Machado and the national-AVE Madrid

Antonio Machado worked his whole life as an inspector for the low-null-know-nothing speed line between Seville and Madrid. After years sweating on the catenary, he was kicked out of the bull-skin-fraud railway company. On the platform of his exile, the poet of the track wrote that there is “a Spain that dies and another Spain that yawns”. Antonio, with the respect I have for you, and you already know that my cat and I recite your verses from memory without being drunk, there are not two Spains: there is only one.

If there are deaths and yawns in the Toledo accident (formerly in Adamuz, Gelida, Galicia, in Rodalies-Llunyanies…) it is because Spain is Madrid. The only process of independence has been this one. Madrid has become independent from Spain. Metropolis and colonies with AVE perfume marketing. Madrid is the AI (animal intelligence) of Spain. Spain exists via ouija Madrid. Spain is only for iron. An infrastructure that comes out of the artificial km 0, simulacrum, PVC, hologram. A non-place that went "from village to court". An autonomous community awarded by the raffle of "café (and turpentine) para todos", becomes a nation-state. Madrid: the "loctite" of Spain. A fiction created to be real. Madrid, a material and spiritual supermarket: the rest, a paved parking lot of the Spanish pseudo-dream, but with national-Madrid looting. We have gone from “from Madrid to heaven” to “Madrid to earth”, the pocket, lobotomy. Madrid, orphanage of Spain. We are all children of Madrid. We are all slaves of Madrid. The AVE is Madrid. Jesus Christ, Doraemon, Elvis are Madrid. And we wanted to be…

The train was arriving: “It is the time for maximum effort”, since "we want to save Catalonia and continue our task of returning it to itself; if not, in a few years we will be as far from Europe as the states that intervene with conquest operations, which we hypocritically qualify as police, and neither trade, nor nascent industry, nor the strivings for our culture will be possible". This was written by the president of the Commonwealth of Catalonia, Josep Puig i Cadafalch, in 1919. The Commonwealth, the first stone of the state of Catalonia, and the welfare state since 1714. When we had nothing and only had each other. When the dream was us: Catalonia.

“A large part of the country has neither railways nor roads, nor any other action from the State than the pair of civil guards or the collection agent who seizes the abandoned farm. A part of Catalonia has no access other than through France. We do not even know the country geographically, as the State has not had time to make a geographical map. All peoples have historical days of their state reconstruction. You will not find them, in Spain, in relation to Catalonia”, that is why it is “a devastated zone of Europe”. There is only one ticket. There is only one journey, one future.

“And past events have shown that only through patriotism did our Barcelona and Catalonia free themselves from a great catastrophe, without any government measure being taken afterwards to make peace lasting. Our patriotism is a guarantee of civilization”. Thus Catalonia “would feel even more strongly its yearning for freedom". The freedom of those of us who are immigrants in our own home. The national-railway iron of the Madrid-Spain chains must be broken. Spain will break due to the infrastructure. Antonio, as you used to repeat while tearing up tickets: “Everyone who waits knows that victory is theirs”.