By Franco Torchia . I woke up in a taxi this morning. Ernesto Tenembaum's radio program, "And Now, Who Can Help Us?", was playing on Radio Con Vos. Just then, the host confessed to not having seen "the ad." At this point, the promotional video from the sports channel TyC Sports for the imminent start of the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia is "THE" ad. The only one. That's why, on the show, they played the audio from that commercial and proceeded with the debate. All the professionals spoke except for Gustavo Grabia, the sports journalist (and, as far as I understand, emphatically dedicated for some time now to investigating hooligan groups, political connections, and violence in Argentine stadiums). Grabia's silence—a member of a show on the channel in question and accused days ago of revealing on air the names of victims of sexual abuse at a first-division club—contributes to a possible interpretation, hours after the crime committed by the companies responsible for producing the ad. Football and advertising, in the last (at least) 20 years of history, have remained untouched. No social forces, no regulatory advances, no shifts, and above all, no pretense. They are two incredibly powerful sectors of society that don't even need to feign compliance or make public commitments. When I got out of the taxi, I recalled a category coined by Umberto Eco in * Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals *. Like that work, like Umberto Eco, like football, and like advertising, I appealed to the past perfect, to a bygone era, to 1964, to antiquity: Eco uses the expression "elite of the irresponsible" there. Who are they?

Say whatever you want, without consequences.

The sun rose in Buenos Aires, and I felt, consequently, burdened with a sense of impunity: well, I told myself, the “elite of the irresponsible” must include soccer players, almost all advertising executives, Tévez and his son's twisted wrist; Fuerte Apache being suggested as a Chechen concentration camp for that child; TyC dismissing last year the rape allegations made by two girls against Boca Juniors stars; Lionel Messi inciting the rest of the national team to dedicate their World Cup qualification in the locker room “to the fucking journalists”; and Gustavo Grabia condoning it by remaining silent; raising his voice to denounce Pablo Moyano at Independiente and remaining completely mute in the face of these crimes of public communication. They are the ones who, I believe, enjoy the benefit of irresponsibility and inhabit a linguistic community without restrictions. They can say whatever they want without consequences (deleting the ad doesn't imply any effective consequence, much less a condemnation). Fiction also has no restrictions, but if anything has happened to literature and film with their death certificates, it is that those deaths are decreed by propaganda, in any of its media.

Malpractice and loose ends

Stéphane Mallarmé, in “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (1897), broke the language; the multinational advertising corporation McAnn did not. Advertising is, fundamentally, the death of any possibility of liberating exploitation of language, insofar as it always has to say something. Before, during, or after, the advertising message is bound to an obligatory, exhortative, and guiding reference. It is for this reason that “saying whatever they feel like” does not apply. They cannot and should not, as poetry can. And it is precisely because they are not protected by the vulnerability of literature that they must be subjected to legal proceedings. Malpractice, but there they are and will remain, free.