A recommendation for this day
this time, it's a movie
Dear potential Pan-Americans,
Not all of you are estadounidenses so you may not have a day off to celebrate a foundational myth of a waning hegemonic global power disguised as a day for gratitude.
For those of you with the day off after the θxng who are as alienated from your family as you are from the political electorate—especially in light of events in the last two years—you, saddened and angry and wishing for some escape with this day, taking your holiday to lay on the couch in front of the screen, because climate change has made your θxng a rainy shitshow rather than a crisp autumnal day of Gratitude—may I recommend you spend some time with El Conde?
Released in 2023 by Netflix, this political family farce gets rid of most of the classic lore of vampires except their perverse immortality to tell an allegory of free-market capitalism’s relationship to imperialism and slavery.
Now that the US has chosen its own authoritarian to lead the country as a big fuck you to groups within our country and the world generally, it might be interesting (if not soothing) to compare our present with Chile’s past.
It’s hard not to see the parallels between the President and Pinochet: while Forty-Seven didn’t come to power in a military coup backed by the Deep State of the US government when he assumed the mantle of Forty-Five, he appears to be building the infrastructure for the putsch of Forty-Eight.
A little Chilean history for us Pan-Americans who don’t know much about the world outside of the Northern Hemisphere:
In 1970, Chile democratically elected the first Marxist government in the Western hemisphere, and, through a coalition government, tried to do some socialist stuff: expand free education, get free milk to kids in poor areas, implement minimum wages, and nationalize some key industries, particularly copper mining; it was also working on something like a jobs-guarantee for the poor.1
Rich people and the middle class were pissed (as were others, like truckers and copper miners, but part of the economic woes that sent those people to the streets were the ripple effects of the global economic order), and then there was military coup2, led by Augusto Pinochet, a burgeoning Corrupt Military Dude, that kills a bunch of people.
Unsurprising the socialist President died, supposedly by suicide.
Corrupt Military Dude comes into power, continues to kill people and steal a bunch of money for about three decades in power and has a bunch of children and henchmen who also steal gobs of cash–even from orphans. Like, how could you be such a cliched baddie in the real world? Chile is just a bunch of dumb assholes stealing money and killing people for a long time, and then Corrupt Military Dude dies.
And pretty much everyone gets away scot-free with the money.
This is what I gleaned from several frustrating years in college Spanish, the back page biographies of Isabel Allende’s novels that I never finished and the Roberto Bolaño ones that I did, plus cruising Wikipedia after watching a movie with my Hollywood crush in it. I could be misremembering the details; I’m no HCR.
That background should be enough for you to get into the El Conde. The film is set in the near past of Chile, shortly after the “death” of its dictator, Augusto Pinochet, a vampire with origins in the French Revolution.
Having become bored with living, he says he has resolved to die, but a spate of gruesome murders bring his children to his estate. They don’t give a flying flip about the murders of their countrymen, though; they have come to find where all the loot is and who will get what when he finally goes.
The movie is, IMO, a hoot.
The parallels with our own circumstances may not be uplifting; the movie suggests that Chile is still dealing with the origins and heirs of Pinochet. If there are lessons to learn from this movie, if us Pan-Americans are capable of learning anything from history or fiction, they may be:
ain’t nobody who can manipulate corrupt daddies walks away without become corrupt themselves and;
we will never move past the demons fighting to suppress the ideas of the Enlightenment if we are organizing ourselves in lefty-righty political units.
So fuck the familial unit organized around a dumbass daddy, property ownership that transcends a single lifetime, and despairing about the macro.
Time marches on and the best you can do is close your laptop before the sun sets and get outside–unless of course, the climate is shitty, unlike here, in sunny San Diego.3
Thankfully not a bloodsucker literally (but maybe figuratively?),
X
You know I’m all for jobs, in moderation.
It’s a safe assumption that there was some involvement from the CIA, as this was during the Nixon-Kissinger era of US foreign policy.