Take a look at Spain. Try, if you can, to go beyond the great people, the warmth friends that you have made and you will made there. Try not to think in paellas and chorizos, in gazpachos and turrones. Nor in the coast or the mountains.
Think in the politics of Spain.
Earlier today there was a solemn act in the spanish parliament, “homage to the victims of terrorism‘, as it is called. It was instituted a few years back, to remind the country that to defeat the ETA, all political parties agreed with condemning violence as a form of political pursuit. But today the opposition, the right wing party PP and the far right wing party VOX did not attend the act, instead deciding to stay outside the parliament, in order to protest guvernamental policy regarding the Catalonian independentists.
It is not an exaggeration to say that such a great country as Spain is, the nationalism embedded in it is a rotting disease. And let’s not get us started on the civil war, that unbelievable bloody conflict that might have inspired a whole generation of my political coetaneous, and the international brigades, and Hemingway and the Guernica, and all sorts of heroism, but also took a horrifying saldo in lifes and split families and communities up to today, almost hundred years later. As a matter of fact, the fracture lines in the spanish political landscape are still a heritage of that war, where the current opposition are the direct heirs of Franco and the socialist government are today’s republicans.
One of the things that Franco thought was that opressing the identities of Spain’s many nations would make a stronger country. And here we are, so long later, still arguing about the independence of Catalonia. Oppression obviously backfired. Nations came back stronger. To the point of absurd. How could an independence movement make any sense in the time of the European Union?
Why should we pay any attention?
And yet. I live in The Netherlands and is Sunday, the night slowly falling. Uncannily quiet out there in the street, and not only because tomorrow is monday. The oh-so-long-ago-called Orange Clockwork has fallen in the football field. The Netherlands is out of the European Championship, and a quiet falls in the city, a sense of communal defeat. As the dutch themselves says it, the 17 millions of virologists that this land had, which suddenly transformed into 17 million football coaches, will be back at their normal jobs tomorrow. And I wonder about that ritualized confrontation of nations, football. How comes that we still need it? Somehow the thrill of seeing Maradona score that goal at the english faded so many years ago, at least for me. Perhaps it is not very elegant, or sexy, this thing of closing an article thinking that I am missing something. But perhaps I am missing something.
What would that be?