Milei and Sarmiento
After Cristina Kirchner declared herself the reincarnation of a great Egyptian architect, after she praised the idealistic young people of the "decimated generation" as paradigms, and after Axel Kicillof bowed down before Rosas, it seems reassuring to have a president who sees himself reflected in Sarmiento.
A great prose writer of the language, Sarmiento was the father of the classroom in South America, the first apostle of public education, a visionary, a controversial man, and also a polemicist. A fighter. A preacher of modernity, José Ingenieros called him. Ricardo Rojas called him the prophet of the pampas. Borges, our first poet. The only problem is that Milei remembered Sarmiento on Monday because of his nickname, "the crazy one." According to the President , this was because "he was a serial insulter."
Among the universal figures who shared this nickname, very few, such as King Charles VI of France (" le Fol "), actually suffered from occasional psychotic episodes. The rest were simply vehement, temperamental, turbulent, determined leaders, above all people distinct from the common prototypes. This uniqueness, combined with the effective implementation of bold ideas (some extravagant, fortunately not realized, such as the one he proposed in 1849 in "Argirópolis" to move the capital to the island of Martín García), prompted common parlance to name him with an often ponderous metaphorical diagnosis of madness. Sarmiento himself cheerfully recounted that during a visit to a mental asylum upon receiving him, he had been told: "Finally, one of our own has arrived."
The term "serial insulter" deserves to be considered an anachronism. Not only did it not exist in 1868, but it wasn't even widely used until just twenty months ago, when Milei's public image, unwittingly, began to monopolize it. This was because, as president, he renewed the brutal way he spoke about his antagonists and critics that he had employed first as a television panelist and then as a successful presidential candidate.
Congratulations, along with his Sarmiento-style reminiscence, Milei announced on Monday that he will stop using insults . The announcement came after LA NACION published a report with statistics on the insults hurled in his first 12 months, a total of 4,149, a figure that rose to 611 in the last 100 days, including 57 sexual insults. The president considers this change of attitude a test. "I'm going to stop using insults to see if you're ready to discuss ideas." This is an acknowledgment of something that was obvious to his critics: that insults and discussing ideas are not compatible today.
Milei insists that it all comes down to a problem of form. "This group of standard-bearers and discerning experts on form" would have condemned Sarmiento "to the stake." He mockingly mentioned "the dictatorship of form... let's confront them by respecting their form, once and for all, to see if they can demonstrate the intellectual standing to give us a battle of ideas." This phrase warned that the experiment had not yet begun .
Last year, Milei had emphatically praised the national hero and railed against revisionism when renaming the Kirchner Cultural Center, which now bears not one but two names: the Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Palacio Libertad Cultural Center. But at that time, he didn't mention his theory that the mentor of the familiar dichotomy of civilization or barbarism was his predecessor in the art of insults, an oblique comparison that deliberately benefits him, as well, by suggesting that they both share the determined character of great transformers.
Perhaps the short list of presidents who are self-authorized to consider their individual rights like those of any pedestrian should mention Agustín P. Justo, who, tired of being hissed at everywhere he went, one day stood on the open-air carriage transporting him around the Palermo racetrack, looked at the jeering crowd, and gave it a pompous finger. Of course, it was a one-shot. But that doesn't invalidate the profound question that Alberto Fernández posed not so many years ago: "I move like an ordinary man, I feel like an ordinary man, and sometimes I don't realize that I am the president and I have to set an example."
The troublemaker from Cuyo, as José Ignacio García Hamilton titled his rich biography, was not used to controlling the arrogant impulse that came with the combo. “You're so poor that if we turn you upside down, you wouldn't even lose a peso,” a congressman once insulted him (an anecdote that immediately saves us from remembering how inverse those times are to ours). “No matter how they put it, you never have an intelligent idea,” Sarmiento retorted.
The occasional epithet, such as "ignorant," "little doctor," "little lawyer," was bandied about, but it coexisted with a certain amount of word-working. Sarmiento called Nicasio Oroño "a salt-house skinner." It's true that he didn't address Juan Bautista Alberdi with the utmost consideration. "Acrobat," "dead soul," "convict," "prudish," "soul and face of a rabbit," "hunchback of civilization," he called him. Or "a dog of all weddings." He also called him a hypocrite, "a liar by habit." He might even throw something sharp at him like "old spinster on the hunt for husbands." Those were strong words back then. But obscenity wasn't part of the repertoire, much less were there insults dedicated to attacking the opponent's sexuality through references to oppressive social roles. Genital insults, homophobic, transphobic, carnal subservience, none of that was there. Misogyny and attacks on the rival's masculinity, yes.
Comparing ranks is also very subjective. On what scale? One was the second founding president of the republic. The other took office on the day that continued democracy reached—a historic record—40 years. The cultural contexts of two eras separated by more than a century and a half are spectacularly different: one, with wagons; the other, with six-wheeled electric vehicles traveling on Mars.
According to Félix Luna, Buenos Aires experienced a very intense and fervent political life in the thirty years following the fall of Rosas. "It was an explosion of vital forces repressed during the long dictatorship and expressed, among other things, the cult of courage, the virile and comradely spirit that defined the porteño of the time, as well as the difficult learning process of a still imperfect and inorganic democracy." Luna does not idealize the public debate of that time, when voice recordings did not exist. No one knows what voice Sarmiento had. The debate took place through the newspapers, each of which was the expression of a personality or tendency.
Milei likely understood Sarmiento's 1869 remark that newspaper language was worthy of "a den of thieves" as an early endorsement of his ways. He was referring to the press, which had called him a savage, lazy, rancher, sergeant, horse, flip-flop, ignorant, liar, plagiarist, bastard, a scoundrel from San Juan, a lame pig, the poisoner of his wife's first husband, brainless, a traitor to his country, an egomaniac, and—the list of adjectives is much longer, but in short—crazy, in this case in a pejorative sense.
There were new parties, of course, but the rules were fluid and scruples about electoral competition were few and far between. If a party was lucky enough to have a military officer capable of mobilizing, threatening, or overthrowing governments, Luna wrote, it made the most of these opportunities. It was necessary to give the impression of triumph, because that was essential to gaining support.
Victoria Villarruel has just sued three members of the presidential entourage and an extreme Millenium-supporting media outlet that viciously attacked her after the President himself accused her of treason, conspiracy, and promoting a currency run.
Milei did not clarify on Monday whether or not the self-imposed truce of insults will affect her dispute with the vice president. It is also unknown whether she is willing to change her hostile and defiant behavior toward the executive branch. The problems between Sarmiento and his deputy, Adolfo Alsina, are a mere trifle compared to these. It seems it won't be so easy to move from a system of relations with unlimited insults to a republican debate of ideas.
lanacion
