The roar of our time It is a clear and committed book about the world we live in. The interview with its author, Carlos Granes, a Colombian born in 1975, could become an encyclopedia of this human moment, which is characterized by crazy or misguided people, the most obvious element of which is Donald Trump.
This is part of the conversation that took place between us at the publishing house (Taurus), which published the book. The names of this story of evil, hatred and madness characterize the entire book. Among them, besides Trump, Milley (the chapter title dominates “Milli and the Moral Renewal of the Homeland”), Buric, Petro, Amlo, Bukele and other visionaries who turn this work into a result of Grannis’s intelligence as a writer and as a special envoy to a time that gives chills. He is also the author of Revenge Fantasy, Invisible Fist, Conquest of Paradise, and American Rave.
– Could this be your most committed book?
-I am committed to everyone. In everything I try to understand the world around me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a historical book that forces me back to the nineteenth century, or if it’s a book about the present. What I want is to understand the world in which I live. That’s why I investigate and try to reflect and understand, and when I understand, I begin to express my opinion. In this, it seems that I am in the arena and not in a position of ridicule, because it relates to what is happening today in culture and politics.
– It is a challenge to say that, yes, because culture and politics are what move the world… This has been a recurring obsession of mine since I started writing. I’m obsessed with the avant-garde period, because it’s the moment when culture meets politics and creative people try to make politics or bring about a social revolution through culture. I have always noticed that the two phenomena are intertwined and influence each other. In my previous books, I have provided a historical description of this movement from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. And now, in The Roar of Our Time, which is of immediate importance, I discover something interesting, which is that this combination of culture and politics has produced a strange result.
– Politicians and artists exchanged roles due to very specific historical circumstances. But what we are witnessing now is that politicians are not only transgressive and defiant, not only are they using emotional shock to win over voters, but they are also working with a subject that used to be the artist’s own, the deepest background of man, even the most dangerous of man. They begin to act with low emotions, which reinforces antisocial impulses.
– What are the consequences of these situations?
One sees statements by politicians that incite hatred, division, and polarization, without any hint of shame and without any reference to electoral sanction. It is very confusing that politicians do this and become entertainers, rock stars, trying to seduce voters with the same bigoted mechanisms that singers use. They have become a strange phenomenon.
-What do artists do?
Artists have become more like guardians of what we might call the status quo. There is little left of that world that formed after May 1968… They are trying to preserve some of the moral issues that politics specifically challenges. This puts us in a very strange position.
– What are the consequences of this for politicians?
– The politician is seen as a rebel, especially politicians of the New Right, but also politicians of the left… Both are shown as rebels who conquer new electoral bases, new pockets of votes through defiance against institutionalism. While artists achieve success in the market, especially in the official artistic circle, in defense of good social causes. It is a paradox of our time.
–Very soon a contemporary interpretation of the hatred we experience will appear in your book…, also linked to Donald Trump…
–We’ve seen Trump say something that seems impossible for the president of any country, as well as for the United States, which is that he forgives his enemies, “I hate them, and I wish them the worst”…and this is very troubling because it implies that he only rules for his own voters, for his own rules…basically he rules against everyone else…and this is happening on the right. But look at what’s happening in Colombia, where we saw something similar: that Gustavo Petro went out into the public square raising Bolívar’s war flag, which is a very aggressive war symbol, and also waved it against Congress where he saw the slave-owning scoundrels… he was inciting people to seize the institutions. It is very strange for politicians to do this, brazenly appealing to base emotions, basic sentimentality, to retain the loyalty of their voters and almost turning them into tribes entrenched on both sides, ready to do the leader’s word. We have already seen the consequences.
Hate is the precursor to fear, even the other part of fear…
Yes, it’s part of the fear. Fear of pluralism, fear of difference, fear of modernity, fear of societies where there are no unanimous voices, where there is no diamond consensus… fear of someone who thinks differently than you, fear of conflict that is inherent in modern societies.
– There are many fears, well…
The way to confront these fears is to try to return to homogeneous and unified societies… We see that the right hates immigrants because it considers them a corrupting element, and the left delegitimizes non-progressive ideas as a factor of fascism… They move from divergence to fascism very easily… I believe that fear is one of the major problems of our time. Enlightened, liberal and social democratic thought allowed us to live among different people, in conflict with the different ideas and values with which we lived. We are now in an all-or-nothing situation, we are targets or trenches… It is a war, a cultural battle for total domination, the delegitimization of the other: anyone who does not think like me is an enemy. He is a danger, a threat to society. Then there is a fear that translates into a deep hatred of everything different, which is immediately perceived as a threat.
– When I talk to you, there are drums saying that Trump is interfering in Venezuela. How has this man changed human, cultural and political relations in the world?
– In a brutal way, he totally messed it up. At the geopolitical level, this has weakened and eroded multilateralism, which was the Western system of governance that gave stability, security, and prosperity to much of the world. He appears to be attracted to Putin’s idea of a multipolar world, where great powers exert power in their spheres of influence. Russia in Eastern Europe and the United States in America. This turns the world into a less safe, predictable, and more chaotic place, where what matters is the strength of armies and economies. It is worrying because for a continent like Latin America it means isolation. Latin America is economically weak and does not have strong armies, which is why it is at the mercy of the great powers. We’ll see what happens in Venezuela, but this could be a test of Trump’s regional geopolitics… It’s still too early to think about the possible consequences… It’s a real test…