It happened in Madrid It was a successful program on Telemadrid that my grandmother, widowed and a little bored, was passionate about in the late nineties. I was living with her at the time and tried to convince her to change that noise to something else. Don’t look at that old-fashioned scarecrow, he told her, but she was true to her ways: the Soon and events were their cultural nourishment, and that would not change in the 1980s. He thus became convinced that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse were riding through the neighborhood of the Embajadores.
The program managed to segregate a woman who had lived there since 1939, who grew up in a fugitive republican family and was a victim of repression, who survived the post-war poverty, with a thousand stories of hunger, and who had crossed the Madrid of the quinquis who robbed pharmacies, to lock herself in her house with ten locks. In vain I told him that the neighborhood was more beautiful than ever, that there were theaters and trendy restaurants and pedestrian streets where before there had been many with syringes.
Elon Musk did not invent alternative realities. Fear is always a profitable product if sold to customers convinced that the world has left them aside and no one understands them. This is how the National Front grew in France, and this is how Vox hopes to grow with its so-called workerist strategy.
The new vice president of the Congress, Carlos Hernández Quero, is a thirty-year-old historian who wants to bring the teachings of his doctoral thesis, entitled The overflow of the liberal city: political culture and conflict in the suburbs of Madrid (1880-1930). While the PP, the PSOE, Sumar and the rubble of Podemos search for grapes of wrath, this disciple of José Antonio Primo de Rivera strolls through the old working-class neighborhoods with alarmist speeches about the Moorish rapists and underlining the bourgeois caste of the centre, insensitive to the dirt, the broken tiles and the buses that every day fill up more and more and stink more and more.
The smart ones at Vox know that no amount of data will kill this story. Neither the low crime rate, nor the fact that it is immigrants who keep neighborhood businesses alive and prevent them from becoming nursing homes without services, nor the memory of the hard years of industrial reconversion, when parents in early retirement went to the bar and unemployed children remained stranded. Like my grandmother, they don’t even open the windows to control the fire. They will keep them closed and turn up the volume on the television.
