Part One

“A manifesto is a communication made to the entire world whose only pretension is the discovery of an instant cure for its political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomic and literary syphilis. It may be pleasant and good-natured. For certain it is always right, always strong, vigorous and logical...”

Tristan Tzara

Well, well, you common people. You thought you could keep out of sight for another two thousand years? You think everyone is an idiot and a buffoon like you? You think your crimes, cheating and megalomania will pass sealed and clandestine to your grave? You could not be more wrong! Once again you have blundered! Your life has been one colossal and sad mistake.

There are a hundred blank sheets of paper on my desk this spring night, and upon them I shall inscribe the lamentations of all of those whose lives you have claimed. You must either take this on, or take your final bow and depart in shame, from life and from history.

Yes, I understand that your guilt is relative; that since you live in a bubble the law can never reach you, let alone hang you. To dispose of you now would be yet another needless crime, another act of barbarism. It would only serve to show how misunderstood you are. There are plenty of reasons and motives, and more than enough stupidity for you to do what you do. For you have encouraged this oppressive regime which, if not your creation, was instituted by your grandfathers and further distant ancestors. They were backward, ignorant and treacherous people, their minds entrenched in chauvinism.

You have never really stepped outdoors, beyond your home, your office, or your church. You have lingered with your neurotic comrades and submissive women, all so utterly enslaved and dependent that they would never have challenged— nor even thought to have challenged — the degrading and servile condition that they have endured for centuries.

You, despite your deranged demeanour, have never even seen the inside of a prison cell, mental hospital, or nursing home. Thus you can know nothing of yourself, and nothing of the people who gave up their lives for you. You have never spared a thought for the prostitution of women, the prostitution of socialites, the prostitution of your own wife! Yet you are ever eager to devise fresh methods of consumption, and turn the essentials of life into an addiction. You do not realize that tomorrow you will be held hostage by your crimes, if not by your victims.

You arrogant technocrat – you have not shown a single gesture of kindness to the beggars who have staggered towards you. All around the world you are the same. You affect the air of a family man, yet you wear trendy clothes, paid for on credit card installments. You make good on the ten percent you reap from your dubious dealings with the State.

You sniveling official, you trample your minions underfoot then grovel to the big bosses, the ecclesiastic rabble, and to anyone who might put in a good word for you tomorrow. You never really looked at the nature that surrounds you; never dared to doubt, question, investigate or challenge the values, beliefs and fanaticisms which enslave and repress your fellows, the semi-literate multitude. You have never truly respected a man, woman or child. Oh, you think I’m mistaken? No - you’re just mistaking respect for indifference and questionable dealings.

Oh powerful, impotent populace! You float like a supporting actor through soap operas, through the anterooms of embassies, the halls of the Vatican, the labyrinths of National Congress and the toilets of brothels. You hold the reins of universities, of oligarchies, of the theater of daily life, this circus where we squander our lives choosing – as Cámara Cascudo said – between the competent thief and the honest donkey. Your hands caress gold-plated knives and forks that have cost the miserable lives of generation upon generation of laborers and naïve parents, brainwashed by the church into raising their children as slaves and cannon fodder.

I understand you, populace. I know and understand you when I see you return home at night, exhausted, with that evangelical look and the sign of the vulture upon your chest. You proclaim that philosophy and anthropology are useless, but in public you recite quotations, if only to hide your incurable open sores and muffle your inner scream – the primal scream that hounds and torments you to this very day.

I watch you eat like a ravenous hyena and clean your teeth like a monkey. You sit on your veranda, greeting and flattering doctors, politicians, secretaries, traders, lobbyists, and thieves; the entire cast of this obscene comedy you call Society. I follow you down a busy street and catch you checking your reflection in a shop window, deftly brushing away the dandruff. You walk with practiced precision, careful not to get your shoes soiled as you step between the starving children who would hungrily lick your car tyres clean for a few coins. You are a neurotic, of this I am certain. You crave the admiration of all women, and the envy of all men. You long for the managers to stand and take off their hats when you come bustling in with a briefcase under your arm, as though you were a king bearing stolen treasure. You never dared imagine that there might be people who are not scoundrels and predators, people who are not like yourself.

