The Language of Politics

so this might not have a lot to do with linguistics, but it is a really entertaining and inspiring article. and radical clowning did come up briefly in class last week. enjoy...

Superman Saves Bogota
How A Big City Mayor Made A Mockery of Crime
by William Thomas 05-12-05

Preface - Total article 2,875 words, including illustrations and full references, available by signing up for Convergence Weekly.

When your city is on the verge of chaos, and all appears lost in an anarchic bedlam of random shootings, lawless drivers, killer smog and street kids turned desperados, the only chance left is to put in a call to Superman.

Deciding the situation was so hopeless, only a Super-Hombre could intervene, the rector of the National University did just that. Whipping off his professorial duds, 48-year-old mathematician and philosopher Antanas Mockus donned red and yellow tights and began calling himself, “Super Citizen”.

Forming the Visionario Party, Mockus called on cynical city residents to vote for him, and to “Arm yourselves with love.” More than six million residents were so desperate, fed up, or intrigued— they did.

Antanas Mockus was first elected mayor in 1995.Talk about a hot seat! What does a mayor do when drivers ignore traffic signs and signals, and pedestrians wade into traffic wherever they please? If your name is Antanas Mockus, the first thing you do is have 1,500 stars painted on the spots where pedestrians have been killed.

Then you hire 420 art and drama students as mimes to poke fun at reckless drivers and loco pedestrians.

It worked! A car would ignore a stop light, or belatedly stop on the “zebra stripes”, blocking a city crosswalk—and carumba!—a mime wearing white face would pop out of nowhere and mimic the driver’s bad behavior. When passersby stopped to boo and applaud, the mortified driver would usually put his brain in gear along with his car.

Without saying a word, Mockus’ mimes mocked acts of littering into near extinction. Jaywalkers running across the middle of a busy street would be shadowed by clowns mimicking their every move. Leading by exaggerated example, the dramatically dressed mimes also helped seniors and disabled citizens across busy intersections, until residents clued in and took over those good citizenship roles themselves.

”Knowledge empowers people,” Mockus liked to say. “If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change” “If people understood well, they probably would not act in the wrong way.”

Bogotáns laughed so hard, traffic fatalities dropped by more than half—from 1,300 deaths per year to about 600.

DON’T SHOOT
“ In a society where human life has lost value,” Mockus believes, “there cannot be another priority than re-establishing respect for life as the main right and duty of citizens.”

For the Christmas season 1995, Mockus publicized the high percentage of murders committed with guns in Bogotá: 73%. Under the new hope and motto, “That all guns rest in peace for this Christmas”—City Hall started a campaign of “voluntary disarmament.” Those who turned in weapons received flowers or food, and a certificate commending their act.

The voluntary disarmament program was repeated in 2003. As more than half of those who thought it better to have a gun for “protection” changed their minds, saturation media coverage saw the city’s homicide rate start to die—from 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003.

The 2,538 guns collected at City Hall were melted into thousands of spoons for poor children. Each utensil was inscribed: “I was a gun”.

TWISTED TIGERS AND A PUBLIC BATH
Who could ignore a man who celebrated his wedding in a circus tent surrounded by tigers? As María Isabel García reported, his wedding ring is a gold Möbius strip. As Mockus puts it, “Whenever I get involved in strong conflicts, I look at my finger and try to remember that in the end we are all on the same side.”

Saying he felt ashamed for abandoning his mayoral mandate to run for el presidentè in 1998, Mockus donned a dark suit and stood knee-deep in a city fountain as an indigenous leader dumped a bowl of water over his head. Mockus meant the cleansing ceremony to serve both as an apology to disillusioned supporters, and a protest against the forced baptism of Indians by the Catholic Church during their bloody Conquest.
Mockus won his second term by a landslide.

700,000 WOMEN’S NIGHT OUT
But women in Bogotá were almost as captive in their homes as their sisters in Baghdad. So the Super Citizen responded to the call by announcing a “Night for Women”. During these citywide events, Bogotá’s teaching mayor asked the city’s men to stay home that evening and reflect on women’s roles in their lives and society—in between taking care of their children, of course.

“Una noche de libertad en la ciudad de las mujeres,” proclaimed the press as 700,000 women—nearly a quarter of the city’s female residents—joyfully took to the streets on the first of three liberated nights Mockus dedicated to them.
Attending free open-air concerts, the women of Bogotá strolled thoroughfares temporarily converted into pedestrian zones. In the city’s southern barrios, Schapiro saw grandmothers and their granddaughters filling a park to hear a storyteller.

Freed from fear, hundreds of thousands of women also flocked to bars like the Kamikaze and Cafe Atlantico—reputed to be the best club in South America. Meanwhile, in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Cristobal, women taking back their streets in celebration stopped and applauded whenever they saw “a man staying at home, carrying a baby, or taking care of children,” Schapiro reported.

VOLUNTARY TAXES?
When city funds ran short, Mockus asked citizens to pay 10% extra in voluntary taxes. His critics stopped laughing when 63,000 people paid the optional taxes in 2002, the city collected more than three times the revenues it had garnered in 1990.”

HOW TO TAKE A SHOWER
When water ran low, Mockus reappeared on TV programs across the city—this time in the nude. As his constituents watched in bemused disbelief, their dripping mayor turned off the water in his shower, soaped himself vigorously—then turned to the camera and invited them to do the same. Today, water use in the capitol is 40% less than before the shortage.

PEDDLE POWER
What about pollution? A city of 832,000 vehicles, Bogotá is located in a stunning but often smog-shrouded setting higher than 6.000 feet in the Andés, When inversions trap poisoned air over the slums and skyscrapers, Colombia’s capital becomes nearly uninhabitable. Mockus designated “car-free days” to encourage the use of public transit and bicycles along more than 200 kilometers of new bike paths.

His transmilenio became an integrated mass transit system with exclusive lanes for 250 buses—99 of which be run on natural gas. The remaining diesel buses come with the latest EU environmental quality standards.

Mockus always insisted that he was an educator, not a leader. I like more egalitarian relationships. I especially like to orient people to learn.” A government promoting laughter and life, and dedicated to the welfare of its citizens helps too. After six years of Mockus’ practical pranks, Bogotá has been transformed on the street-level, writes one observer—after Mockus introduced a clean, modern bus system, expanded public parks, and built schools in the city’s poorest barrios.

Eat your rigged ballot boxes, Yankee gringos. As another American blogger wrote the tierramerica website in Colombia: “After visiting Bogotá twice, I am willing to trade Mockus for Bush AT ONCE!”