Break a leg

A few days ago, the group Fades announced via Instagram that they had to cancel the concert in Vilassar de Mar on June 23 after several people in the audience threw ice cubes onto the stage during the performance. It is sometimes difficult to ascertain the motive for an assault, but intuition rarely fails to determine its origin: in this case, it could be hatred of the queer expression they embody or the defense they champion of the Catalan language and culture. They can also know this because they constantly receive, daily, threats of this kind through social networks. The next day, many media outlets reported the news and, like the group's own statement, linked the assault to the rise of the far-right.I am now writing these lines with many doubts. Firstly because far right has become a term as imprecise and worn out as mental health, housing crisis or neoliberalism. We use it constantly thinking we know what we are referring to, but it barely denotes any certainty. We could imagine the profile of a person who threatens a music group on social media or who, later, assaults them during a concert: it could be someone who has meditated the attack; someone who, in an improvised way, has felt confident enough to start throwing ice cubes; someone who has made violence a form of seduction; someone who has let themselves be carried away by their environment, in a kind of initiatory ritual that involves hatred of difference. Some must be militants of the far right and must agree, without cracks, with their political imaginary. It would be wonderful if that were the case, in fact: we would know who they are, what they think, what they want. It happens, however, and I am sure, that many of them are not followers of Vox or Aliança Catalana: perhaps they follow incel gurus on the internet, perhaps they feel infinite frustration, perhaps they only know how to express some feeling if it is from phobia and aversion, perhaps they are resentful uneducated people or perhaps they are fans of the new retrograde centennial binarism. No idea. I am not writing now to understand who they are, what they think, what they want. What I believe unites them all, those who now insult and later will call for raids, is a severe sense of legitimacy in the public agora, and here lies, in my opinion, one of our great challenges. They all feel that they can do it as they could not do it a few years ago, that they have finally recovered a freedom lost by political correctness and leftist do-goodism, by the progressive feminist agenda that, according to them, has gone against their well-being. Extreme right aside, the war, here, is about discourse and language: there are those who believe that their truths can now be expressed with sovereignty, freedom, and a broad approach. They can take the floor because no one disputes it, they can occupy the space as they please because there is no one left defending it.I was ruminating on these things when, a few days ago, while this was just happening in Vilassar, I was having dinner with a publisher in the Pyrenees who told me, convinced, that one of the evils of our time is that we who dedicate ourselves to the word (writers, publishers, poets, journalists...) do not take it. We censor reprehensible conduct with some quick tweet, a brief article (like this one) and little else. And lucky, in fact, if we do. Many times we are stopped by self-censorship, fear, imposed shame, paralysis. Thus, the feeling widens that the public agora, where discourses are found, where bodies are found, is empty, desolate, ready to be paved with the cobblestones of hate. What I wonder, today too, is what would happen if, in cases like this, instead of the organizers reading a manifesto after the aggression and some media publishing the news, feigning dismay, a group of people surrounded the aggressors, denounced them or, simply, with the desire to take the word, to reclaim common space, and much more effectively, broke their legs. But we won't do it, of course.