The other day I remembered an anecdote with my grandmother Clara. The first time I published an article, I called her and told her that she had been in the newspaper. She answered me: “In the police section…?” It was not the case this week… But I did go out on the networks! Receiving insults, of course -even from macrista writers- which would be quite similar to the police section… What was my crime? Try to think a bit. I don’t have networks, but that doesn’t seem to be the ideal place to propose ideas, thoughts, even debates. Will the newspapers be that place? I believe it less and less. Nevertheless, here I am, weekend after weekend, typing quickly with the hope that some idea will reach the readers and we will share a community of modest reflection.
Last week’s column dealt with the place that Miami occupies in the imaginary of the Argentine middle and upper classes, and how Messi’s arrival at Inter in that city makes a system with that imaginary. Let’s go back: from the 19th century to the middle of the 20th, the imaginary, especially the Buenos Aires, dreamed of Europe, especially Paris. That was the cultural, aesthetic, ideological reference, the model of life that they wanted to imitate. Starting in 1976, with the arrival of what is usually called “neoliberalism” – which is much more than an economic plan: it is a way of being in the world, a set of beliefs about how to live – that European centrality began to mutate, and already in Menemism Miami became a key reference for those middle and upper classes. A way of life, that’s what he was talking about the other time. The urban aesthetic of Miami is replicated in Buenos Aires in the malls, in Nordelta, in Puerto Madero, among other areas and places. Miami as a way of life embodies the vintage climate of Buenos Aires from 1976 to date. And here is my crime: I said (oh, I’m afraid to say it again…) that Messi’s presence in Miami (with all that it generates, read if not, the almost daily articles in Clarín on the subject) overlaps with that social imaginary, with that way of life that Miami proposes, and that the Argentine middle and upper classes imitate with immense relish.
2,141. I have just spent 2,141 characters from a column of 3,000 explaining something as obvious as the sun rises in the east, or that the water, in the plain, boils at one hundred degrees. It doesn’t matter, after all, that’s also journalism: repeating the old as if it were new. Meanwhile, I almost ran out of space to talk about the great match of Argentinos Juniors the other day against Fluminense, which I think they tied for lack of experience (the goalkeeper foolishly getting himself sent off, the central defenders almost colliding with each other in the Flu’s goal) , nor of this Boca who does not play at all and puts all the chips to Cavani, who was a crack -and perhaps he will continue to be, we will have to see- but who is not Messi (Oh, I backed down! Now I speak well of Messi as a historic megacrak!), nor of River that wins even when it doesn’t play well. The eighth of the Cup started much better than expected.