I can still hear itFriends forever which closed the Goya Awards gala, held in Barcelona last Saturday. The fact that, nearly thirty-four years after the Olympic Games, Barcelona has nothing new to offer when speaking to all of Spain on television and has to resort to nostalgia for an extraordinary but bygone era made the undisguised institutional purpose of turning the night of the film industry into a mere spectacle even more evident.star systemHispanic culture, which we share in a banal way of burying so many unresolved differences, implying that, if they aren't resolved, a fraternal embrace is the way forward, because the false path has been abandoned forever.
Friendship demands a plan of equality that doesn't exist in the hierarchical relationship between Catalonia and Spain. Even assuming the years of the Process hadn't happened, the commuter rail would still be here to remind us how much the State cares about our mobility. It cares about it exactly as much as it cares about our well-being, measured by the level of fiscal suffocation that has been damaging our public services for decades. And, of course, friends don't ask each other what's on their ID cards, nor are they intolerant of each other's languages.
A lot of time has passed since what could have been and wasn't. Nor is the world the same as it was in '92. The Western bloc viewed the fall of the Soviet empire as the (happy) end of history. It was in Barcelona that South Africa returned to the Games after more than thirty years of being banned due to apartheid, and Europe was integrated in Maastricht. The anguish we are experiencing due to the escalation of the war in Iran makes any comparison with the present impossible. The party ended many years ago.
