Not just Chile, but Argentina as well. I think they they get rid of their junta in the mid-80s or a few years prior.
Speaker: So yeah, you you've got this this sort of fall of American, propped up American cold War dictators happening simultaneously to the ah sort of fall of communist dictators in the East. But obviously most of the So the destruction of Eastern European communist regimes is quite violent. Well, it was either violent or was quite momentous in some kind of like very visual way.
Speaker: So Berlin, obviously, it's very visual with the fall the Berlin Wall, like we talked about on um Goodbye Lenin. If you go Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, it's much more violent. sort palace queue style. And then in Russia, it's kind of absurd and bleak and sort of odd and full of sort of like living in sewers and vodka and stuff.
Speaker: And like tanks firing on the, um it's called the White House, isn't it? The Russian parliament building. I do think it's called the White House, yes. Which is hilarious. Yeah, there's ah there's a bit where like the Russian federal forces are firing on the Soviet. sort And it's, yeah.
Speaker: But what's so interesting about, I think, Chile is that it is in some ways actually more representative of the end of history in that it's like a technocratic movement Yeah. End of a dictatorship that is mediated through like, as we're about to find out, like advertising and like almost like proto social media campaigns.
Speaker: Well, it's like Gene Sharp's ideal end of a dictatorship. You know what i mean? Like everyone, like every, the international community exerts pressure. But it might, I'm sorry, might actually, it might actually be too tame for Gene Sharp in some ways. Because like Gene Sharp is people power, right? Like Gene Sharp's ideal end to a dictatorship is everyone kind of like holding hands. being like, we will overcome.
Speaker: the reason this film is so interesting and this period of history is so interesting is that not even that happens. yeah Yeah, it's it's like Habermas's ideal end to a dictatorship, but like not in like a self-undermining way. Because instead of it being like reasoned debate that destroys the dictator, it's like, who can play the best Coca-Cola commercial in such a way to convince people to to end the dictatorship? And what's really fascinating, because I didn't know anything about this either. i mean, I know about Pinochet, but I'd never, due to in curiosity, I suppose, had never actually found out how it is that he you know lost power.
Speaker: Because I think in America, we're mostly concerned with the fact that the U.S. installed him in the first place. Like the sort of just that part. And the movie feels fake. Like you're watching it like this can't possibly, like there's no way. and then be cutting They're cutting in real footage from, you know, from the the period, from the campaign. And you're like, oh yeah, like this is actually just what happened. I mean, obviously it's not exactly what happened, but they really did.
Speaker: just like do the fairness doctrine from like American communications to the country of Chile for like a few weeks in nineteen in the fall of 1988 and just like saw what would happen. like Even the fact that, and we'll get there obviously, but at the end of the movie, they're all like, well, Pinochet is just not going to accept the results.
Speaker: And then he just does because the the Secretary of the Navy like visits him in the palace and is like, you can't. You have to go. but he's like, oh, damn. It's just so strange. It's so strange.
Speaker: Yeah, it's it's deep. odd And I think that, yeah, the reason I was so confused by the film was that Here was a dramatisation of, like, the first time I learned about this referendum was like in the museum, and it was sort of like all this horrific.
Speaker: yeah The exhibit starts with like um black and white footage of the coup, I think extracts from the film The Battle of Chile, you get like testimony around the sort of motivations of the junta and Salvador Allende's government.
Speaker: You then have this huge section about the disappearances, like a massive wall with every face of anyone who's ever disappeared, Yeah. It's really profound and horrific. And then it just has this pathetic ending, right? Which is just like, and then there was a referendum. it' It's just like, I don't know. Yeah, it's it's... I mean, so we should say the mechanism for the referendum is that in 1980, the Junta sort of goes...
Speaker: The junta is installed in 1973 after the there was a CIA-backed coup. It's the Nixon administration at this point, isn't it? Fairly sure. Basically just strapped the Chilean presidential palace. And we don't know if Salvador Allende like shot himself in the head or was killed in the bombing. But yeah, anyway.
Speaker: And this is democratic-elected. not even communists, like democratic socialists, like like kind of to the left of the Labour Party, barely kind of government. It's not that radical, right? And this junta is installed and, you know, they're very naughty. They're throwing people out of helicopters um and they're disappearing people and then neoliberalising the economy. And obviously famously the Chicago boys, a bunch of economists come the University of Chicago and they they do they do the capitalism, they do the free market and stuff.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, they do neoliberal. The key is that, like I mean, obviously neoliberalism is basically about to start in the US too, but there Chile becomes almost what how you might think about a place like El Salvador or even Argentina now. Now. Like this sort of yeah laboratory for liberal reform in the strongest possible sense.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a sandbox, right? And i mean, I think Chileans will say this. like i I remember like getting in a cab to go to a club in Santiago as a 22, 23-year-old and this guy being like, you know, we're just America's bitch. like wait but We always will be.
Speaker: I think Chileans have a profound sense of being the kind of most Americanized country in Latin America for that reason, in some ways. Part of that, this is this has to do with the movie itself even. like This is sounds so silly, and forgive me, but like in America, right our conception of Latin America is, at least in my experience, mostly drawn from the northern part. I mean, we have a lot of Brazilians in New Jersey, but... like you know There were a lot of like Ecuadorians growing growing up around me or Mexicans or Guatemalans or you know groups who've migrated here as a result of the great instability and terror that we instituted in those places.
Speaker: But I have not met many Chileans. And so you go to the movie and you're like, oh yeah, these are people who like... first of all, they live in a place that gets like cold, like in a way that is is not true for like Guatemala. And like, they're like national dishes, like steak and mashed potatoes. And you're like, oh, but this is, this is different, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, it's very like German as well. I mean, they they have obviously a huge... Compared to like Central America and the north of South America, they had a massive wave of like Welsh, German, British, French, Irish ah immigration in the late 19th century. I mean, Jesus Christ, they even have a state that's called Bernardo O'Higgins.
Speaker: That's the kind of idea. So, like it's yeah, it's it's quite like European um as a society. And... Yeah, I think Chileans like to think... This is what's so interesting about the referendum is that I think Chileans kind of pride themselves, um not all of them, but like a kind of middle class, the middle class of liberal centrist Chileans sort of pride themselves on the fact that that there was a kind of bloodless coup that's kind of technocratic...
