Insult Manifesto

Along with an aggressive foreign debt, political crisis and declining productivity, an additional melancholic issue marks the Ecuadorian experience: the gradual loss of an invective with overtones of creativity. Not so long ago, titans of vituperation walked these lands; sadly, those days are over. It would seem that today people only resort to using a handful of four-letter words to vent their fear, hatred, contempt, disgust, irritation, horror, anger, envy and rage. The weekly television and radio presidential national broadcast, along with a good part of the social media, have turned, after a promising start, into a series of dark testimonies that reek of banal obscenity. Before, insults were more elegant. People displayed an invective full of imagination and ingenuity that was, at times, imposing. This possibly occurred because back then, obscenity was the exception, not the rule, and there was no easy way out after letting fly the first insult.

The insults, jeers, boos and clowneries are not in themselves the problem. The problem consists of a civic culture that operates in only one direction and closes the doors to dialogue and exchange, even of words. Most disturbing of all is the response of those on the receiving end of the insults, who aspire to banish “intolerance” in favor of an aseptic political and verbal climate, an artificially neutral public arena, “free” of all conflict and controversy.

Thus, we find ourselves between the Scylla of a unidirectional ignominy, shielded by fear and force, and a Charybdis fearful of debate. A civic climate which, under these conditions, is not only afraid to respond, but rather aspires to impede all political opponents from choosing a confrontational approach. This situation has gradually become the norm in the educational process. Today, teaching (which can only be civic as well as technical) shuns every conceivable form of clash of ideas, methods or tactics, to the detriment of learning. In every popular public forum, educational authorities proclaim a civic protocol of evasion, of circumventing all forms of debate/conflict. Over two thousand years ago, in the Phaedrus, Plato pointed out the inconvenience of instruction without teachers, an education devoid of living interlocutors, disastrous, in his eyes, since it promotes a “false erudition” in lieu of true wisdom. For Plato, as well as for a long line of thinkers who follow him, civism, which requires, among other things, learning to dialogue and debate, consists of a face-to-face and indispensable exercise of citizenship, a process in which those involved tend to appraise the conflict, because conflict constitutes the mark of diversity and, at the same time, a privileged mechanism for learning to live in democracy.

In all this, language is the portal to that learning of the world, of life, of the struggle. Of all the accumulated knowledge of classical antiquity, there is only one area of knowledge that has not been disproved, altered, disqualified or eliminated: rhetoric, the art and the technique of persuasion; that fearsome device to which all responsible citizens must have access. At present, rhetoric is not only presented as an indifferent, outdated or inconsequential type of knowledge, but also as a reckless, irresponsible or abusive one.

We wish, through the publication of “el insultador montalvino” (the montalvino insulter) to draw attention to the need to respond to the powers that be with all the expressive resources intact; to the importance of linguistic creativity as a sign of civic health, and the importance of conflict for learning; to the need to learn about the great polemicists and devotees of the invective, in the history of Ecuadorian culture.

The “insultador montalvino” consists, then, of a game designed to make us think about the political and democratic dimensions of the creativity of fiery language. It aspires to be a contribution that allows readers to think about the conditions of contemporary public discourse and the need to reintroduce reasoned and creative polemic in our civic repertoire. To achieve this, Ecuadorian literature provides us with an inexhaustible source of inspiration and learning: Espejo, Montalvo, Mera, Solano, Marieta de Veintimilla, Manuel J. Calle, Palacio, G. H. Mata, Raúl Andrade, Velasco Ibarra, Alejandro Carrión and many others.

Finally, we believe in the need to think of the insult as a two-way street: a verbal behaviour willing to issue and receive acrimony and, in the process, as is the obligation of every politician, to learn not only to hurl insults, but also to receive them. Being a political actor implies having the maturity, integrity and courage to accept the dissension, discord and even the discourtesy of others, without relinquishing one’s right to respond, with pyrotechnics and knowledge of sources and through a cautioned language, when being denigrated. Thus, we would like to contribute to the analysis between politics, language and civism in XXI century Ecuador. Those who previously supplied the republic with invective, thoroughly amused themselves, when they sought to attack, condemn, criticize, belittle, spatter, denigrate, despise, insult, reprimand and ridicule, and they explored and expanded the language with gusto.

In this context, the presidency was and is frequently the subject of invective. Abraham Lincoln’s presidency is a good example. While the founder of the Republican Party was in office, he was called “inter multa alia,” an undesirable obscene clown; the apotheosis of the Great Hog; a cross between a crawling crane and an Andalusian donkey; a presidential Balaam; a threshold eunuch; a coarse fool; tavern illiterate; a presidential funambulist; a loud jargon-spouting lawyer; a cross between a nutmeg vender and a horse trader with a guard; the incarnation of a joke, and a low-level usurper. “It cannot be said that he is missing a screw,” mentioned the New York World, in August 1864 “but rather that all the machinery is broken, sprawled, rickety, ruined, suitable only to be thrown into the fire.”

Insults build and destroy, arm and disarm, mark and unmark its priests, and its words live on. For instance: the insults of Martin Luther, who, when referring to King Henry VIII writes: “He is a pig, an ass, the spawn of an adder, a dunghill, a basilisk, a lying buffoon, a mad fool with a frothy mouth, a king of lies, unfortunately for God, the King of England, that cursed and rotten worm.”

This machine then, goes to celebrate scorn, taunts, jeers, gags, rudeness, ridicule, teasing, acidity, acrimony, sourness, causticity, hardness, aggressiveness, curtness, brusqueness, surliness, discourtesy, contempt, inclemency, insolence, offensiveness, slandering, insults, vilification, blasphemy, bashings, provocation, execration, irreverence, curse, protest, repudiation, accusation, abuse, expletives, reprimands, affront and recrimination.