On your free weekends at home you get drunk, drift from door to door in your prison pajamas, shouting at the maid, instilling fear into your children, enslaving your partner, and disturbing the neighborhood with your silent screams. To you poetry is an aberration, music is an irrelevance, and art is the work of savages. When traveling abroad, always shielded by your tourist-guide, you will only visit the historical monuments, the museums, the graves of heroes and the famed boutiques and nightspots. You stay on the thirteenth floor of the Sheraton, watch mainstream American films, fuck call girls, steal ashtrays, towels and the other paraphernalia produced and laid out simply to satiate your rabid kleptomania.

You have choked passion into a polluted and exclusive act, climaxing in a puny and premature ejaculation. For you, science is the deals you can make, and grandeur is the power and smell of the stock exchange. But – oh the irony! – the more money you make, the more degraded you become, and the more you resemble the very people you have striven at all costs to distinguish yourself from. For there is really nothing between you – nothing, that is, except for the accumulation of money, clothes and masks; the delirious dream life, and the shiver you feel in high class theaters and private clubs.

Oh poor populace! Poor lost peasant! Poor exploiter of information and emotion! You dress in the creations of in designers and hold your cigarette in a borrowed manner. You studiously bleat French phrases, thinking that will gain you access to the Academy of Letters. And why not, you ask, because surely a flair for deviousness is an essential qualification. Your daughter speaks several languages and plays Liszt (because you demanded it) and has already been introduced to her future husband: he’s rich and learned, but an impotent heroin addict. Of course, you don’t actually care about all of these fatuities, all these social shenanigans – but, after all, there is a lot of money invested in them. Her future husband’s inheritance will boost your capital, and any ‘small marriage incompatibilities’ are easily kept within bedroom walls.

You do not trouble yourself with the emotional or sexual fulfillment of your children or grandchildren, since your own upbringing was inhibited and repressed. You are a natural expert in cultivating manners that are dispassionate, and devoid of sexuality. You knew that in this world your daughter would have no choice but to fall into the arms of the common people, since it is the common people who describe and prescribe all advances and all steps that the blind, mistaken masses should take.

Oh populace! I suspect that everything within you has been shaped by anguish and fear. I suspect that even as a teenager, lacking in self-esteem, you dangled a cross or talisman, an image of your master from your neck. You needed to identify with a football team, a rock-band, a soap-opera actor, or with some anonymous rapist… soon you became as fat as a pig, on your knees idolising your own despicable mediocrity. Soon you were braying like a mule as you carried each successive dictator and monarch of the world. Your passions are either temporal or spiritual, precisely those of the Lord’s. You have no urge within you to trespass beyond the ideological lines drawn out by your demented forefathers. Indeed, for you the symbol is more sacred than what is symbolised. The ghosts of‘other worlds’ have you shitting yourself on the street, or coming on all superhuman in a mystic-narcotic dive.

You are, without doubt, a rabid dog, a tormented pitbull. Your bark is not one of conviction nor sovereignty, but merely a knee-jerk reflex of your training, your beating into fear and submission. You jostle in the universities with the great student herd, not seeking wisdom, but merely to satiate your endless neurotic craving for erudition. You do not concern yourself with discovering the causes of your misery – even less the misery of past generations – but opt instead to mutter on for hours about matters already discussed and defined, done and dusted many a century ago, some even by your earliest ape descendants.

The first time we spoke you said you were a Marxist. Later, you claimed to be a Leninist, praying to Lenin in your sacred chamber. Another time, you had images of Che Guevara and Priest Cicero around your neck. At your graduation a blind man could see your goose pimples rise in veneration at Mussolini’s theories, as you saluted the ‘honorable’ guidelines of Republic and Imperialism. From then on your favorite slogan was that often quoted by Wilde: “You’ll earn ‘my’ bread with the sweat of ‘your’ brow.”

You are always ready for a photo opportunity; you know the perfect moment to offer your arms to a starving and leprous child, who will allow herself to be hugged, oblivious to the trap and ingenuously colluding with your villainous act. You affect to kiss her, delicately avoiding your suit being soiled, not allowing your mustache to touch that emaciated face or letting your mouth breathe the stench from that rotting open mouth.The press are unaware of your infamy, and your bodyguards are oblivious. Politicians pretend to see nothing, while the crowd – worthy of compassion – howl frenetically in their terminal state… All of this is so ancient and unconscious that you fail to recognize the repugnance of your gestures. You continue on in firm support of this system of colonels and disgusting philanthropy, fantasizing about the day that the powers-that-be would eliminate the social scum as if they had arisen out of thin air.

