Lately it actually seems like Antanas Mockus has a serious chance of becoming the president of Colombia. The poll by El Tiempo and La W says that Mockus would get 38.7% of the vote in the first round compared to Juan Manuel Santos’ 26.7%, Noemí Sanín’s 9.8%, German Vargas Lleras’ 3.3%, Gustavo Petro’s 2.8%, and Rafael Pardo’s 2.3%. On the second round, if Mockus and Santos are the two choices, Mockus gets a 41% to Santos’ 29%. The poll by CM& shows Mockus getting 34% of the vote to Santos’ 35% in the first round; however, in the second round, Mockus gets 50% to Santos’ 44%. An Invamer Gallup poll showed Santos winning the first round but Mockus getting 47% of the vote in the second round versus Santos’ 42%.

For an election that seemed like it existed merely as a formality just a few weeks ago, these results are a shock, to say the least. It’s hard to believe that barely three months ago almost no one really contemplated four years without Uribe himself, let alone there being a reasonable chance of his successor not taking power. The trends are favoring Mockus. It seems like in every poll, he’s getting closer and closer to Santos, now even surpassing him, even though not much has really changed. Mockus hasn’t done anything visible since selecting Sergio Fajardo as his vicepresident. He hasn’t really shined during the debates (which isn’t to say he performed poorly; he simply did as well as some of the other candidates who are getting negligible votes), and he’s had a few public slip-ups, the type that would be a giant media event in the United States but luckily get glossed over here. Santos isn’t bleeding voters, but it doesn’t really seem like he’s going to get higher numbers anytime soon. He already has his followers; people who want continuity already know he exists, whereas Mockus is still getting his name and status as the frontrunner opposition candidate out there.

The last time I got excited for a political candidate, the candidate himself wasn’t terribly great. Mockus is better, but the same principle applies. I’m not really expecting a Mockus victory, and even if he does win the elections, I’m not sure his presidency would be entirely successful, or even successful at all. But in a lot of ways, this election is like the Obama election. It was important then for people to vote for an idea, and against an idea, and such is the case here too.

Uribe’s government, and by extension Santos’ campaign, is based on the idea of Democratic Security, which really doesn’t mean a whole lot other than ‘fighting the guerrillas’. That’s his entire thing, really. That’s the premise of Santos’ campaign: we have to continue with security. We have to keep defending ourselves. We have to keep battling.

How true is that? When Santos was the Minister of Defense, Colombians found out that army had been killing civilians and dressing them up as guerrilla fighters, because they could get a financial reward for every body they delivered as a kill. There’s about 1,000 cases known so far, with little in the way of justice. If you think about this, it’s staggering. Hundreds, maybe thousands of deaths goes beyond ‘bad apples’ or ‘isolated incidents’, it’s a reflection of policy. In this case, the policy was to delivery corpses so that people would feel that some ’security’ was being reinforced.

Last year, it was also revealed that the DAS, the Administrative Department of Security, was illegally spying on various opposition politicians, judges, and journalists. Going beyond that, DAS officers were actually harassing people and threatening them with death, in some cases those officers being the ones assigned to ‘protect’ those people in the first place. The director of DAS, Jorge Noguera, was arrested because he was found to have collaborated with paramilitary groups in order to divert DAS resources to some of their activities, including murder.

While no one denies that there were some security improvements during Uribe’s presidency, the aforementioned incidents are a very serious matter. They are not something that can be brushed off and ignored. It wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that under Uribe, the State and its various agencies became a bigger threat to citizens’ lives than they had been in the previous governments. That’s something that should be cause for concern, because there is a difference between the government, which supposedly represents the people and is placed in power by their votes, and guerrilla groups. There is a degree of moral culpability that we all share if our government is going around threatening and murdering people, which isn’t the case when it’s an external agent.

And yet, these events didn’t destroy Uribe’s presidency, and they haven’t destroyed Santos’ candidacy. Uribe was weakened, sure. But realistically speaking, if he had been able to run for a third term, he would have won, and Santos is still in very good position to take the Presidency. Why is that? Why has Uribe been a ‘teflon’ president?

