I refer you to the controversy unleashed last week by a conference given in a school by Mayor Oreja, a veteran PP politician who was once Minister of the Interior. The school was the Cristo Rey Concert Center in Madrid, the audience was around three hundred ESO and high school students and the presentation of the event was carried out by a teacher who went by the stage name of Mother Cristina.
As you must know, Mayor Oreja’s speech consisted of a review of the country’s ills, delivered in such a mournful tone that it made Joaquín Costa and Unamuno look like they had stepped out of a Eugenio joke. So far, nothing to say: don’t invite Mayor Oreja to laugh or to promote Bolshevism, in the same way that you don’t bring Ione Belarra to strengthen ties with Israel or Puigdemont to gloss over the virtues of the centralized state.
True to himself, Mayor Oreja rattled off one after the other, and without the slightest compassion for his tender audience, all the clichés about the decomposition of Spain that are part of the narrative of the most catastrophist right since at least from the times of the count of Romanones. The story of forever. Suicide in Spain (although, as he explained, he seemed to be talking about murder at the hands of rogue politicians rather than suicide), decay of customs due to minorities exalted by their personal self-determination (here a subtle nod to the trans law) and contempt for human life in any of its forms: to the unborn by the abortion law, to the born but impaired by suffering by the euthanasia law and to all others by the unbearable existence of Pedro Sánchez.
Logical and normal. It is necessary to prepare young people for what awaits them tomorrow and there is no doubt that it is a successful educational plan (look at the results of the PISA report on the Community of Madrid, which are so superior to those of Catalonia) instruct in the pluralism and variety. I am absolutely certain that Jaime Mayor Oreja’s conference at Cristo Rey will be followed by others from Ángela Rodríguez aka Pam, Arnaldo Otegi and a masturbation workshop promoted by some ministry: not everything will be fun, friends!
What is perhaps not acceptable and understands the brilliance and category of the act is something that in no way can be imputed to Mayor Oreja, who said what he thought under the protection of freedom of expression that recognizes a Constitution – of which he seems to be a great enthusiast – with great critical and public success. I am referring to the invitation to the students made by Mother Cristina at the end of the event, to offer them more information about an organization close to the ideology presented by the lecturer with a somewhat scandalous proselytizing intention. Above all because his fervent enthusiasm made me think of something that transcended the academic realm and entered the neurasthenic, even if God save us from the psychologists of being around the house and especially if, as is the case of a servant, they bring lawyer’s gown
Apart from that, nothing new under the sky: a conservative politician deeply embittered by the sign of the times repeating slogans that seem older than those laminated menus of restaurants that have not changed the gastronomic offer since the times that Manuel Fraga He was Minister of Information and Tourism.
What is strange is that this way of seeing things of Mayor Oreja has more and more predicament among conspicuous intellectuals-opinionators who in their day were clearly identifiable with the “left” and who today buy into any excessive hyperbole about the ruin of Sanchist Spain with the faith of the convert. It’s strange. Above all because these are outstanding cultural figures with an irreproachable past of opposition to the dictatorship and defense of democracy, who once led the most progressive thinking in the country and who, to my surprise, now subscribe to surprising conviction the theses of the most valetudinarian conservatism.
Jordi Gracia analyzes in an excellent article in El País (“No es la edad, es el poder”) the trajectory of these professional sermonizers who took very badly the rough and Manichean disqualification of the transition carried out by Podem, who entered the drift of catastrophism in the arms of Catalan independence and who, although they reacted with understandable acrimony to the excesses of political correctness, embarked on the strange journey that leads from Gramsci to Mayor Oreja. How we should see each other!