The historical obsession

Elias Canneti, en masse y poder has brilliantly and extensively discussed the role of the leader, power and the mass. Somewhere, he describes how an individual ceases to be and loses his essence by merging with the mass, by feeling part of that enormous and unbeatable, with power. That to which the leader has summoned and that makes you belong and therefore stop being yourself, but part of something. AMLO knows that, by intuition and for this reason, in a single act, he satisfies his ego, gives an order, shows muscle of power (even if it is bought) and generates the feeling of empathy, that everyone belongs to something, even if that something is as pyrrhic as the report he offered.

The number of people who attended the march (they have called it a procession), some with evident indifference, others, the majority, with passion, shows the capacity for mobilization that the 4t has and shows the shared frenzy of seeing the leader, of take a picture with it, touch it, keep the experience to yourself to turn it into a personal historical fact.

Whether the march was gigantic or insufficient to cover the entire zócalo is a minor matter, it seems to me. The sociological and political fact is much more important. The public television commentators chanted the history of the event; the importance of the fact that for the first time the public media “voluntarily” joined in broadcasting this event. The rest of the television stations were obliged to follow the event and fill with narrative the endless 5 hours that the leader’s procession lasted to the stage from where he would speak.

Notes in various media reported during the day the hundreds and hundreds of trucks parked everywhere near the march and with interested intention, banners and signs were displayed with the supposed places of origin where the marchers came from, to leave testimony that the governor of that entity had met his quota.

The caps did the same. Claudia Sheimbaun placed in the growing cynicism in which she has decided to act for a few weeks, she was recorded giving bread to attendees and thanking her for her presence. Others fared less well. Eberard ended up with a spit in the face, what an aim of the attacker. Adán Augusto drenched in sweat, bruised and in pain, risking his skin for his boss who, in notorious irresponsibility, decided to walk in the middle of a sea of ​​people, defying the slightest prudence and security of the head of the Mexican state and president of our country. However, the only thing that was heard from all of them was the importance, the transcendence and the greatness of the “historical event” that they were experiencing or have just experienced.

The triumph for the citizens who do not belong to or do not share the historic feat of yesterday, is that while the leader made a vanity procession with assistance from the states, the march on November 13 was held in dozens of cities in the country and it was attended with reason and collective passion by a huge group of Mexicans convinced of the need to take care of our democratic institutions. Whether or not that march was historic, yesterday’s did not touch the INE one iota and we can be satisfied and alert about this. One thing is surprising, however: after yesterday’s march, what’s next? Satisfied the egomania of the leader and having shown muscle that money helped to strengthen, what do we have left as a country? The division is evident and deepening. That there are two Mexicos that coexist in a more fragile and tense way, abjuring the enormous plurality that we are as a nation, is a fact. That the march was probably useless, other than to read data and works that we see every day in the morning, is evident. That nobody mentioned yesterday or addressed the real problems of the country, more than with happy numbers that cannot be verified in the official figures themselves, is palpable. We are adrift, divided between those who want to conquer history by marking it as their own and those who believe in the natural course of history, and someone will say whether or not what we did in defense of one or the institutions was historical or not. Nothing more, but nothing less too.