Uribe has been worshipped during his entire presidency, sometimes in ways that were vaguely creepy. He wasn’t merely a president; he was a savior. I’ve heard more than a few people say Uribe is the best president of any country, for example. Or the best president in the history of Colombia, a claim that’s not entirely unreasonable coming from people who have only experienced National Front presidents and the dubious failures that followed, but hardly realistic, especially as more scandals come to light.

I believe that many colombians needed an Uribe, regardless of who he actually was. They needed this great savior figure, one that would help them fight against evil and help them survive. The two presidencies before Uribe’s were absolutely terrible. Samper’s presidency was spent almost completely in court when it was revealed that drug traffickers had financed his campaign. Pastrana’s presidency had tried a peace process that ended up being a resounding failure, showed the guerrilla group FARC to be wholly uninterested with the concept of peace and demostrated that they held incredible disdain towards colombians (FARC leader Marulanda infamously didn’t go to the first peace process meeting, and the photograph of Pastrana next to an empty chair became the defining image of the years). Colombians were being kidnapped at record levels, the state couldn’t guarantee anyone’s security, and the country seemed like it was becoming unlivable.

People needed this idea of a Great Man that would swoop in and save them. And in a way, Uribe did. The government fought against FARC, and security improved in the country. But to what cost? Besides the previously mentioned government scandals, there’s the fact that paramilitary groups took over vast regions of the country for many years, including Congress and in all likelihood the Casa de Nariño (presidential palace), and in the process committed a vast number of atrocities that are almost unspeakable in their depravity. The real tragedy of the paramilitary phenomenon is how much support it had from society, tacit and hidden support, but support nonetheless. Even not too long ago, you could still find people arguing “well, the paramilitaries fought the guerrilla, right? so maybe they were good”.

Colombia was in one of those moral quandaries. How far are you willing to go for protection? People were willing to go very far, and they simply looked the other way and downplayed or refused to acknowledge any terrible thing that happened. That’s why Uribe is a teflon president. Vast numbers of people have simply never been interested in seeing his government for what it really is, because they need to know they are being protected, they need to know they have nothing to fear anymore. And in the process, the country’s fallen even lower into the pit of immorality it was already in.

Like most other countries, we have our narrative, and it requires us to be ‘good’. The fight against FARC is such a narrative. It’s a view of the world in which colombians are good people, and they have an external enemy, which is FARC, and they are undoubtedly bad. We, the good, struggle against these evil forces, always ready to strike. It’s no big secret that rallying the people against a common enemy can be used to justify a lot, but like everything in the world, people can identify in others what they’re unable to see in themselves. There are some billboards against Antanas Mockus that have appeared in the past few days, and their premise is basically that under a Mockus government, other evil external forces (Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa) will defeat us. It’s us against them, and if it’s not Chavez, or FARC, there’ll be a new Other to fight.

As Colombia’s become more and more poisoned, lots of people have simply refused to look within themselves and challenge their assumption about how good the country really is. How good can a country be if it’s willing to turn a blind eye to the executions of hundreds of civilians by the military, to the point where people would consider rewarding such an act with a vote? Many of the things that happened in the country had the general approval of the population, and a lot of these scandals aren’t seen as so bad. What gives? Fear?

A big part of Mockus’ surge is simply that he’s the opposition candidate. As soon as Mockus got the push he needed to get a bigger part of the vote than the other opposition candidates, his numbers started increasing dramatically until the point where he’s now the frontrunner in various polls. Could another opposition candidate have achieved this?

Maybe. I do think, though, that Mockus’ points are precisely what people who are looking deep within themselves are responsive to. His campaign is based on the idea of honesty and legality, and that’s one of the things he’s most known for, being a man with integrity. He’s the antithesis of ‘the ends justifies the means’, the candidate that’s most focused on the substance of those means, and the toll they can take on a country.

The days when anything that happened under Uribe’s administration would be defended to the death have been over for a while. It’s not clear which crisis was the one responsible for this. Maybe it wasn’t a single crisis, but simply the aggregate. Maybe it wasn’t even a crisis, and people are simply tired of Uribe. As the first president to be in power for eight years, he’s had more time to accumulate scandals and failures than the average president, which no doubt has ended up reflecting poorly on him.

Regardless of whether Mockus would manage to succeed in changing the mentality of Colombians, simply winning would be a large change in itself. It would mean colombians are able to look at the reality of their country and work towards fixing it, and themselves, instead of forever focusing on the external enemy. In a few months, we’ll be finding out just how much will there is out there.

