First I laughed, with that absurd laugh that the absurd provokes. Then I thought about how much easier it usually is to ride a simple speech, overbearing and based on a few unverifiable data that take it apart. And how much more seductive can they be? the robustness and elegance of simplicity that a verbiage that tries to explain what to our understanding is obvious, as obvious to us is the roundness of the Earth, although also in favor of that from time to time we have to make an effort to argue, not without laziness.
To refute a cheerful nonsense that takes between ten and twenty seconds to enunciate, sometimes three or four minutes of argumentation, historicization and contextualization are required, and the neo-fascist soon loses patience and begins to suspect that they are trying to sell him a mailbox. The complex makes the neo-fascist suspicious, but the world is complex and it is worth stopping for a moment to think, especially if it helps to minimize damage.
The author of those lines is my brother Eduardo, a musician and writer, who rehearsed that theory of the Milei phenomenon while he was driving his car with me as co-driver and I asked him to write it.
With remarkable synchronicity, I also received a message from my friend Uriel. “Letter P took out a couple of notes that will surely appear mentioned in some history book when the emergence of carapintada neomenemism is reviewed”, he told me, referring to the excellent articles in Guillermo Villarreal( Milei’s Mysterious Journey To The Tomb Of A Miraculous Rabbi In New York) y Ailin Bullentini ( With hugs and shouts of freedom, genocidal prisoners celebrated Milei’s triumph). I told him that perhaps we have the consolation prize of witnessing a break in history: the end of our country as we know it. Uriel humored me and reminded me of a genius from Tato Bores, hero of national political humor. in the documentary The mystery of Argentinathe argentinologist Helmut Strassein the midst of ruins from which he rescues portraits of Carlos Menem and branded milk containers Vicohe wonders: “Did Argentina really exist?”.
pande the cúnico
The revelation, by Bullentini, of the celebrations of the repressors housed in the VIP prison of the Campo de Mayo military detachment generated a cascade of expressions of astonishment on the social media accounts of this portal. It is not for less in a country in which, 40 years after the end of the dictatorship, the atrocities of state terrorism remain open wounds in the daily life of thousands of people: there are grandmothers looking for grandsons and granddaughters who are looking for their grandmothers or living fictional lives, sons and daughters of missing mothers and fathers… The past as a continuous present that continues to hurt.
The same thing happened with the note exequiel fleslerjournalist from the Entre Ríos de Letter Pabout the candidate who, “without intending to offend”, regrets the 40 years of democracy because “with soldiers we would be better off”a classic of the domestic fascist heritage that, perhaps because of its simplicity, as my brother reflected, it is difficult to dismantle with a similar handful of words.
In addition to being interesting to me, Eduardo’s theory reflects, it seemed to me, a state of mind that brings together a tight majority of the electorate that, in shock and trembling in disbelief, tries to explain what appears to him as inexplicable.
Perhaps it is a late exercise, delayed by faith in reason and triggered, now, by an icy bath of a reality that we thought was unlikely. We tend to ignore, let the nonsense pass. Apart from the work involved in refuting it, it seems like an idle task, aimed at preventing only probable scenarios in sci-fi dystopias. Worrying about those absurd sentences matches us with those who enunciate them and that hurts our intellectual egos or puts us in the position of admitting disturbing conditions of possibility.
Marcelo Wallsa brilliant analyst and sensitive man, has been preaching in the desert since 2020: he is the author of a saga of notes on what he called the rise of rage what Letter P collected in the evening of the hectic Sunday of the STEP. I told them, you could hit your chest. On the other hand, in these hours, in which he calls for an in-depth debate so that this portal is up to the editorial challenge it faces, he also has reproaches for himself: it mortifies him to have fallen short.
Another chance
If the majority of the “ordinary citizen” group did not see it coming, politics did less, supposedly busy reading the signs of the society it claims to represent. Otherwise, it is not understood that the two alliances that led the fleeting era of bicoalitionism in the country have triggered the chance to reorganize the political system that exploded in 2001 by force of self-destructive internal dynamics, sustained behind the back of a community that hatched the egg of the poisonous snake in the heat of the terrible governments of Cambiemos and the Frente de Todos. Last Sunday, politics lost the referendum.
Fortunately, the electoral process offers revenge and good. Primary elections are usually clues to freethinking essays and ideological purisms that are regretted the next day. To the adjusted majority that processes as best it can the blow of the far-right bump he has nothing left over: it is lawful and prudent, for the purposes of the reconversion of romanticism into pragmatism in the transition to the general elections on October 22, to add a few of the 17 percentage points that it treasures Patricia Bullrich at 30 Milei.
The vote, now, should be useful, in self-defense. It is still possible to prevent Tato from becoming a prophet.