Speaker: sort of referendum that was a result of the 1980 constitution, right? which We should say that basically the junta was getting nervous. They were kind of going, we need to legitimize ourselves. Like we've done all this brutality. We've neoliberalized the economy, but like we're not one of those, you know, tin pot Central American banana republics. Like we need to look good on the international stage. Like we're more, we're more respectable than that. And I don't really do think a lot of Chinese have a sense of being slightly superior to other Latin Americans, unfortunately.
Speaker: And yeah, so they institute the 1980 constitution, which makes a provision for a referendum to happen in eight years' time on Pinochet's rule. And we should say that that that constitution is still in place.
Speaker: So... Yeah, they tried to get rid of it. They tried. i Yeah, I wish to say that Gabrielle Boric, like two, three years ago, um did try and get rid of it, but unsuccessfully. So yeah, this is the odd thing, I think, about the film is that Chile is very much still living with the ghost of Pinochet. Like a lot of the the legal structure is Pinochet era.
Speaker: And yeah, like it's maybe when we started discussing the film, how successful this referendum campaign actually was ah like really changing things. and Well, yeah, I think you're you're completely correct.
Speaker: Maybe it's just best to actually say what makes up the movie because I think it betrays everything you just talked about very squarely, which is our main character who is, as Sam said earlier, played by Gail Garcia Bernal.
Speaker: His name is Rene in the movie, and he seems to be the son of some kind of dissident and was himself exiled um for a period, which seems to have given him a kind of international outlook.
Speaker: And he is working at some kind of advertising company that is affiliated with the regime insofar you need to be affiliated with the regime to be like a functioning business in the world, right? Because the dictatorship has its fingers in in every pot.
Speaker: But at the same time is being asked by an old friend of his, um this kind of like older guy, who is working on the no vote.
Speaker: So on the one hand, he's got the fact that he works with a regime-affiliated business. On the other, his kind of sensibilities are on the side of no.
Speaker: And what are what is his job? This is the funny... The movie opens... with him showcasing an ad they're making for, I think it's called Free Cola or Freedom Cola, something like this. And it's just like shots of people downing bottles of this this soda while like smiling and like you know dancing and having a really good time. And just the classic like ad man What do you do when you want people to do something? You show them having fun doing the things. you know A commercial for like arthritis medication or something, and it's like people you know riding scooters or something, and it's just your brain affiliating one with the other.
Speaker: And I guess really the driving engine of the movie, and there's a lot of other stuff that we can get into, is his joining the No campaign semi-covertly And telling them basically like, you can't just put a bunch of murdered people on television. All of your ads can't just be, oh um the name of every disappeared person.
Speaker: Instead, we need to show people how fun it could be in a post-Pinochet Chile. and so We're going to have like people walking along sunsets and having picnics. and All of the like underground communists who've been like seeing all of their friends executed for the past 15 years are like, are you out of your fucking mind? like i'm not I'm not defeating Pinochet with like literally the Pepsi commercial for the Pepsi generation. like That's not how we're doing this.
Speaker: No, it's very like United Colors Benetton, isn't it? And it's kind of advertising. And it's it's interesting because it's... It's a it' We Are The World. Yeah, it's it's Give The World A Coke. um It's very different to kind of the advertising that you get later in the late 2000s, 2010s, which is maybe more ironic.
Speaker: Yeah. ah more narrative-driven, sort of absurdist at times. Like, this is very, like, earnest. It's, um but yeah, quite a postmodern in the sense that it's, like, s splicing together different various bits of footage that are, like, non-linear, but they're supposed to sort of, like, present a vibe.
Speaker: That's a very good point because he's not the only one getting to make the clips because basically each side gets 15 minutes on television over a course of like a couple weeks or a month or whatever it is. And so he's making parts of it, but parts of it are also being made by this other guy who has a much more sort of dire and serious view of what it is they need to be doing. So like, it's also this weird montage of like,
Speaker: basically say no because we want to have fun. And it's, you know, people dancing in a club. And then the next one will be the mothers and sisters and like fathers and brothers of like Los Disapplicidos. And they're just like, my name is this. And holding a picture of their son being like disappeared on this day. And then it like cuts back to like a really tall guy walking into a sunset while like the voiceover is like, I'm going to say no on October 9th. or whatever whatever day it is. you know So it's the ads themselves take on a postmodern quality.
Speaker: They do, and they they they invent this jingle, don't they? They go to this musician, he's kind of like, what do you you want sing Beatles influence, Rolling Stones, Bach? And he's like, no, I want a jingle. I need a jingle. And ah the jingle is ah it's Allegria Viendee.
Speaker: And it's it's sort of sung in this kind of like, almost like proto-African, proto-world music, kind of, almost like Paul Simon-esque, like... Yeah. Which also is incredibly like late 80s, early 90s. I want to really drill on this. like there South America is kind of of Operation Condor.
Speaker: Condor sound to effect, please. Where the US giving money and material to regimes who are just like by the thousands killing and disappearing and imprisoning their own people.
Speaker: And so, you know, 15 years after this, there's a young guy coming along and being like, well, what if we did an ad where it's an old man in bed with his wife who like is a little bit younger looking and he's going, can we please sleep together? And she just goes, no. And over and over and over again until the end is like, and this is why you must vote. No. you know like saying no to the old man, like joking about Pinochet. and like you know Three members of your family and like a bunch of your comrades were literally thrown out of helicopters by the Pinochet regime like five years ago.
Speaker: This is the odd thing about the film, isn't it? is' that It doesn't really explain how Pinochet has lost enough power that you can put that stuff on TV and not like immediately get executed.
Speaker: Well, there's something very, like dare I say, post-Soviet about this and also the way that you described Chile earlier. Because when I think of like a good like Georgian or like you know Ukrainian center-left sort of person, it's kind of the same thing. It's like, well...
Speaker: we we need to get rid of the dictatorship. We're going to do it the right way, right? And part of that comes from, i think, ah this is maybe a little bit stark of me to say, but similar to Chile, like a belief that we, on the edge of civilization, aka Europe, like need to do things the right way, as opposed to the Russians, who are considered kind of quote-unquote Asiatic in that framework. Or here in Chile, it being like, well...
