The biologist Jared Diamond demonstrated in his award-winning essay Armas, gérmenes y acero (Pulitzer Prize in 1997) that the way in which we have always learned history, depositing in the talent and character of an infinite number of proper names – caciques, kings, generals, inventors and artists – his helm contained a deep hunger for the novel and, with a scientific eye, he could follow the future of human societies objectifying the factors that explained the fate of tribes, kingdoms and empires
Nevertheless, imputing the downfalls of history to individual vices and virtues has always been the hegemonic view, and it is difficult to think that it will cease to be so. A simple example is the uchronic debates about the possibility of time travel and assassinating Adolf Hitler as a child. It is not so much the result of the moral discussion about infanticide that matters, but the magical thinking on which it rests: that without Hitler there would have been no Nazism.
These days, Madrid is playing the lead role – more intensely after the resounding result of the elections of May 28 – debates around Ayusism, a certain conception of politics as a vector of a predatory economy that consists, to sum it up in a matter that ran like wildfire yesterday, to triple the price of the transport pass and at the same time give aid to wealthy families to pay for servants.
This political culture – based on an anxious search for profit through economic traces of the golden age – is also expressed in its anecdotes, such as the one explained on his Twitter account by cartoonist Mauro Entrialgo: “Madrid bar. You ask for cane. They say they only have double glasses. You ask for one even though you don’t feel like it. Then someone comes and asks for a glass of water. They put it in a cane glass. This is Madrid now”. Serving only doubles is not as mean, as greedy a gesture, as throwing water into the ridiculous trickle of the reeds, typical of the Thénardier innkeepers of Les Miserables, who when they weren’t watering the jugs of wine stole boots, buckles and watches from the dead in the fields of battle
The temptation of her political adversaries to incarnate that rascality of the slot tavern keeper in Isabel DÃaz Ayuso is the greatest success of the Madrid president. If we focused our gaze on the underlying currents, it would be easy to see that this process of picaresque medievalization, that social degradation and that avaricious abuse are no different from those that punish the rest of Western societies. In May, “the real estate party and the tourism party” won the elections, as the essayist Jorge Dioni López – author of El malestar de las ciudades – says, and not so much Isabel DÃaz Ayuso. Understanding the deep reasons, beyond their occasional interpreters, is the first requirement to try to reverse, as López points out, that assertion about our economic culture: “Spain’s raw material is Spain, until it runs out “. And by “Spain”, it refers to you and me.
