Upside Down
Eduardo Galeano
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Program of Study
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Ladies and Gentlemen, Come On In!
A Message to Parents
If Alice Were to Return
The Looking-Glass School
Educating by Example
The Students
Injustice 101
Racism and Sexism 101
Lectures on Fear
The Teaching of Fear
The Industry of Fear
Sewing: How to Make Enemies to Measure
Seminar on Ethics
Practicum: How to Make Friends and Succeed in Life
Lessons for Resisting Useless Vices
Master Class on Impunity
Case Studies
Hunters of People
Exterminators of the Planet
The Sacred Car
A Pedagogy of Solitude
Lessons from Consumer Society
Crash Course on Incommunications
The Counterschool
The End of the Millennium as Promise and Betrayal
The Right to Rave
Sources Consulted
Index
Also by Eduardo Galeano
Praise for Eduardo Galeano’s Upside Down
Copyright
For Helena, this book that I owed her
Upside Down has many accomplices. It is a pleasure to finger them.
José Guadalupe Posada, the great Mexican artist who died in 1913, is the only one who is innocent. The engravings that accompany this book, this chronicle, were published without the artist’s knowledge.
Others, in contrast, knew full well what they were doing and collaborated with an enthusiasm worthy of a better cause.
The author must begin by confessing that he would have been unable to commit the act of these pages without the assistance of Helena Villagra, Karl Hübener, Jorge Marchini, and his little electronic mouse.
By reading and commenting on the first criminal attempt, a number of others also took part in this mischief: Walter Achugar, Carlos Álvarez Insúa, Nilo Batista, Roberto Bergalli, David Cámpora, Antonio Doñate, Gonzlo Fernández, Mark Fried, Juan Gelman, Susana Iglesias, Carlos Machado, Mariana Mactas, Luis Niño, Raquel Villagra, and Daniel Weinberg.
A portion of the guilt—some more, some less—is borne by Rafael Balbi, José Barrientos, Mauricio Beltrán, Rosa del Olmo, Milton de Ritis, Claudio Durán, Juan Gasparini, Claudio Hughes, Pier Paolo Marchetti, Stella Maris Martínez, Dora Mirón Campos, Norberto Pérez, Ruben Prieto, Pilar Royo, Ángel Ruocco, Hilary Sandison, Pedro Scaron, Horacio Tubio, Pinio Ungerfeld, Alejandro Valle Baeza, Jorge Ventocilla, Guillermo Waksman, Gaby Weber, Winfried Wolf, and Jean Ziegler.
Also responsible to a large degree is Saint Rita, the patron of impossible deeds.
Montevideo, partway through 1998
This book now constitutes a threat to the English-speaking world. That would not have been possible without the fervent complicity of Mark Fried, Tom Engelhardt, Susan Bergholz, Bert Snyder, and the Metropolitan editorial team. One day, they will have to answer for their deeds.
Montevideo, partway through 2000
* * *
Ladies and Gentlemen, Come On In!
Come on in!
Step into the school of the upside-down world!
Rub the magic lantern!
Lights! Sound! The illusion of life!
Offered free to one and all!
Let it enlighten each of you and set a good example for future generations!
Come see the river that burns!
Lord Sun illuminating the night!
Dame Moon in the middle of the day!
Mam’selle Star tossed from the sky!
The jester on the king’s throne!
Lucifer’s breath clouding the universe!
The dead walking about with mirrors in their hands!
Witches! Acrobats!
Dragons and vampires!
The magic wand that turns a child into a coin!
The world lost in a throw of the dice!
Don’t fall for cheap imitations!
God bless those who see it!
God forgive those who don’t!
Rated R: Sensitive persons and minors not admitted.
—Based on eighteenth-century criers’ pitch for magic lanterns
* * *
A Message to Parents
People respect nothing nowadays. Once we put virtue, honor, truth, and the law on a pedestal.… Graft is a byword in American life today. It is law where no other law is obeyed. It is undermining the country. Virtue, honor, truth and the law have all vanished from our life.
—Al Capone, speaking to Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. The interview was published in Liberty magazine on October 17, 1931, a few days before Capone went to jail.
If Alice Were to Return
One hundred and thirty years ago, after visiting Wonderland, Alice stepped into a mirror and discovered the world of the looking glass. If Alice were born today, she’d only have to peek out the window.
If you decide to train your dog, congratulations on your decision. You will soon discover that the roles of master and dog are perfectly clear.
—RALSTON PURINA INTERNATIONAL
THE LOOKING-GLASS SCHOOL
■ Educating by Example
■ The Students
■ Injustice 101
■ Racism and Sexism 101
EDUCATING BY EXAMPLE
The looking-glass school is the most democratic of educational institutions. There are no admissions exams, no registration fees, and courses are offered free to everyone everywhere on earth as well as in heaven. It’s not for nothing that this school is the child of the first system in history to rule the world.
