I have borrowed for this article the Spanish title of the hilarious book Getting Evenby Woody Allen, in which he made a casual cartoon of the topics of the cultural world. I have remembered this series of stories of the director of Annie Hall before him Cultural Rights Plan Presented by the Minister of the Ramo, Ernest Urtasun, as a fundamental project of his mandate in the Plaza del Rey.
Culture in its most authentic expression is a exercise for and for freedom, both creators and public. Without that vocation of freedom there is no culture that can be considered as such.
Sánchez’s plan, on the other hand, declares culture as a “transverse tool” to implement an alleged hegemonic vision of the world under the pretext of responding to the challenges of our time, as Equality between men and women or environmental protection.
Curious way to ignore that there are other public management instruments, not only culture budgets, to face these challenges, before which by the way the government It is not very close precisely. See the harmful effects of your law of It is only yes Regarding sexual violence against women or their warm attitude towards a very serious national emergency such as the current wave of fire.
The statement of the presentation of Urtasun according to which “there is in each cultural manifestation a vibrant reason of state” already invites you to susite a plan that would express more the willingness to wear the consciences of creators and public to taste a certain party doctrinethat the mood of guaranteeing the plurality of looks over the world.
It seems that culture is proposed as the instrument to reduce citizens’ minds through slogans, instead of expanding their Knowledge spaces, reflection and criticism.
The alleged justification of the plan is unquestionable: the promotion of citizens’ participation in cultural life, a principle included in article 9.2 of the Constitution and also linked to article 44.1 on the responsibility of public authorities when guaranteeing the access of Spaniards to culture.
There has been a previous preparation work of the document with thirteen working groups formed by experts and about twenty associations in the sector. But it is inevitable to think that Urtasun and his team came with preconceived ideas.
To the main motivation of the declared “cultural rights”, such as citizen participation in cultural life and public policies in the field, only twenty -five pages are dedicated, half of the extension of some references of the Councils of Ministers, while the use of culture occupies almost twice as much pages To model society According to the ideology that is intended dominant.
Previous analyzes include a criticism of public cultural action that also concerns the work of the Ministry of Culture and its subsidies policy. Thus, it is recognized that “when among the citizens the perception that cultural policies only benefit a very specific sector is installed, the percentage of people who interpret that public spending in culture is not an investment that generates benefits for the whole society but a dispensable expense.”
Movies that receive much more Ministerial subsidy That what they later collect in theaters could be a good example of this distrust, especially if its filmmaker manifests later as an consummated government spokesman. However, the plan does not establish any measure to combat the use of the culture budget to benefit a certain caste.
For the rest, it is unusual to read in a document from the Government of Pedro Sánchez that it is intended consecrate the privileges of one of the richest regions At the expense of the poorest only in order to content their ultra -nationalist partners.
While Urtasun is removed from the hat a plan against social inequalities and territorial gaps in the field of culture, he defends at the same time that his own government is hammering the links of the coffin of the principles of equality and solidarity between Spaniards enshrined in the Constitution.
There will be no greater threat in Spain for the alleged “cultural rights”, and especially for public cultural policies, than the consecration of a financing system that rewards the potential that dilapidated in its “embassies” through the world and punishes the vulnerable that it spends efficiently in its neighborhood libraries.
Beyond this essential contradiction, the Cultural Rights Plan It also shows a will to end once and for all with Spanish culture. It is very striking that the plan of the Ministry of Culture avoids any declaration of recognition to Spain as a nation with one of the world’s greatest cultural inheritances.
Not a word contains the plan on the condition of the Spaniards as depositaries of a great legacy of civilization, which today increases in the five continents through Spanish, shared by nearby 600 million speakers.
Quite the contrary, in the section on “multilingualism” the respect for official languages in their respective regions according to their statutes, but nothing of respect for Spanish, official language of the State, in communities where it is pursued in education against the law and judicial sentences is defended.
Even more striking is that, in the two hundred eleven pages of the Urtasun document, it is only used on one occasion, and pejoratively, the term “Spanish culture”, thus written, in quotes, as an artificial idea without subject to reality. Spanish culture is also considered as an exclusive concept fruit of “historical or official narratives”, in which “a significant percentage of the population is not represented.”
It does not detail the document covered by Pedro Sánchez what is that “significant percentage” of Spaniards who are not recognized in Spanish culture, a term of universal scope, always alive, renewed and throbbing, which has always demonstrated, in Spanish, Galician, Catalan or Basque, its most authentic fertility against the official and of the established.
Perhaps it is for that reason for what the government intends to end once and for all with it, beyond the minister of the minister against bullfighting that inspired Goya, García Lorca, Picasso or Miguel Hernández. Because the Spanish culture has been rebellious, from Zalamea to Fuenteovejuna, from the Valleinclanesco Especent to the “rotrefactos” of 27, to everything that today represents Sánchez and Urtasun and their obsession to win the universal legacy of Spain in literature, arts and thought.
It should be remembered the sentence of Unamuno, which assured that “I am Basque and therefore, doubly Spanish”, a condition that the old rector of Salamanca also assigned to Joan Maragall, from whom he said that “by force of Catalan, he was deep, intimate, endearingly Spanish.” But, who will have to see Unamuno and Maragall with the “cultural rights”!