At home you slouch sad and depressed, you kick your dog, almost ready to end it all. But an unexpected knock at the door has you suddenly perfumed, a Zen smile emanating from your face like an arsehole. Yes, simulation and spectacle are the star-attractions of your tin-pan production. From backstage bouts of depression and embarrassment, somehow you always manage to pull off a display of judgement, conviction and freedom… yet deep within your historical bowels, you know you are a hypocrite and a second-rate scoundrel.

You pursue other people’s daughters as if you had the right to copulate with them, to rape them, but should your own daughters dream to seek the slightest orgasmic pleasure outside the marital bed, you expel them as libertines or bitches, even risk their being stoned to death.

Yesterday you attacked an old German woman, publicly denouncing her as “a dirty old woman, a usurer, a thief!” Today you loan money, buy family jewelry from the unemployed, negotiate votes, occupy illegally landed properties, steal pensions, and falsify medicines and food. You peek through neighbours’ blinds and cock an ear to their intimacies, as if you and your wife are on some permanent ‘honeymoon’.

How curiously perverse, this scheme of yours, to be the richest, most famous, most powerful and renowned tyrant. To lie, steal and spit in the face of the world. To invade the public safes, forge scientific data and approve criminal economic laws to control the naïve community that grant you absolute control over them, and the power of attorney to improve your repressive and criminal regime. Yes, the paramilitary corpuses, the medical police, the maximum security prisons, the federal revenue, the spies, the torturers, the messengers from the afterlife, the legions of vicars and priests, the minors courts, the public notary offices, the gunmen, parliamentary immunity, the appointment of judges, the bankers, the public servants, the businessmen and trade associations, the armies, the parties, the television concessions, the radio, the monopoly on food and fertilisers. All of these widen the chasms between people and deal a deathblow to impertinence. At the theatre you applaud on your feet, even when you do not understand a word or note of the show, ever conscious that your godfathers and superiors are sitting right behind you, watching and judging your hurrahs and the quality of your cashmere cardigan.

You spend your whole life inducing your sons, friends and servants into marriage – a conjoining of idiots! – not because you believe it is natural and healthy, but because you cannot bear to be alone in your trap, because the freedom of a single soul is a glaring testament to your own slavery. You pack them off to farmhouses to pay tithes, to run as candidates for the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate, to join the Mafia, to seduce adolescents and withhold taxes. It is a delirious and hysterical spectacle.

Illness is your everyday companion and – in spite of the medicines and vitamins you swallow – you crave it as the air you breathe. From the scourge of your symptoms you develop your goals, objectives and programs. This symbiosis exposes the motivation and the magnitude of your social deficiencies, and of all your institutionalised barbarism. You are the medical profession’s top client: you eat shit at their prescription, for medicine is the last word in everything, from breastfeeding to heart surgery, from rubber preservatives to tablets for your erections.

Beneath your ‘polite’ suit and your servile character, you forge medicinal abuses into a kind of modern shamanism, ruled by the absolute word of incontrovertible mystics. Oh populace, I am tempted to despair in you. Despite your chronic mediocrity, you have conquered the world and its media. Your newspapers imperially invade the most distant of nations with an almost exclusive dedication to gossip, of crimes, trivia, stock-market fluctuations, and cultural and diplomatic orgies... in short, of every social prostitution. Somehow you acquired the right to vomit indiscriminately over the masses, without considering the personal consequences of those you vomit upon, those who never ask nor desire to see you waving at the balcony of your palace. You acquired the freedom to change other people's lives through robbery, commercial demagogues, and political hysteria, behaving like scoundrels without accountability to the species or to history.

I saw you at the theatre again this evening. I heard your stifled critique and your domesticated donkey steps as you gathered with fellow imbeciles and seduced ‘defenseless’ boys and girls, whilst believing yourself praiseworthy of a socialsexual revolution. Streets, schools, churches and clubs, NGOs and ‘scientific’ centres reproduce like bacteria, full of cowards, liars and dirty hypocrites that don’t even deserve a look, a word, or a vow of trust. Men of your nature proliferate like rats, and play host to the parasite of decadence.

I am tired of acknowledging you as an aristocrat of birth or of money, but never of character or spirit. In any case, all the known aristocracies have been racial deliriums, schizophrenic crises or narcissistic manifestations that have defended perversity with the support of hired armies and gunmen. You and your cronies should look at your ‘aristocratic’ selves in the mirror, or for the same spectacle, go visit the gorillas at the local zoo. This should convince you that your little‘aristocracy’ is a ridiculous and cannibalistic institution that will not suit any future society.