In the looking-glass school, lead learns to float and cork to sink. Snakes learn to fly and clouds drag themselves along the ground.
MODELS OF SUCCESS
The upside-down world rewards in reverse: it scorns honesty, punishes work, prizes lack of scruples, and feeds cannibalism. Its professors slander nature: injustice, they say, is a law of nature. Milton Friedman teaches us about the “natural rate of unemployment.” Studying Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, we learn that blacks remain on the lowest rungs of the social ladder by “natural” law. From John D. Rockefeller’s lectures, we know his success was due to the fact that “nature” rewards the fittest and punishes the useless: more than a century later, the owners of the world continue to believe Charles Darwin wrote his books in their honor.
Survival of the fittest? The “killer instinct” is an essential ingredient for getting ahead, a human virtue when it helps large companies digest small and strong countries devour weak but proof of bestiality when some jobless guy goes around with a knife in his fist. Those stricken with “antisocial pathology,” the dangerous insanity afflicting all poor people, find inspiration in the models of good health exhibited by those who succeed. Lowlifes learn their skills by setting their sights on the summits. They study the examples of the winners and, for better or worse, do their best to live up to them. But “the damned will always be damned,” as Don Emilio Azcárraga, once lord and master of Mexican television, liked to say. The chances that a banker who loots a bank can enjoy the fruits of his labor in peace are directly proportional to the chances that a crook who robs a bank will land in jail or the cemetery.
When a criminal kills someone for
an unpaid debt, the execution is called a “settling of accounts.” When the international technocracy settles accounts with an indebted country, the execution is called an “adjustment plan.” Financial capos kidnap countries and suck them dry even when they pay the ransom: in comparison, most thugs are about as dangerous as Dracula in broad daylight. The world economy is the most efficient expression of organized crime. The international bodies that control currency, trade, and credit practice international terrorism against poor countries, and against the poor of all countries, with a cold-blooded professionalism that would make the best of the bomb throwers blush.
The arts of trickery, which con men practice by stalking the gullible on the street, become sublime when certain politicians put their talents to work. In the shantytown nations of the world, heads of state sell off the remnants of their countries at fire-sale prices, just as in the shantytowns of cities criminals unload their booty for peanuts.
Hired guns do much the same work, albeit at retail, as the generals whose wholesale crimes get billed as acts of glory. Pickpockets lurking on street corners practice a low-tech version of the art of speculators who fleece the multitudes by computer. The worst violators of nature and human rights never go to jail. They hold the keys. In the world as it is, the looking-glass world, the countries that guard the peace also make and sell the most weapons. The most prestigious banks launder the most drug money and harbor the most stolen cash. The most successful industries are the most poisonous for the planet. And saving the environment is the brilliant endeavor of the very companies that profit from annihilating it. Those who kill the most people in the shortest time win immunity and praise, as do those who destroy the most nature at the lowest cost.
Walking is risky and breathing a challenge in the great cities of the looking-glass world. Whoever is not a prisoner of necessity is a prisoner of fear, deprived of sleep by anxiety over the things he lacks or by terror of losing the things he has. The looking-glass world trains us to view our neighbor as a threat, not a promise. It condemns us to solitude and consoles us with chemical drugs and cybernetic friends. We are sentenced to die of hunger, fear, or boredom—that is, if a stray bullet doesn’t do the job first.
Is the freedom to choose among these unfortunate ends the only freedom left to us? The looking-glass school teaches us to suffer reality, not change it; to forget the past, not learn from it; to accept the future, not invent it. In its halls of criminal learning, impotence, amnesia, and resignation are required courses. Yet perhaps—who can say—there can be no disgrace without grace, no sign without a countersign, and no school that does not beget its counterschool.
THE STUDENTS
Day after day, children are denied the right to be children. The world treats rich kids as if they were money, teaching them to act the way money acts. The world treats poor kids as if they were garbage, to turn them into garbage. And those in the middle, neither rich nor poor, are chained to televisions and trained to live the life of prisoners.
The few children who manage to be children must have a lot of magic and a lot of luck.
TOP, BOTTOM, AND MIDDLE
In the ocean of desperation, there are islands of privilege, luxurious concentration camps where the powerful meet only the powerful and never, for even a moment, forget how powerful they are. In some Latin American cities where kidnappings have become commonplace, rich kids grow up sealed inside bubbles of fear. They live in fortresslike mansions or groups of homes ringed by electrified fences and guardhouses, watched day and night by bodyguards and closed-circuit security cameras. They travel like money in armored cars. They don’t know their own city except by sight. They discover the subway in Paris or New York, but never use it in São Paulo or Mexico City.
