When the judiciary of our enemies stuck its claws into JxCat candidate Laura Borràs (Barcelona, 5/10/1970) because of a piece of malpractice which the Institution of Catalan Letters (ILC) and the majority of Catalan and Spanish government bodies have carried out all of their lives without major upheavals, I thought that the ideological apparatuses of the state were beginning to look seriously at the possibilities of this specialist in Catalan and comparative philologist who - as I warned before anyone else - has all the numbers to become the first female president in the history of Catalonia. Laura Borràs is parodied by the political satirists of the TV3 show Polònia for her obsession with expressing everything in the first person and, in truth, the Together for Cash-alonia candidate is very pleased to have met herself. That’s one of the things I like most about her, because any nation that wants to be a state needs the narcissists who add more pepper than salt, well-nourished egos to put an end to this horrible curse we have of modesty.
Currently, there is no one - Puigdemont aside - who has Laura Borràs's capacity to make hearts race among the dear convergent ladies who are still going along to indepe demos and convincing the sovereignist electorate that it is worthwhile to move your ass and risk your life to go to the polls on 14th February. Borràs is an academic who has little recognition among the specialists in her field, and she doesn't damn well need it, because from literature she has extracted the essence of sculpting a will to power as well as a Machiavellian nose that will propel her to the throne of the Generalitat. Laura also possesses a frightening ubiquity; when she was director of the ILC and Catalan culture minister she added more events, recitals and spectacles than anyone, and her chronic insomnia meant that she could respond to tweets (those which praised her, és clar) in the wee hours of the morning, showing off her marble smile based on having taken a selfie with almost every biped in the country. In the world of Catalan independence, there is no one better than her to spread the good word.
With Laura, I share an obsession for Mozart's Don Giovanni, of which she knows by heart all the verses of Da Ponte, and not only because she has a very agile brain, but because Borràs is a seduction machine almost as insatiable as the most important libertine in the musical history of the West. Borràs has understood that the key to the art of the seducer is to feign a total simulacrum and reach a point where an otherness is necessary in order to live, and this is how she can present herself and defend that if she can (and if independence gets 50% of the votes), she will reactivitate the very same unilateral declaration of independence that the gentleman who is ahead of her on the JxCat list suspended. But this doesn't matter, because Laura is so good hearted that she has managed to make every god believe that she comes from the Puigdemont universe, when, deep down, we know that she embodies the holy convergent continuity with more determination and rigour than Marta Ferrusola's bun. In fact, Borràs complies with the first condition of the convergent to the millimetre; namely, to deny completely and absolutely that she is one.
In an election where everyone is playing for a draw, boring and mediocre to the point of exasperation, Borràs is the only candidate who has done something as simple as wanting to win and showing that on her face
In a country with politicians who look like eunuchs and in which Salvador Illa can aspire to something like winning an election, the giant figure of Laura, accompanied by her court of page-girls, has a charisma and magnetism. In the private dining rooms of the best restaurants in Barcelona, businesspeople are already dreaming of a political environment in which this independence thing is just an urge that one has, in the same way as one aspires to have a house in the Empordà or fornicate with one's neighbour, and that Laura can entertain the defeated prisoners of the concentration camp with her waltzes and sardanas. In an election where everyone is playing for a draw, boring and mediocre to the point of exasperation, Borràs is the only candidate who has done something as simple as wanting to win and showing that on her face. Notice that, next to her, Puigdemont already looks like an aged figure, from the past. Carles, alas, is smart enough to know that they are already getting ready to put him to bed.
For now, independentism is nothing but pure rhetoric, and even the dumbest voter sees perfectly well that as long as the martyrs command the "post-process" period and their pardons are negotiated with Spain, Catalan secession is as unlikely as Pere Aragonès wetting his pants. In this regard, the quotation culture of the JxCat candidate, tailored with the tweets and phrases of greatest impact, is magnificent for imposing security and firmness. We won't have independence, we already know that, but Laura will give us speeches full of fragments of Sagarra and Rosselló-Pòrcel that are utterly brilliant and the archetypical Catalan will thus be able to do that thing which is ours, believing himself smarter than the enemy. In this, we also know, Junqueras is completely wrong: Catalans do not want to be better people than others, but simply, good and with a defeatist spirit, only asking of fate that we are considered more cultivated, mindful and so on. The Spanish have got it wrong; we are not racists or exclusionists, just culture vultures.
Laura is the president we deserve and on the 14th February she will rise victorious so that in Catalonia men in black can win again and after ten years rehearsing the revolution, as the well-known classic says, everything will have changed in order to stay the same
That Borràs has a vanity and a spirit of victory, like Ada Colau, is no problem. The important question is to see how, deep down, the background that she rest upon holds no truth, it is a gas giant of a planet that, for the time being, still resists the full explosion of the system of cynicism and lies of Convergents and Republicans. For this reason, Laura, who knows perfectly well the falsity of everything, has made haste to reach the summit of the list of Together for Cash-alonia: she knows that the little credibility of the pro-independence parties is about to run out, and it is at the last minute of the match when a seducer can do his last trick and save himself from burning or from the cheated-on husbands that are chasing him. Such is libertinism, an art that works only to fill the void, that shines but has no essence, that sails from victory to victory, but leaves behind only corpses and broken hearts. Thus is Laura, racing from behind in the electoral race to traffic in the little faith that pro-independence voters still possess.
That a frothy and lie-strewn process ends in such an entertaining simulacrum, in the presence of vanity without verity at the country's highest level, makes complete sense. Laura is the president we deserve and on the 14th February (or later, when Illa or Aragonès again degrade their autonomy to the point of little glamour and total parsimony) she will rise victorious so that in Catalonia men in black can win again and after ten years rehearsing the revolution, as the well-known classic says, everything will have changed in order to stay the same. She will do very well, I'm sure. We hope that police chief Trapero won't stop her when she decides to give us the independence declaration which caused Puigdemont to pee his pants and which her predecessor tried to muscle through by putting a wee banner up on the balcony of the Generalitat. Vanity without verity, this is what we deserve after believing ourselves worthy of something like freedom. Vanity without verity, this is what is wanted by a Catalonia where even the air is a lie.