Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Timothy McVeigh’s execution approaches on May 16th under the presidency of George W. Bush who, as governor of Texas, oversaw the execution of 152 people, more than any other state governor in history. It is unlikely that members of the mob clamoring to watch McVeigh die will take the time to read The Stranger, but they should. And so the students in the steady flow from Harvard to the investment banks should pause and read Upside Down. What is the value of their work, what is it they accomplish if, “in 1997, of every $100 in currency transactions, only $2.50 had anything to do with the exchange of goods and services”? It will be unfortunate if Upside Down is only read by those who already look beyond the borders of their experiences, for Eduardo Galeano is trying to take the blinders from the eyes of a broader public, one whose wits have been addled by entertainment masquerading as news. Subtitled “a primer for the looking-glass world,” it is as redundant to the living-wage activist as The Stranger is to the inmate on death row; comforting, perhaps, but not terribly informative.

Galeano is one of Uruguay’s most prominent authors and many of his books have been translated into English. His title comes from an 18th century criers’ pitch for magic lanterns that implores, “Step into the school of the upside-down world!” And Upside Down does read a bit like a school textbook. It is a litany of declarative sentences such as, “Fear is the raw material that sustains the flourishing industries of private security and social control, and it’s in steady supply.” The problem is that the book’s readers are not elementary school students asking what fear is. The stark factual style that seems reasonable when discussing facts is a bit baffling and annoying when Galeano beats the twin drums of truisms and vague generalities. No one is surprised to learn that if Chilean newspapers declared the U.S. government to be unsatisfactory, they would be ridiculed. Slogging through such a catalogue of our sins can become tiresome, but when it does, any decent person is then ashamed of his or her boredom.

The book is stuffed with facts about injustice in the world, so stuffed that the facts run into one another and thus seem, in a weird way, to be immaterial. The argument for lowering the prices of anti-AIDS drugs does not depend on whether 40 percent of the people under the age of 20 in sub-Saharan Africa have HIV or 20 percent of the people under the age of 40 do. Either way, there are many people for whom the drugs are far too expensive because pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to lower their profit margins. The sad fact is that though Galeano is continually pointing out the obvious, it needs to be pointed out. Drugs to combat AIDS are not the only ones that are artificially expensive: marijuana, cocaine and heroin are also costly. Galeano quotes a former head of the New York City police narcotics squad: “If imported cocaine were to disappear, in two months it would be replaced by synthetic drugs.” Galeano persuasively argues that the drug war has had little effect on illegal drugs besides unnaturally inflating their prices.

Indeed, Galeano is at his best when discussing such absurdities as the drug war or the U.S.’s overuse of automobiles. In these cases the path to a solution is clear: to attack the problem of drugs by curbing demand, and to reverse the worldwide trend away from public transportation. It is when Galeano discusses grosser problems, such as the increasingly skewed distribution of wealth, that his discussion is frustrating. He comes across like a crabby housewife continually pointing out flaws in her husband’s manner of dressing. He overcomes this in the rare moments of true poignancy, when he shouts, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” Galeano is not a nag without good reason, and he doesn’t propose a solution because there is none: “Social injustice is not an error to be corrected, nor is it a defect to be overcome. It is an essential requirement of the system. No natural world is capable of supporting a mall the size of the planet.”

While the book is occasionally very funny, most of what seem to be attempts at dry wit fall flat, quite possibly having been lost in translation. Mark Fried has done a competent job bringing the book into English, but no more. Galeano seems to be aware of the dangers of translation, and has done much to attenuate them through his liberal use of the engravings of José Guadalupe Posada to illustrate the text. The book is worth buying just to see the whimsical woodcuts of skeletons, soldiers, dragons and peasants. Posada died in 1913; his illustrations survive not only the passage of time but also the change of languages beautifully.

Though the book has its shortfalls, they are minimized if one reads it in textbook fashion, a section a week. Galeano’s catalogue of “plastic delights, plastic dreams,” will gradually build up and the world will indeed slowly begin to seem Upside Down.