There was a vote for financial reform today, which predictably was filibustered. Predictably, every Republican voted against cloture. Predictably, Ben Nelson did a Ben-Nelson-type thing. Predictably, Obama talked about being disappointed. The entire thing was so predictable that I wouldn’t be surprised if news organizations simply published a speculative draft they’d written last week.

Besides how predictable it was,  I think it’s important to acknowledge how funny it is that they are only voting on financial reform in mid-2010. The economy crashed in late 2008. It’s been over a year. It’s only now that Congress is trying to pass some type of reform. Nothing terribly radical. And even that fails.

After the financial system was crippled, it only took the American government one and a half years to fail at even getting to a vote.

Everything about this is great.

I’ll avoid blaming the Obama administration (even though I like blaming them for every ill in the world up to and including the weather), though it really does highlight why some have soured on his administration. Any legislation they propose starts disappointingly (so you get one disappointment), then doesn’t even pass (you get your second disappointment there), and then finally passes in an even more disappointing form (third disappointment). By the time the bill passes, you aren’t sure if you’ve just witnessed a political victory, or if you’ve stared at some sort of Lovecraftian horror right in the eye and realized life itself is pointless.

I’m not sure how you call that feeling of fondly remembering a time perceived as ‘distant’ when it’s actually something that happened not too long ago (relatively speaking). Can we go with nostalgia? Feels odd to use nostalgia when talking about a period where you were the ’same’ person.

When you crush on a band for some time, it ends up becoming part of a moment you cherish, especially when it’s only a constant in your life for a short while. I keep thinking about The National lately. Forgotten how great they are.

I’m rusty. On better days, I could write a long album review. Now I find myself wondering why I even find an album good, beyond semi-circular arguments. Which isn’t to say I was entirely happy with what I used to be able to come up with. But it was better than nothing. Wait, was it better than nothing? Hmm. Maybe, maybe not.

I’m thinking the way to get out of that hole is through The National’s High Violet.

In a country that’s had very little choice at the voting booth come presidential election time, a country whose latest president has been in power almost a decade and has massive popular and political support, it’s fitting that an open,  democratic election is going to take place in the coming months as a direct result of the sitting president’s power grab. Uribe’s attempt at running for an unprecedented third term, and all of the drama that arose from the situation, has left the country in its current situation: an upcoming presidential election with half a dozen candidates vying for votes and notoriety, whose alliances might be what makes or breaks them in both the first and second rounds, since clearly no one’s about to win 51% of the vote like Uribe did twice in the past eight years.

The direction of the country in the next four years will be determined in a flash. A longer election campaign with consolidated political party machines would have been a different story. Had Uribe tried to translate his popularity into a leading role for his political party, Partido de la U, they would have surely remained in power. Instead, by trying to remain in power personally, he alienated some of his natural successors, and as a result there isn’t a clear Uribe-approved presidential candidate, with Juan Manuel Santos being the closest after notorious Uribe lapdog Andrés Felipe Arias failed to obtain the Conservative Party nomination.

Santos, Uribe’s former Minister of Defense, is the only candidate in the running that can take credit for the current government’s actions. For a vast number of people, this is unquestionably positive: he’s tough on the guerrillas, he’s associated with some popular actions taken by the military, and he’s been on every television screen for the past four years. For many others, it’s unquestionably negative: the military escapades in Ecuador created international tensions and led to that country’s attempt to capture him via Interpol. Perhaps more gravely, at least inside the country, the military infamously killed hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians from poor neighborhoods, dressed them up as guerrillas, and received monetary compensation for the kills, part of a program that gave rewards to the military based on body count. It remains to be seen how much colombians actually care about it; these “social cleansing” programs, when executed by paramilitary groups, are not always seen negatively.

Visible as he may be, Santos is not a charismatic man. I never really thought Uribe had much charisma either, but he had an image that a lot of people identified with, as the rural leader who liked the fields and was intellectually modest. Which isn’t to say that Uribe was not a well-educated, wealthy man, but the perception is that he’s not part of the political class that colombians have been hating on for quite a while. Santos, on the other hand, is very much a part of them. He’s one of those stuck-up bogotanos from the political world there, who’s changed his politics and hopped in with whoever’s presently popular so many times it’s stunning, even for a country where political convenience is the norm. Santos can wear a hat on commercials all he wants, but it will never be credible the way it was with Uribe. Nothing about the man really communicates anything positive. Shallow as it may be, I’ll say he looks downright creepy.

