Avian metaphors

On Thursday, just before the white smoke announcing the appointment of the new Pope appeared , a seagull landed on the Vatican roof and regurgitated a rat to feed its young. There was the seagull, enjoying those fifteen minutes of fame that, according to Warhol, everyone would have in the future. The video has gone viral, because ordinary things are much more interesting than extraordinary things and because it's a metaphor for the fact that life is everything that's happening outside the spectacle (no matter how hard we insist that life is just the spectacle). Prediction or not, thirty seconds after the regurgitation, when the white smoke appeared, the Vatican's streaming service was filled with comments saying " habemus ratam ."

I like birds. I think they understand the world better than we do. It 's because of that quantum "sixth sense" that allows them to escape storms before they happen .

In 2015, a bald eagle, a symbol of the United States, pecked Trump while he was taking a photo as a candidate for Time magazine's Man of the Year award. And there's also the anecdote about the rainbow lorikeet that pecked Angela Merkel as she was saying goodbye to her sixteen-year term. Or the one about the birds that defecated on Putin and Biden during their speeches. I love avian metaphors as a thermometer for measuring world tensions . When Pope Francis released peace doves in 2014 to call for an end to the violence and conflict that had just begun in Ukraine, one of them was attacked by a crow and the other by a seagull. Call me crazy, but I call all this cinema.

In the 1960s, during a campaign to control a plague of sparrows in China, Mao Zedong called for their mass elimination. The sparrow plague ended, but in its place came plagues of locusts, bedbugs, and cockroaches. An estimated 15 to 45 million people died from the famine it generated. Unfortunately, this isn't a metaphor, but what comes next is. We all know who killed our beloved bluebird. "The bird has been released," announced Elon Musk when he bought Twitter and transformed it into X. The plague of locusts, bedbugs, and cockroaches soon arrived and turned what had until then been a revolutionary tool for information and public opinion into a dumping ground. What can I say, if the metaphor speaks for itself: birds have always been the ones informing us.