It's all a matter of branding. I thought so on Tuesday, seeing the images of the King and Queen of Spain and their daughters watching the World Cup match against France, dressed in the team's second kit, the white Adidas jersey. Apparently, this model sold out before the team's debut in the tournament and has demonstrated the success of the nineties' design, somewhere between melancholic and second-hand shop, and the success, above all, of having renounced the flag's colors and replaced the blood red with a very pleasant burgundy. I also thought so because, seeing fans with the rojigualda wrapped around their bodies like a second skin, a rejection awoke in me that the white jersey managed to appease. I have read some articles that argue that Spain, unlike the United States, maintains a peculiar relationship with its own symbols, an appreciation that I find false: you only need to get off the AVE at Atocha to realize the categorical and unequivocal presence of national iconography.The triumph of the t-shirt, in my opinion, lies in this making Spain seem like something different from Spain. Quite iconic, in fact, that the solution is white, because that way someone could talk about "whitewashing" and pat themselves on the back, but I certainly think this successful strategy captures a global trend: making things not seem like what they are. Let me explain. On the one hand, there is the casualness with which patriotic discourses, constitutional or not, are imposed in public spaces today (in my gym, a guy shows up every day with a t-shirt of theaguilucho, and everyone is so calm), and on the other hand, there is the desperation of those who do not want to resemble this, but whose alternative proposal is more cosmetic, aesthetic, than anything else: putting on the white t-shirt allows for articulating a kind of liminal space, opening up a fleeting disidentification, making it seem for a while that things are not as they are. It paradoxically deals with maintaining the background with a new form that promises a new background. However, over time, this new form becomes fixed, and once everyone has swallowed the renewed symbol, there is no need to redo anything: Spain wears white, but it remains Spain.I find that something similar has happened with Aliança Catalana, which hides textbook racism under a protectionist discourse that argues that public services should be reserved exclusively for nationals: even though Orriols sometimes shows herself to be radical, anointed with impunity to express any opinion (a few days ago she referred to the veil as "headscarf"), she also oscillates with more diplomatic discourses that she articulates to distance herself from what the population associates with Vox. However, when one discovers that 22% of Aliança Catalana voters will choose Vox in the general elections one realizes that, even though Orriols dresses in white, even though she appeals to a millennial Catalan identity and a history of persecution and survival, she shares more dreams with Ignacio Garriga than with Abbot Oliba.All of this, I suppose, is to say that there are things that are unreformable, and exacerbated patriotism is one of them. And that, faced with the impossibility of making people believe that the Spanish flag represents a single good thing, it is better to drag it, that is, to pass it off as some form of transformism, and to pretend that it is no longer there, that it has melted away: that it is now white. It is similar to the cry of the Javis after winning Cannes with a film about the Civil War: "¡Viva España!" I know what they meant (long live another Spain, a republican, antifascist, queer, plural Spain...), but there is a certain naivety: their cry, however renewed they want it to be, is still exclusionary. And the truth is that, for many people, the problem is not that the idea of Spain is obsolete, but that the problem is the very idea of Spain, reformed or not, with a white shirt or red and yellow. I mean: if the kings wear the second kit, there must be a reason for it.