The rest of the candidates have a history in politics too, many of them having made runs for president before. The number of candidates, the state of the political parties (the Liberal Party in particular at a very weak point), and the redundancy (many of these candidates share the same voting bases) has made most of them weak throughout the admittedly short campaign.

Lately, though, things have been taking a strange turn, one that’s actually exciting and would lead one to think that the country has a reasonable shot at changing course over the next few months. Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, eccentric academic who’s widely respected but who’s never managed to make a dent in his various presidential campaigns, is gaining strenght at the polls. The latest results showed him taking 24% of the vote, to Santos’ 29%, taking over the number two spot from Noemí Sanin (another old politician who’s ran a few times). Mockus is about as different from Santos as you could realistically conceive a candidate to be. The clearest thing about Mockus is that he’s honest. His administrations in Bogotá were remarkably honest, he did his best to steer clear from traditional political tit-for-tat, managed the city’s budget well, and engaged citizens by making them appreciate and respect their city more. His stunts were famous: dressing up as SuperCitizen, having mimes harass errant drivers, sponsoring ladies’ nights out, and more.¹. He’s never been able to present himself as presidential, though. In fact, the last few mayors of Bogotá, though popular there, have a style to them (informal, intellectual, sophisticated yet down-to-earth) that’s hard to reconcile with the more traditional President.

The recent boost in Mockus’ polling numbers likely corresponds to his union with another former mayor, Sergio Fajardo. For a little while people saw Fajardo as a possible Colombian Obama, a guy who the youth could rally around, whose message might resonate as he was an ‘outsider’ rather than a well-known political figure. His administration as mayor of Medellín was widely respected, and he embarked on a slow but steady campaign around the country, in order to put himself out there and gain some notoriety outside of Medellín. Beyond that, though, he ran into problems. He was too cryptic in his positions, seemingly never coming down strongly for anything (much like Obama, funnily enough). He made an ill-fated attempt at translating his own popularity to a political movement, but lack of identification meant that people weren’t really sure who the Fajardo-approved candidates for Congress were, and they didn’t have much success. His polling numbers were low, too, and it didn’t really seem like people knew who he was. His presidential campaign was as good as dead.

Since it was clear that he wasn’t going to get anywhere, his supporters started indicating that he should ally himself with Mockus², which he’s done. This week they announced their union. Mockus will run for the presidency, and Fajardo will be his vice-president.

Even though Fajardo himself wasn’t polling well, and Mockus’ numbers were not amazing, the union has given new life to the campaign. While vice-presidential choices usually mean almost nothing in Colombia, in this case the union gives them an air of cohesion; instead of seeming like the usual Mockus run, now they appear as a genuine political project, which most of the other candidates can’t say.

There’s no indication that a Mockus presidency would be an unqualified success. One could argue that the country’s massive corruption would overwhelm him. It’s one thing to solve a city’s problems, and another to deal with an entire country where there’s all sorts of different attitudes. It’s one thing to deal with a few strong local institutions and another thing to deal with massively corrupt national ones. It’s one thing to get bogotanos to like their city and respect it, and another to get costeños to do the same. But I don’t really care though. I’d rather he try and fail than to have some dubious power-grabber or perennial bootlicker there.

With Mockus as 2nd in the polls, the elections actually have some meaning, because there might actually be repercussions beyond ‘level in which we’re fucked’. When the race was between Juan Manuel Santos and Noemí Sanin, it was reasonable to assume that a vast number of colombians, those who support the more center-left candidates, wouldn’t have cared  much for the runoff. But if it comes to a Mockus vs. Santos duel, it would be a fight between the more traditional political groups and the more independent members of society.