Speaker: Yes, we're a brutal dictatorship. you know Yes, we're going to make sure that if you so much as say the word socialism, you know because at the business all the time, the guy's like, you're friends with communists. He's like, they're not communists. He's like, well, they're socialists. He's like, they're not socialists. like The total erasure of all ideology, because that would be, yeah you can't affiliate with it. like we're We're suppressing free speech entirely. But like when push comes to shove, they care enough about the international world, like the way that the world sees them. It's like, well, come on, we're not we're not bloodthirsty tyrants. You might have thrown a person or two out of a helicopter, but for God's sake, you know this is this is basically Europe.
Speaker: you know We're white, is basically the the subtext, I think, there. And I don't know enough about like actual Pinochet's Chile to say if that's true. but Yeah, there's definitely like a ah respectability. a required one, yeah.
Speaker: And it's just it's it's odd that the film is quite physically muted around the protagonist, right? So you have this coalition around the No campaign that presumably includes some kind of underground communists, some sort of social democrats.
Speaker: the main sort of lead for the campaign is ah a Christian Democrat, right? His name is Jose Tomas Orita. and So the Christian, I mean, we should say this is Christian Democrats in Chile are slightly more left-wing than they are in Europe.
Speaker: And I think it's ah the person who replaces Pinochet is a Christian Democrat, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, he is. Patricio Alwin, yeah. Yeah, he's got a good like Welsh last name or whatever going on there. like this This guy like whose ancestors are from Brittany becoming the you know Christian Democratic president of Chile. Very funny.
Speaker: This is actually kind of to the point of the movie in that we want talk about politics, right? Obviously, the politics of the moment are boiled down to yes and no. like there's One of the issues with the no side is that it represents so many different political tendencies that it can't actually say anything real about what it wants because none of them agree on what that thing is. And this ends up being kind of a powerful stand-in for the end of history itself.
Speaker: Because, you know, it's not as if three years later, Chile um became Allendean state, you know, under like a social democratic version of the dictatorship of the proletariat, where they just won elections until 2020, you know, four or five, six, whatever, and just like instituted, you know, full welfare reform, though there was some of that.
Speaker: it It ends up becoming like a slightly more left version of any capitalist country in the West, right? ah So you can't say, oh, we know what our politics are. The right-wing side here is essentially also anti-political. It's just like, we're going to bring back the market, and it's going to be fine. But if you look at their ads, because it shows us the Pinochet ads too— they're all just like a mixture of... ah to give an example, there's a whole debate early in the movie about whether Pinochet should appear in a suit or in his military uniform.
Speaker: And very late in the movie, they're kind of interviewing people who are responding to the ad campaigns. Versus like, oh, he's been in a military uniform for 13 years and now he's putting on a suit? you know What a hypocrite. What a liar. you know like There's not even a politics to the Pinochet side. It's just sort of like,
Speaker: almost like Soviet-style propaganda of like wheat fields with like nice sunsets. And then that'll be followed by like him literally kissing a baby. like That happens multiple times in the ad campaign.
Speaker: There's also an ad fact which is like, Colbert production has risen by 30% in the last two years. Yeah, I was kind of thinking about that. I'm i'm in no way trying to compare Pinochet to the Soviets, but because that would be very end of history of me to do.
Speaker: But it is funny how much you get the feeling watching the ads for the Pinochet side, how gerontocratic his rule must have felt and been.
Speaker: Because it's so exactly the kind of commercial you could imagine like ah Gorbachev making in like the late 80s or something, where it's like brawny men like doing their thing. Oh, I know things suck, but yeah, don't worry. like like Bauxite production has gone up by 15% on year for the past three years. you know Isn't that amazing? um It's very out of touch.
Speaker: And part of the... point of the movie, or at least what seems to have happened in 88, is that the youth culture and kind of like commercial vibrancy of the no side is what carries it over. like Almost as if Pinochet had had some actual admin, this might have been a real race you know kind of thing.
Speaker: But he doesn't, and advertising wins. And I find that kind of fascinating because Obviously, we associate Gen X in the 90s with like the rejection of advertising, with ad busters, with sort of the attack on the mad minification of our brains.
Speaker: But this is a movie that's very much like, no, um we're still subject to it and it works, because it does work in the movie, and presumably in real life to some extent it did work as well. But yeah, I think it it may also be worth mentioning that like he does have a family. i don't know about the degree to which we think that's important, but he's in this situation where his ah girl ex-girlfriend, but baby baby mama, lack of better term,
Speaker: It's kind of unclear. Yeah, it's it's a bit of yeah so it like a loose B story, isn't it? Yeah, he's got a kid. um He's got this sort of, like I said, baby mama situation who has like a new boyfriend.
Speaker: The point is that she's a radical and at multiple times during the movie, she's arrested and then released. And he actually uses his regime connections the second time to get her out, which yes yeah it is kind of fascinating.
Speaker: Yeah, and she constantly accuses him of basically like playing into Pinochet's hands. And this is the big question that underlies the referendum, is that is this a kind of legitimate... The no side effectively don't see the constitutional settlement as legitimate, right? and They're constantly saying, should we even be engaging in this referendum campaign? Because we're sort of like, by proxy, legitimizing the constitution of 1980, right?
Speaker: And the Pinochet regime by even like engaging in this. And then the other question is, yeah, if we win, is it even going to be respected? and I think his his sort of ex-girlfriend accuses him of this multiple times, right?
Speaker: Yeah. Well, she she thinks of him as, there is a certain kind of like old guard political versus new guard political a situation here, like on the left. where he's like, well, what if we use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house? You know, basically like what if I used what I've learned working on soap opera commercials, um which is where you can get there, but how the movie ends in fact. Oh yeah. Glorious. Yeah.
Speaker: to to overthrow the regime. And she obviously comes from this more sort of like, if not armed faction, then at least like actual dissident, like underground political organizing thing.
Speaker: And the funny part is that she loses in that sense. Like the main character, Renee succeeds. And one thing I couldn't stop thinking about during the movie, and and not to pat Gen X on the back, but it's like, I kind of get some of that political influence perspective they had going on. Because like imagine if you saw this happen. You'd be like, oh, good. just going to vote our way into the best future possible. You know what I mean? like That's just what's going to happen.
Speaker: um And it didn't. But you kind of get their optimism when you see things like this. And I mean, even if you think about the fact that there's like 100% nearly participation in this referendum, it's just, I don't know. I can imagine being there.
Speaker: You've lived through the the Cold War and everything. You see this and you're like, my God, maybe people actually can just go to the ballot box and have success. But yeah, also think that to return to something I mentioned a few minutes ago, I can't help but be kind of fascinated by the way in which The movie dramatizes this feeling that we've gotten from a few of the other movies, right? If you think about Pinions, Twisted Issues, we've seen it with Fresh Kill.
