By turning the key of language, I understood that I was mute and dead to the world because of the curse of words.” This is how one of the most extraordinary poems by the brilliant Leopoldo María Panero reads. A confession as clairvoyant as it is destructive for someone. … which generated the perfect verb was incapable of communicating with the outside world. The speeches of Azaña, Churchill and Lincoln achieved in their time what Panero lacked and made political communication something capable of mobilizing a nation, a feeling, an ideological argument. The 272 words of the Gettysburg Address marked the history of an empire as much as the 400 pages of Cicero’s Catilinarias. To understand their meaning, it is not necessary to know their content, they were transcendent even at a time when those who were touched by these geniuses did not even know how to read.
No one remembers the words of Margaret Thacher or Olof Palme in this Europe of the 70s and 80s who, with our Judeo-Christian roots, made the West the West we carry in our memories. None of this can be measured, there are no measurements or “insights” capable of quantifying how much these truths were capable of changing the world. Political campaigns now refuse all of this because no one can sell you a program that can tell you whether the “likes” your message gets are the result of the genius of the author or of an army of boots prostituting him.
Yesterday I was speaking with a long-time politician who sadly stated that none of this made any sense, that politics should continue to be done as always because politics in capital letters is not a matter of ratings, but rather the exercise of public service. An attitude towards the agora that no company of young entrepreneurs specializing in Artificial Intelligence can measure and therefore charge. The success of an honest approach to res publica cannot lie in the need to calibrate it according to little hearts or thumbs up on a cell phone screen. It’s not about resurrecting Pericles, but being aware that success is linked to a conversation with the mayor of a city that has a water leak or with a compatriot who sees how the world is changing before his eyes but is unable to explain it as happened in Panero. None of this can be measured, none of this can be organized by a digital marketing expert, none of this can be expressed in the low flight of a drone that ends up blurring the image in a clear sky that promises you sunshine. The terror of saying that entrepreneurship does not always equal success has convinced us that some don’t want to talk and others don’t want to listen because they simply can’t charge you for the value of a word.
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