The image of a lettuce with a wig and Mrs. Potato eyes lit up the facade of the Palace of Westminster in London on Thursday night. Few headlines more bizarre than this can be found in the political chronicle, but the fact is that life has long since stopped imitating fiction simply because reality has gotten out of hand. If Winston Churchill raised his head, he would find a United Kingdom outside the EU, Elizabeth II’s son as King and the Conservative Party turned into a collective laughingstock. And lettuce as the best summary of what politics is like in the post-Brexit United Kingdom.
We live in times when the legendary Waldo from ‘Black Mirror’ seems vintage to us. Years of trivialization of public and political discourse (the victory of irrationality that Al Gore warned about at the turn of the century) together with social networks and the loss of prominence of the traditional media system (what is cause and consequence is ultimately irrelevant, they are phenomena that are feed each other) has opened the door to crude populism, that each country adopts its own face, or more than one: Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Silvio Berlusconi… There are many (too many) examples of politicians-buffoons who not only lie, but also insult intelligence, humiliate reason and trust their fate to magical thinking and the self-confidence of unapologetic ignorance. Of course, show, they give a lot.
Liz Truss, the shortest Prime Minister in the history of the United Kingdom, politics defeated by a lettuce with a wig, It is one of the first to pay a high price for a style of doing politics (without complexes, they call it in different places) of which it is far from being the only representative. Truss is not the only one who governs in a mindless way (increases spending and lowers taxes); not the only one that tortures and twists the truth; nor the first to star in Groucho-style Marxist twists: 180 degrees, change of direction, if you don’t like my principles, I have others). Yes, it is one of the first to pay for it. Perhaps because certain elites in the UK have seen the ears of the wolf after feeding it for decades, or perhaps because the caliber of the disaster of those of not creérsleo.
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Perhaps without knowing it and possibly without even intending it, the ‘Daily Star’ has starred in a first-rate exercise in journalistic satire. ‘New narratives’ is one of the favorite mantras in journalism today. We journalists are looking for new ways to capture our work, since we are convinced that between social networks and messaging services, between TikTok, memes and tweets, the classic ways of presenting the news (the inverted pyramid, the news bulletins, the chronicle, the reports) are old artifacts, out of fashion, generationally condemned to obsolescence by generations that already see the 30 accustomed to short clicks, to the texts that are counted in characters and not in words and to the videos with filters. The ‘Daily Star’ lettuce is an exercise in new narratives that follows the British humorous tradition, a surreal touch with echoes of Monty Python and a scathing critique of power. It encapsulated in a still image on Youtube the unreason of British politics, the absurdity in which the country has plunged, the emptiness of a public discourse in which staying in power is the only reason for being of the different actors. In addition, the parody of the lettuce has been a movement to the totality to the banalization of public discourse (of which the ‘Daily Star’ is not innocent) that has brought the United Kingdom to the well in which it is: as the Waldo of ‘Black Mirror,’ if the Tories called an election tomorrow and put lettuce up for Downing Street, they would still win. After all, Boris swept through and Brexit was done. Run, Mrs. Lettuce, run, what’s the worst that can happen? What does the country add to the chaos?
The UK has sent us a message, yet another, to whoever wants to listen: who sows populism, demagoguery, sectarianism and trivialization, harvests lettuce.