Speaker: We've seen it even just sort of like in the background of a lot of our discussions about kind of like media and consumerism throughout the whole whole season. Yeah. is that like the dominant mode is what it is you are told on television.
Speaker: And it's usually ah question of criticizing it. But here, even if the characters themselves aren't Gen X, you know Gen X is kind of like they're young adults or just coming into that period you know when this is happening, it works. it It actually, it's positive. It's being harnessed. It becomes a means to change. And it's a world that, that world feels both,
Speaker: hopelessly bygone, but also still extant insofar as social media for so many people represented in the late 2010s, this potential for organization and change. you know Trump's meme magic or like Bernie's internet-based campaign. K-Hive.
Speaker: Yeah, the K-Hive. That is still with us. It's just not in the form of the advertisement as broadcast on television. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's interesting, isn't it, in the film that theres a they sort of do a fake newscast, well, not fake, but you sort of an Ertzatz newscast with this dissident who is invited to sort of present the advertisements as a sort of anchor.
Speaker: And yeah, he makes the case, you know, to it's the first time in like 15 years that any dissident has appeared on TV. And so, yeah, like the the centrality of TV as a kind of political weapon or sort of medium is is is very much foregrounded. I think it's interesting you're saying like,
Speaker: that there is something potentially self-undermining about conservative or authoritarian neoliberalism, right? That you see, i mean the famous case that is always made is Thatcher, that Thatcher was a neoliberal in economics but a Victorian moralist in cultural values But her unleashing of the market and deregualization of the market led to a vast sort destruction of society that actually like was more corrosive to sort of yeah family life and the state and religion and whatever than anything that socialists have ever done. And in some ways, like the Pinochet regime is also a case in point, right? In that it's only because Chile has undergone such intense neoliberalization and free trade and opening up of markets that almost everyone has a TV.
Speaker: And so the the medium for his destruction is is is ah is made available. Yeah, I mean, it's it's, and the flourishing of this kind of like underground sort of cultural life that is somewhat depoliticized, but still antithetical to the dictatorship is also sort of a byproduct of, you know, a country that is by Latin American terms, like fairly wealthy because of the Pinochet reforms, which in some ways did work.
Speaker: economically, but they've faithfully undermined sort of Pinchot's authority. And yeah, I think it's interesting that it is, yeah, averted. It's a sort of inherently capitalist medium that sort brings down that the Pinchot resume rate.
Speaker: ah Even saying that they worked, I think, is interesting for our purposes because it's kind of, um it's the the odd thing about neoliberalism, right? That that even infects kind of the Gen X, the Xers who are interested in going forward, whether we're talking about in Goodbye Lenin or here or in any of the films that we've dealt with that involve, you know, the Scorpion song Wind of Change that I keep going back to, where...
Speaker: The idea of what works is ultimately a blossoming culture in which people can drink Coke and have fun and like go to a club and you know not face repression.
Speaker: right Repression, whether it's the Pinochet idea of repression as... We're going to drop you out helicopter if you don't like sign on to Milton Friedman's version of you know how an economic system works. you know if you If you haven't taken Econ 101, we will take you out back and and shoot you. Or the you know the East German version, whatever.
Speaker: And that itself, which obviously seemed so vital and obvious to the people of that moment, the young people of that moment, even to Gen X today, at least in the United States,
Speaker: It no longer has the same cachet because I think living on the other end of the emergence of that of that choice, you know the old joke about the you know Soviet grocery store having the cereal aisle with one kind of cereal and the dairy aisle with one kind of milk, and then they come to the United States and it's like, ooh, they have 17 different brands of milk and 17 different brands of cereal.
Speaker: Well, the reality of that choice in the West has really done two things. One, it's resulted in a reconcentration of corporate power that in reality sees like the same economic forces behind all of those brands of milk, right? That's one. And two, just like economic degradation to the point now that... like the fact that I could spend $250 to like go see a middling band from the 1990s in the worst seats you can possibly imagine, where you're guaranteed to have four different non-structurally necessary pillars in front of your eyes um when you go. like Yeah. like it
Speaker: It doesn't capture us in the same way. like At this point, yes, we obviously there's a desire for community. There's a desire for togetherness. There's desire for fun. None of that's been erased. But the idea that it's going to come about through like the appreciation of rock music, the donning of blue jeans, and like having a nice crisp Coca-Cola on a summer afternoon. like Even that vision of the good life.
Speaker: that the opposition to both East German political authorities, to Hanukkah and Egon Krenz, and that the opposition to Pinochet, that those are built on, it's just not really there anymore. And it's a kind of interesting to like explore the the remnants of the dream that once existed. And to live kind of on the other end of that nightmare.
Speaker: yeah Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting film. Like, I was sort of questioning whether the film was Pablo Durain's, you know it was sort of reveling, whether it was a sort of liberal triumphalist film or whether it wasn't. And I i sort of came down, I'd be interested to hear what you think, like I ah sort of came down on the side that it wasn't.
Speaker: I think for two, three reasons. um Firstly, it's 2012, right? So we're much further along from this liberal triumphalist moment that even than we are in Goodbye Lenin, which is 2002.
Speaker: So we're a good way into the new era, right? um And in many ways, you know we're post-2008, so for some people, the end of the end of history has kicked in, arguably.
Speaker: And yeah, i think yeah there there are hints that Lorraine is maybe not entirely endorsing this vision of the future that is presented by the main character. And there's the scene where he's shooting the the the no main no-advertisement, and... um There's that, yeah, like Twilight's Glen where they put this family having a picnic and ah there's a a bunch of baguettes and like a basket.
Speaker: And one of the sort of assistant directors goes, goes in and kind of goes, what the fuck? Why, why are there so baguettes? Chileans don't eat baguettes. Like, no, this is, this is completely disconnected from reality. Like, this is not Chilean. Like, get them some fucking bread rolls.
Speaker: But in Al's character, the ad man of comes in and goes, no, it's it looks good. yeah Keep it in. like it The baguettes look good, right? And I think that those kind of things, like I wouldn't assume that Lorraine would have added those in if he wasn't sort of hinting at a sort of yeah, this mode of undertaking politics is effective, but it's kind of, you know, creating quite distance from the average person that is going to kind of cause problems later down the and And then secondly, like,
Speaker: and then secondly like The ending, right, is very deflationary. yeah Once the no side realizes it's won, Garcia Bernal's character, Rene Salveira, the ad guy, he's just sort of empty.
