One is well acquainted with those intimate, highly flammable moments of fiery and passionate ardor, also called Sunday lunches. Sometimes at those family after-dinner discussions, virulent, slippery discussions break out. The conversation gets rowdy, gets out of hand, and suddenly, in the middle of an exalted sentence, a sudden certainty visits you: you have begun to exaggerate your indignation, what you say is not what you think, you distort your own ideas. The obsession to accommodate reality to the narrowness of each one of our interests is called “Procrustean syndrome”. A giant “procrustean” came out of the bowels of the excellent English novelist and essayist Martín Amis when he declared, a few years ago, to the tabloid newspaper The Sun: “Without football and with his addiction, Maradona would have lived off crime and subsidies.”
The stereotype of the class slacker who skips working and gets a subsidy has clear media and political precedents in our country. Picking up Amis’s phrase, one wonders how many Argentines today think the same. Undoubtedly, for a large part of Argentine society, the Maradona family represents the adjusted profile of a clan that would have lived off crime and subsidies, protected by a mother “welfare queen”, thus baptized by the Anglo-Saxon media to the “queens of the subsidy”. “, women dedicated to cheating the system and giving birth to one child after another to accumulate state subsidies. That lazy lower class, so given to sucking and “spitting” the motherland’s teat.
In May of this year, the writer Martín Amis died. It is interesting to re-read “Diego Maradona: what was the golden boy”, one of his most insidious articles on the player and the Argentines. It was published a few years ago by the British newspaper The Guardian and reproduced with a certain festive mood by La Nación. “In South America, it is sometimes said, or it is claimed, that the key to the character of the Argentines is in their assessment of two goals that Maradona scored in the 1986 World Cup. In the first, which he himself baptized’ the hand of God’, Maradona, in an impressive levitation, intercepted a cross shot and put the ball into the net with his cunningly concealed left fist.In the second, made minutes later, Maradona picked up a pass in his own penalty area, he lowered his head, charged through the entire English team, fooled Shilton and slotted the ball into the goal. Well, in Argentina, they prefer the former to the latter. For the male Argie, foul play is incomparably more pleasurable than the clean one. The same thing happens in government and in business. They not only tolerate corruption, they adore it (…) In a broader sense, in this culture, always abiding by the rules has something humiliating and abject.”
You have to imagine to what degree of sensitivity and contempt the art of football can sublimate the darkest passions. We don’t always understand how much strength it takes to live in fragility. He left a great universal literature, and an inveterate xenophobic. It is useless to try to please those who live ideologically from his discontent. His beautiful and masterful pen was sometimes filled with scorpions.
2023-08-26 03:01:00
#Amis #hatred #Maradona #lazy #underclass
