Adjectives are loaded by the devil. “The Catalan @paugasol has blamed me for the failure of the #juegos2030. With the respect that this athlete deserves, he should be better informed and not assume that the @COE_es obeys strict sports criteria. In this case, he has been an ally of the independence movement & rdquor ;, the president of Aragon, Javier Lambán, tweeted in response to a comment by Gasol, a member of the IOC after having been chosen by the athletes in the last Olympic Games, in which he pointed to the Aragonese president as responsible for the failure of the candidacy of the Spanish Pyrenees to the winter Olympics. gasoline, world-renowned athlete, banner of the Spanish basketball team for years and known for not being, precisely, independentista, is nevertheless Catalan, and therefore, in the eyes of Lambán, suspicious. Lambán has given a political recital in this long soap opera of the joint candidacy between Catalonia and Aragon for the winter Olympics. In order not to be a nationalist and to deplore nationalism (of the others, of course), Lambán has complied with the manual of the perfect nationalist: he has defended the honor of what was his in the face of the humiliations that the foreign enemy, Catalonia, tried to inflict on him; he has disdained rationality (technical and expert reports, including those from Aragon) to embrace the flag and emotion in defense of the sullied dignity of Aragon; has denounced conspiracies and betrayals against his land (that COE allied, in his opinion, with the Catalan independence movement); He has not let an offense go by from so many perfidious people to his land and, like the child who saw dead people, he has seen everywhere Catalans or friends of Catalans or victims of blackmail by Catalans: Minister Iceta, President Sánchez who agrees in the Congress with the independentistas and, in the end, Gasol himself. The Lambán protocol is a classic.
Adjective more than descriptive
The adjective, oh, marks everything. “The Catalan Gasol & rdquor ;. It is not true, as Lambán tweeted later, that this “Catalan & rdquor; just be descriptive. “It doesn’t bother me that they call me the” Aragonese Lambán & rdquor ;. It makes me proud & rdquor ;, the president of Aragon tweeted. His intention was not to make Gasol proud, but to point it out, to question its prestige and even its identity. Once Catalan, always Catalan, deep down. It has happened to Gasol and it has happened to many others, as we children of Andalusian immigration well know that in Barcelona we were the charnegos and in the town, the Catalans, and in neither case was the adjective simply descriptive. In the eyes of many in the rest of Spain, a Catalan has to prove very hard that he is Spanish, that is, that he does not act or feel like a Catalan. And yet, the doubt always persists.
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To not be ‘the Catalan’ you have to work at it. Like Jorge Fernández Díaz, without going any further. The one who at the time was the face of the moderate wing of the PP against Catalan nationalism (his opponent was Alejo Vidal-Quadras), has made headlines this week due to the publication in ‘El País’ of the audios of his conversations with Commissioner Villarejo to orchestrate the dirty war against Catalan nationalism in the years of the ‘procés’. They are some audios that are embarrassing. But nothing happens. There is no judicial process underway or public opprobrium for a minister who lied about what he is heard admitting in those audios. And it is difficult not to think that if nothing happens it is because what Fernández Díaz is heard to say had the objective of stopping the Catalan independence movement. Go for them, hey.
The generalized analysis to explain Lambán’s policy regarding the Olympics is that he is campaigning for the regional elections next year. Seen like this, Anti-Catalanism is a better electoral asset than taking the Olympics to the Aragonese Pyrenees. It must be true, Mariano Rajoy did not take a toll on collecting signatures against the Statute. Spain has a serious problem with Catalonia, which is not only territorial, constitutional or related. When “Catalan” is a pejorative adjective, when anti-Catalanism is equivalent to votes, when “for them” everything justifies it, it is the very essence of democracy that is faltering. That of all Spaniards, Catalan or not.