In Praise of Posatura: When Scum Becomes a Brand

If you ask a wine producer what is scum, will look at you with a mixture of annoyance and resignation. It's that slimy, opaque and decidedly unpleasant deposit that accumulates at the bottom of the barrel after sedimentation. Something that must be filtered, discarded, and quickly forgotten so as not to ruin the flavor of the final product. Figuratively speaking, the dictionary is no more lenient: it defines lees as most despicable and abject part of a company or group of people.

Yet, the magic of contemporary communication It lies precisely in the ability to take the bottom of the barrel and transform it into a luxurious object of worship. Not long ago, during the founding assembly of a new political movement, a local leader harangued the crowd, proudly exclaiming that he and his followers represented “the waste and the scum“, saying they were very proud to embody the “children of no one”.

A wonderful logical and semantic short circuit. One wonders: since when has being openly definable as "despicable" or "leftover" people become a aggregating factor, a medal of valor to pin on your chest with proud arrogance?

Waste Packaging: The Aesthetics of the Background

We live in the era of market positioning, and politics has now assimilated the rules of industry influencer. If the biographical reality of contemporary leaders – often characterized by guaranteed careers, high institutional ranks and positions of absolute privilege – does not spontaneously offer the epic of the truly excluded, the consensus industry must take action by manufacturing the appropriate packaging. If you can't sell a solid and marketable vision of the future, sell the the underdog's murky charm.

Claiming the label of “scum” is a stroke of genius of subversive marketing. It works as a definitive shield against any rational criticism: if you accuse a movement of proposing retrograde ideas or questionable conduct, the response will not be an argument, but a proud and theatrical “Yes, we are the scum, so what?”. The intellectual or moral limitation is not corrected, it is institutionalized, packaged and transformed into a a surefire successful identity brand.

The Supreme Short Circuit: Mirroring Yourself in the Gap

But it is by digging beneath this rhetorical pose that the most delicious and perverse paradox. The narrative of these movements is almost always based on the hunt for intruders, on the defense of borders, on the rigid categorization of those who have the right to citizenship and those who instead deserve a hasty dismissal. “re-emigration”. There's always an "other" to point out as a foreign, degrading, parasitic element. Someone who tarnishes the nation's ideal purity.

And here the mechanism jams in a unprecedented intellectual own goal. At the very moment in which the leader claims for himself and his people the status of "scum", he puts himself exactly on a par with those he would like to expel. If you are the sediment at the bottom, the waste, the biological waste of the barrel, you can no longer pretend to be the good wine.

Without realizing it, the moralizer sees himself reflected in his own enemy. Both, in the taxonomy of contempt, occupy the same level: that of unwelcome existences. The difference is that the former suffer this label as a social drama; the latter they wear like an expensive perfume to collect votes on talk shows.

The Sommelier's Awakening

Perhaps, after all, we should simply take these statements at face value. If a leader and his followers choose to define themselves as the dregs of society, who are we to contradict them? It would be rude, as well as presumptuous, to deny them an identity so painstakingly asserted from the stage.

However, as any good sommelier knows, when you decide to drink a wine without decanting it, deliberately ignoring the sediment at the bottom, the side effect is mathematical: a decidedly bitter aftertaste and a terrible headache the next morning. It remains to be seen how long the country will tolerate this collective binge of posatura, stubbornly passed off as the nectar of the gods.