One thing is certain: in this reptilian world all your plans are converted into laws. From simple street-vendor and preacher you have metamorphosed into media proprietor. Thus your voice is heard, your projects are taken forward, your paranoia is transformed into constitutions, and your own intestinal and sexual disorders are considered universal maladies by the World Health Organization. Here, on this ridiculous planet, your ‘personal laws’ and soap operas are converted into ‘social laws’, while the flag you designed flies haughtily across the ceaseless winds of human falsity. With your valets you have confused yourself, damaged the soil, turned elders into imbeciles, retarded the youth and plotted out a suicidal way of life. You have created the States, the countries, the IMF and all the other international institutions that have underhandedly granted diplomas of honorability to ex-presidents and crooks.

You, populace, through your diplomacy and statistics, have disseminated dozens of pathologies among men and women; you have isolated atoms and built bombs, killed with acupuncture, hemlock and other ‘pharmacological’ practices. You have violated the world of ‘madmen’, legalising pseudopsychiatric shrines and brothels of children with the same ease with which you earlier legalised slave ships, alcoholism, the guillotine, real estate, the banks and bloodbanks and – vilest of crimes – the renting of houses…

Everyone was fooled by your ‘accidents’, ‘heartstrokes’ and erratic mental spasms… But the most lucid ones do not fall for your dreadful lie, for they see you cowardly planning your own death. Like an Australian rabbit, an invasive species, you die psychologically long before you die physically. And I do nothing but spy on you. I will have nothing to do with your official criminality, your despicable social joke. I simply observe you, evaluate the magnitude of your despair, and calculate the depths of your cowardice. One moment I feel sad for your bitter heart, the next I roar with laughter at your manic dissociations. Just as you stop me from living, I stop you from dying! I shall keep you aware and alive until the moist coal and fatal arrogance that inhabit you are consumed by flame.

Ah, human rabble! What a disgrace to live in the same century as you!

So often I have seen you humiliating, lying and stealing from simple and miserable people. Your hands were agile, your eyes were dim and all your actions carried the visible signs of social corruption. I have watched your conferences, your classes, your frivolous promiscuities and masochistic orgasms, where you always present that same satiated sheeplike face. Often you are found drunk, injecting heroin, eating peyote or stuffing yourself with barbiturates… And you always have the same complaints, recite the same fragments of the Gospels, a phrase of Rajneesh, the dogma of Stalin, the bullshit of Chico Xavier, or a supposed erotic adventure that even old Casanova would be unable to pull off.

So often your children are found abandoned, emaciated by sadness, with torture scars on their bodies carrying your endorsement, if not left by you directly. Your children are literally shattered by the barbarism of this system you have legalised. No one doubts that you are a fifth-class procreator, genetically predisposed to hate your own offspring. Before thinking of giving birth or impregnating someone, you might wish to check that, under their ‘Aryan’, ‘African’ or ‘Hebrew’skin, your partner is not concealing a donkey or a crazy cow. She might gladly put her children in a prison school or religious jail to facilitate her career, into an institution where they have their childhood dismantled to produce submissive, passive cowards. You have made a human tragedy of your ejaculation, an ecological disaster of your ovulation. Before bearing children you should find in a partner some evidence of discernment in life and serenity in death. Examine what they eat and drink, examine their dreams, and ask how they might accelerate the future freedom of all children...

You do not suspect that I have been studying you for so long, patiently coexisting beside you, surveying your conversations, treachery and plans, and carefully gauging the level of your insanity. I have taken you along many roads and been astonished at your gestures. I have wept for the trees you have uprooted and the rivers your sewers have polluted. I have scrutinised your despicable lies and rigorously investigated your delirious routine. On occasion I dare to comment on your crimes, on your ‘ethics’, your authoritarian concepts of human sexuality and the future of mankind…you answer furtively and evasively, turning the conversation around, accusing me of being a cheap ideologist, an immature leftist who is envious of your professional ‘success’. You become angry – the rage of Wilde’s ephemeral mushroom against the immortal, entrancing, and exquisitely lovely orchid – declaring that nature, aesthetics and the body were, for you, nothing but absolute shit... O impoverished and dangerous populace.

End of Part One