Liberals believe that politics is about freeing individuals to live as they want within just bounds. Nationalists believe it is a tool for translating a sense of ethnic identity and a fondness for folkdancing into, respectively, sovereignty and national ballets. No one can remember what socialists believed.
For the rest of us, however, politics–I speak, BTW, as an ex-activist and -propagandist for several leftish and environmentalist causes–is about getting out of the house and boozing and fornicating with wild and wicked people with whom we pretend to share some noble interest.
For this reason, when I came to Barcelona I immediately attempted to get some kind of political life for myself. Given my views on the Iraq war, I was considered persona non grata by all parties but the PP. I did my best with the female branch of the Aznar fanclub, but, to be blunt, my bicycle isn’t a 4×4.
It was thus with great anticipation that I read denunciations in the nationalist-socialist press of new party, Ciutadans de Catalunya, as a bunch of intellectuals (makes for interesting Googling, BTW). I honestly thought that within a couple of weeks of joining I’d be snogging a girl with funny hair, Finnish glasses and a few poorly-memorised Baudrillard quotes to add some air of decency to the proceedings.
The party presentation today was a bitter disappointment: they all look terribly normal; so terribly normal, in fact, that I’m worried that there may be rather a lot more of them out there.
(There’s a good piece here by José García Domínguez.)
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