First of all, we welcome the brand-new National Director of Discourse appointed by the Milei government. This is not a joke.
As reported, on Thursday Mr. Martín Polakiewicz was officially appointed to that position — a philosophy graduate from UBA who is also finishing a master's degree at the Universidad de San Andrés. In other words, a well-prepared individual. They needed one.
The timing couldn't have been better. That same Thursday, His Most Excellent Excellency the President of the Argentine Nation, Don Javier Gerardo Milei, wrote on his X account, verbatim: SHITTY JOURNALISTS (sic), THEN THEY COMPLAIN WHEN I TELL THEM THEY ARE HUMAN PIECES OF SHIT WHO DO NOTHING BUT LIE. YOU ARE DISGUSTING TRASH.
This beautiful presidential text was posted and reposted by him 14 times over two days. This presents us with two problems.
The first is on its way to being resolved. He wrote "periodistas de mierdas" — that is, the word "mierda" (shit) with a final "s."
This means Polakiewicz took office as National Director of Discourse and on that very same day he already had work to do. Not much, but important. It's not as though he'll have to debate Toto Caputo or Karina Milei on Hegel, Nietzsche or Kant. He will simply need to explain to Javi that the correct form is "periodistas de mierda" without the "s," because in this case the word "mierda" functions as a qualifying expression. There can be one journalist who is "de mierda" or a hundred journalists who are "de mierda." The number of journalists increases, but the "mierda" qualifier stays the same.
To be more graphic and leave no room for doubt: you say "tenemos un gobierno de mierda" (we have a shit government) or "tuvimos muchos gobiernos de mierda" (we had many shit governments). All different governments, all in the plural, but the "mierda" remains singular.
Perhaps the Real Academia Española has a more technical explanation, but these examples should suffice. And if all else fails, there's always Polakiewicz now.
The good news is that, all things considered, in that same text Javi wrote "MIERDAS HUMANAS" (human pieces of shit), this time correctly. There the "s" is appropriate because "mierdas" functions as a noun and "humanas" agrees with it in the plural. So Javi does have some intuition about when to use the "s."
Before explaining what the second problem raised by Milei's exquisite phrase is, let us quickly clarify that this is not the first time a government has brought in philosophers dedicated to thinking about what a president should say and how he should express it.
In all fairness, officials who have historically held this type of position tend to concern themselves not only with what a president thinks and says, but also with what the rest of us Argentines should think and say. We have a great deal of experience with this.
We won't go back as far as the days of Raúl Apold, that media secretary and architect of the Peronist narrative during Perón's governments between 1945 and 1955. We mentioned him in this column a few months ago, and it is clear that there are no longer any Peronists who remember him. Perhaps Julio Bárbaro and two or three others.
Nor will we speak of those who played that role in the government of Isabel and López Rega. In that era, these people wrote the speeches of those two statesmen and managed their communications. But they also banned artists, shut down media outlets, censored books and films, and if you didn't know how to express yourself in the way they deemed correct, they sent you to the Triple A to teach you a lesson. They were not philosophers — they were simply small-time fascists whose names no one remembers anymore.
This type of figure fell out of use until Cristina came along. Let us take a look.
As everyone knows, Cristina fancied herself an architect. She once said publicly that in another life she had been an Egyptian architect. Why Egyptian? Nobody knows. She could have chosen a Renaissance architect or one from the Bauhaus. Someone would have to ask her. A lovely topic for her to chat about with the sycophants who are buying apartments at San José 1111 to be nice and close to her.
That said, legend has it that she once burst into the Casa Rosada shouting "Bring me Foster!" She was surely referring to Sir Norman Foster, master of contemporary architecture, with whom she wished to discuss architectural matters, colleague to colleague.
What most likely happened is that one of the dimwits surrounding her misunderstood, and instead of bringing Sir Norman Foster, brought her Ricardo Forster, philosopher and member of that unforgettable geriatric, national and popular organisation known as Carta Abierta.
Such are our governments. If they don't botch it with the "s" they botch it with the "r."
By the time the mix-up was discovered it was too late, and they had to invent a position for the deadweight Forster: Secretary of Strategic Coordination for National Thought. From the beyond, López Rega must have thought, "son of a bitch, how did I never think of that myself."
Reality proved that Forster's coordination, thought and national strategy were utterly useless — without the "s" — because in 2015 Macri showed up and handed them their backsides. Forgive the crude language in this column, dear reader, but Milei makes anything permissible.
For failing to know history and learn its lessons, Macri made the same mistake. He surrounded himself with thinkers, strategists of every stripe and brilliant philosophers such as, for example, Alejandro Rozichner. What use were all those big brains? None whatsoever — in 2019 Alberto Fernández steamrolled them in the first round with 48% of the vote. They all went home while the opposing fans chanted at them, "look, look, look, take a photo of that…"
They weren't beaten by De Gaulle, or Mandela, or Churchill. They were beaten by Alberto — the embarrassment that is Alberto.
Not content with the stupidity of Forster, "President" Alberto and his boss Cristina doubled down and invented a new masterstroke to control thought, the narrative and all that nonsense: NODIO. That was the name of the brand-new Observatory of Disinformation and Symbolic Violence. This is not a joke either, dear reader. They started off on the wrong foot from day one, since the acronym NODIO did not even match the name of the new public body.
The director of this madness was Miriam Lewin. The result? The President of the Nation is Javier Milei.
Today, Javi's government is repeating the very same mistake made by the lousy governments — without the "s," let us remember — that preceded it.
Surrounded by communication geniuses, narrative specialists and budget-rate philosophers (Rozichner again, for instance), they are going to achieve what seemed impossible: if they keep this up, in 2027 any idiot Cristina chooses to nominate will win. Don't say you weren't warned.
As we were saying at the outset, the phrase Milei posted fourteen times on his X account had two problems. One has already been explained.
Which journalists is he referring to? To whom do we award the points? Bonelli? Novaresio? Pagni? All of Clarín? All of La Nación? Paulino Rodríguez again?
We need a serious president who insults people with precision. Name, surname and outlet. It is important that he cooperate with the Argentine Mandrill Association (AMA). Should he fail to do so, we will have no choice but to suspend the championship.
To be clear: grammatically it is without "s" and in sports terms it comes with first and last name.
Martín Polakiewicz, please take care of it.
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