DOS VIOLENCIAS, UNA REAL Y OTRA IMAGINARIA

Basado en un interesante artículo de Morris Berman, acerca de dos tipos de violencia: La estadounidense y la mexicana.

Al final escribe:

This is a long discussion, but briefly, Mexicans generally are cynical regarding the possibility of fundamental change. They have a kind of insight, or maturity, that American voters lack. The latter believe that change comes thru the ballot box, even though history shows that is not the case. Mexicans know it doesn't. They know there isn't any real difference between the two major parties (PRI and PAN). I admire their willingness to live in reality, to recognize what's what. At the same time, as some Mexican friends have pointed out to me, this wisdom also has a resignation attached to it; too great a willingness to comply with the status quo, to be passive in the face of events.

Le comento:

Maybe its not a pasive atitude in the face of events, but the wisdom to face the fact that “large scale” issues actually do not concern us really. The worst thing one can do to a large scale politician is ignore him, he feeds on our approval, not even a real one, but just as a number for the survey and speculation they love so much. C. Geertz has a “dilema”: “Amor a la tribu (small scale) o amor a la patria (big scale)”. In the latin world I believe we are irrationally loyal to our loved ones (here) and not the rational “cause” (over there).

Latin world doesn´t have superheroes that every common can project himself in (messianic figures “violence included” that get closer to a god as they find “The Truth” of right and wrong), but criatures among criatures of a god that share a fatality with that “big picture”. US’ers all use the “small leagues” to be “some day” in the “big leagues” that for me is basically the american dream or rather say delusion. Small towns to the big city is the business. There is an intrinsic sense of expansion, but a self expansion that is at the end pretty lonely. Because to get there you must not only “sacrifice” your life, but comply with a series of repressive protocols, that permit the lonely american life style. (In all it’s “splendor”.) Law and Order is very expensive.

This is why I think latin violence is pational and intense, because it deals with true small scale social problems of power and love, fusion and gangs. On the other hand US’ers violence is psychopathic, because it deals with this obsesive “stik to the cause always” a distant cause, that “some day maybe “I” will live in”. Not us now and here. Pasion murdering has to do with a bizar intensity with a known one and hot blood, and not serial killing doing to do with a certain "cause" in the loonies head.

A distant cause that works for a boss (a vision with a mision) I don`t even know, that deals with world scale matters of which I am totally ignorant of, and actually don’t even care that much. ¿Why? Becuse it’s not real, it’s abstract, a promise, an ilusion. The world needs small tyranny’s with the good and bad random in them, real intensive life “scaled to us” and not on a “wide-screen” CNN seeing a bomb atack on Iraq, a kind of Macondo we could say. “Realismo Mágico” were there is no logic in a man with a “yunta de bueyes” next to a high-way, except arguing if he is just poor. Fidel Sepulveda knew this very well, one of the wisest men I’ve met.

Our resigned latin wisdom has a saying that always makes me laugh: “Son unos hijos de puta, pero son nuestros hijos de puta”. A wise ass or smart ass contemptuously told me Roosevelt said this about Somoza (true thing I didn`t know... sorry), but here in Chile (latin) we used it for Pinochet, formed in The School of Las Americas in Panama, by U.S.! The question here is, what is better, a true "enemigo poético", or an abstract figure like the FMI? What Roosevelt says is he is not even happy about his puppet, what the "adage" means (decir popular) is that maybe this figure is better than an invisible one, although we know he is still a puppet who really didn't make the decisions. Like english pirates made nobles? Lord Cochrane or Lord Pinochet?

A small “almacen” has less variety and is more expensive than a supermarket, but what the hell. Latin women have a wise joke: men care about the important thing’s, the war in iraq, god, macro economy problems, and leave us the trivial problems, decide where to go on holiday, what to eat everyday, how to organize the house and family... what’s really the important amigo? “Cariño y contacto “con” otros”, or awareness of the “big picture”?

It’s honest to say backgrounds “do” matter, what does the statement “we are esencially the same” mean? Plato is not one of my favorites. I don´t intend to be racist, but the “melting-pot” has it’s issues. Isn´t Puritan democracy quite cynical? English colonialism simply exterminated natives, (the Spanish at least were merged), and now the “American model” wants to sell the american dream to any immigrant without distinction? Come-on! That inconsistency itself constitutes a neurotic repression that makes US’ers “dream” so violent, forcing “peace” when there wasn’t even a dialogue in the first place on native soil. Talk about a way to heal wounds by believing in something that is not. US owes a debt to his own native town. What can make us think it cares about “other” people or nations?

El “ninguneo” product of miscegenation Octavio Paz talks about in the “Latin” american world “IS”. The US model tries to use “money” (or before that “knowledge”) as a way to make abstract distinctions between people with the “same” background (being poor) becuase there was never a blending. As incoherente both worlds can be, I find the “latin” american structure more honest because one can “see” that reality and the dialectical conflict in everyday life and the consequences that implies (underdevelopment in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile etc). In the States on the other hand, for the system to work, there canot be a “palpable” dialectical conflict, the machine needs to “do work”, the belief must be an internalized coherence in every “model citizen” or savior of the ilusion, that needs to “exterminate” anything that upset’s that deep belief.

ARTICULO ESCRITO EL DIA DEL TRABAJO HACE UNOS AÑOS: (DOBLE CLICK)