Outburst of fury This phrase would be a perfect summary of what happened yesterday afternoon on social networks, with terms like “scandalous”, “what a shame”, “Madriz” or “shameful”.
I confess that going through the trend list every Sunday to knit this weekly gossip is a lot like crossing the school yard during recess: you dodge a ball with every step you take. Because the football monoculture, so significant in the sports sections of the news – where it is impossible to find the result of any specialty that does not have balls -, beyond being boring for those of us who are only puritans in terms of breaches with the Treasury and Social Security is also the refectory in which an entire country resolves its most primal emotions, those of unhappiness, joy, hatred and fierce anger.
This immeasurable escalation in feeling is one of the most relevant conquests of human civilization: that all the passions associated with fratricidal brutality, conquest and aversion to the other have disappeared from the real world to sublimate in the war fictions that are team sports – the playful dramatization of the wars of other times where the penons of the white rose fight those of the red rose – is another step in the progressive conversion of bloody violence into a harmless and profitable substitute in which the bravest and most reason-seeking of human specimens may indulge their less exemplary passions without causing irreparable harm. For this reason, it can be assumed that around sport and its fans there are sporadic outbreaks of blind violence, conventionally applied to street furniture and, only on some exceptional and unfortunate occasion, to other fans or passers-by.
As sovereign subjects, we have the right – who needs it – to circumstantial abandonments to let off steam. Since they are exhausting exercises and one has always militated in indolence, with age they fell into disuse, but to be honest, I still remember the day when I spent more than a quarter of an hour scolding the referees of the International Superstar Soccer by Konami. That is, shouting at the PlayStation. The only reason it didn’t go out the window that day is that I had paid for it and I had had to save for a year. She knows it and I know it, although after that day we never talked about what had happened again.
In short, it’s great that you’re upset about another Real Madrid robbery – it happened, or so they said on the network formerly known as Twitter, but to find out if it’s true you’d better go to the Sports pages because I don’t have any more information – and I hope it stays that way, that the irrational fury is contained in a space like a stadium and in the strict time that a game lasts. It took many wars and centuries to get it there. Letting her out would mean going back centuries and ending up being a member of QAnon, praying to Ferraz or voting for IsabelDíaz Ayuso.
