memory, resignation, passion, frustration, nostalgia, national identity

Someone told me that I sound angry from my posts.  I don't mean to convey that all.  Frustration perhaps.  I feel like no one is neutral about anything here, which puts me in my element because there is are strong opinions and a passionate tone used to assert them.  This forcefulness is juxtaposed an imposing sense of resignation.  There is joke that there is a protest everyday in Buenos Aires, which shows that there are people who want to march and bang pots and pans about something, but it is mundane and nothing out of the normal.  A protest doesn't shock or even necessarily draw attention.  I'm still slightly frightened when I hear the small fireworks commonly set off during protests here, loud noises have always made me a bit on edge, but the most elegantly dressed of people can walk past a group holding banners with Lenin's face and the sound of something potentially dangerous without so much as a bat of an eye.  Everyone seems quick to complain, as if complaining is some way a manner of working through the hardship of living in a place that seems to be both fantastically exciting and overwhelmingly chaotic.  The chaos and excitement are one and the same, it depends on how you choose to look upon it in any given day, or perhaps in an singular situation.  Just walking through the business district yesterday I laughed as I heard a Guia "T" (the essential guide to the buses that everyone needs to get around) salesman suddenly shout "Que país este!"  I have no idea what provoked this comment, but it something commonplace to here, and yet never ceases to entertain me.  I have come to say such things about the States when I have to explain certain things to Argentine friends about how our health system works, or how, of course speaking in generalizations, the progression of politics works.  When it seems so strange to a someone that we do not have a public health care system, among other things, I have to resort to "I come from a very strange country."  Yet no one inside the States, with the exception of few, would say that we are resigned to something in the States, but we invoke it's identity as a beacon of liberty.  I can't think of a single time I have heard someone have a simple interaction on the street during the day and say, in a resigned and tone, as if speaking of the condemnation we are fated to by living in our country, "What a country we live in!"  We here our politicians make such statements to talk about how great we are.  Our national identity is not used as an explanation for how things are not working efficiently or how people treat each other without respect.  When someone is rude the nation is the scapegoat.  A population of people who talk about how awful their home is, their politicians are, the citizens are.  It is more complex than any one line explanation.  I was discussing these kinds of comments with an Argentine friend who gave me an answer I think is worth sharing, maybe not as an answer that explains away the question of why people blame Argentina or Buenos Aires (often with a shout and smile simultaneously), but as a possible window into a mentality that many people her do have.  He said that such expressions of frustration are a result of a population (talking only about BA) that wants to think they are first world, but is, more than once a day, coming up against reminders that they are really third.  I am not saying that I feel we the terms first or third world should even be used anymore or ever, but this explanation made me think about how the sometimes flippant or humorous reference to how broken the country or political system is is often is followed by what seems like an eagerness to say that we are in the third world.  Comments that draw this geographical space into a geopolitical one identified with under-development, are often coming from people of the middle-class, not from people starving on the streets.  My friend made reference to the European architecture that makes the city different from La Paz or what is universally identified as a poor country (poor Latin American or South American city) and the contrast with a change system that actually impedes one's ability to travel through the city.  So, according to his theory, you have a group of people that want to believe they are European, but are reminded that they are in, what they themselves are so quick to label, the third world because they experience an inefficiency that would be an absolute absurdity in a city like New York or Paris.  It's a desire to be somewhere else or a part of BA from a more economically sound past, probably never actually experienced by this individual, that turns into a frustrated resignation with a daily and simple undertaking (in his example needing coins to get on a bus).  Nostalgia, a memory of mythical past (a memory that is only mythical for those that reminisce about an experience that they feel they belong to without having actually lived through it), and the frustration with a far inferior present.  A "European Elsewhere", as Michael Taussig would call it (see The Magic of the State);  a South American country that could be many places, but I think is a fitting analogy for Argentina.  Taussig does not give the name of the country on which this ethnographic work is based on, I will not disclose it here, mainly because his theory is to be applied to not one specific nation-state confined by fixed borders, but a concept of such a nation-state that exists strongly in this part of the world (perhaps even in other continents).