Would I find la Maga?

It’s a sort of irony that the very first sentence of a novel I read in my teens and have been one of my constant aesthetic references contains this word, this name. Somehow the name MAGA, which in Spanish is linked to mystery and magic, and which Cortazar chose as a metaphor for that way of living without squeezing the tubes of toothpaste from the bottom up, it is now mysteriously linked to just the opposite. It is also a sort of irony that this motto —Make America Great Again— has become associated and embodied by lies, propaganda, lack of knowledge and disregard for it. I’ve been pursuing la Maga all my life. It’s an irony that what you pursue becomes what you hate.

I do not really think there is or will be a huge difference in practical terms with one elderly president or the other in the USA. That country is what it is, its problems and challenges won’t be easily tackled, and its real options won’t differ a lot… As long as that president, whoever it is, stick to what have been the principles and values of a minimally democratic country! It’s not the case with current MAGA’s promoter. His America is not the America I would like to see back on its feet again. He has been eroding its values and principles from the very beginning, squeezing the tube of democracy from the bottom up with the paranoid determination of someone determined to empty it of any meaning.

That’s the reason people and organizations (not only in America) which had never done it before, are publicly asking to vote for the only possible alternative. Let me call it the rationale option. Of course, there are those who still thinks “magic” is the option, and they will continue to expect the slender silhouette of a MAGA etching on the Pont des Arts, or the White House.

No, I do not want to find la Maga any more. Not this MAGA.

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Features Image: Kees van Dongen, The Corn Poppy