Conservatism And Its Disappointments

In October of 2017 there zipped into our solar system, and then out of it, a tiny, luminous, apparently smooth, apparently tumbling-on-an-8.5-hour-schedule object. Our Sun’s gravity caused it to sling around, back into interstellar space— but our Sun’s light may also have propelled it. The latter might not have been the case if it were merely a comet or some other chunk of rock or ice or frozen hydrogen. The object may have been designed to fly as it did. The question may never be settled, but to judge from Avi Loeb’s book extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, if you’re an astronomer on that planet, it may be your ill luck to be interviewed by journalists on that planet. Dr. Loeb was asked by Sports Illustrated what would be involved if there were a soccer competition with aliens. He was also asked by CNN whether aliens have religion. I confess I’d flipped to the back of the book and found that one, before regaining patience and going back to wherever I was in my reading; until I finish, I won’t be able to say whether this was actually a good question well handled, fair speculation about a link between technological achievement and spiritual advancement. What did occur to me, in view of another book I was reading, was this: whether aliens have religion, what if we discover that they have politics?

More precisely, what if they have Argentina-grade politics? I submit that if this is found to be the case, everyone on Earth, possibly including Argentines themselves, will totally drop the subject of UFOs. If aliens are so self-absorbed, no outsider will want to learn anything about them. It just won’t matter how good their steak is.

Argentina, even more than the rest of Latin America, has that power to wave away onlookers, to make its intramural passions just too tiresome to analyze. Which is, I think, really a good thing. If you remain (as I do) interested in such places (or such planets), that should be your hobby, nothing more. Which brings me, at last, to my title theme. Still dipping into the life and times of Juan Perón, I learned that he did not marry Isabel right away. Perhaps understandably: if you meet a girl in or near a nightclub in Panama, you don’t want to rush into things. But by the time he and this very much younger lady got to Spain, there was perceived some local pressure to formalize their relationship. Folks in Madrid were quite conservative. They did not approve of cohabitation. It took some arranging with a bishop, because Perón had been excommunicated (and what if aliens did that?), but eventually a Catholic wedding was made possible, and the rest is history.

The biography I’m revisiting did not state exactly how those stuffy folks in the Spanish capital had made their displeasure known, or, for that matter, whether they suddenly became cheery once the knot was tied. But this interlude did remind me of another such clash with local custom: that of Anastasio Somoza and his girlfriend Dinorah Sampson. I’d read that after the guy fled from Nicaragua to Paraguay, he scandalized the latter’s capital by his unconcealed carryings-on with, again, someone obviously his junior. But unlike Perón, Somoza wasn’t a widower: he was still married!

And after his assassination, he would be buried, in Florida, in a mausoleum now shared with his lawful wife. His girlfriend seems to be still alive, none the worse for having to ID Somoza’s remains on that Asunción street. Maybe still inside the Mercedes that had been hit with a bazooka after being riddled with bullets. Ick.

Again I don’t know how the local quality had registered their disapproval of this man’s behavior. And again I just had to take an author’s word for it. (As for the assassins, they were from out of town, and if they had any quarrel with the ex-dictator’s arm candy, their getting shot by Paraguayan police put an end to that.)

This doesn’t happen – much – in the U.S. I did once read a book about Orlando Letelier, who in his own exile met a similarly violent end on a street in Washington, D.C., but I recall no grumping about his lifestyle. I cannot speak for the rest of Earth, but I think we Americans don’t inquire too closely into immigrants’ domestic arrangements, which in Letelier’s case seem blameless.

What we do inquire into is itself hard to figure, at least by me. Nicaragua was, believe it or not, once of urgent interest, and maybe even for a reason: it’s relatively close to the U.S. Argentina, and Paraguay and Chile and Spain, hardly. Which leads me back to my opening comments about visitors from outer space having their own politics. I do not expect us ever to meet the former or learn of the latter. I do, however, like to imagine that whatever space aliens’ preoccupations are, we will find them too incomprehensible or too silly to care about. We may marvel at the logo on the hulls of their ships – is it on their flag too? Does it have a military meaning? Is it racist? - and then discover it’s a diagram of a dance step. Or it’s a glyph, one of hundreds used by their accountants, translating as one or another degree of “chronically unbalanced budget.” Their very exploration of the cosmos may merely be a quest for currency they can’t print and therefore can’t hyperinflate.

And then we find out they have a very old political party called the Radical Union, which splintered decades ago yielding a Radical Intransigent Union. But I think we’ll be bored before any of that is ever determined. I think to the extent we ever do detect extraterrestrial politics, we’ll simply call their loudest version “liberal” and their quietest version “conservative.” And that will be close enough.