Two different descriptions of the people

Posted by: | January 18, 2009 | Comments Off on Two different descriptions of the people

The “exploited people”:

As we saw with Williams, culture is ordinary which it means that culture is made by people, but which kind of people? A nation is an heterogeneous group of people, a nation is made of different social classes. In My Message, Eva Peron keeps speaking about “her” people which means the Argentineans but especially her sustainers, the Peronist ones. She keeps claiming universal messages such as solidarity, togetherness or social cohesion but we do not really know to who she is speaking to: which people does she describe?  “Her” vision of the people is a very including one but by reading her message, she creates divisions and categories: the workers, the women but also the people’s enemies like the oligarchies, the clergy and the ambitious. Her discourse is not balanced: there are the people’s enemies and the people’s defenders but her conception of the people’s defenders is very restricted to the Peronist.  She seems very close to the people: she speaks about sleeping, living with the people. On the one hand, she’s totally devoted to the people but on the other hand she seems also very populist. Obviously she does not have the same living conditions that the majority of the Argentineans and she wants to describe herself as non ambitious but she has been animated by a certain ambition before reaching the power even. To be ambitious could be a very good quality and does not mean necessarily to think only about its own interests. I do not really like her way to create special categories and to extract herself from others. She seems wanting to be so close to the people that her discourse becomes not credible so that we could wander which people does she target?

The ”people-target”:

The people could also be a target.  She wants to win over the people by erasing the frontier between the people and the politicians but this frontier is normal. The politicians are the representatives of the people but they are not the people. It is not a mirror representation but a representation by delegation of power.

An imperfect people:

The text written by Borges is the opposite.  He describes some people who do not like Peron and its regime. They do not manage to identity, recognize themselves in Peron’s speech. They are very skeptical and ironical with the notion of “togetherness”.  At the end of the text, they kill a Jew, this murder is the symbol of the total disunity of the people which is totally opposed to Eva Peron’s speech about unity and solidarity. Borges’s text describes an Argentinean people which seems more real. Contrary to Eva Peron’s speech he emphasizes the people’s flaws that’s why for me his description of the people seems more realistic and convincing.  


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