July 5, 2016
(essay for a volume to be entitled Why Ideas Matter in Politics U.S.A.)
Friends, I want to share with you some thoughts about and from Carlos Fuentes, memorialized at his Mexico City service in May of 2012. When I was teaching, my UK students fairly often heard about or from him. For example, in the Reagan-Bush years when our government was promoting the Contra war against a struggling democratic regime in Nicaragua. In June of 1983 Fuentes gave a Harvard commencement address raising the hard questions in the most eloquent terms.
He asked: “Are we to be considered your true friends, only if we are ruled by right-wing, anti-communist despotisms? Instability in Latin America–or anywhere in the world, for that matter–comes when societies cannot see themselves reflected in their institutions.”
In one of my favorite essays, he wrote: “Societies are healthy when they accept that history and language are an unfinished business–our unfinished business–and bring questions and skepticism to bear on that unsatisfaction.” And he contended: “We shall now live together or die together.” This brings to mind how Wendell Berry closed his recent Jefferson Lecture: we do not have to live as if we are alone.
In a book I usually assigned to a class on “Culture and Politics in the Third World,” Fuentes comments that we need to “realize that we descend from death, that death is the origin of life, that without the death of our ancestors we would not be here in the world at all.” Not surprisingly, in the essay I mentioned he warns about our “amnesiac rush toward the future [as] endangering our future…” As the 1980s began, Fuentes linked this not only to the “industrial powers” but to another mindset exhibited by our economic and political elites: “the spurious necessity that is said to drive the economic world.”
I might put it this way: today Speed permits little time to think about this Austerity Ideology. So whether it is cutting a county public health budget or the federal Social Security program we are expected simply to move on to tinkering with the next electronic gadget. Facebook calls!
Those of us living in political cultures dominated by Big Coal such as Kentucky and West Va. are expected to ignore reports with captions such as “Coastal Cities Prepare for Rising Sea Levels,” “Ocean Life on the Brink of Mass Extinctions,” and “Greenhouse Gases Higher than Worst Case Scenario.”
Carlos Fuentes closed his essay with a quote from Samuel Beckett: “This world could be uninhabited.” But he also agreed with his friend Milan Kundera who notably wrote, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” As Fuentes himself claimed: “The wars against memory are finally lost by those who undertake them.”
That is why I want us to remember Carlos Fuentes.
