This term we have seen things we would never have believed, such as the “Blade Runner” version, but until we have recovered from the horror and amazement we have to bat our eyelashes when we see the Spanish army deployed in Catalonia!! With astronaut suits, drones, precision rifles… … For a hunting party. The same unit that took three days to show up to help in the Valencian disaster showed up at Collserola to kill wild boars with immediate effectiveness. The miracles of the Sanchista era, where the only things missing are the burning ships, X-ray storms and tears in the rain that di Prada loves so much.
But there is more. This week we saw a president declaring the meaning of a ruling by the Constitutional Court before filing a proper application for protection. We’ve seen him deny that there’s a reason his name is Pedro, which is that he really knows his most valued assistant, the man in prison today to whom he entrusted the most committed tasks. We’ve seen him humiliate himself (for the umpteenth time) to plead with a fugitive to maintain his parliamentary support, and the day is likely not far away when we see him go for photographs with him at Waterloo.
We saw a guy walking around Moncloa with an open fly. (Well, the women he exposed himself to during his rude insinuations saw it.) We’ve seen the most feminist party in history hide complaints about this issue and bail it out again when the press reports it. We have seen the trap of promoting a colonel in the Civil Guard to remove him from some of the more rigorous judicial investigations. We have seen the government abandoning sixty billion in European funds due to bureaucratic inability to manage them in the absence of a mandatory budget law that has not yet been introduced.
We’ve seen an abdicated king record a sadly homemade video to promote his memoir as if he were a fashion writer on a Planeta Prize promotional tour. We have seen the present King’s Council cruelly and contemptuously dismiss – “neither expedient nor necessary” – the sudden paternalistic initiative, which confounded the present inhabitants of Zarzuela, the supporters of the constitutional monarchy, and the ruling class which felt baffled by the inadequacy of the idea.
And all of this in just three days on Christmas Eve was scheduled without the traditional political truce due to untimely electoral emergencies. It is the tone of a time devoid of stable certainty, where the unexpected has become the norm and society has grown accustomed to constant anomalies. And we have yet to see many new things and “firsts” that we thought were unimaginable. Some of them, as Giuseppa Bagaza’s mother said, will make our blood run cold.