The 'practical-inert' Argentina and the pain of comparing ourselves with Spain

A woman serves us in a bar.

She's argentine.

She has lived in Madrid for 20 years.

She tells me: “An Argentine lady also ordered a coffee with milk yesterday and she asked me 'How much is it in Argentines', in relation to the price, which of course is in Euros”.

-The girl, or the waitress as they call her here, answered: "How do you know?"

-The client tells me (the girl tells us) the same thing: “How to know”.

We do not know how much we spend, neither in Spain nor in Argentina.

This incognito currency that we have does not make everyone uncertain.

How much do we charge?

How much do we spend?

It is not knowing where we are standing, or where we are going.

We are lost while

.

Comparisons are hateful, but sometimes they are instructive.

In Madrid from where this column is written, another, more relaxed rhythm predominates.

That observation is not at the same time an Argentine classic, seeing the exterior with better eyes than our arduous reality.

But isn't this view true, at least in relation to certain countries traditionally close to Argentina?

It is true, of course, that it is easier to visit a country or a city than to live in it.

Life is not naively simple anywhere and there will be people from Madrid who refute this hypothesis, but in the eyes of an average Argentine

, the way people walk, talk and go through the taverns of the people of Madrid and of the Spanish in general is different.

They circulate as if they were not in the middle of the work season, calmer.

In Argentina we live in suspense.

All the time.

Because subjects who do not represent anyone want to take Lago Escondido, because Jones Huala, who threatened the country, is an entity and one cannot explain how such an annulment caused so much trembling, because we shed so many tears for Lucio and Fernando Báez Sosa, and even the sentences respective do not conjure or console them, because the dead and so violated lie without remedy.

Here in Spain there are also horrors, because human beings tend to become dehumanized everywhere, but -and this is the look of a participating flaneur- there is

.

Before, Spain was hell many times.

A great war massively bloodied it between 1936 and 1939, and then Franco came, and then ETA, and a thousand and one disasters.

But something seems to have changed despite the politics and the waves of Podemos that insisted and insists on producing Chavismo to continue doing damage.

Something changed outside of traditional political circles, something was transformed in society.

When one enters a supermarket in Spain, one perceives, by contrast, the undoubted course towards Venezuelanization that we are experiencing in Argentina.

.

And there the shelves empty, while thugs are organically sent to control prices that are uncontrollable because inflation is deeper, immeasurably deeper.

There is an interesting Sartrean category that can be given a twist to understand something of what happens to us in Argentina.

It is called the

, we define it here as a praxis that pretends to be productive but remains passive.

Let's take an egregious example: the Lucio case.

The civil service that should have warned about what was happening was "working", various authorities who could not or did not want to avoid seeing the seriously injured boy.

But they were inert.

, mummified, collecting their salaries, but without acting.

And that is deadly.

The practical inert is literally deadly in far more cases than we suppose.

There is a political leadership mired in the "practical - inert" as we define it here, sunk in a rhetorical praxis but inert in reality.

There are thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who are

.

They are yes, but they are not.

They are inert, passive, sunk in the simulation of exhibitionism as if they were, as if we were strictly speaking, dolls from a doll's house or dolls, who have features but no dynamics, nor real life.

The practical-inert annuls a good part of Argentina.

Not to all of Argentina of course, because the majority moves and does, and saves lives and helps and works from sunrise to sunset.

But inert bureaucrats do a lot of damage, they hurt those who do so much to get ahead.

They hurt, with wounds that do not close, and that deepen, while time passes us irremediably.

look also

The real Argentina and the aspirational Argentina

Expired, the keyword of assassins