Culture does not stop but…

Please forgive the ellipses, they correspond to the many paths of a giant that never stops, that is always changing: human manifestations. Added together, they give one fact: culture at that moment. We know that a photograph is not a film and we try to avoid that risk of “professionals of culture”, in love with a photographic analysis that they take as a development and it is not; it is the manifestation of a whole in an instant and another and another will come.

“I have traveled many paths, I have opened many paths; I have sailed on a hundred seas, and docked on a hundred shores. Everywhere I have seen caravans of sadness, proud and melancholic drunks with black shadows, and simpletons who look, remain silent, and “They think they know, because they don’t drink wine from taverns.”

“Bad people who walk and stink up the land… And everywhere I have seen people who dance or play, when they can, and work their four palms of land. Never, if they get to a place, do they ask where they are going. When they walk, they ride on the backs of old mules, and they do not know what it is to be in a hurry, not even on holidays. Where there is wine, they drink wine; where there is no wine, fresh water. They are good people who live, work, spend time and dream, and on a day like any other, they rest under the earth.”

There is no foolishness in the poet. It is not the monumental depth of that phenomenal beast that was Miguel Hernández, nor that similar to any of us who rises and rises, that was León Felipe. A poetic definition appears of a Spain that saw itself lost in “isms.”

Concept: “Antonio Machado is part of one of the most famous aesthetic movements in modern Spanish literature. It is the artistic aspect of Spanish regenerationism, which had the purpose of providing a solution to what they considered Spanish decadence in the 19th and 20th centuries. “There was, for them, an external Spain, hypocritical and false, and a true Spain, which was illiterate, miserable and neglected in its social rights.”

The poem is a portrait of the cultural movement and the concepts that Machado anathematizes. It is one of the paths that fork in the analysis of an impossible: What is Culture? We can delve deeper… we have to think about Javier Milei.

From a clandestine mini-radio station somewhere in London, Charles de Gaulle was broadcasting. In his hoarse, nasal voice, he introduced himself by saying: “Moi, La France” (“I, General de Gaulle, currently in London…”) – an appeal to the French Resistance on 18 June 1940, broadcast on the BBC’s outdoor radio set. You don’t need to know French to understand.

Once France was liberated from the Nazis, de Gaulle took power. Being a right-wing nationalist general, he called a controversial member of the Communist Party, André Malraux, to be his Minister of Culture. They knew each other and knew each other; the common enemy, Nazism, had made them share in the same effort: liberation.

Malraux asks: “Moi?” They say that de Gaulle looked at him, nodded and said: “Tell everything.” Apocryphal, brilliant, this is true: de Gaulle wanted culture to be a narration of so many events, so he trusted someone who had shown honesty and decision at the essential moments. Let us remember that Malraux was a pilot in the Spanish Civil War and among other works he is the author of “The Human Condition” (1933).

De Gaulle did not choose an allied general, a clerk, a scribe, he chose a little path, another of those that branch off: he chose that “Culture” should count. And he chose someone with an open mind. There is a necessary counterfactual: the postwar period in Europe, in Paris, gave us Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Boris Vian, Juliette Gréco and the Hot Club with Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, all together on the same curve of popular history.

That, wow, surprise, gave us our “civilization and barbarism” in Argentina from 1940 until approximately 1980. That cultural reformulation in Paris… was it with Malraux, against Malraux, with Malraux’s wink? Unassailable example, when they arrest Sartre in the 60s, de Gaulle says the unassailable phrase: How can they arrest Voltaire? I’m sorry for the distance to Milei.

An error, typical of Encyclopedism, proposes that it is systematic instruction that confines “Culture.” Instruction is a staff and a medal, perhaps a necessary door, but I agree with those who believe that culture is varied, multiple and, in many cases, stubborn and in struggle against consecrated forms.

In the province of Santa Fe, where I grew up, where I live, it comes out automatically, like the AI’s predetermined writing: “Ministry of Education and Culture.” After María de los Ángeles González, “La Chiqui”, that is not the case. I am not impartial when it comes to mentioning it. I know her, I know who she is, who she was, what her public life has been like and part of her private life since very distant years in Rosario, where poetry, theater, the future in them and the life of each one were discussed as the fact necessary to improve the present.

“La Chiqui” was there. That’s where it comes from. A personality with a basal Peronism and an alluvial characteristic of building in the theater, in the text, in the proposal, could not limit himself to the lateral decisions of a secretariat. “La Chiqui” liberated the Culture of Systematic Instruction. He let go of her. He took away the bureaucracy of the Palacio del Abecedario. Let’s salute Hermes Binner, without any distraction, “The German” accepted the request and defined the culture with ministerial rank.

The confession of uselessness of those who followed tends to tire me out, leading me to exhaustion: “Chiqui left the bar too high.” Sorry? Can’t anything else be done? I know more than two officials who confessed it. They did not resign, so from the time they confessed onwards they are guilty of explicit uselessness. I suppose they will be happy when, for Culture, Milei says “there is no money.”

Let us repeat: “Everywhere I have seen caravans of sadness, proud and melancholic drunks of black shadow, and pedantry in the cloth.” Let us add, Malraux asks: “Moi?” They say that de Gaulle looked at him, nodded and said: “Tell everything.” Apocryphal, brilliant, this is true: de Gaulle wanted Culture to be a narration of so many events and he trusted someone who had shown honesty and decision at the essential moments.

Let us remember: “La Chiqui” liberated Culture from Systematic Instruction. She let it go. She removed the bureaucracy from the Palace of the Alphabet. By repeating, adding, remembering these three moments in the history of culture (strictly speaking: the history of Man) in the West – we are there, until proven otherwise – we notice that there is a common point, so visible that it astonishes the distraction.

They were not afraid. There was no form or form. There was no prejudice. Machado defines a Spain that he anathematized. And its worst men, absolutely described. “La Chiqui” González is action. She does not exist except through her actions. Mind you, “La Chiqui” González is not minor in this province, understanding text and context.

There is a problem, life is a continuum and we should learn. It is no longer possible to have an act and a young lady in a tailored suit and sing the anthem. Okay, but it’s not enough anymore. Networks, that other way of communicating and transferring the imagination – and altering social behavior and its rules – are not in a ministry, they are not anywhere and they are in everyone. He is the Sunday columnist and the dawn rapper. She is a hangout on the corner, she is the cell phone in her pocket and the hearing aid in her ear to listen to someone, you don’t know, a different one.

Be careful, with or without commission for the party, Los Palmeras en el Obelisco is no longer worth it. There is no way out in the political event with the speakers at full volume and the organizers with the banner and the choripán given away. But there is a positive warning sign. Positive, it is repeated. Two signs. Four days of free jazz in which there were 60 numbers (in four days!), in a room in Rosario that was always full.

On June 20, urban buses in Rosario were free. The entire population understood the movement… and moved. There were no fears or doubts: it moved. Colophon: one of the central numbers (free, obviously) was a set with viral significance. That is rebirth… or spasms of agony.

The agony goes the other way: Abel Pintos and Luciano Pereyra charge 90,000 pesos for a seat at Luna Park. They fill it up. Where “La Chiqui” truly set the bar high is at this point: she managed without asking, looking back or charging a commission and worse… without political income for the future. In the end, yes, it is true, culture does not stop, nor does it charge a percentage, nor does it speculate on what people will say, it does not stop, it goes for a better tomorrow, with or without Milei.

Human behavior faces a question: Does the algorithm define it? Does it redefine it? Will Milei be there tomorrow or did he simply teach the use and abuse of a weapon? Don’t ask me, I’m a journalist, I’m the one who asks the questions.