For weeks I have been receiving instructions via whatsapp to create the Republic of Catalonia. I am part of a sentimental plot that moves through chains messages that keeps our troop together and alert, either to pay the bail of Artur Mas or to concentrate on the streets. This is due to the spamming of several pro-independence friends who, however, leave me out of the important missions because they know well, as I have taught them, that there are moments in life when you do not know where the friend ends and the source begins.
A couple of days ago I got a message sandwiched between heart emoticons that said «Let’s take care of the Jordis». We must let them know that they are present, that they are key pieces of a united people that fights peacefully for being free, I translate. «Let us fill Soto del Real with letters and postcards for the Jordis,» continued the message, and the postal address of the jail was attached. The Jordis, I thought. And the crazy idea that one of the Jordis begins to receive more letters than another because he is better looking. As if in the eighties we were forced to choose one of the Bros.
There are more incredible things going on than a normal brain can process. The amazing thing about the Catalan “process” is not that the rich have organized the taking over of palaces to expand their lounges only because they feel like Bolsheviks for a month —October, of course— but the immense number of people who believe no payment will be necessary to cross the river with the scorpion on top of their backs. This immense number of pro-independence people by conviction has seen in the last five years how the eternal nationalist bourgeoisie who did not want to risk anything, now seems to risk everything because they have changed some Articles of the Estatut. A revolution of people who want to lose privileges and live worse, of course; a revolution of the posh, the social class that best sniffs and smells what suits them. What can go wrong?
To them, nothing. That’s why you start making revolutionary casino decisions, like taking cash from the cash dispensing machines to attack the banks. What follows is that they will send the housekeeping help to pay with cents. Either the Revolution is made or it becomes ridiculous. And a revolution that asks to get money from the cash dispensing machines, 155 euros at the end of the month, to give yourself a treat if you do not know what to do with it, you have to expect anything. When they warned Lluís Llach on Twitter that no one should use multiples of five (as if Llach knows what is taken out or not of an ATM), he did not answer «then 150», but 160. They have two lives of advantage. To all, especially to their own.
No one has better defined the role that the Catalan bourgeoisie has reserved in the Catalan process: give yourself a treat. For little less than to make capitalism fall. A fall that, if it ever came to happen, would be paid by the same who have been paying the parties all along, as has been recently proven in Spain. Because there is only one clear thing. When this ends —be it victory or defeat, whatever that means at this point— and the consequences of the destruction will come, some will be paying the bill and others will run to take refuge in their inconsideration and their fortune. People who are there for adventurous reasons, to live strong emotions and to play with those of others; an ideological “all you can eat” with which to feel protagonists of the story while raising the flag with one hand and taking the headquarters of their company to some other place in Spain with the other. They have half of the money in red and the other half in black, and when they see that the ball is going to fall they take away the roulette, an entrepreneur tells me in Barcelona, a Galician who has been his whole life providing the roulette, the ball and the magnet. It will not be any different now. They have never paid anything and it has always been better that way; when they think of paying something it is because they think they will double their investment. To whoever and whatever, under whatever concept.
Originally published in Spanish: “Regálate un capricho” Manuel Jabois. El País.
