translated from Spanish: From Donald Duck to Donald Trump, another reading of a pandemic Chile

The book To Read Donald Duck published in 1973 in Valparaiso by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart has over time become an icon text for studies in theOries and History of Communications in Latin America. The methodology of analysis proposed there leads to the conclusion that Walt Disney’s cartoons manage to raise awareness and stereotypize the heads of the Latina girl and young people for a model that instills in them questions of knowledge/power: respect for military authorities, money and all kinds of transactions typical of a neoliberal paradigm.
Interestingly, until today, Chile was the one who best did the task of alignment and alienation in view of what the Disney school proposed as a prototype of the liberal project that was being implemented – dictatorships through – in the southern cone of the continent.
Shortly after the University Editions of the Catholic University of Valparaiso published this volume, the hands of the United States allied with the upper class and the Chilean military class devise what would translate – in the end – into the worst episode in the history of Chile. The product of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet and his henchmen, sponsored by the Nixon administration and inspired by the private company with pretensions in this sector of the world, it is finished enacting The Disney ideology through the galloping eruption of the Chicago Boys.
With that said, it can be understood that the criticism of Donald Duck by Dorfman and Mattelart is nested in a look that we can conceive in a space that remains consistent with the realms of classical power, “orwellians” and binary structures where the “bad” must be left on the margins and the “good” are the ones who can and should make the decisions. The Disney School and Chicago Boys were the “good”, the rest of the world – including Chileans – the “bad”.
They were formerly tools designed to model individuals and their bodies, make them docile and domesticated, the product of pan-tricized and disciplined confinements and incarcerations. Now social outbursts and pandemics take to the streets, but – in turn – they re-confine us and cloister us, otherwise, from the invisibility of ilumically panoptized connections. A question that leads us to totalizing screens that from the living room “lead” to work, school, university, cafes and family and amical gatherings, zooming our lives from the home and with global and global coverage.
This is the new era of post-truth that can be exemplified by the good case of the other Donald [Trump]. Among other post-truths, Trump assured that his election victory was the largest since Ronald Reagan’s, that the crowd in his investiture was the most massive in American history, that his CIA speech had a standing ovation from all present, and that climate change is a Chinese invention to wipe out the U.S. economy… like the current pandemic.
Post-truth, in its Trump mode, is a way to impose a higher ideology by which their executor(s) intend to force others on something, regardless of whether there is evidence for it or not. Politicians, in this scenario, make post-truth outweigh citizens in importance, managing to cope with events and changing their direction at no (political) cost. Chile was no exception when the country’s “chile-zualization” was used in the context of Sebastián Piñera’s last election campaign.
The fake news is created for a specific purpose. It has its own purpose. It is not only reduced to a news fact that has non-true information, but is an invention that is created with alevosía, deliberately.
The problem with all these forms of spreading facts is that they can not only have political consequences, but they can also directly affect the social ecosystems of countries or populations altogether. One sample: About a month after the U.S. election, an uncontrolled man entered a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. and pulled out his shotgun. He argued that he had known that Bill and Hillary Clinton were participating in a child sexual slavery network commanded from that fast food place.
At the same time, in Chile and also after the elections, Piñera was unable to deal with a huge unreasonable disbandment of her population who chose to take to the streets bored of historical abuses that can be glimpsed from the d projectand Dorfman and Mattelart on Donald Duck to this day of Piñera-Donald Trump and who, together with the “Chilezuela” that exemplifies these latter lines, was sucked from so much abuse, exploitation and collective invisibility.
The excess of simulated images took Chileans to the streets to burst, to burst socially, to make that unreality look for other horizons than those of a society built by the impossed truths of Donald Duck and his family and the post-truths of Donald Trump and his friends.
Falsehoods that end up over-colonizing – like a big lie – the cultural acquis of the country and the world, crowned, at the moment, with the already inevitable abyss of an eventual pandemic that forces the confinement and which, in this pause, leads to revive the most hopeful of “magic” (magical) as they read/hear/see the staging of “The Plague of Insomnia” (Aranguibel, 2020)[1], invited by the “Gabo Foundation” and inspired by incredibly contingent passages from the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Soledad

[1] More information at: https://fundaciongabo.org/es/recursos/video/video-completo-cortometraje-la-peste-del-insomnio
 
The content poured into this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.

Original source in Spanish

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