Speaker: ah And he sort of just holds his, if there's no sort of people power or everyone holding hands, he just sort of takes his son and walks home. And it looks kind of almost sort of semi-distraught.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, and it's the soap opera itself, right? Like the movie, the the big campaign, at the end of the movie, everything has succeeded, right? They won, Pinochet, the regime attempts this sort of series of like rolling blackouts to do like a fake count of the votes and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But they win, ah you know, spoiler. And after this, he's back at his job. with the same boss who had been like serving glad gladly serving the Pinochet regime earlier in the film, they're still working together and they're working on an advertisement for a new soap opera that involves a bunch of like you know extremely white-skinned Chileans in like kind of evening gowns or something that the women on the roof of an apartment building or a business or something, a skyscraper. And then all of the men are there in tuxedos, as they say, like like James Bond.
Speaker: um And there's like a helicopter and it's all shown to us through the news, which is now reporting on this fact. And I think that's significant because they were already planning to do that before the regime fell.
Speaker: that That soap opera was already going to exist. It just now gets to happen with a guy whose ancestors you know died forever. defending a plot of land in like the hill country of Wales against March lords.
Speaker: Admittedly, from what I've learned about Patricio Owen, does seem to have rolled back some of the stuff, like instigated or initiated a welfare state in a way that didn't exist under Pinochet. Did you know did like an okay job and in that sense, like you know reduced poverty, increased literacy, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: But at the end of the day, like the actual like stuff of Chile, what it is culturally, the vapidity and sort of depression that characterized the movie, which we haven't talked about. like So much of the movie is just about, like are we even going to be able to get anyone to vote? Because everyone's just been so dispirited by you know years and years of dictatorship. And it doesn't really seem like outside of partying,
Speaker: that Pinochet has been defeated, that like that changes that much. It's actually saying not to bring contemporary politics in. don't want to upset anybody. I know, you know, we have listeners from all over the political spectrum, but um Gabby and I couldn't help but think about like the Trump years in America, which has had, I think, a similar effect. I mean, haven't said to Gabby, it's like, well, you know, they're disappearing people, bo bla blah, blah, blah. And she sort of like looked up at me like,
Speaker: Well, yeah, that's happening now too. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're completely correct. I mean, not on the scale, not in the exact same way. But, you know, America these days is kind of characterized by a similar kind of dispirited apathy that leads people to to be both very invested in politics and also totally disgusted by them.
Speaker: And I was like, yeah, I mean, is this what we can expect? You know, when like the Gavin Newsom Reich starts, you know, like it's, we get the same, the same movies, you know, thankfully some of the, uh, maybe more immediately, obviously draconian policies are rolled back, but like of the, some of them aren't. And it's just kind of like, like we don't even get Patricio Alwyn probably. You know what I mean? It's not even going to be anywhere near as good. mean, I felt that about the Biden, the Biden win in 2020. It was like, I felt like a, a burnout's character in a way, but I'd run a bunch of, I can fix for Biden. I didn't, but yeah, I remember like certain of my flatmates sort of, you know, putting on Bruce Springsteen and kind of,
Speaker: whooping and cheering when that election happened we were in the uk by the way how cut how cocked are we that we even care that much yeah um yeah some of them were sort weeping and cheering and there were two of us and a friend who was sort of like this isn't gonna solve anything like yeah this is yeah like we've not this is the same problems persist and we'll rear their head again i like but but yeah biden is not gonna solve this It's not articulated in such a sort of like clear way and in this film, but yeah I think there's a kind of sadness at the end, and I think that's Pablo Lorraine winking at you, that you know things are going to carry on happening. i mean two twenty twelve right you're In two years into the Sebastian Pinera presidency. a Sebastian Pinera, to me, is like Vincenzo Fox. He's like the bush of Chile. He's just kind of like...
Speaker: Yeah, very neoliberal, maybe sort of culturally conservative, not as conservative as like caste we have now, all like Trump. Like he's very much of that kind of like late 2000s, early 2010s moment.
Speaker: And yeah, it's, yeah you know, Panera just sort of like decimated the Chilean healthcare system, like made it very, very unaffordable. And yeah, I think probably a lot of people in that moment, especially Chileans watching it in 2012, probably I think would have appreciated the kind of lack of triumphalism in the film. It's like, well, obviously this was a good thing, ah kind of fi shape but where are we going? And like, were the methods, you they were effective, but maybe the the sort of old codgers, the old communist codgers who were complaining about the the lack of content in like this kind of politics have maybe maybe something of a point.
Speaker: Well, and I think that's, from the perspective of our podcast, what's kind of interesting, because like these people still walk among us, meaning the Xers who celebrated these moments. And specifically, like I'm thinking about the other day, and why wouldn't it be, seeing a, there were recent like state elections in Germany, and I forget which state it was off top my head.
Speaker: But um by far the biggest voting b block for the IFDA, Xers, of course. Who else would it be? And you just have to wonder the extent to which, like, kind of believing in that bill of goods and its contentlessness when it didn't lead to, like, a utopia where everyone did, you know, MDMA and, like, watched cool TV programs. Like, when that's not what happened and you just got, like, the 30th Star Wars spinoff Where it's like, oh, well, actually, we're following the head Ewok on this series, and his name is Grim. And he has really wonderful times riding this cyber scooter across Endor. And you can't the MDMA because it has fentanyl in it. Yeah.
Speaker: you can't do the mdma because it has fentanyl in it and just like whatever. like and and you know i I made $42,000 as a welder in 1993, and you know now I make $65,000 as a welder in 2026, and I'm like one of the lucky ones. you know I'm not saying it's justifiable, but maybe it shouldn't surprise us that given all of the other cultural stuff we've talked about over this series, that like They don't know what to do with that.
Speaker: On the one end, they're fully aligned to Marvel, you know, hero Marvel being a stand-in for the advertising mindset of the of the primary, you know, the main character.
Speaker: They're still fully aligned to that, but what it promised didn't actually deliver. The burgers are too expensive in the Burger Reich. You know what I mean? Like, you can't even afford the burgers. Yeah, well, they've been stung by the fact that the the contentlessness of these these moments, right? like and It's interesting that, and it's not a sort of fictional device, it's real, but it's ironic that it's real, is that obviously the the side proposing the end of the dictatorship and the kind of release from that is the no side. they're not the yes It's not should Penis Shea leave and the yes side, no side is the other way around.
