The 100 of The Times

One by one, precisely in a week in which I find myself entangled in feelings of inadequacy, I have looked at the photographs and little descriptions of the 100 most-influential of 2011 according to The Times magazine. With only a few exceptions, the list is a collection of obscenely rich people; that is, a list of capital-ist, most of them Americans. And thus, I come to think that after too much trouble, too many gruesome experiments of social engineering and a great deal of failed utopias, influence is just a one-variable dependent parameter of money. The seasoning has got its own momentum of fashion (oriental and Arabic trends plus medical health and human-tragedy humanitarianism), but the roasting remains as our grandmas used to serve it.

In addition, this is the list for 2011, a quite ephemeral crown of dust in the wind. Also, I don't understand the claims of some about the expansion of democracy or the transition to the real democracy by means of facebook, twiter or Internet as a whole. Indeed, it looks to me only as the spread of plutocracy. The heroes of the anonymous, you and me, remain unimportant, albeit fighting all through their daily, unique lives.

As far as I can see -as today, the sunny afternoon of the Holy Saturday- the most influential man of all the times has been Jesus, the Christ. He got nothing, a very unimportant person in his time, a sole local pimple to Roman authorities, someone who was born poor and lived and died poor and abandoned in a gutter of the Empire and, who, still, had a message to convey: the Kingdom will be built on the disposed stones, i.e., you and me, and many others a thousand times more disposed of.

Out of the list of The Times, checked out in 5 minutes, only this lady (below) has been influential to me, I mean, to a certain part of my anatomy. Perhaps, perhaps, one form of tragedy in our world is the substitution of influential people by mediatic, ephemeral animals, money makers. And this is a too cruel form of self-mutilation, if you think about that, because what is it to remain? What or Who is there to offer us some relieve from the Emptiness and Dictatorship of the Instant? Will it be true in the end that we are no more than tiny pieces of conscience in a vast, infinite, careless Universe?

                                          Blake Lively, a gossip girl.

(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT)