Good interview of Carlos Alsina with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Onda Cero. Questions with intention, documented, that try to contain the ex-president’s torrential rhetoric. Alsina does not hide that she does not agree with the mutant criteria of the current PSOE. Zapatero argues with respect, trusting that the listeners will have forgotten why he lost the election after introducing some elements of falsely progressive frivolity into Spanish politics. When they discuss the political situation in Catalonia, Alsina is belligerent – ??perhaps too much – and Zapatero clings to the idea of ??dialogue and legitimate decisions as an antidote to the poison of unilateralism, immobility and tension. With the eloquence of an untrained juggler, he claims the effort of the Statute as a starting point and claims that amnesty is compatible with socialist principles, but self-determination is not.
It is a phrase that has been repeated a lot these days. Literally, it questions the viability of the negotiation and pushes us towards a possible electoral repeat. Aware that uncertainty is the only irrefutable truth that governs the planet, Zapatero adds – with a firmness that I don’t know whether to interpret as hope or panic – that if you need to change your mind, then change it. And quoting the British journalist Martin Wolf, he says that “he who does not change his mind does not think”. When a politician quotes a journalist, it’s bad. The interview includes details of endogamy?that add morbidity to the pettiness that surrounds the desire for prominence of those who, like Zapatero and so many others, are not resigned to losing their capacity for media influence among those who, for better or worse, they do not consider that not changing one’s mind is necessarily equivalent to not thinking.
We must be very bad for the interview with Zapatero to be an oasis in an informatively ominous morning, with expansive massacres and, in a dimension of proximity, a circulatory collapse (delays in trains, failure of alternative bus lines, chaos on the roads and insane traffic to get in and out of Barcelona) that invites you to take a deep breath, listen to the radio and, if you can’t stand what’s being said, to console yourself in the most undignified way: thinking that in other places on the planet (“We don’t have water, we don’t have electricity, we don’t have medicine”, explains a spokesman for Doctors Without Borders in Gaza) have real reasons to see that the world is ending. We are left with the moral doubt of asking ourselves whether, in the current circumstances, enjoying the joy and pleasures that are available to us is a sin, a betrayal or, as the propaganda pulpits of one side convey and the another, an ignominy. The year 2023, however, is not yet over, and invites to recover that maxim attributed to Santiago Rusiñol: “There are years when it would be better not to get out of bed”.
