Politicians on the campaign trail always kiss those who can't vote for them. Before they kissed children, now they stick their noses in the sheep's wool, and it is that perhaps they are slowly approaching the average voter. After all, the sheep speaks the language of most politicians. In five days, hundreds of head of cattle have been harassed and groped by politicians of all stripes, and the campaign has not yet started. I've seen a smiling Pablo Casado photographing himself surrounded by a bunch of sheep and I don't know, you'll say I don't understand this, but I'm not sure it was a brilliant idea. Perhaps it would have been more eloquent to kiss a ribeye.
But to me, all this rustic festival brings to mind H. L. Mencken, who, with the virtue of always distrusting the fervent mass, wrote that "democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance ". "No one in this world," he added, "has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of ordinary people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office for it." What makes me fear that we still have to see many lambs handled by gentlemen recently arrived from the Cortes, dressed in Colonel Tapioca's clothes and kissing our food from a few months from now without sanitary control.
One of my best bosses liked to repeat that useless effort leads to melancholy. Most of the politicians in the campaign don't know it, but the people of the countryside see through us, those of us on the floor, with disconcerting speed. In that delight that is Las cosas del campo by José Antonio Muñoz Rojas, his profile is well drawn, and has a bit of prophecy: "Made to dust and sorrow, with the song without joy, brown, against the ground, furrow goes, furrow comes, already to the plow, already to the sickle or to the hoe yoked to the earth, noble men of the field, in oblivion and in despair". You can get an idea of what they think of your electoral poses for Instagram.
High time someone need to teach how to make coconut rice to Sanjeev. https://t.co/AfzHjKxHTK
— Anand Fri Jun 25 13:53:08 +0000 2021
But how are they going to do the same, since almost no one dares to denounce, what do I know, the ruin that the 2030 Agenda will mean for Spain – the emptied and the full one –, how the piglets are going to try to get on their laps no matter what Whatever happens, maybe they should choose their victim well. I have distant experience as an animal petter, and I'm not just saying that because I've been a parliamentary chronicler for a few months. My childhood memories of summer in Ribadeo are the mornings sailing the estuary, Calvo Sotelo hieratic by windward, maragotas and bream fishing with my father, and the way to the farm at sunset, stroking the heads of some cows in the stable, waiting for the hot milkmaid for homemade desserts. As children, so unconscious, we tried to subdue everything: cows, donkeys, dogs, chickens, sheep, goats, or ducks. And I have not seen, apart from the cockroach, an animal more indifferent to caresses than the sheep.
I have tried the most varied beasts. While you rub its head, the old cow looks at you condescendingly without stopping ruminating, as if she were convinced that you are about to join Santiago González's Republic of Fools. The rabbit, always a traitor, looks for the warmest place in your lap to piss on you. The donkey doesn't even look at you, maybe you just look familiar. The turtle doesn't understand what makes you even try. The hamster, like the cat, steals your caresses, squinting its eyes, without ceasing to feel an ancestral resentment for you. While the parakeet can sleep and a certain melancholy when you scratch under the beak, thinking that it is a pity that you are not a parakeet. But the sheep, nothing, if it does not escape, is impassive. Perhaps because they know better the human condition, and even more so, the condition of the politician on the campaign trail, capable of kissing a slug, if there were a slug farmer capable of changing his vote by looking at it.
Of course, if that emptied Spain exists, I still have my doubts, it will be so again as soon as the polls open, and politicians go from kissing sheep to the noble art of bleating in Congress. And in that its emptied inhabitants will have won, that perhaps one day in revenge, when all this has happened, they should organize themselves, travel to Madrid, and caress an official car, feed an adviser and take a selfie with deputies and unionists kissing a couple of crabs in El Telégrafo.
