2023-08-26 03:13:31
My son: since you are very young and you have been here recently, you still do not know that you have been born in a country of cyclical crises. It’s every two decades, that’s how the story works, that’s the fable; you will see it for the first time.
I was young when I began to notice repetition. I worked in an English institute and we would give the students some articles from Time Magazine or other foreign media to start didactic conversations: learning global vocabulary for a local experience. Words play a very important role, you have to know if they pre-exist the event or not, because then they synthesize experiences and distortingly freeze them on a vintage postcard. My students noticed with surprise that the words for something so local already existed in English, and in very strange ways: picketers, pans, and the list is familiar: hyperinflation, poverty, cacerolazos, piqueteros. The entire lexicon eventually led to looting: ransack, plunder, with infinite meanings.
Already in 1989, already in 2001, the press (especially the international one) looked at the phenomenon abroad and could see with more clarity and perspective what here every day obstructed us: the art of looting was organized for political purposes. But when it happens it seems that we have erased the previous version, like an old TDK cassette: to record a song you had to get rid of another. But since you don’t know, my son, what a TDK is or how looting works, I see myself in the loving need to protect you from fear with some tool that I don’t have.
It’s like those butchered cows alive on the side of the road in 2001: to each supposedly real event, your country adds symbolic capital, a staging. Does it seem to me or are these theatrical resources increasingly crude, as if forms were neglected enough? Today the looting is organized by WhatsApp groups and the looters are on motorcycles. Is not too much?
But be careful, my son: that does not mean that the reason for the looting is not intact. People go hungry, and if they are invited to spend a day, what difference does it make? With all their rights violated, there is no way that this anger does not fold at the baton of any orchestration that promises rapi-revenge.
Very soon, this week or the next, dear son, you will see the video of a Chinese man crying between gondolas. It is an infallible script. I understand that Duhalde has already started to reappear on TV, but now I don’t have the time and the breath to also explain who Duhalde was. We will watch the video together, I will hug you and we will wait. It is a December in August.
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