Daily Inspiration Quote by Alma Guillermoprieto

Time is supposed to clarify history; Guillermoprieto points out how it can also anesthetize it. “One, two, three, four, five years go by” has the rhythm of counting off a metronome, a casual tally that mimics how news cycles reduce political catastrophe to calendar math. Then comes the sting: “Marcos gets a little boring.” In a single, almost offhand phrase, she exposes the media economy that feeds on novelty and treats sustained struggle as a genre that inevitably goes stale.

The line lands because it’s not really about Subcomandante Marcos as a person, but Marcos-as-spectacle: the masked insurgent who once supplied the perfect narrative package (iconography, romance, revolutionary rhetoric) for audiences far from Chiapas. Guillermoprieto, a reporter attuned to how stories are consumed, implies that what exhausts isn’t the conflict but our appetite. When the symbolism stops feeling fresh, attention drifts, even if the underlying conditions that produced the uprising remain.

There’s also a quiet critique of foreign fascination with charismatic intermediaries. The world’s interest can hinge on a figure who translates an indigenous movement into a legible, media-friendly myth. Calling him “boring” isn’t a dismissal of the EZLN’s stakes; it’s a condemnation of the way coverage often swaps political analysis for personality, then abandons both when the personality no longer entertains.

The subtext is grimly practical: boredom is power. When audiences tire, pressure fades, accountability loosens, and the people living the story are left with its consequences after the spotlight has moved on.