Little by little the past becomes unacceptable, unless its crudeness, its gloomy convulsions, are subjected to a kind of pasteurization, a correction and cleaning process similar to that of Instagram photos.
The past is confusing, difficult to understand, even more alarming for the people who inhabit the present as provincials who have never left their land, nor have the desire to do so, and live convinced that there is no way to live like it anywhere. , although the information they have about the outside world is very scarce, and generally reduced to commonplaces.
There is a pride, a narcissism, a nationalism of the present, and the border that separates it from all the extension and richness of the past is increasingly closer, and more hermetic, strengthened by ignorance and disdain.
On all the windows of the old trains, which were foldable—one of the many shortcomings of the past—a warning was printed: “It is dangerous to look outside.”
Now we are warned everywhere that it is dangerous to look into the past.
That is why safe pasts, of a comfortable exoticism, abound so much, like those theme parks that recreate the London of Jack the Ripper or the Middle Ages of knights and tournaments, or those “immersive” exhibitions in which one can walk through the Vincent van Gogh's sun-dazzled wheat fields without the slightest danger of sunstroke or losing your mind.
Much safer than reading rigorous history books is reading historical novels.
History tends to resemble the “story told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, meaningless” that according to Macbeth's dark monologue, human life is.
With worthy exceptions, today's historical novels, and the luxurious series inspired by them, project onto the past the most orthodox values of the present, and populate it with empowered warrior women in the 17th century, or in Europe occupied by the Nazis, or of impossible, although meritorious, ethnic diversities, of rapacious and sexist white men and native men and women of admirable integrity, respectful of non-binary or heteronormative identities, careful of the environment.
They are the ideal and pedagogical pasts of Disney animated films.
The same company that in other times cultivated childhood terrors and the worst racist stereotypes without the slightest scruple and with immense benefits has now affiliated itself with multicultural beatery.
The past is a cavernous museum that receives fewer and fewer visitors, a great library where millions of books written in languages that almost no one takes the trouble to study or transmit are accumulated.
In a story, Borges speaks of the leader of an invading army who burns an entire library, fearing that in one of those books there may be an offensive word against his god.
In a more meticulous way, and also more efficiently, an entire police organization has now been established in the world dedicated to the purification of the past, to the search and, if necessary, elimination of everything that could be offensive, unpleasant, harmful, or so only annoying, for the hypersensitivities of the present.
It is a multiple and secret police, omnipresent and also invisible.
In some cases, technology grants him powers that old-school minions couldn't have dreamed of.
I have proof: the Past Police - I think the capital letters give it the importance it deserves - infiltrated my Kindle some time ago and caused significant modifications to several James Bond novels that I had saved on it, and that I had read partly for pure delight, partly to document, while I was writing a novel, about that extreme caricature masculinity that Ian Fleming portrayed, and that he probably helped invent: it was the masculinity of the spy movies of the sixties, and of tobacco advertisements , of cars and distilled alcohols, which were printed on a full page and in full color in the international weeklies of the time, in which women appeared as appendages and worshipers of those triumphant men, knights-errant in Mad Men suits
who
also fired a automatic pistol just as they lit a platinum lighter.
Ian Fleming was one of those brilliant and somewhat banal writers who know how to reveal the surface of his time, just as an advertisement or a fashion trend portrays it.
But it also has a sufficient degree of quality of style to suggest the ambivalence and irony of literature.
Irony and ambivalence are not values highly appreciated by the Police of the Past.
Without notifying me or asking my permission, one of these agents has taken it upon themselves to erase on my Kindle many of the racist or sexist or colonialist terms from the novels that I read years ago, I don't know if to protect my sensitivity, already very damaged, or to to avoid infecting me with the deplorable traits of James Bond's character, much more interesting in the novels than in the films inspired by them.
But it turns out that there is nothing in Bond that is not deplorable, and at the same time is not parodic, a recreation of the stereotype that is also a mockery of him.
Correcting his vocabulary is like digitally erasing the cigarettes and smoke that always surround Humphrey Bogart.
In every political police, efficiency and incompetence, the fearsome and the ridiculous, are mixed.
These days the Police of the Past, using one of its many covers, in this case the British Board of Film Classification, has found a crime where another police force endowed with less insight or resources would have only seen jubilant and sugary innocence, nothing less than in
Mary Poppins
, the flying governess, the eternally virginal Julie Andrews.
You can't trust anything anymore.
In that 1964 film, seemingly so cheerful, with its simple illustrated story colors, a lunatic character, a retired admiral who fires a cannon at the door of his house every afternoon, says the word “Hottentots” twice, once them addressing the children whose faces are blackened with soot.
In the administrative prose that is the universal language of this police, the Classification Office says that the film “includes a derogatory term originally used by white Europeans towards nomadic peoples of southern Africa” and therefore has “the potential to exposing children to discriminatory language or behavior that they may find disturbing and that they may repeat without realizing its offensive nature.”
Until now,
Mary Poppins
could be seen by anyone from the age of four.
Now the appropriate age is delayed to eight, and “
parental guidance
” is advised.
I have not the slightest nostalgia for the models of masculinity that prevailed in my adolescence, nor the slightest doubt about the brutality of colonial exploitation in Africa, or about the widespread and shameful acceptance of racism.
Precisely to exercise ourselves against the prejudices and abuses that many times no one sees is what we need to know the past without makeup: and look at it with our eyes and ears open, without fear of words, becoming aware that we now, in our present, we are also blind to injustices that will become evident with the passage of time, and perhaps we will deserve to be judged with the same harshness that we dedicate to those who came before: we will be asked to account for the state in which we will have left the world, and for the cruelty with which we have treated the most vulnerable human beings and animals.
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