The big business of the moment is hate, the other is fear. It is difficult to discern which is the cause and which is the effect. Whether hate breeds fear or fear breeds hate. The only thing we know is that violence feeds on both. We cannot ignore that our life works submerged in different trivializations of violence. That gray area in which all residue of pity towards the other is extinguished, and where the human figure ceases to move.
All “normality” can become a disturbing machine to trivialize violence. Every time we compromise with violence, we trivialize it, and immerse ourselves in a reality of vulgarized cruelty. “The next day they put a holiday. Once again they made us understand that they do not care about the lives of the people, of those people who find it difficult to make ends meet”, Mauricio Macri expressed after the attack on the vice president. One might think that the more banal an individual is, the more trivializes violence. The fight against violence, which in theory could explain the defense of freedom, consists of avoiding the suffering of others, not feeding it; in dismantling his drive, not raising it to suspicion; in reviling it, not in subliminalizing it. As we can see, it is not necessary to go to Francisco Franco to observe a certain institutionalization of violence. That banal individual, hopelessly normal, who signed torture and death sentences while having coffee after dinner with his wife and his ministers. Crazy things.
The sinister vaudeville of the last minutes of the match between Platense and Racing is an example of this. The richer and deeper the knowledge, it seems, the more stubborn the ignorance becomes, and the greater the reactive effect of obscurantism. It is curious to observe how the goalkeeper, Gabriel Arias, decided to address a part of the Platense fans at the end of the game. He staged an obscene gesture, explanatory of the culture of the excessive male. It was not decided by a sleeve cut, nor by a disqualifying insult. No. He transformed his index finger into a “giant” phallus determined to rip the ass off of the entire squid grandstand. He tried to hurt the pride of his peers, normalizing a violent gesture, of a sexual nature, in a universe like soccer where the identity condition has not yet crossed the limits of the Neolithic. That inquisitive finger turned out to be the symbol of the male misfit, who demeans.
The grotesque climax reached its parody when the Platense players tried to attack the goalkeeper in an attempt to recover the “honor” of a humiliated and questioned manhood. It was then that the males multiplied squared. It seems that so much loose testosterone clouded common sense; the least common of senses. The nonsense took overtones of a porn movie, but without anyone coming out of the closet.
Gestures like this have fed violent, exclusionary and patriarchal societies. A whole “performance” sustained in a manhood of “long penis”, of alpha males, of unbridled and banal violence.
Gabriel Arias will have to wait for the sporting sanction that the AFA Disciplinary Court will apply. He acknowledged that he lost his composure in the face of insistent homophobic insults. His exculpation is curious, since his illustrious finger behaved in a staging of blatant militant homophobia. In the end, he admitted that he had been wrong: “violence is never the solution to violence,” he declared. Something that Macri should know.