If you thought the coronavirus pandemic caused anxiety, try watching the daily COVID Variety Show of Colombia’s President Ivan Duque.
I tried, but I was beginning to have panic attacks after five minutes of what is arguably the most cringeworthy propaganda show ever.
I tried it again, this time with six milligrams of clonazepam in my system, and still couldn’t prevent extremely high levels of despair.
The only part that was funny — and only because I was on drugs — was when Duque proposed we use cardboard cutout cartoon figures to indicate to others their social distancing behavior is in order.
This is not normal
Any sober person would interpret Duque’s idea as a president gone insane or tripping on psychedelic drugs considerably stronger than benzos.
In fact, one has to be in a comatose state to tolerate an hour of Duque’s pathetic attempt to confuse the public that he is not single-handedly driving a country of 50 million people into the ground.
I wasn’t that far out, so I gave up watching and read the transcript, which also felt like torture as it made zero sense.
The excess of meaningless statistics, the constant contradictions and the president’s evident cluelessness of what he’s supposed to do caused high levels of despair.
Duque’s attempts to compensate his utter ineptitude with propaganda used to be hilarious, but that was before our lives were on the line.
Twitter is so much easier
The president’s latest and most epic public embarrassment is the work of his propaganda chief, Hassan Nassar, a right-wing pundit.
Nassar was an outstanding influencer on Twitter and hired earlier this year to improve the public image of “Porky.”
Who could have known that formulating logical sentences of more than 10 words that include terms like “contagion” or “quarantine” was above the pundit’s head.
Additional efforts to introduce double-speak to make the president’s perpetual failures sound like achievements do not just confuse the public, they confuse the president himself.
The consequence is an hour of incomprehensible gibberish, void of any logic and uttered by a visibly confused dynasty politician that’s almost definitely harmful for public mental health.
The combination of a deadly pandemic and Duque’s embarrassing ineptitude may kill us, but at least we’d die laughing.
Anything is more humane than being subjected to this Clockwork Orange-like torture for an extended period of time.