Argentine storyteller Jorge Luis Borges used to contend that authentic metaphors have already been invented. Regarding new ones, either they are weak or are little more than remakes of the classics. "True [metaphors], those which formulate intimate connections between one image and another, have always existed", he wrote. Cooling down a hot potato ("Sacar las papas del fuego", a common expression in Spanish which smoothly translates to English), for instance, is just as useful as timeless: it works due to the linkage between the image of the difficulty which is solved at any time in any place with that of the burning potato.
If we are to explain the commonly held belief amongst Mexicans that Mexico barely stands out in good things (without using that many words), then we should ask the safe help from the ubiquitous metaphor of The Crab Bucket. They will get it: seeing the lone crustacean at its useless struggle against its peers in order to connect this scene with whatever political, economic or cultural traits are considered characteristic of Mexican society. The Mexican man never excels, because the Mexican men are going to take him down.
Although it might well apply to fellow countrymen of success like filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, the social critique suggested by the Crab Mentality does it better to the soccer star Javier Hernández's career. The more popular and more familiar, the more useful. Those good and bad seasons through which the tireless young man from Jalisco has remained in Europe without falling prey of surrender have taken him beyond the place of mere sporting figure: he now personifies the idea, powerful and appealing, according to which his fatherland can no longer be compared to a bucket full of hideous crabs. Some of them could still survive, far too many perhaps. But in the times of Negro Iñárritu and Chichadiós, the metaphor shall be absolutely obsolete.
Metaphors do much more than simplifying the complex. They function as this simplification is done by means of a contrast, imagination and reality. Mexico is not The Crab Bucket given that neither all vices can be imputed onto all of a country's inhabitants nor those vices can be exclusive national property: metaphors like these simultaneously portray all of the world's societies and none of them. By becoming the archetype of the success of Mexico, the Javier Hernández idea moreover blurs our metaphor's contrast and leaves it as another cliché. Another unworthy commonplace that revolves in half truths and fallacies... The archetype gives Mexicans the strongest of cases for finally saying, "Yes, we can".
In terms of winning hearts rather than winning minds, archetypes crush metaphors. The contrast between imagination and reality gets replaced by a contradiction, a clash of opposites with no room to nuances: just as the accepted archetype of beauty defines ugliness by opposition. Values against anti-values; good Mexicans against bad Mexicans. One necessary analysis of the Chicharito idea in the country where crabs keep moving sideways must ask for who these are (the bunch of those envious, resentful, mediocre, jobless and idle that wander in the streets and proliferate within social media), and, what is more, must ask too for what banners are lifted by the newest national archetype itself: the cult of success, the self-indulgence, the work made in order to shut mouths, the unfettered vanity. The belligerent side of strong hearts must subdue the side of lazy hearts.
Metaphors, however, can reach further than archetypes when it comes to winning minds and hearts. The Crab Bucket is as much a critique to every social vice as the concept of Chauvinism encloses an ever-pertinent critique to archetypes which suspiciously wrap reasons into flags. A word of French origin, Chauvinist copes with one bizarre offshoot of nationalism which, besides, translates to other languages, though its arrival South of the Rio Grande seems forever delayed.
Questioning whether the twice Oscar-winning director makes films that are rich in photography but poor in narrative; or questioning the fair merit of netting handfuls of goals in contrast to assistances to other teammates which can be counted with less than five fingers, is more often than not understood as the crab treason toward the archetype of Mexican excellence. It is so understood in the place where there is no self/social critique, Chauvinism, Jingoism.
As Borges rightly contended, the power of metaphorical language brings us to look into the intimacy of two juxtaposed images: The Crab Bucket is one for reflection on whole societies and not on random groups of individuals. This Chicharito idea, turned into archetype of social rhetoric, more than to describe is dedicated to judge people on arbitrary criteria. Good and bad countrymen we are, no matter how many first-touch goals inside the penalty area of a soccer field are needed to make us submissive and silent.
@Cesarkickoff
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