Funny/Not Funny

 

The news by newspaper and the news by mail only occasionally converge...

I got a piece of mail from Banco Sabadell today.  For a moment I wondered whether it might be something retro like a paper account statement in spite of their spiffy smartphone app, and then I worried that it might be some kind of bill.  But when I got upstairs and opened it I discovered a form letter (in English, since my account was set up in that language - they do have good software) addressed to "Dear Sir/Madam" and informing me "personally" that the bank's Board of Directors has decided as of October 5 to relocate their registered offices to Alicante in order to "fulfill [the bank's] commitment to take the necessary measures to ensure at all times the proper legal security and protection of the interests of its customers."  No particular reason.  They just want me to know that I definitely should not panic and withdraw money, and that they've always thought Alicante was lovely at this time of year (which I'm sure it is).


Given that this was major headline news (internationally) a month ago (round about October 5, when it happened), I can only assume that sending a letter to account holders six weeks later is designed for those who happen to have been living under a rock with their fingers in their ears.  So now, when everything is over but the shouting for Catalunya, the slow and inexorable grind of paper mail begins to mercilessly detail the decline of the region.  It's sad in a way, but also so out of touch as to be funny.  Like a smoke detector going off as the fire trucks are stowing their hoses and white smoke is rising from the charred ruins of a building.

The Banco Sabadell thing is just mildly amusing.  On the other hand, the opinion piece I read yesterday in El País is not funny at all.  It does, however, capture some of the impotent rage that the Catalan separatists have aroused (I believe in many cases naively and guilty of nothing worse than self-absorption).  I think many people mistake the offense left-wing Spaniards take when someone like Puigdemont refers to the central government as "golpistas" for a form of patriotism or "Spanish nationalism."  Rather, as Justiniano Martínez Medina explains in "Gracias, Paco," Spaniards of a certain generation and political background are offended because "esos miserables....al mentir, insultan la memoria de nuestros muertos y muertas."  Trivializing the memory of the dictatorship trivializes the suffering of those who survived it (and those who did not).  Perhaps Yeats (who was himself a pretty rancid nationalist who undoubtedly would have supported Catalan independence but in spite of that a good poet) catches the sense of Justiniano Martínez' article best in English:

Was it for this the wild geese spread
the grey wing against every tide?
For this that all that blood was shed?
For this Edward Fitzgerald died?

Yet they were of a different kind
the names that stilled your childish play
who went about the world like wind,
yet little time had they to pray....

Banco Sabadell's actions may hurt Catalunya in the long run, but they are not personal.  The separatists' circus will have absolutely no effect in the long run, but some of its more hyperbolic claims spit on the graves of the dead.