“Yesterday I cried to see you, Llorona, today I cry because I saw you.” So says the song that we hear so many times by Chavela Vargas and that was immortalized for new generations by the film by Adrián Molina and Lee Unkrich for Pixar Studios, Coco (2017). Although Mexican folklorists agree that it is a popular song from the Oaxaca region, there is no standard for the lyrics of the song and more than one hundred different couplets have been recorded, among which all kinds of influences can be traced, from the clearly popular ones to rhymes by Luis de Góngora.
Al Capone (Robert de Niro) cries listening to “Il Pagliacci”, in the opera, in a scene from ‘The Untouchables of Eliot Ness’ (1987), by Brian de Palma.
“Yesterday I cried to see you, Llorona, today I cry because I saw you.” The point is to cry. The verse summarizes one of the greatest gangrenes that has spread through Western public life for years and whose intensity, far from subsiding, continues to gain strength and threatens to take everything before it: that of the victimhood of the oppressors, a phenomenon of sentimentalization of moral authority that, in honor of Brian de Palma and his monumental The Untouchables by Eliot Ness (1987), we will call it “the tears of Al Capone”.
Capone cried at the opera, moved listening to the tenor sing an aria from The Clownswhile hitman Frank Nitti (unforgettable Billy Drago, in his white suit and hat) approached him and whispered that Agent Malone (Sean Connery) had been murdered as ordered. Tears can be sincere but not innocuous and one of the historical temptations of tyrants, one of the favorite attributes of coercive power, is the sentimentality of the mourner. Autocrats and genocidaires tend to be tender hearts and cinema had never expressed it with the exquisite overacting of Robert De Niro.
Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) informs Al Capone (Robert de Niro) that Malone (Sean Connery) has been murdered, in a scene from ‘The Untouchables of Eliot Ness (1987), by Brian de Palma.)
All of this comes from the fact that in the last 48 hours #NiUnDuroALaCruzRoja and #EsUnPutoHombre have successively trended on networks and together, these two exhibitions of moral misery are a great summary of the effervescent moment they are experiencing, in these years weimarianosthe worst instincts and how they are built from tears and the feigned condition of victim.
The first refers to the tasks of caring for DANA victims — in which usual suspects such as the podcast participate TV Alarm Status— and the second is yet another of the cyclical hate campaigns suffered by the transsexual collective, orchestrated by the most recalcitrant machismo or by veteran feminism, displaced from the hegemony of the movement by the new generations.
Both, in appearance so dissimilar and deep down so similar, “yesterday they cried to see you, Llorona, today they cry because they see you.” The point, we repeat, is to cry. Perhaps this is the change of era that the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner saw coming when he wrote The temptation of innocencethat the way to subjugate and subjugate would no longer be to claim that kind of natural right for the strongest to dominate the weakest—bringing Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche to their sardine—an argument on which colonialism was based, but also Nazifascism, but on the contrary, the condition of victim.
The philosopher Javier Gomá often says that the law of the jungle was the law of the strongest and the law of culture is the law of the weakest, and that in the transition from one to the other, in protecting the vulnerable, it was written the progress of humanity. It is obvious that today those who seek to subjugate, subjugate and dominate from a position of power believe so.
That and nothing else is the fictitious “cancel culture”, the construction for white men, owners of the history of humanity during millennia of hegemony and domination, of an imaginary of mendacious victimhood that legitimizes their angry reaction. We have just seen that the strategy works in the US elections, expressed in one of the most ridiculous and reactive president-vice president tickets that masculinity has ever known.
The fictitious aggression in the second case is “the erasure of women” and to understand it, in the Spanish case it is enough to go back to the first weeks of 2019, when the Congress of Deputies was weeks away from approving the first Spanish Trans Law. Once the debates on amendments in committee were concluded, the presentation was being drafted to elevate the law promoted by the PSOE to a plenary session. Even the PP was willing to vote in favor, based on what was stated in committee. And within socialism there had hardly been any debate or controversy. However, the then refusal of ERC and PDECat to support the budgets led President Pedro Sánchez to anticipate elections and the initiative declined as it was not approved in plenary.
The norm that was approved four years later, in substance, was the same, but the initiative came from Unidas Podemos, then head of the Ministry of Equality, with Irene Moreno at the helm. It was this change that triggered the conflict in political terms. In social terms, those who had worked as academics for decades in the hegemony of the feminist movement were displaced by new generations of women and by a brutal broadening of the collective, which began to be seen in the feminist strike of March 2018. This explains the eventful and controversial processing of the second initiative, compared to the peaceful acceptance of the first, a change in hegemony.
As in the other case, the strategy is that of La Llorona. Becoming a victim is now the only argument of moral authority that political tactics seem to know, and self-proclaimed radical feminism defines itself today as the victim of a group as marginal—in a statistical and social sense—, vilified, exploited and obliterated as the trans collective. .
“Yesterday I cried to see you, Llorona, today I cry because I saw you” warns us of Capone’s tears, the same ones that we can imagine on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu as he crushes the Palestinian people from the moral authority of the historical persecution of Judaism. Bruckner, let it all be said, is becoming a victim of his postulates —“after old age, bagpiper“, says an Asturian adage, – warned of all this when age had not yet clouded his judgment, in a shocking sentence that also applies to the anti-politics that so many claim in the case of the Valencia disaster: “An entire town plunges into the belief that he is condemned to suffering and obtains, not only an aristocratic dignity, but the certainty that everything is allowed to him because everything is owed to him.”
