What did the anonymous spy tell his audience who came to listen to him speak on an unrelated topic?: “I’m a spy”. Now, why on earth would one tell an audience one was a spy, when that is precisely the case, and presumably trying to maintain ones anonymity? Exactly because an audience would not expect a spy to admit one was a spy, and so be fooled by the admission, or at least not register the game at hand at all.
What would you do if you were an Argentine Minister of Economy when you were in the government palace in Buenos Aires, protestors outside wanted to tear your head off for screwing things right up, and you wanted to get out?
A supreme case of such a comedy occurred in December 2001 in Buenos Aires, when Argentinians took to the streets to protest against the current government, and especially against Domingo Cavallo, the Minister of Economy. When the crowd gathered around Cavallo’s building, threatening to storm it, he escaped wearing a mask of himself (sold in disguise shops so that people could mock him by wearing his mask). It thus seems that at least Cavallo did learn something from the widely spread Lacanian (ref: Jacques Lacan, French psychoanalyst and student of Freud) movement in Argentina—the fact that a thing is its own best mask.
This was at a period when Argentine politicians could not even walk around town or be seen in public at all, let alone be seen to buy expensive items from expensive places. The period came to be known as the cooking pot revolution (so called because of the banging of pots in the centre of town by youths and workers dressed in masks).It was in protest at destructive privatisation measures of almost all government owned assets, linking the Argentine peso with the US dollar, lowering import tariffs, and abolishing restrictions on capital flows.
The former president Carlos Menem avoided the capital city altogether, the city mayor Anibal Ibarra shaved off his beard to avoid recognition while Cavallo took to wearing a mask of himself.
Like the spy announcing to a laughing audience that he is a spy, Cavallo took to wearing a mask of his own face (like many other protesters against him) in order to conceal who he really was.
Big Brother, recently, has also learnt that the thing is its own best mask, with the contestant who dressed as a mole, while simultaneously trying to convince other housemates that he wasn’t a mole. And he succeeded. Instead the other housemates voted Yvette, the medical student, who now thinks everyone hates her.
Few of us thought we would see the day when a protest movement in Latin America could be so well imitated, by such popular culture.