They don’t live in the city where they live. They’re not allowed to set foot in the vast hell that threatens their tiny private heaven. Beyond the walls lie regions of terror filled with ugly, dirty, envious people. They grow up rootless, stripped of cultural identity, aware of society only as a threat. Their homeland lies in the designer names on their clothes, and their language is a modern Morse code. In cities around the globe, children of privilege are alike in their habits and beliefs, like shopping malls and airports, which lie outside the realms of time and space. Educated in virtual reality, they know nothing of real reality, which exists only to be feared or bought.
Fast food, fast cars, fast life: from birth, rich kids are trained for consumption and speed, and their voyage through childhood confirms that machines are more trustworthy than people. When the day arrives for their rite of passage, they will be handed the keys to their first four-wheel-drive all-terrain corsair. In the meantime, they construct their identities by driving full speed down cybernetic highways, devouring images and merchandise, zapping and shopping. They feel at home navigating cyberspace the way homeless children do wandering city streets.
* * *
A Child’s World
You have to be very careful when you cross the street, Colombian teacher Gustavo Wilches explained to a group of children. “Even though the light is green, never cross without looking first one way, then the other.”
Wilches told the children that once he was knocked down by a car in the middle of the street. His face darkened as he recalled the disaster that nearly cost him his life. The children asked: “What kind of car was it?” “Did it have air-conditioning?” “A sunroof?” “Did it have fog lights?” “How big was the motor?”
* * *
* * *
Store Windows
Toys for boys: Rambos, Robocops, Ninjas, Batmen, monsters, machine guns, pistols, tanks, cars, motorcycles, trucks, planes, spaceships.
Toys for girls: Barbies, Heidis, ironing boards, kitchens, blenders, washing machines, televisions, babies, cribs, baby bottles, lipsticks, curlers, makeup kits, mirrors.
* * *
Long before rich kids stop being kids and discover expensive drugs to fool their solitude and shroud their fear, poor kids are sniffing gasoline and glue. While rich kids play war with laser-beam guns, street kids are dodging real bullets.
In Latin America children and adolescents make up nearly half the population. Half of that half lives in misery. Survivors: in Latin America a hundred children die of hunger or curable disease every hour, but that doesn’t stem their numbers in the streets and fields of a region that manufactures poor people and outlaws poverty. The poor are mostly children and children are mostly poor. Among the system’s hostages, they have it the worst. Society squeezes them dry, watches them constantly, punishes them, sometimes kills them; almost never are they listened to, never are they understood.
Everywhere on earth, these kids, the children of people who work hard or who have neither work nor home, must from an early age spend their waking hours at whatever breadwinning activity they can find, breaking their backs in return for food and little else. Once they can walk, they learn the rewards of behaving themselves—boys and girls who are free labor in workshops, stores, and makeshift bars or cheap labor in export industries, stitching sports clothes for multinational corporations. They are manual labor on farms and in cities or domestic labor at home, serving whoever gives the orders. They are little slaves in the family economy or in the informal sector of the global economy, where they occupy the lowest rung of the world labor market:
• in the garbage dumps of Mexico City, Manila, or Lagos they hunt glass, cans, and paper and fight the vultures for scraps
• in the Java Sea they dive for pearls
• they hunt diamonds in the mines of Congo
• they work as moles in the mine shafts of Peru, where their size makes them indispensable, and when their lungs give out they end up in unmarked graves
• in Colombia and Tanzania they harvest coffee and get poisoned by pesticides
• in Guatemala they harvest cotton and get poisoned by pesticides
• in Honduras they harvest bananas and get poisoned by pesticides
• they co
llect sap from rubber trees in Malaysia, working days that last from dark to dark
• they work the railroads in Burma
• in India they melt in glass ovens in the north and brick ovens in the south
• in Bangladesh they work at over three hundred occupations, earning salaries that range from nothing to nearly nothing for each endless day
• they ride in camel races for Arab sheiks and round up sheep and cattle on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata
• they serve the master’s table in Port-au-Prince, Colombo, Jakarta, or Recife in return for the right to eat whatever falls from it
• they sell fruit in the markets of Bogotá and gum on the buses of São Paulo
• they wash windshields on corners in Lima, Quito, or San Salvador
• they shine shoes on the streets of Caracas or Guanajuato
• they stitch clothes in Thailand and soccer shoes in Vietnam
• they stitch soccer balls in Pakistan and baseballs in Honduras and Haiti
• to pay their parents’ debts they pick tea or tobacco on the plantations of Sri Lanka and harvest jasmine in Egypt for French perfume
• rented out by their parents in Iran, Nepal, and India they weave rugs from before dawn until past midnight, and when someone tries to rescue them they ask, “Are you my new master?”
• sold by their parents for a hundred dollars in Sudan, they are put to work in the sex trade or at any other labor.
Armies in certain places in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America recruit children by force. In war, these little soldiers work by killing and above all by dying. They make up half the victims of recent African wars.
* * *
Flight/1
Chatting with a swarm of street kids, the ones who cling to the bumpers of buses in Mexico City, reporter Karina Avilés asked about drugs.
