The Triumph of the Mediocre

The Triumph of the Mediocre / Regina Coyula
Regina Coyula, Translator: Unstated

By email, this second and efficient manner that we Cubans have a
receiving information, I have received a brief text that is attributed
to various authors, but that jumps into the ring anonymously.

The triumph of the mediocre is the title and it refers to the situation
in Spain. Removing some paragraph or some local reference it fits us
perfectly. I will be returning to an old critique, but I don't get too
excited by what I see all around me. The bad taste and the vulgarity are
not only in the lyrics of danceable music: the patterns of dress, the
design (or the absence of it) that proliferates in the environment,
social behavior, the deterioration of services, the bad functioning of
education and health, the one time workhorses of the battle, the
grayness of politics and politicians; the list where everyone who fills
it, has something to do with the fact that mediocrity wins.

I don't have the cure. There are no magic potions. But in our case, the
enclosure in which we live and the exodus that has divided us must be
taken into account. A Pyrrhic victory.

The Triumph of the Mediocre

Perhaps the time has come to accept that our crisis goes beyond the
economy, beyond this or that politician, the greed of the bankers or the
risk premium. To assume that our problems will not be changed by one
party or another, by another battery of emergency measures, or a general
strike. To recognize that the principal problem of Spain is not Greece,
the euro, nor Mrs. Merkel. To admit, to try to correct, that we have
become a mediocre country.

No country comes to such a condition overnight. Nor in three or four
years. It is the result of the chain that starts in school and ends at
the establishment. We have created a culture in which the mediocre are
the most popular students in high school, the first to be elected to
office, those who have the most to say in the media and the ones we vote
for in elections without caring what they do. Because they are us. We
are so accustomed to our mediocrity that we have ended up accepting it
is a natural state of things. Its exceptions, almost always reduced to
sports, serve us to deny the evidence.

Mediocre is a country where its inhabitants spend on average 134 minutes
a day in front of the television that shows principally garbage.
Mediocre is a country that in every democracy has not had a president
that speaks English or had the least knowledge about international
politics. Mediocre is the only country in the world that, in its rancid
sectarianism, has managed to divide even the associations of victims of
terrorism. Mediocre is a country that doesn't have a single university
among the 150 best in the world and forces its best researchers into
exile to survive.

Mediocre is a country with a quarter of its population unemployed yet it
finds the greatest motives for outrage when the puppets of a neighboring
country make jokes about its athletes. Mediocre is a country where the
brilliance of another provokes suspicion, creativity is marginalized —
if not stolen with impunity — and independence is punished. The country
that has made mediocrity the great national aspiration, pursued without
complexes by its thousands of young people who look to occupy the next
place in the Big Brother contest, by politicians who insult without
coming up with an idea, by bosses who surround themselves with the
mediocre to hide their own mediocrity and by students who ridicule a
classmate for his hard work.

Mediocre is a country that has fostered the celebration of the triumph
of the mediocre, cornered excellence until it is left with only two
options: to leave the country or to allow oneself to be swallowed up in
the gray sea of mediocrity.

October 5 2012

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