Speaker: and The sort of the the side campaigning for the end of the dictatorship and campaigning with the slogan, no, ah And there's something interesting in that, right? That even if they had been given the yes side, there's so little content in the referendum beyond just sort like, let's get rid of Pinochet, that you know well there's no proposition of anything beyond that.
Speaker: So no is actually quite suitable. And it's kind of like, a yeah, it's quite post-political, right? it's it's it's It's a disavowal of something rather than a positive sort of slate of like, well, here's what we're going to do.
Speaker: I think that's an excellent point. And it makes me think about the word content. um in that we're using it here in its more traditional sense, which is like, what is the the internal matter of this thing, right? like what What is actually inside the form? What is the matter in Aristotelian terminology?
Speaker: But today, of course, we mostly use that word to mean like the the stuff you drink out of the slop trough, right? Like, I i need to eat my... you know For a little insight for the listeners here, i had oral surgery earlier this week, and so i can only eat soft foods.
Speaker: And so you know if I'm sitting down with my like mashed potatoes, they're the only thing I can eat, whatever, my wife's not home yet and I've walked the dogs, what am I going to do? I'm i'm like, all right, well, to to YouTube to watch Gary Eats. you know Gary Eats is content, right? It was contentless or perhaps remains contentless in a political sense.
Speaker: But it did generate a form of content, you know, 25, 30 years later. It's the replacement of content with content. Yeah, yeah exactly. And the and the the new content is itself, you know, and this is to to signal back to the Anton Jaeger interview in a way is like, the content there can even be political on its own terms. Like it can...
Speaker: It can be, I don't know, ContraPoints or some you know bread tubers or whatever. That um Maoist guy, Jason whatever, who's, I don't know, sort of famous for being this in like the early 2010s, late aughts. It could be that, but that doesn't mean it has it gives way to action.
Speaker: Similarly to how in the movie, like the action of saying no leads to the same soap opera. It leads to him working at the same company. it Presumably, its primary change for his family is that his ex-girlfriend, who he seems to have a weird relationship with anyway, isn't going to be put in prison like once every few months.
Speaker: But like that's that's the sum total of the content. you know And yes, we're bracketing off some things. like There are things that improve, but if we're looking at the longue durée, you know...
Speaker: Malay is in Argentina. It's just also, I mean, I just liked the... ah I yeah i can't couldn't help but noticing this. but There's, I think, a very defining pattern of like politics in the 2010s, which is um the the children of Marxist academics or dissidents becoming uber-centrists.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. So, like obviously, ah Pete Buttigieg, his father, what's his name, something Buttigieg? He's like a Marxist history history critic. He's a Gramsci translator, I think.
Speaker: Yeah, and obviously you have the Miliband brothers, Ed and David, whose father, Ralph Miliband, was like the foremost sort of Marxist sociologist and economist at LSE in the 60s and 70s. And like, yeah, the character in this film, obviously, René Sadevier, played by Bernal, is the son of this kind of communist dissonant.
Speaker: And, you know, if when he's talking to these old communists, they're always like, I knew your father well. Yeah, this is kind of like... And then they're just like eminently disappointed with him when they realize who he is. Yeah, they just hate him. And it's just like that, like I had a flashback to... There was like a kind of mockumentary made about the Miliband brothers in like 2015 or 2014 and their rise to power.
Speaker: And there is like a point where like they're being confronted by their like father's like comrades, you know? And they're just like, this politics is contentless. It means absolutely nothing. Yeah. And them being just like, checking their watches and being like, well, I've got to go to the Sunday morning briefings. And yeah, it just, yeah, it just, it managed to capture something that I think is perhaps universal. There's some kind of, be wary of the Marxist-academic child, is what I'm saying. Well, it's the red bourgeoisie. It's the problem of class reproduction when dad makes $200,000 a year being a professor at the University of Chicago or whatever, and the kind life that allows you to have.
Speaker: And i i I think there is something that we've kind of touched on, but not really gone into detail on, which is the reemergence of, you know, we talked Ostagi on the ah Goodbye Lenin episode.
Speaker: You get, again, not to be too horseshoe-y about this, but in like a formal sense, a parallel with this where like Malay is in power in Argentina. You know, therere are they were unable to get rid of the Pinochet constitution, right? When they when they tried a few years ago.
Speaker: yeah And ah the the current new president, I always forget his first name, but Kast, has been very, very positive about the Finnish regime, hasn't he? Well, and so it's like, we've actually come so far from this that we can basically recover it in some way or sort of be like, oh, maybe it wasn't all that bad. I mean, even if you think about the fact that, and to be fair, this is just how like non-American political parties work, but like the party that Kast...
Speaker: What was originally, I think, part of back in the day was the Independent Democratic Union. you know what I mean? And just these these kind of blasé names for a party that's like, well, what if we went back to um using the gold standard and like executing dissidents in the streets? and like We're the Democratic Union. It's like, yeah. The communist part is called like Friendship is Magic. Exactly. And it's it's a fascinating... um Oh, well, by the way, um I did not know this. this is I'm just hearing this for the first time. I did hold my finger up to my ear, everyone, just so you know.
Speaker: But Kaz's father served in the Nazi military. He is in the Wehrmacht. So, like like like, what do you like we expect? do you expect? It's like every Latin American election in the 2010s is like i like former communist versus like the son of like an SS officer.
Speaker: In a way, I mean, one of the discussions we often have on here is like, we're still in the end of history. you know like The casts are still trying to bring back Pinochet. like We haven't see Okay, hear me out. Big brain take here.
Speaker: Both the yes and the no votes here represent the end of history, right? Because like what is Pinochet but like the neoliberalism that is supposed to destroy communism and like bring us into the kind of eternal circulation of ah the valorization of value, right?
Speaker: And it's non-end of history insofar as it's a dictatorship, but its economic policies are perfectly in line. Like, with, um you know I don't know, Clintonite reforms to the American system in the 1990s.
Speaker: And on the other side, you have kind of the other part of what it means to be in the end of history, which is the contentlessness of ideology, like the formal quality of democracy, that this is important, the building of liberal regimes that will you know allow us to vote until the end of time.
