It is common that these days the debate between firecrackers and anti-firecrackers is reproduced, what is not so frequent is that the issue is raised in openly political terms, as the journalist Xavi Serra did this week on Twitter. He wrote this: “Throwing firecrackers is right wing. An act guided by the same principle of lack of solidarity with the suffering of others as Vox’s policies. Does it cause pain to pets, people with ASD and many older people? Let them hold on It’s tradition.”
Among the responses, one of the phrases of recent days emerged, “que us bombin”, as an expression of individualism with a certain nihilistic touch. But for every person who thinks like Serra, or who writes these days on networks things like “eternal hatred of firecrackers”, there is another (or more, the census is not clear) who believes the opposite, that the use of fireworks in the street is the maximum expression of the festive occupation of public space and an act of rebellion against authority and that in no case could be described as totalitarian.
That is precisely where the anthropologist Manuel Delgado goes, such a lover of bonfires, firecrackers and the night of Sant Joan that he usually posts photos on networks with the arsenal of gunpowder that he buys and who for years personally took charge of going with a van collecting junk of wood to keep alive the bonfire in his neighborhood, Fort Pienc. “A Sant Joan bonfire is a barricade,” he says. And a festival, the closest thing to a revolution. “We investigated this in a book called Carrer, festa i revolta. The ways of appropriating urban space in festive conditions are the same as those that occur in riot conditions and Sant Joan implies that. The parties and the revolts are made of the same paste, they respond to the same insurrectionary logic. The idea of ??not throwing firecrackers is the same logic that indicates that, in the name of civility, you can make the revolution but not step on flower beds, which is what happened in 15M”.
Delgado insists that “firecrackers are thrown because they have always been thrown” and that he cannot even imagine a society in which nobody bothers anyone, “a peaceful garden where people greet each other, hug the trees and circulate cycling”. Every celebration, he says, implies discomfort for someone. “A party is a tumultuous appropriation of public space. There is no possible alternative, ”he believes. Thinking back to his childhood, when there was a bonfire run by children (more boys than girls, he admits) on every corner and they represented the exercise of a “lying insurrection by a sector that is habitually mistreated and ignored as is childhood.” This, he acknowledges, is no longer the case, since the firecrackers are bought by adults and are part of a regulated business.
The anthropologist Jose Mansilla, a member of the Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà (OACU) is a member of the pro-firecracker camp and believes, contrary to Serra’s tweet, that there is no action further from Vox’s ideology than launching carpenters and super devils in the middle of the street “There is nothing more left-wing than throwing firecrackers. What is right-wing is prohibiting the throwing of firecrackers or sending the moral message that it is negative for certain groups”. Didactic, Mansilla offers up to five arguments to justify his position: 1. It is about annoying. “As far as I know, nothing has been achieved at any time in history without disturbing.” 2. “It is part of all those activities that are carried out in the street and unite large and small in an intensive and decommodified use of public space.” 3. The authorities should stay away from parties. These, he believes, “must be governed by self-management, or, as politicians like to say, by co-responsibility.” 4. “Public intervention would only displace this co-responsibility, which must occur in specific events.” And finally (although, he says, he could go on listing), 5. “The street is a shared space. Just as hyper-congested spaces bother us and we avoid or tolerate them, we have to develop similar attitudes at parties no matter how little we like them”.
What would be, then, an example of self-management in the urban environment? “If I am throwing a firecracker and someone comes and tells me that it bothers them, I go and change my place. But I do not forbid. It is perverse that general causes are mounted based on minority casuistry ”, he believes. To which it could be argued against that precisely the struggle of progressive movements in the last century has consisted in making the interest of minorities gain weight.
“That you have no legal impediment to throw firecrackers in the street and thus justify the practice regardless of the damage you cause to others indicates a negative and purely liberal idea of ??freedom”, opposes, on the other hand, the philosopher Eudald Espluga, who answers this question from La Vanguardia while taking the car to leave Barcelona for Madrid with his dog, Teo, who has been suffering the effects of the explosions for days now. In Madrid there will be no firecrackers for Sant Joan but there will be a mascletà next year, which its mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, has promised to import.
Espluga says “with a small mouth” (because it does not seem like a problem as serious as others) that yes, throwing firecrackers is right-wing for various reasons, because relying on tradition to continue doing it implies a conservative bias and because, in practice , the ritualistic explanations that speak of the liberating power of gunpowder seem to him to no longer make much sense in a current context.
