The biologist Jared Diamond demonstrated in his award-winning essay Guns, Germs and Steel (Pulitzer Prize in 1997) that the way in which we have always learned history, depositing in the talent and character of an endless number of proper names -caciques, kings, generals, inventors and artists – its rudder, contained deep down a hunger for novels and, with a scientific gaze, the evolution of human societies could be followed by objectifying the factors that explained the fate of tribes, kingdoms and empires.
However, attributing to individual vices and virtues the compliments of history has always been the hegemonic view, and it is hard to think that it would stop being so. A simple example is the uchronic debates about the possibility of traveling in time and assassinating Adolf Hitler as a child. The result of the moral discussion about infanticide is not so important, but rather the magical thought on which it is based: that without Hitler there would have been no Nazism.
Madrid is the protagonist these days –in a more intense way after the resounding result of the elections of May 28– debates around Ayusismo, a certain conception of politics as a vector of a predatory economy that consists, to summarize it in an issue that was running yesterday like gunpowder, in tripling the price of the transport pass and at the same time giving aid to wealthy families to pay servants.
That political culture –based on an anxious search for profit through economic tricks of the Golden Age– is also expressed in his 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 glass. You order 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 nowâ€. Serving only doubles is not such a stingy, greedy gesture, like pouring water into the ridiculous glass of reeds, typical of the Thénardier innkeepers from Les Miserables, who when the wine jars did not water they stole boots, buckles and watches from the dead. on the battlefields.
The temptation of her political adversaries to embody that meanness of the cuartos innkeeper in Isabel DÃaz Ayuso is the greatest success of the Madrid president. If we focus our gaze on the background currents, it would be easy to see that this process of picaresque medievalization, this social mischief and this greedy lawlessness are not different from those that plague the rest of Western societies. In May, “the real estate party and the tourist party†won the elections, as the essayist Jorge Dioni López –author of El malaesta de las ciudades– says, and not so much Isabel DÃaz Ayuso. Understanding the deep motives, beyond its occasional interpreters, is the first requirement to try to reverse, as López points out, that assertion about our economic culture: “The raw material of Spain is Spain, until it runs out.” And by “Spain”, he means you and me.