Speaker: but without you know necessarily an ideology. And we're seeing cracks in that, but the cracks are back to pinochet. like you know The crack is not like... um it's it's It's almost like something at the periodic table. It's like an alkaline acid neutralizing each other. like this referendum but If this referendum it had resulted in fifty fifty right if it had come to a draw, what would you get in terms of politics, in terms of actual concrete politics? You'd get Blairism.
Speaker: ah Yeah. And that's like, I'm not i'm not kidding, because Blairism, what is Blairism? It's the kind deracinated Western Marxist sort of tradition through Gramsci and like Marxism today, Stuart Hall, like in cultural terms and in economic terms, it's like a vaguely softened version of Milsson Friedman. That's what Blairism is.
Speaker: I honestly think it was a total Friedmanite victory. Yeah, with a dash of Stuart Hall. And like yeah, it's it's it's in a way like, okay, the no side won, but really, if you look at the politics of Chile, maybe up until the Boric-Gabriel-Boric victory, both sides won in reality.
Speaker: Well, this is... you've You've allowed me to conjure a kind of guy in my head. And this probably did exist in like a post-Soviet world, and I'm just not aware of it. But a guy who like... and this Actually, I'm kind of just describing Pinochet in a way, but I mean it for the left, which would be like if Keir Starmer wore like a Mao cap.
Speaker: You know what I mean? like like If he's still dressed in that way and they still had like big parades that involved showing off tanks and everything, but the economic policies were just like, yeah, you know Chicago school, everything. So you get sort of like, I don't know, basically like Belarus. I think I'm basically describing Belarus, so i don't although I don't think they quite deregulated or or d um denationalized the economy in the same way. Maybe like the PRI in Mexico, the Revolutionary Institutional Party, right? like They were very like very big on that the aesthetics of the Mexican Revolution and kind of this kind of like socialist revolution. But then we're like doing welfare reform in the M.I.T.
Speaker: Yeah. And yeah, I think that that in a way is a good stand-in for what's going on here because it's... There's something, it's a very funny movie. I mean, a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of like high concept, but it's a funny movie, but it is in a way, in on further reflection, a kind of sad movie. And I think you're right that Lorraine is trying to gesture at that as best he can within a movie that is otherwise, you know, mostly just about being dramatic and a little bit funny here and there, you know, like it's a movie that seems to understand how this isn't going to work out or how it's only going to work out to a certain extent. And I almost have to like applaud him for that because it's, it's such like a good victory. If we're thinking about how history is written, like what could be better than getting rid of Pinochet? And of course it was good, but,
Speaker: What do we have to show for it? um Aside from obviously the the great victory of like not necessarily doing disappearances, but now you've got a guy who's a right-wing populist in power who's probably going to get right back to doing some version of that in his own way.
Speaker: Or Trump in the U.S. Bukele in El Salvador or whatever the hell is going on in Venezuela and now that like the Trump family is, you know, and its associates are basically like controlling whatever's going on with the Bolivarian revolutionary remnants there.
Speaker: it's um It's a movie that testifies maybe more than any other to the like political feeling of existing today, even if it's set in 1988 and is all about television, which obviously is not quite so hot now.
Speaker: But yeah, I think it speaks to... like If you look at the Malay government in Argentina, like how surface-level things still are. like He like touted himself as like this revolutionary libertarian, and yet...
Speaker: If you look at kind of, and like, it's very pro-Trump, very, he's going to realign, break with a Peronist style foreign policy. And yet he's still like accepting like billions of pounds of investment from China after calling them them like communist pigs or something. i think communists yeah Like communist assassins, I think was the term. And it's like, everything is at the level of rhetoric.
Speaker: And when, yeah, like when you dig into the actual policy of so many of these characters, it's like how different, you know, it's very cosmetic. I mean, the only exception to that is maybe Bukele and El Salvador.
Speaker: He's kind of created a new thing in in a way. Although if you see kind of crypto as just like an outgrowth of what the Chicago and Austrian schools were up to, yeah then... Just with like mass arrests. yeah Yeah. well And that's you know but that's why Pinochet is the great person to hold up here. Because at least previously, and I'm not saying this is ever true, but at least previously...
Speaker: these kinds of like libertarian figures could hold themselves up as saying, well, no, no, but I'm anti-statist. Like, no, no, no, we're not doing arrests or whatever. But it all did kind of just come back to Pinochet one way or the other. like you know It's super max prisons instead of helicopter drops, but I mean, it's not all that different. And for me, that demonstrates in a way the thesis of the podcast, that we are we remain mired in this moment that we think of as beginning with the fall of the Soviet Union, and it does insofar as that represents the death of an alternative.
Speaker: But we we live in Pinochet's world, you know as horrifying as that sentence is to say. Yeah, I mean, we we we've we really do. I mean, when I lived in Santiago, i lived in the suburb called, ah well, two suburbs, Vitacura and then Las Condes, which are, if you if you sort of Wikipedia the 1988 referendum, dear listeners, you get a map of the sort of two sides, and N, N in red and C in b blue.
Speaker: And ah there's a little like carve out for Santiago and um the little blue triangle for C, so keeping cliche on, in the... Northeast, yeah. That's Las Condes and Visecura, which is where I lived.
Speaker: um And if you like go on to like any Chilean election, like the center-right or the far-right candidate will always win Las Condes and Visecura.
Speaker: It's a kind of upper-middle class, very white, yeah bourgeois area of the city. And I kid you not, like I would go to house parties aged 23, and there would be like a drunk 19-year-old being like, well, you know, British Air wasn't all that bad. Okay. He made my made my ah grandfather very rich. The trains run on time. and yeah it's just... it's so It's still... Just like a word association game where it's like, you know, Mussolini, Pinochet, whatever, and just the same things, you know, sort of. Yeah, and it was odd, Chile, because I felt simultaneously that it was the most polarized culture I'd ever lived in. it e g that, yeah, like, I'd go to one house party and have, like, a guy in a fucking polo shirt with a baseball cap being like, man, Pinochet was the best. Yeah.
Speaker: like And then go to another house party where like someone else who was probably his cousin, because like Chilean elites like circulate, wearing a Salvador Allende tee with like a Mapuche knitted cap on. And Mapuche's are the indigenous people of central Chile. With a Mapuche cap on being like, oh my god, have you read Judith Butler?