“Throwing firecrackers around Sant Joan is the Eurovision of heterosexual white men who are having a bad midlife crisis,” he ditch. The same ones who, citing Pedro Sánchez in conversation with Carlos Alsina, have felt “annoyed” with the feminist measures of their own Government in the last four years.
Without statistics at hand, Espluga calculates that 90% of those who buy firecrackers these days at kiosks are men who pass on the hobby to their sons. “It is part of a consumer practice, like almost all parties, already commodified and passing it off as a Dionysian and Bataillano ritual does not make much sense. I don’t see that there is a transgressor in buying firecrackers and making some people and non-human animals have a hard time”.
For Maria Herrero Canela, the firecrackers in Sant Joan ceased to be a theoretical debate a long time ago, because it has very real consequences at home. Her 14-year-old son Genís is autistic and has an intellectual disability, and she is an active member of the Mares Disca Union, a name that itself contains a political intention: “Disca” is the term preferred by many environmental activists. of disability, because it implies a rebellion and a claim to difference. Genís will spend the festival tonight admitted to the Clínic’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit at his own request. On a routine visit to the Hospital de Dia this week, he broke down in fear of what was coming (he knew that Sant Joan was coming and had been suffering for days from the occasional firecrackers) and asked to stay there, in an environment where he has spent many sleepless nights. your life and where you feel safe.
“Other years I took him outside of Catalonia to avoid firecrackers, but this year he is very unbalanced due to the hormonal explosion and I did not dare to travel with him,” explains Herrero. For a person like Genís, firecrackers cause real suffering, on the one hand because they are unpredictable, which makes him very upset, and on the other because he hears them in his head at an enormous volume, due to the hyperacusis suffered by many people. with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). “It gives him enormous headaches,” clarifies his mother.
And it’s not that Genís doesn’t like parties or traditions. In fact, he is a giganter and is part of a gigantic group of people with different abilities, although when trabucaires are included in the parades, he needs to stay at home, because that noise also becomes unbearable for him. “Why aren’t light firecrackers thrown, without sound? It is hard for us to assume that traditions change. We no longer mistreat animals, and we no longer hang people from the public square, and many traditions that we believe to be ancient are not so ancient. People with children with disabilities know that care for minorities ultimately improves everyone’s lives. What about people who are sick, people who are dying?”
Herrero finds the question of whether throwing firecrackers belongs to the right “interesting” but he does not launch into an answer, partly because, he says, he has lately been rethinking what is the left and what is the right. “What I am clear about is that throwing firecrackers is unsupportive, it is not respecting the vulnerable and minorities in the name of tradition.”
As a solution, he proposes a regulation, decreeing zones, perhaps entire regions in which gunpowder does not spread. “Let people be given the option to organize themselves,” he says. These palliative attempts are also often met with controversy. The announcement that this year a kiosk with low-intensity firecrackers, which sound like a hair dryer at best, was being installed in Barcelona, ??has been received with contemptuous comments. “Woke firecrackers” called them a tweeter.
Woke or not woke, popular fireworks have historically annoyed the established power, points out Gil-Manuel Hernàndez, director of the Museums of Festive Culture of Valencia and historian of Valencian popular culture, which necessarily goes through gunpowder. “In the Baroque there was an official fireworks, linked to the festivities of the monarchy and the high hierarchy of the church and a popular fireworks, which since the Enlightenment tried to be prohibited by the authorities. Gunpowder in the hands of the people always had subversive charges, ”he points out.
As well as regarding the failures, he says, there are irreconcilable political readings – when the now extinct Pacte del Botànic was signed and Joan Ribó arrived at the Valencia City Council, there was much talk about whether the failures of the culture of the right could be separated – the pyrotechnics would be sociologically cross. “You couldn’t say it’s conservative or progressive.” In Valencia, debates have been generated, for example, about whether it is convenient to throw castells and mascletàs near the Oceanogràfic, taking into account that it bothers many animal species.
Hernàndez agrees with Delgado that “being at war and having a party are similar” and that the party is itself an insurrection. “It has happened many times that a carnival has ended in revolt. Now, however, it makes sense to revisit the tradition. “It is confronted with needs that arise from modernity, which implies negotiating, conceding and regulating. Let’s get to it, even though a lot of people might not like it. The tradition has to be adapted to groups that previously did not have this centrality. The question, from my point of view, is that what was undebatable before is now an option. Tradition is not the norm, it is reviewable”.
