Blair no aquário

Por que é que os peixinhos dourados não morrem de tédio nos seus aquários? Porque, carecendo de memória, se deliciam com a excitante novidade que esse previsível ambiente a cada momento lhes proporciona.

David Marquand acredita que, na sociedade sem sentido histórico em que vivemos, a memória zero tende a afectar toda a gente, e chama "presentismo" a essa patologia da pós-modernidade. Na opinião dele, desenvolvida num notável artigo incluído no último número da New Statesman, é também desse mal que padece Tony Blair:

Blair's fatal flaw was not just that he knew no history. It was that he had no sense of history, that he was constitutionally incapable of thinking historically. He was a sucker for novelty, particularly when it was wrapped up in pompous sociologese. His fascination with fashionable glitz, his crass talk of a "New Britain" and a "Young Country" and his disdain for the wisdom of experts who had learned the lessons of the past better than he had were all part of the same deadly syndrome. No one with a sense of history could possibly have thought that 9/11 marked a historic turning point, that Saddam Hussein posed an unprecedented threat to the world, or that Iraq, of all places, could be transformed, at the point of a gun, into a beacon of western-style democracy. But, by a terrible irony, the presentism that brought Blair to his doom had been new Labour's passport to power. Not for the first time in political history, the road to hell mimicked an earlier road to heaven.

"Sucker for novelty": bela expressão! Há tanto disso por aí.