Speaker: So it really did feel like the most polarized society I'd ever lived in. And yet, at the same time, when you looked at the politics beyond rhetoric, politics beyond language, and like signaling and sort of positioning, it was the most boring, like Switzerland-like technocratic place ever.
Speaker: And yeah, I think that is quite, like, it's a kind of, it was hyper-political sort of ah before the term, avant d'électre, right? Like, as ah as a place to me. Like, um,
Speaker: Everyone was an extremist, but no one was an extremist. You know, ah you've just made me remember something, and maybe this is like a good way of wrapping up because it's a similar story from a different place or the ways in which you encounter.
Speaker: because when Listen, at least for me, and I was in the conservative world as a young ah young man, like i never heard anyone speak positively about Pinochet. right I mean, you probably would now right if you were to hang out in right-wing circles in the United States, but you know There are certain things that you sort of are just like are good, like the union victory in the Civil War is good. It is good that there is not a dictator in Chile. It is good that, I don't know, Franco handed over power, blah, blah, blah, whatever, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum.
Speaker: And i encountered my first like separation from that in college, where there was a girl who was from El Salvador. And I, you know being a ah young man at a Jesuit school, you know we learned about Oscar Romero, for those who don't know, the sort of Archbishop of San Salvador, who was shot while saying mass because he was opposed to the this sort of dictatorial or or right-wing government in that country who is you know doing terrible things to the indigenous and poor populations.
Speaker: And I remember saying something about this to her, and she was like looked utterly disgusted with me that I would say anything positive about Oscar Romero. And it was in that moment that I realized that, of course, she's from some kind of like landed family. you know i probably should have realized that I was meeting a Salvadoran who was like whiter than I am. and probably put two and two together on that one, but that these, like, tendencies sort of were, like, waiting in the wings for the end of history to exhaust enough of its, like, Gen X optimism to then pull people over to its side for the return of those things.
Speaker: I guess it's, like, to be seen right there, like, whether these tendencies will actually, like manifest themselves in a real way, or whether it is all sort of mostly contained at level of rhetoric. Like, will cast actually, like,
Speaker: issue in a sort of fascist dictatorship. I mean, I'm just like deeply skeptical that he will. He'll probably like tinker on the tax code and like say some annoying stuff and that'll be it.
Speaker: And in that way, yeah, like it seems like the impasse is we're not really, we can't really break through that impasse. that The sort of world of of no is the sort of the entirety surface is still very much there. And like how much can you actually do in the world that we live in?
Speaker: i I've got it. it's It's interesting because we live in the eternal no. Like, in the sense that we do now because, like, if you if you think about it, like, what is politics now? And I'm not saying it hasn't always been this to a certain extent, but really now is, like, people getting exhausted of whatever's happening because it sucks.
Speaker: And then the next election is just a big no to it. Like, What is Joe Biden but a no to Trump 1? What is Trump 2 but a no to Joe Biden? What is, and I feel bad saying this, Keir Starmer but a no to conservative domination for you know over a decade? like What is the coming to power of the Christian Democrats but a no to the Olaf Scholz regime, which itself is a handover from the Angela Merkel regime?
Speaker: like it's um And what is Merkel herself but kind of a no to the the the prior government there? like We live in every election being a referendum on the existing political power that itself is usually greatly disliked because it is it has the content of that what we see in this movie, whether it comes with a Bill Clinton face or a George Bush face or whatever.
Speaker: And so people just reject it because it stinks. And there's no imagination of anything new. And so we just say, no, no, no. And we have to learn someday to be able to say yes, I think once again.
Speaker: I think, yeah, the the thing that's so good about this film is that there is something platonically or in the abstract kind of noble about direct democracy. And yet when it's actually enacted in our fallen world, you know, our post-lapse era in world, it's just it's incredibly depressing. And yeah, everything is intermediated. And yeah, I think it it opens up that question of, you know, how direct can you really get?
Speaker: I mean, i live this, and I think we should close on this because at this point, were just I'm just sharing my life. But um and for the listeners who don't know, i am a an elected figure in in the town that I live.
Speaker: And we had a council meeting on Thursday. And earlier in the year, there had been all this discussion of, oh, we're going to reform the bylaws for how the council operates because of issues that have to do with agenda setting, like dumb procedural stuff that the Democrats would say when they don't want to do something in the US.
Speaker: And um I had been quite excited about this, if only because I thought that the bylaws were not great. And they went into a committee. It disappeared into this black hole. you know It came out.
Speaker: I saw it on the agenda for this past week. I get excited to be like, nothing has changed here. like i It was sent two days before the meeting. nothing had did but They were barely changed. And i got up and I said, i have to pull this resolution. you know I even saw on it that it said it had to be approved twice. you know That little veneer of like, oh no, but this has really been given the rubber stamp because it needs to be voted on in two consecutive sessions with with yes. right And I raised my hand like, we have to pull the resolution.
Speaker: they turned to me and say, oh, you weren't at the last meeting, Chase. We're sorry. Or Councilman Paduzniak, we're sorry. But it was actually already voted on yes last time, so it can't be pulled. And we'll now just turn to a vote.
Speaker: And we go around and I'm the only no. And the new barely reformed bylaws pass. And nothing... ah ever changes. And i think of that in what you're saying about direct democracy, because of course, everyone up there is elected, right? Everyone up there, including myself, won an election.
Speaker: But when you think about things like turnout, when you think about things like who runs for office in a town like mine, meaning like a small town, when you think about the fact that most people are probably just voting based on their party affiliation and not looking too hard into who the candidates are,
Speaker: um i doesn't it It does not, in my opinion, mean that we've built like the most dynamic or powerful council. It leads to situations where you say you're going to reform the bylaws and then basically do nothing and put it on there that there needs to be voted on twice, and it gets voted on twice over the one no vote.
Speaker: And dare I say, in that case, no was the correct answer. So, all right. With that, thank you all for um for listening. I invite you all to consider subscribing. If you have not, feel free to hit us up via email at deathphotopod.gmail or on Twitter, which we always forget to plug, which is death as a photograph on Twitter at deathphotopod.com.
Speaker: You can get in touch with us there as desired. And tell your friends. We're growing. We're loving it. We appreciate the love and support. And we're hoping that you will not say no to us, but instead an overwhelming yes to institute our Pinochet-like dictatorship over the podcasting space. So with that, all right. Have a good one, everybody.
Speaker: Bye-bye. Adios.
