A string of pearls

Strange, when the leader of a European political party that aspires to govern says he is a “radical anti-capitalist.” At first I didn’t believe this, but I checked it on the internet (assuming that this is a good place to ascertain veracity), and it seems that it is true. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba indeed said he was a radical anti-capitalist, just like Kim Il-sung; but he did qualify that he meant “speculative capitalism.” As if there was any other kind.

A little later I heard of another pearl uttered by the man whom the Socialist Party has put forward as the next prime minister of Spain. He said that “the 500-euro banknote should be prohibited.” Perhaps garbage crews should go around collecting them house by house. The PSOE seems to believe that it will win some youth voters by letting drop a few of these schoolyard gasconades, but all it is likely to do is lose the support of those with adult common sense.

The unending string of pearls of recent months began when the Catalan premier, Artur Mas, said he was calling elections to achieve an overwhelming, heroic majority; a vote that would give him moral authority to bang the table and demand that Catalonia take her rightful place in the sun, among the concert of great nations with a national soccer team of their own. It was a disaster, and anything but a victory, yet he came out on the balcony beaming, as if it was.

With a left that seems to be lobotomized, and a right that exists only to conserve the privileges of the hundreds of thousands of parasites who impede any effective action on the part of the administration, especially concerning the major Spanish public (now privatized) companies, the only alternative was guerrilla war — but not even that is on the cards.

We seem to have touched bottom. This was clear enough when the government decided that its “indispensable” cutbacks must include those that have amputated what is normally called “culture” — which is just what politicians in general are short of, and the only thing there is never enough of in this country. (Spain, as we all know, has been domesticated, but not civilized.)

What importance can schools, universities, museums, reading, cinema, libraries and science have for a class of people who spend the day yelling insults at the other side, and keeping their parliamentary seats warm?

Our prime minister made it clear enough when he presented a gift to the new pope: the Spanish national soccer team’s shirt. The fervor of religion and the understanding of the mysteries of faith can find no higher expression.

The cultural stature of the Spanish government was summed up in the photo of Pope Francis gazing in perplexity on the t-shirt, as if it were a specimen of the duck-billed platypus. There is not even an excuse in the fact that Francis is from Argentina, a land at whose mercy we now are. No. This colossal gift recalls the wonderful statue of Don Quixote that the king once gave the American astronauts, so they could take it up into space with them. True, that tacky tourist souvenir was not the monarch’s own idea — as this t-shirt is presumably Rajoy’s.

In this state of things, perhaps the best thing is to go home, sit down, turn on the television and watch videos of lady politicians masturbating, to pass the time for two years until the next elections roll around, and then give our vote to the political figures most apparently endowed with common sense — Rosa Diez, for example, or Ciutadans, if you are really obstinate about continuing to live in Catalonia. Not that their splinter parties will ever be strong enough to save the situation, but just as an experiment to see whether they go the way of the others, i.e., that fatuous behavior is hardwired into the political species.