These Are My Principles; If You Don’t Like Them… I Have Others

When parliamentary arithmetic forces principles into political contortions.

THESE ARE MY PRINCIPLES;
IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… I HAVE OTHERS (G. Marx)
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

Self-help manuals say that entering politics is like volunteering to cleanse souls, except that instead of a hose they hand you a flamethrower and throw you headfirst into an Olympic-sized pool of radioactive mud.
The theory is beautiful: you arrive with spotless boots, your head held high and a handbook of republican ethics printed on rice paper.
But the reality is more like an episode of “The Walking Dead” with five-a-side football pitches: the moment you brush against the doors of Parliament, the laws of physics bend, the air thickens and the only objective becomes seeing who can steal the last finger sandwich before the brawl begins.
Because mud is not merely dirt; it is a typical state of that matter.
It is that magical place where ideals melt like cream ice cream under the blazing sun, and where ideological consistency lasts exactly as long as a streaming contract with a confidentiality clause.
But the true summit of contemporary art —the kind that would bring tears of emotion to Groucho Marx himself, the brilliant philosopher of inconsistency with the illustrious surname who bequeathed us the line “These are my principles; if you don’t like them… I have others”— is reached when high politics intersects with the Olympics of contortionism and mass escape, releasing that unmistakable and dense smell of sulfur.
Consider the clinical picture: on one side, we have a political sector whose backbone is so straight and rigid that it seems welded together with nuclear-submarine titanium.
Its leaders grew up drinking freshly milked milk to the rhythm of military marches, paying daily homage to military order, polished boots and a visceral, eternal and non-negotiable hatred of anything smelling of Tupamaro, urban guerrilla warfare or Marxist campfires —the other Marx, of course, not the comedian.
Their survival manual promised that they would never, under any circumstances, cross the street hand in hand with the sworn enemies of civilization.
Until, of course, the day of the General Assembly and the Cardama case arrived.
The electronic board showed a diabolical tie.
The struggle in the mud threatened to end “all square,” and the arithmetic of power —that capricious goddess of parliamentary vote-counting— demanded a Faustian pact.
The temporary occupant of the chair desperately needed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire and avoid embarrassment, but his own people were not enough; he needed outside votes to light the oven.
So what does the champion of military order, the uncompromising guardian of Western and Christian morality, do?
Does he stand firm with the republic’s lightsaber, stare directly into the eyes of the former guerrillas who were the enemies of his childhood and shout a “Never!” loud enough to shake the stained-glass windows of the Legislative Palace?
Please. What a lack of imagination!
Faced with the supreme terror of having to press the little green button alongside the lifelong arch-enemy —and risk setting fire to the patriotic holy card in his pocket— the heroes unleashed their hidden superpower: the technique of voluntary abduction.
Two legislators, possessed by a sudden and relentless cosmic need for the urinal, or perhaps by an urgent need to retrieve the car they had badly parked in Purgatory, decided to vote with their feet.
They did not cross the aisle shouting, nor did they betray anyone openly; they simply evaporated from the chamber with the skill of a midnight demon.
Poof. They disappeared. They vanished into thin air, leaving behind a thick trail of sulfur and scorched principles.
And of course, with their graceful escape, they left the chamber with exactly the right number for the bloc of former guerrillas and their host of last-minute indoctrinated followers.
Receiving praise from those whom their own political sector had insulted with quasi-obscene epithets in every language, dialect and sign language known to humankind —and allowing, coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the vote to be won by sending the Disco through.
A masterpiece of infernal alchemy!
They handed victory to their intimate enemy, rescued the side they had branded corrupt ad nauseam, and then went home smelling of sulfur but with consciences as light as a punctured inflatable mattress, saying with an angelic smile: “Us? Vote with them? You must be crazy! We just happened to go to the bathroom at that exact moment.”
It is an act worthy of a hypocritical parliamentary witches’ sabbath.
Turning one’s coat without anesthesia is already old-fashioned; there are so many flip-floppers hating their other leaders. Today’s fashion is to disappear into thin air like a Mephistophelian hologram so that the neighbour carries the blame, while the atmosphere remains filled with that unmistakable stench hypocrisy.
In the end, deep in the swamp, the extremes do not merely meet: they sign a contract with the devil, divide up the compromised spoils, and go off to have coffee together.
Demonstrating that the only homeland these fledgling “martyrs” are truly willing to kill for is securing themselves a seat tomorrow, even if it means licking old slippers and split toenails.

Political consistency
Parliamentary arithmetic
Principles and power

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