The cliché says that it is in exceptional circumstances that a man is known (the saying, which is clearly from another time, does not seem to apply to women). Ábalos-Koldo-Cerdán when they talked about how they shared the money obtained from commissions and (in the case of the first two) choosing the prostitutes on which they spent it. heroic circumstance to know what stuff they are made of.
Another conversation that we should avoid, because it is also repugnant, although of a different kind, is the message that the brand new Secretary General of NATO, Mark Rutte, sent to his owner, the President of the United States. The text message is regrettable in more than one respect, starting with the mimetic language he adopts from his interlocutor—that BIG in capital letters, a redundancy that unnecessarily underlines the impoverishment of linguistic resources that Harvard's enemy has made one of his hallmarks—not to mention his own hallmarks. (It would be interesting to know why Trump decides to make the message public: whether because his ego cannot resist letting the world know the praise that is emphatically directed at him, or as a cruel way of punishing other balls, in yet another demonstration of his power.)
However, we can all agree that the most serious aspect of Rutte's unfortunate message is not the form, but the substance: the unwavering assumption that European NATO countries must increase military spending to an amount equivalent to 5% of their GDP. Why 5%, and not some other random figure like those the US president has used in the "negotiation" of tariffs? Where does this figure come from? (For comparison: European countries, as Carme Trilla has explained, allocate an average of between 0.6% and 1% of GDP to public housing, something much more necessary than bombs, and in our country the percentage is barely a ridiculous 0.2%).
As if that weren't enough, the demand that we allocate this huge amount of public money to arms comes from a politician who, when he was Prime Minister of the Netherlands, was, along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, one of the most fervent defenders of the austerity policy that emerged in the wake of the European crisis. A policy that has historically proven to be unjust and misguided, and which was decided, one must assume, with the same rigor and knowledge with which the rearmament of Europe is now being considered.
We live in difficult times. Difficult to live through, but also, and perhaps above all, difficult to understand: we live in the perplexity of seeing how a portion of our neighbors, people like us, have handed over the reins of public affairs to a group of acrobats, often suffering from severe mortality. unimaginable limits (the current King of England comparing himself to a tampon in a supposedly seductive message to his lover, or Bill Clinton in the Oval Office with an intern under the table doing what Americans call blow job while he was talking on the phone), but the desacralization to which we have subjected the powerful does not seem to have led, on the contrary, to greater democratization. We have ended up replacing the ruling elite with a caste of demagogues who have no personal or political quality, only an unbridled ego, an insulting lack of shame and obvious ignorance.
But how David Fernández said on these same pages"Things aren't like this: things are like this, which is quite different." Our obligation is to change them, if we don't want the Ruttes of this world to impose their roadmap on us, a path that only leads, from victory to victory, to ultimate disaster.
