Undoubtedly, for many football lovers the return of the Copa América will have meant the feeling that, in a world marked by strangeness and uncertainty imposed by the pandemic, something returns to its place. Today life is a more or less declared struggle to recover or reconvert those things that until recently we took for granted and that the irruption of the virus put on hold, from work to the carelessness with which we greeted our friends. So getting the ball rolling again amid the necessary protocols is good news. What is disheartening is that, along with the ball, banality, rude nationalism and manipulation devices also roll again. It offers a sport as popular as soccer. It is not the game that is the problem, but what is around it.
Today, when turning on the TV, there is no way to avoid those noisy advertisements that appeal to the national team’s jersey to feed a very Argentine epidermal jingoism. It is, if you will, a way of confirming that we can only feel united by the anabolic of an exacerbated emotion that depends on the antinomy us-them and that reaches stratospheric peaks when the triumph confirms us in the deceptive idea that we are superior. Of course, this emotion is fostered by discourses that pursue a subaltern goal and require manipulation to achieve their ends.
The saddest scene of this phenomenon was carried out by deputy Carlos Heller on Tuesday, when in the middle of the session he interrupted the presentation of another legislator with the idea of remembering with collective applause the second goal that Diego Maradona scored against the English in the World Cup. 1986. He wanted to join the campaign promoted by the AFA so that at 16:09 the country shouted the goal when it was exactly 35 years after that conquest. The fact is sad not because of Heller’s frivolity, owner of a particular perception of the “general feeling” that in his words he tried to interpret, but because he reflects in a small gesture the attitude of the government of which he is a part.
Judging by what we see on a daily basis, those who call themselves interpreters of popular sentiment are very far from that sentiment. More: mismanagement is explained because they are ruling for the benefit of their own interests, with their own agenda, with their backs to the people and reality.
“Heller’s frivolity in asking the idol for applause in the middle of the session reflects the attitude of the government of which he is a member. They are, in truth, far from popular sentiment.”
With the pandemic exceeding the barrier of 90,000 deaths, what is expected of a legislator in full session is the strenuous search for effective policies to alleviate the suffering that the virus is causing in society. However, the priority is the celebration of Maradona’s goal. A walk through the streets of the suburbs allows us to verify with our own eyes the increase in poverty and indigence reflected in the statistics. It seems that there are two countries increasingly distant from each other, and that one of them enjoys its privileges at the expense of the sufferings and deprivations of the other. The image of the former Minister of Health sharing a glass of wine without a mask on a Madrid street while the tragic consequences of his poor management are felt here – to say the least – also supports this perception.
In this alienated drift, the invocation of Maradona, as we saw last year in the unscrupulous collective wake convened by the Government, is indeed the appeal of the ruling party to the bubble of unbridled passion, a resource of the first order for populism that encourages Cristina Kirchner. Artfully manipulated, that irrational fervor that incubates fanatics blurs the evidence of reality and allows an irreducible antinomy to be installed, of course, between “us” and “them”, between good and bad. What worries and occupies the Government today in the first place are the electoral returns of this polarization strategy inherent to its power.
Passion and reason are not opposed. Rather, they are inseparable. I’m not saying it. The French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin said so, on the same day as Heller’s paper, in a wonderful interview with François Busnel in The Great Bookstore, great French TV program. Morin, about to turn 100 and with a shuddering lucidity, said that he had reached by experience a kind of maxim: that reason controls passion, and passion feeds reason. In that interview capable of reconciling you with life, Morin also said that in these days of “hypertrophy of the self and degradation of solidarity” every great change implies a return to the sources; more precisely, the sources of humanism and culture. In times when machines are relegating direct human relationships and nationalisms encourage xenophobia, Busnel asked him about ethnic conflicts in France. Morin pointed out that the essential quality of the French identity is that it harbors many others. He spoke of unity in diversity. An idea that in this dramatic present, and already back in these pampas, could be of benefit to the opposition
