Things Fall Apart

A long time ago, I read Joan Didion's collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. They were written in the 1960's and were a comment on the tearing, shifting, changing society of that time. The title of the main essay comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, and it is an allegory of the enormous change in society after World War I. The old is gone, a strange, new, menacing future is arriving. The first stanza goes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. In Spain today the centre is beginning to fail. Increasingly, people are becoming polarized. Either they are ranting against the "Spanish oppressor" or against the "separatist traitors." No one is talking any more of sitting down to talk things out. Not even the King. 

When the King went on television the other night on a rare appearance, he spoke about upholding the law. He put Puigdemont, the regional president of Catalunya, totally in the wrong for having gone against the Constitution. At no moment did he say the differences and the reasons for having broken the law should be discussed, explained, and fixed. Instead, he paved the way for the Spanish government to eventually dissolved the autonomy of Catalunya. 

I think that was the moment things became even more "them" and "us." The only ones even approaching a call for dialogue are the separatist leaders and the leader of Podemos, a leftist national party. Everyone is saying that dissolving the autonomy would be the worst thing to do. Yet the central government in Madrid is not backing down, and is ordering Puigdemont not to declare independence "or else" but is not holding out any solution to the problems that led Catalunya to this point in the first place.

People who once didn't care what happened in Catalunya are now coming out on one side or the other. People who once thought the region was doing the wrong thing now want them to become independent, seeing the intransigence of the central government as completely undemocratic. Others, who seemed lackadaisical on patriotism, are suddenly wrapping themselves in the flag and screaming "Traitors!" Especially on the receiving end of that appellation is the Catalan football player, Gerard Piqué. He voted in favor of Catalan independence, yet showed up for training with the Spanish national team the other day. It did not sit well with many fans, on either side. 

The problem is not only that people are divided one way or the other. The bigger problem is that the extremes are coming out in alarming numbers. In Catalunya, in some schools both the teachers and the students are harrassing the children of the Guardia Civiles and Policía Nacional who have been living there for years. The children are being told that their parents are murderers and should die for their sins. Policía Nacional and Guardia Civiles are persona non grata on the streets, and some do fear for their lives. 

In the rest of Spain, at some demonstrations in favor of the unity of Spain, some groups have come together to sing the anthem of the Spanish fascist Falangistas, the Cara al Sol. Fascist groups are becoming emboldened, and those who are in favor of national unity, yet against fascism and all it represents, are finding that they are having problems discerning fascist groups from simply patriotic groups. They all sport the Spanish flag, they all have a patriotic discourse, but they have different ideologies. Unfortunately, patriotism in Spain is still linked to nationalism Franco-style. I though we had outgrown that narrow vision of country; sadly, no.

Newspapers that once seemed objective no longer are. I had a favorite newspaper that I once perceived as telling most of the truth. Now, it has developed a bias in favor of the central government, at least in its reporting of this mess. I am now checking a wider variety of newspapers for information, and I notice that while a news item may be printed in its entirety on different papers, the descriptive language the reporters use vary widely. One newspaper even talked about the leading members of the separatist movement by calling them the "Sanhedrin." The first image that word brings up? The Jewish council that condemned Jesus to death and then handed him over to the Romans. The "traitors." Even the press is starting to take sides, trying to gauge the future this is leading us to, and trying not to lose readers by picking the losing side.

We've been through this before. But our capacity to commit the same mistakes is wondrous. We haven't learned from history because we are not encouraged to learn our history. Elderly people who suffered our great exercise in brotherly cruelty eighty years ago are watching in shock as we are poised on the edge of the abyss once more. I've been into poetry these days, and another fragment of a poem by Carl Sandburg jumped out at me. From the end of his book-long poem, The People, Yes, comes this:

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas...