I may be wrong and pessimistic, but I’m starting to think our society has come to a point where even politics are treated like products to be marketed. It seems today that ads and strategies make a bigger impact than issues and people.Is democracy real? The many different types of democracy (constitutional, socialist, non-governmental, direct, representative, anarchist, etc.) are different ideological flavors for the expired notion that “the people” choose and influence the actions of a government.Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority. Or the democracy we think we live in is the dictatorship of an oligarchy.I would borrow the humorous definition of a Brazilian writer, Millor Fernandes, in his “Dictionary for Chaotic Definitions” (my translation): “Dictatorship is when you tell me what to do; democracy is when I tell you what to do.”From another point of view, I would say we are living in a democracy as long as we continue buying — along with the goods we (don’t) need to keep our fancy lives running — the sense that we have some importance in the decisions that are made for the future.Our democratic society professes to be working by morality, when in reality it works by the manipulation of the law, and the marketing of influences. We like to think we hold our politicians morally accountable, but we only see the white-washed images of those politicians their consultants allow. Politicians that run on personal morals consult with prostitutes. Politicians that fight gay rights get caught looking for gay sex.But we apparently still like to fake the facts and play the game of hypocrisy.Now as never before, governments and political figures market their demagogue speeches as the panacea for a crazy and collapsing world, and we unconsciously  support the play of power.There’s this amazingly hypocritical propaganda in Brazil that says we are exercising our citizenship when we vote. And voting is mandatory in Brazil. A few of the Sundays during the election year we go to public voting houses to fabricate our own tragedy.But there — as here — winning an election is a matter of who has more money to throw a bigger campaign to better distract the people’s attention from the truth: We are not living our own lives freely as we should.Now you must be thinking I’m just a revolting young columnist. But I’m not saying that there isn’t such thing as a democracy. There is democracy in a community that gathers to stand up for its priorities and rights.But I’m afraid that simple principle has long been drowned out by the interests and mandates of an oligarchy that controls wealth, prestige and welfare — and the way we look at them.And I am not talking in terms of left and right. The left-right political duality has no use besides combusting weak and false debates between stupid radio and television personalities.The final, most outrageous thing about the “democracy” I’m talking about is that it’s expansionist. Well, what could be less democratic than war? This country is in Iraq trying to spread “democracy,” but the people there are dying daily and suffering always.How could militarism and democracy relate? Someone help me. I can’t understand that.It’s time we wake up from the nightmares of the 20th century and start recognizing that the political and economic process is being decided every day by people that resemble anything but the people they are supposedly representing. And “democracy” is as arbitrary as a disguised dictatorship if we don’t try to stop it. Marcelo Vieira is 32 year-old  jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_mvieira.
 
 
 
—-Contact Marcel Vieira at [email protected]