And there is Mockus’ main weakness: the country is still very old-fashioned politically; the same political families buy votes, the same party machines move voters under the promise of a few dollars per vote, and the idea of an opinion vote is a longshot for many. Mockus is the anti-politician in that sense; some focus was given to his plea that, if one were to vote for him, one should do so because of one’s conscience, not because of an order given by anyone else. Whoever remains from the old guard after the first vote (Santos, most likely) will have the support of many of the political machines, the big families, the networks. Mockus and Fajardo would need to mobilize a vast majority of the opinion voters, those who might be more apathetic as they have no material reward. Though the Green Party, of which Mockus is the candidate, isn’t usually strong, the results of its internal primaries, the ones that gave Mockus the nomination over Peñalosa and Garzón, were promising.

Can Mockus win over the truly ‘popular’ vote and take the presidency?

Well… maybe if I register to vote…

Every year or so I give a listen to some of those bands from the past, the ones that you’ve grown out of and you associate with specific moments of your life. Often these bands are so questionable that you can hardly justify having listened to them in the first place. Nothing falls more squarely into that last category than metal bands.

Heavy Metal was more or less responsible for turning me into a music listener. It’s what got me to pay attention to music as a phenomenon. Nowadays, though, I find it to be the complete opposite of almost everything I look for in music, and generally offensive to my sensibilities. I must have changed immensely from those days, though it doesn’t really seem like it. I have a certain affection towards the music and the subculture, but I can’t help but look at it with a critical eye.

Though I didn’t listen to metal that long, I saw enough to feel comfortable making some general observations.

There’s a sense in the metal community that their music is not merely great, but that it is greater than all other forms of music. It’s common for metal fans to only listen to metal, perhaps with some proto-metal classic rock bands thrown in the mix. Among metal fans who I interacted with, the question of whether the metal genre was enough for a listener was treated genuinely, and there really was an attitude that nothing else was worth listening to. It makes sense, if you think about it. It’s an outsider’s genre, and not exactly a ‘cool’ one; you have to convince yourself that its community is self-sufficient, that much like the world might not need you, you don’t need the world.

Metal becomes a very confrontational genre, because people are defining themselves by it, and in opposition to “decent society” or “the establishment” and whatnot. During the early 90s metal, glam, and all other excessive 80s genres were shunned in favor of alternative rock and its variants, and everything that metal represented was treated as a joke for a very long time (famously, metal’s most popular mainstream representative, Metallica, ditched the whole aesthetic and reappeared as a hard rock band). Metal fans unsurprisingly ditched the mainstream too.

One of the ways the whole superiority thing manifested itself is in what I guess you could call the quantification of music. The explanation for why metal was so much better often became a numbers game; “the most is the best”. Metal guitarists are the best because they can hit the most notes per second, metal drummers are the best because they can hit more parts of their drumkit per second than anyone else, metal vocalists are the best because they can hit the highest notes for the longest time, and so forth. Comically enough, it’s also applied to lyrics: metal lyrics become the best because they use the longest words. What you end up with is a lyric sheet full of empty nonsense, unbearably tiresome songs that serve as little more than a showcase of technical prowess, and incredibly repetitive music, because there’s only so many ways you can be a fast drummer. The whole thing can verge on the autistic, especially when you see people counting the amount of riffs on a record to prove how good it is.

If you look at this music this way, everyone else must be some sort of idiot in your eyes. When a guitar magazine publishes a “Best Guitarists Of The Decade!” list, you can scoff at Kurt Cobain being #3 (nowadays it’s probably Jack White, but at the time it was good ‘ole Kurt), because c’mon, how is he the best? Can he play Ywngie’s solos? You’re damn right he can’t. People who listen to mainstream music are people who can’t handle ‘complexity’, and metal’s complexity makes it be as good as classical music (classical music is one of the only genres that metal fans don’t regularly disparage). You can also use this metric to rehabilite trashy rock from the 80s that no one likes anymore (terrible glam bands, for example) because their solos were superior to Nirvana’s.

This all appealed to me, I suppose, because of some sense of superiority that I had, which this subculture just fueled and fueled. It was that time when you’re starting to discover anti-establishment tendencies and no one else seems to, and you feel like you’re onto something. I was questioning my own religious beliefs at the time, and a bunch of yelling about Satan seemed oddly fitting. Metal’s pretty anti-everything in that way, and lyrically it has the same focus, but is criticizing something far larger and more important.

