The global flatterers
The first quarter of the 21st century, especially since the 2008 crisis, has seen a reversal of capitalism and the way we relate to it. Competitiveness and the cult of money are on the rise in politics as well as in leisure, entertainment, and mass sports, and many young people—not all, by any means: it's only fair to clarify this—measure the merits of their role models, primarily athletes, by the exorbitant amounts of money they live in and the women they sleep with or abuse with more or less impunity (the ownership of bodies, especially women's, is associated with the ownership of money). Easy money, offered just a click or a text message away, causes a deep fascination, and so-called strong leaderships, which entail another toxic cult: the cult of personality, have once again become the order of the day. Cryptocurrencies, successful people publicly boasting about their ignorance, mega-, ultra-, or tera-sized patriots, record collectors, dancing on the ashes of charred bodies in war zones. Expressions of what some call (or used to call; everything happens so fast) turbocapitalism.
The cult of personality brings with it the emergence of one of the most fascinating, yet repulsive, figures in the human catalogue: the sycophant. These days, NATO is holding a summit in The Hague that is largely a grand ceremony to give luster and pomp to the decadent figure of the most openly anti-European and anti-Atlanticist president the US has ever had, Donald Trump. It remains to be seen what the real effect of last weekend's US military intervention in Iran will be, beyond adding confusion and tension to a situation already fraught with both, and serving as the first rehearsal for something truly disturbing: seeing the US and Israel (Trump's US and Netanyahu's Israel) at odds. Things didn't end well in the aftermath, because neither Israel nor Iran respected the ceasefire Trump had imposed, but the final straw is now. And Europe and NATO incomprehensibly gather to applaud the final straw in chief.
Trump acts like a whiner when neither Netanyahu nor Pezeshkian (another ultra-authoritarian leader) respect his ceasefire, and at the same time, he tears his chest out, showing the messages NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte sends him to bow down to him. He also expresses his anger toward Spain, for Pedro Sánchez and his government's refusal to allocate 5% of GDP to military spending, a decision worthy of applause regardless of the reason for it, and despite its limited or nonexistent real effectiveness. Gestures, as everyone knows, are important in politics. And now we live in miserable times, in which among the most common gestures we find the bowed head, the bent knee, in the face of unworthy rulers who flaunt and threaten their power.