I was already in a somewhat dark mood about the Koldo case, when Mrs. Von der Leyen appears and ends up turning me into a real asshole. One of those idiots who believe that nothing changes for the better, that history does not advance towards any bright place and that the only thing that progresses – technology – only serves to make us addicted to screens in which we inhabit a virtual world even more stupid than the real. We have never had so much information at our disposal, true, but it seems that the only thing we know how to do with it is thrive in the burriciness. Eliot’s poem explains it best: “Where is the wisdom we have lost with knowledge? Where is the knowledge that we have lost with the information?”
But what I was going. First, the alleged outrages of this Koldo, his hard-working promoter, former Minister Ábalos, and the bitter feeling of déjà-vu that they convey. As if we were dusting off old photographs of Roldán and the Gürtel; or when the old king returned from his hunting excursions and muttered I don't know what about repentance and forgiveness. Always the same: men with arid expressions and ages at which one is already responsible for one's face, conspiring in the booths of seafood restaurants, investing in apartments on the coast and corrupting any idea of public service a little more.
They are the usual guys. Those who, as Alejandro Nieto said when analyzing corruption in Spain, do not operate in that official State described in the Constitution, with majestic and harmonious powers in which everything is designed for the defense of citizens and general interests, but in another semi-clandestine and murky State, which is where public life really takes place. In fact, they might even feel a little sorry for me; condemned to being overweight, constantly eating barnacles and crabs and telling themselves that their best times have not yet passed.
Simultaneously, the president of the European Commission, the circumspect Mrs. Von der Leyen – who sometimes looks so much like Vera Miles from Psycho and The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance – recommends to Europeans an intense rearmament campaign because what Coming is a war more cruel and harsh than the one Putin unleashed in Ukraine, and Biden and NATO are fueling it, while others lay down the dead. You see: arms control has become a Cold War party and what is convenient is to invest in military drones, in old tanks and put tax money to work for combat.
This is what has remained of the illusions of the late eighties after the fall of the Wall, when the largest open-air prisons in history burst in Eastern Europe and some political scientist who was not clairvoyant (God created political scientists so that astrologers did not have such a bad reputation) proclaimed the end of history. I assure you that many of us unwary people share the error: almost all of us who live in that foreign country that is the past and believed that man had improved somewhat since the times of Cheops.
The worst thing is that it is very likely that Von der Leyen is right and will do well to remind us how the world works, because today nothing indicates that new steps will be taken towards peace, democracy and human rights, quite the opposite. Thinkers and states that were once liberal and secular submit to the most brutal manifestations of religion and nationalism, and societies that we once believed were tolerant succumb to the irresistible charm of authoritarian democracy.
The president says it loud and clear: the vision of perpetual peace is just a mirage that distracts us from what truly matters, facing the challenges of the future with large-caliber ammunition, because those Russian tanks advancing towards the west On the roads of Ukraine they dangerously resemble the panzers that eighty years ago spread death in the opposite direction.
If these are the forecasts, in the end it is not surprising that Israelis and Palestinians continue killing each other with the fury generated by the most toxic aspects of the sinister monotheisms illuminated in their territories; nor that Putin can win in Ukraine; nor that people like Trump see his followers grow because the old liberals have died or have nothing to offer. Not even hope. You will agree with me that there are weeks when it is better not to get out of bed.
