To seal his unequivocal symbolic victory, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, movingly unaware of the caricatural effect of his gesture, even decided to create a “FIFA Peace Prize” whose first honoree was President Donald Trump, precisely the same person who, on February 7th, proclaimed that he was going to build the Kennedy Center “great again” However, Trump has already dismantled the collective of directors (Board of Trustees), followed by a small avalanche of layoffs – without forgetting that of the approximately 370 people who worked at the Kennedy Center, more than a hundred decided to leave. For now, Trump has completed the remodeling with the appointment of a new president (“chairman”) – his name: Donald Trump.
Even before the draw, on the 3rd, in a notable article in The Athletic (o site do New York Times dedicated to sport), Adam Crafton and Henry Bushnell recalled how the destructive saga of the Trump Administration belittles the moral nobility of a “sacred institution”. And not just because your Board of Trustees has always reflected the classic bipartisanship of the US political system – also, and above all, because the happy celebration of the contrasts of artistic practices made the Kennedy Center a place where it was possible to be “sheltered” from the upheavals of political life itself.
A certain good conscience in this era of childish moral and artistic purifications will say that we are thus witnessing an aggression against culture. In fact, we continue to pay a high political price because of this analytical simplism. Why? Because we nurture the pious notion that culture (what we give the redemptive name “culture”) exists as a territory of inevitable conciliation and balance. In truth, what is happening configures the aggressive triumph of another cultural universe, viscerally linked to the official values of the football industry – such values can even help to define and promote the languages of some forms of political power.
A local symptom of this new political (im)balance is the fact that, at one moment or another, all political forces cry out against our country’s economic weaknesses and social inequalities, at the same time that Portugal is heroically involved in organizing the 2030 Football World Cup. The fact has been covered by a political indifference that, ultimately, reflects a tragic cultural dismissal.
Journalist