Fine, coarse and uncut: Frederik De Backer looks back on the week. “How long will the shyness last before being swallowed up by the arrogance of everyday life?”
Oh, how shy they were all of a sudden. And ashamed, dear children, so ashamed. They just didn’t fall on their knees for that cruel gentleman from the VRT. Forgiveness, forgiveness! Nobody knew about the pension scheme, Mr. Terzak, well, everyone knew about it, it had even been debated, but nobody knew what amounts were involved, even though they had been in the budget for eleven years in a row. Oh, we’re so sorry, Mr. Terzake!
My face didn’t know which face to pull first. Every day you see politicians beating themselves up loudly, in newspapers, on TV, on social media. See them right. They just barely hit each other at the slightest glimpse of a camera to be the first to stand in front of it, but this week it was a straw drawing. Bowed heads, skittish looks, stammering and stammering.
Comedy.
Who do they think they are? Actually, that sentence would have sufficed as a column. One hundred and twenty times in a row if necessary, so that I had also achieved the number of characters required of me. Because what more can be said about it? This piece is literally my third attempt. I had one in which I stupidly confessed to being at odds with myself, torn as I am by the outrage on the one hand and the imposter syndrome on the other that reside within me. After all, people with much more political knowledge write for this magazine, who know the world like the back of their hand, while at most I know it like the back of my hand. Who am I, simple peasant, to make big statements?
In another version, as I wrote recently, I repeated that we should not constantly pound our representatives, especially over silly symbol files like this, when just as much ignorance is displayed on much more important issues. And that it is precisely our bloodlust that drives them to populism, or rather to fighting only for its own supporters and not for the entire population. If I close my eyes for a moment, I see me typing it again in all my naivety: “Why else would someone with a germ of statesmanship still choose the profession?”
So for the pension, as it has been openly stated in the budget for eleven years. Isn’t anyone reading that thing? And if not, what are those tists doing there all day long for their high wages and their copious bonuses and all those other abundant perks? Are they uncomfortable and does reading therefore not go smoothly? Does the plush itch on their butts? Hundreds of thousands of people barely make ends meet, toiling with sweat dripping up and down their backs, and that clique is dozing off in the hemisphere for thousands of euros a month.
This is not a black day for politics, as I was one of those carrot pullers heard sobbing, this is a black day for goodwill, for credulity, for people who turn the other cheek over and over again to those bloodsuckers because they keep hoping that they will learn from their mistakes, like drug-addicted sons in a shit movie, even though both cheeks have long since been beaten black and blue and spat on and daubed with their idiotic slogans, neatly copied from the debate sheet. Well, where’s the debate token for this farce, gentlemen and ladies fools? How are we going to squeeze our way out of here? And how long will the diffidence last before being swallowed up by the arrogance of everyday life?
No, for politics it is a day like any other, as it always follows yesterday’s and precedes tomorrow’s, with the approval, year after year after another nine years, of parliament. Theater of trickery and deceit for an audience of actors. Farce and drama at the same time.
