Two situations have been revealed in the last week as perfect symbols of the levels of absurdity in the West. The first took place at the MET gala, when some of the guests needed a valet to climb the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum, since their dresses limited their movements; She explained it in this newspaper with Leticia García’s usual acuity. The second was also told by another great journalist from the house, Héctor Martínez Llanos: the requisition of the flags of the European Union during the Eurovision Song Contest. They were not the only emblems removed, nor even the largest number, given that what was intended to be avoided was the presence of Palestinian flags, but it gives us the measure of how the festival has even turned against itself.
Last Saturday Malmö became the most ambivalent city in Europe. On the one hand, in the Eurovision Village, a large number of Eurofans celebrated in harmony. Surveillance harmony: the site was surrounded by dozens of snipers stationed in nearby buildings, some of them sheltered under a huge heart, in a staging worthy of an oxymoron. Meanwhile, a large demonstration against Israel’s presence at the festival was taking place in the streets of the city center. One in which the same could be seen posters of “Latinos for Palestine” and “Queerliberation, stop the occupation“what areas where they chanted”The only solution is Intifada revolution”.
Israel’s presence at this year’s festival has been a stain that the contest will take a long time to erase, if it ever wants to do so. At Eurovision, politics matters, no matter how much its detractors, many perched on the high brow, belittled and that the festival declares itself apolitical—a bit like Saza in The national shotgun—. But focusing the political gaze on Eurovision only comes to revalidate Debord’s spectacle society. “The entire life of societies in which modern conditions of production prevail is announced as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was previously experienced directly has been removed into a representation.” It is, as Noemí Argüelles would say, food for thought. “The show is not a set of images, but rather the relationships between people mediated by those images.” Think about televoting and the privilege that our only wars are cultural. Many cannot say the same.
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