I’m willing to concede that point to metal: it’s lyrical focus isn’t (or at least wasn’t) that bad. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s heart is in the right place, but I’ll say there’s worse places it could have been at. It’s too mythical, though. It’s not criticizing religion as a force in the world, but as some Middle Ages empire that must be defeated (preferably by dragons). It’s not criticizing politics as they are in the world, but as some new world order thing that’s utterly irrelevant to anything. I’m not trying to suggest that being literal is being right; I’m a big fan of Bob Dylan, who was hardly a realist. The thing is, if you listen to a Bob Dylan song, say, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, it’s not literal, but you can associate it to real life concerns. You can’t really do that with a song about the keeper of the seven keys or the warlock. It’s too far gone.

Put this way, it might sound as if metal is completely unredeemable. It has its moments, though. When technical skill is used in service of a good composition, it can be impressive and emotional. The speed and aggressiveness in metal aren’t really for everyone, and I’m not sure they’re sustainable for most people (it’s habitual for teenagers who listen to metal to eventually ‘mellow out’ and move to softer versions, or drop it altogether). When you’re a hormonal teenager, though, it might just be the only thing that’s crazy enough. And though I might not appreciate the qualities that make metal… well, metal, encountering those qualities was what made me think hard about what exactly was there in a song, why I liked something, what I could reasonably consider “impressive” and what I could consider “half-assed”.

I can probably point to the metal band Opeth as planting the seeds of my current musical curiosity, and eventually lead me away from metal completely. I started listening to them as they ‘broke through’, and there were a lot of mixed opinions towards them from metal fans. The band took elements from death metal (growling vocals) and some general ideas like guitar tones, but were not traditionally “metal”, the music was moodier, the instrumentation was restrained and very conventionally ‘melodic’, and they had folkish interludes and clean vocals that didn’t sound at all like the folk that metal bands usually favor. Lots of people disliked them, though, because they were “not metal”, did not have metal riffs, and were just too much of a crossover band. I loved them, though, and after that I started catching onto that ‘crazy’ idea that maybe you couldn’t measure emotion by the amount of notes in a solo.

That attitude towards the band was hardly unique. In the past few years (by which point I wasn’t really listening to metal anymore, but was familiar with the communities), metal has become more acceptable to mainstream tastes and some bands have come out to some acceptance. Within metal communities, though, they’re often looked down as impostors or poseurs, who must be trying to make a mockery out of honest metalheads. And that’s an issue that people who listen to metal are notoriously sensitive about, and I guess it’s one of the things that I find hard to accept about the whole subculture: there’s not much of a sense of humor. Sure, bands can write ‘funny’ songs every once in a while, but the idea that someone wouldn’t take metal seriously, that they’d listen to it for camp value or because they find it a bit ridiculous, can be taken as an insult.

I find that hard to accept that now, but during 2001-2002, these bands were serious business to me. The idea that this whole thing was completely ridiculous and often insane just didn’t really come to me, even as I understood (perhaps subconsciously) that the aesthetics and philosophy behind this subculture were absurd and that imitating them would be laughable (thankfully I never really adopted metal aesthetics in terms of personal presentation). Even as metal genres become more and more a parody of themselves, the attitude barely changes.

I hardly listen to metal these days, especially if it’s not a record I used to listen to. People get upset when music is referred to as being “all the same”, but a lot of metal is truly the same. There’s a lot of obsession regarding genres and sub-genres and styles and revivals, and bands are “old school Florida death metal” and “revival Bay Area thrash” and how in God’s name do you expect anything to sound fresh when you can’t leave the confines of some scene that existed for six months during the eighties? This isn’t really unique to metal, but metal’s where I’ve seen it more closely.

Besides sounding like the same old thing, I guess a real problem I have with metal is that it’s not enough for whatever range of emotions I currently have, if it’s anything at all. I can’t really think of many situations where I could realistically say “This song by Goatwhore really speaks to me right now, really gets to my soul about the stuff I’m going through”. It’s just not really very likely. This isn’t really a lifestyle change; there was never a point in my life during which songs about witches, dragons, or the underappreciated pagan lifestyle really spoke to me. The change is in what I seek from music.

These days, what I’m looking for in a song is a line or two that I can relate to, a line that seems like it has something to do with the experience of being me. There’s really no chance for that line to be “sadistic, surgeon of demise / sadist of the noblest blood”.