If something is proliferating in our time, it is the most despicable opportunism.
Among those who write - we write - in the press, fewer and fewer are resisting the trends of fashion, which is to say the anonymous shouting, with enormous frequency, of social networks.
People who are paid to think for themselves - it is assumed - give it up at full speed to jump into each new tide.
At the end of the day, it is more comfortable for you to chew on everything: you get on the wheel that brings easy applause and it does not matter if in a month it will be the opposite wheel: you get on anyway, taking advantage of the fact that no one exercises memory nor is it going to ugly or reproach you for anything.
To give just one example: when it was time to read Woody Allen's memoirs, I saw how those who had condemned him not long ago defended him.
Perhaps one day the same people who have sunk him will claim Plácido Domingo.
Some of those opinion makers deliberately confuse concepts, to clothe their positions at all times.
On the occasion of the sensible and moderate manifesto of 153 intellectuals published in
Harper’s
magazine
in defense of freedom of ideas (most of them “on the left”, from the anti-Chomsky system to Anne Applebaum, Atwood, Rushdie, Martin Amis), the opportunists have Weighed what rented them more, whether to be for or against.
As the latter is more populist and demagogic, not a few chose it, basing their criticism on something fallacious and creeping: no matter how progressive and liberal those signatories are (no matter how feminists and some blacks there are), they are a group of "privileged "That rebels against the people and defends their" privileges "and their" great prestige and social power. "
And on top of that, many are "white men."
We have reached an extreme where all
achievement
is considered a privilege, which is an aberration and an injustice.
If an individual is famous, or rich, or has succeeded in his own, the label of "privileged" is automatically hung on him, with the terrible negative connotation that the word has acquired.
Not so, check the DLE from time to time.
The one who
achieves
something in life, or the one who succeeds in his profession, is almost never privileged, although of course there are exceptions.
Are they Joaquín Sabina or Ana Belén or Almodóvar, the novelists Landero, Cercas or Muñoz Molina or so many other established ones?
Absolutely.
The first and the sixth are from the same Jaen population, the second - if I am right - is the daughter of a Madrid goalkeeper, the third is from a La Mancha town, the fourth and the fifth from modest Extremaduran places.
None, that we know, had it easy or enjoyed advantages by origin or birth.
Landero has recounted marvelously in a book—
The balcony in winter
if I remember correctly— his stage as a “grocery boy”.
If they
now
have a "privileged position", according to the old phrase, it is because they earned it, sometimes with no small sacrifice.
Am I "privileged" myself?
Depending on how you look at it.
I was lucky enough to have parents who read and I had no shortage of books, unlike what happened to so many.
But my father was a reprisal of the Franco regime, who was forbidden to teach in Spain, as well as to publish in the press until the mid-1950s, and he had to sign collaborations with names that were not his, I have already told you.
Emilio Lledó, who met my parents when he was young, tells me how there were days and days when his fortune amounted to 2.50 pesetas.
They shot as best they could, with a lot of work.
I don't know the origin of the 153
Harper’s
signatories
, but I don't care. If they are who they are today, it is not because of their birth, but because they have done things, they have taken advantage of their lives and the people - the people - decided to listen to them. I read an article in this newspaper that censored them with siby words, and applied the status of "privileged" ... about five times. Curious that its author was a good, relatively young, white novelist, who has already won several awards and received scholarships. But it must be assumed that he excluded himself from the infamous name. Otherwise, such insistent denunciation would not have been allowed. The alternative is worse: his writing would be one more sample of opportunism, one has to side with those who lack "intellectual prestige." It is worth wondering - it is an idiot, but this time it is more than just - why you have that particular prestige or not. We are facing an absurdity comparable to the following: it is as if, mediated the Soccer League, it is judged that those who lead it are "privileged" for this reason, and those who are last are "victims", and they forget that matches have been played and that count. The budgets of the clubs are incomparable, true, but it is accepted and they are not separated for that. The privilege would be that, before the first day, there would be teams with points given away and accumulated, which has never happened anywhere. The conceptual abomination is being reached of thinking that what each one has done with his life is indifferent, and that if someone has had talent, merit, tenacity, luck or even cunning, that immediately makes him a disgusting privileged elitist. Let's see what Sabina, Ana Belén and company think about.