Banksy's leap into the void

1. Waterloo Place is a place where nothing ever happens. The gentlemen's clubs in the Pall Mall buildings turn the stroll under London's stately arcades into a diorama frozen in another era. Suddenly, however, this beautiful corner of Westminster has experienced an artistic jolt that is also a pertinent political critique of global reach. Banksy has placed one of his works which, instead of being a usual wall painting, is a sculpture with volume, with relief, and with a lot of depth. A man, in a tailored suit, blinded by his own flag, walks without realizing he will fall from the pedestal. The work is the perfect metaphor for the extreme right of national priorities which, with America for Americans, Spain for Spaniards, and so on, heads straight for a leap into the void. Wrapped up in nationalist causes, with eyes covered by hatred and selfishness, it leads us all towards the precipice. A small step for a fascist, but a step with nefarious consequences for humanity.

2. Banksy's sculpture, planted in a single night, is a cry of alarm to the world. It is brave, committed art that expresses the fears of the time it has to live in. It is a chestnut, as beautiful as it is well-delivered, to the patriotic blindness that is globally leading us down a rocky path. What the UN fails to do, to stop those who violate international laws, those who start wars without reason, those who don't know how to end them, those who kill civilians with drones, missiles, and bombs of all kinds, an artist attempts to do with brilliant satire. Banksy describes the vertigo that Trump's MAGA entails. Or Jordan Bardella's France, which links the regularization of immigrants in Spain with crime and social degradation. Or, without going any further, the Spain of the Vox deputy who, in the Parliament of Catalonia, addressed Najat Driouech, a deputy from Esquerra, to tell her "We will not deport her, for now." I don't know if what comes before the comma is worse or this "for now" that he added afterwards. I don't know if the threat in the phrase or the Islamophobia of the deputy Tarradas, who grudgingly corrected himself, scares me more. He is already, too, Banksy's sculpture.

3. Not long ago, one morning when Jordi Basté was interviewing filmmaker David Trueba, he asked him if he had already seen Torrente, presidente, the Spanish film that has grossed the most since the Lumière brothers started playing with a camera. Beyond the cinematic comments, Trueba developed an idea that made me pull the car over to the side of the road, to savor what he was saying. The idea was that, faced with the justification of Santiago Segura, who says that in his film he hits everyone – the right, the left, fascists, the wokes, the independentists – one must say no, that is unfair, that not everyone should receive equally, because not all ideologies are equally harmful. And Trueba added that, laughing, it cannot be that the nonsense of some and others are equated. Not everyone is the same. It is not true. And he is right. Everyone can have contradictions, but the racism, homophobia, and sexism preached by the most rancid right, and represented by Torrente himself, are more censurable causes than others, even in comedy. Equidistance, also in art or in the films of recalcitrant know-it-alls, continues to be a deception. It is a refuge for the comfortable, who deep down do not dare to say what they think so as not to look too bad with anyone. After all, Trueba's phrase, which wavered between common sense and philosophy, would lead us to that liberal limit, expressed by a great thinker like Karl Popper: if you tolerate intolerant ideologies (which want to destroy rights and freedoms), you end up destroying tolerance itself. Because of this paradox, we are about to go to hell.