The Government created the Ministry of Good Humor. Or something like that. It wasn't exactly a ministry, but it could be taken as such. It was an organism with a long name, because it is already known that things with a short name do not make sense, freedom, honesty, transparency, that mess. It was, attentively, the Special Temporary Executive Unit Resiliencia Argentina. There's that. The seal of the unit had to be inked and applied between two staff members. The Special Execution Unit... well, that, was meant to improve the social mood of Argentines.
Within hours of the announcement, the government itself discharged the agency. It's a good joke, don't tell me.
What we lost with the decision to cancel the unborn entity is an opportunity to laugh, celebrate and enjoy the joys and misfortunes of the country. That's a shame. But let's put on a good face, it seems that good humor is everything.
With an official body responsible for ensuring social humor, moodiness could have been considered a crime against the homeland and punishable by eight to twenty-five years in prison. The bad face, the frown and the slight whack could have been classified as weapons of war, and their carriers enemies of society. Something like that, if I remember correctly, Aldous Huxley imagined in “A Happy World”, published in 1932, when Nazism was steadily advancing in Europe.
Nor is it a question of living in the permanent complaint. Corruption is not punished, the internal divisions of the Government make it ungovernable when its mission is to govern; the President visits his Russian counterpart and offers him the open doors of Latin America, just when the other thinks of erasing Ukraine from the map; the agreement signed, or about to, with the IMF will tie a knot in our necks, and in other sensitive parties, but worse was the non-agreement, which was tantamount to default and to wandering around the world like outcasts, to plunging into the stinking swamp of misery and underdevelopment or; what is coming is a brutal increase in taxes to face a bar too high to jump and an economy closed to exports and imports and God will protect us. The panorama is added that, as a sign of social nonconformism, a demonstration of the Argentine left destroys part of the city, stones the Congress and the windows of the office of the Vice President of the Nation, which he takes the opportunity to film a video tiktoker and to do what he does best, which is to victimize himself. And on top of all that, the common mortals complain or pretend to complain. This way there is no country that moves forward. The complaint leads to nothing. Neither does the protest, unless you are the guy who a few years ago fired a mortar at the police and now says that social changes are not achieved by asking permission. Get the guy signed up for Chancellery.
Before I forget, that of concluding the agreement with the IMF despite the tremendous and foreseeable adjustment that is coming (I know that adjustment cannot be said, but I can't think of a synonym now) and creating a special body, that is, more bureaucracy, more budgets, more public salaries, is still another feature of humor.
The strange thing is that it was not clear what the strategy of the Executing Unit was going to be, and what follows, to face, for example, the boys of the sticks, the stones and the molotov. Perhaps, the ephemeral organism did not have in its plans to confront the bad mood, but to improve the one that exists, which may already be bad enough. Who knows. It's hard to know how it could be what it wasn't. Another humorous feature of the government, don't tell me.
If the strategy of the Special Executing Unit ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta was not clear, its possible methods were not clear either, nor were they even slipped. Someone may think of Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, Gila, so as not to go that far, of Moldavsky to be in tune with the times. Would literature, television and jokes, social humor improve? By the way, do you know the story of the guy who goes to the fortune teller? A guy goes to a fortune teller's and knocks on the door, knock, knock. And inside, “Who is it?” And the guy, “What a hell of a fortune teller.” It was told by Eugenio, a great Catalan comedian. But I don't think that quick, brief and accurate humor will help too much the guy who sees a revaluation of his property coming and an ax to his meager wallet; good social humor would not repair that of those who live threatened by crime, surrounded by drugs, stalked by crime. Nor that of those who lost family members or friends to Covid, who were also victims of the criminal disability with which the Government faced the first stage of vaccination and discriminated between imperialist and anti-imperialist vaccines. If it hadn't been a tragedy, that was also a humor. For Covid one clown Filomena is enough. Humor may help, but it doesn't work miracles.
Maybe it was all a huge misunderstanding and the Special Execution Unit... you know what's next, was badly addressed from the start. For starters, it was “Temporary”. Gee, what did that mean? How temporary would that have been? Because what was seen was that he didn't have time for anything. But in theory, how long was the experience going to last? And when, and who, would have judged that Argentines had already reached normal levels of social humor? That didn't start well.
The second thing is that the organization attached to its long identity name that of “Resiliencia Argentina”. With the word resilience what happens with most of the words that come into fashion. We use them without fully knowing their meaning. The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, a wise book that should be used from time to time, defines resilience, the first meaning, as “The ability of a living being to adapt to a disturbing agent or an adverse state of situation”.
In this case, in case it was not clear, the living beings would have been the citizens of the country. But what would have been, and is it, the disturbing agent? The government? The social discontent, focused on the latest election results, had clear targets: President Alberto Fernández, his management, the actions of his vice president, the vice-president's son and that of the group led by the vice-president's son.
Let's see if we understand correctly: as a disturbing agent of social humor, did the government create, or did it want to create, a state agency aimed at combating it? Was that the real reason for his rapid death?
Won't we be in the hands of great comedians, and we don't know it?
It would be unforgivable on our part.
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