Heart of the Art

I was fortunate enough to travel through Bolivia in the early 90s. The capital, La Paz, sits in a canyon at just short of 4000m of altitude. This makes it a breathless place. It also makes the main road through the centre of the city a key thoroughfare. When on an almost daily basis it was blockaded by a group of striking workers, traffic and pedestrians could only avoid it through climbing the steep side streets. Needless to say chaos and gridlock was a regular occurrence.

One week we trekked high into the Sierra Nevada. At the end of our trek we descended into a remote mining village at the head of a hanging valley. Tired of pitching the tent we searched for a floor to sleep on and were directed to a café, the grandly named ‘Sheraton Obrero’ (Worker’s Sheraton). Here, once food and beer were served for the night we could sleep on the floor.

We soon became the centre of attraction and over ‘huevos rancheros’ and a cold beer the talk turned to politics. One old miner told me how lucky we were in England to have such great leaders. I thanked him and enquired as to of whom he was thinking. ‘Reagan! Hitler! Thatcher!’ came the emphatic response.

I assured him we could only take the credit for one of those and that we had just deposed Thatcher. He looked at me as if we were mad. How could anyone get rid of a global superstar leader who was right up there with Reagan and Hitler? Surely we had replaced her with a very powerful man?

Spanish was neither of our preferred languages so I struggled to find a way of explaining John Major to him in a way that might make sense. My eye caught upon a word in the menu, ‘verduras’ (vegetables) and no doubt prompted by the wickedly funny Spitting Image parody of Thatcher in the restaurant with the Cabinet, I described him as ‘una verdura gris’ (a grey vegetable).

This brought howls of shocked and incredulous laughter. Look what the crazy Brits have done now, replaced the Thatcher with a vegetable. I spent the rest of the evening trying to explain quite how British democracy and the Conservative Party really worked. I don’t think I was successful.

Much later I was reminded of Bion and his work on psychodynamics and dependency groups. The dependency group is all about being saved by a great and omnipotent leader. Inevitably the leader fails because nobody can live up to this expectation. Then they are cast aside.

I found a lot that linked us with the Bolivians.