We've always been fascinated by events in the United States. Whoever is the US president and how this might affect global politics, the economy, and culture has always been a crucial issue, especially in post-war Europe, although American dominance became more entrenched with the collapse of the USSR and the so-called victory of the Cold War, when the system of free-market capitalism, hand in hand, ruled. With globalization, what became globalized above all was the United States' influence on the rest of the globe, so knowing the latest political mania of the president living in the White House was as obligatory as paying local taxes.
However, this fixation on all things American has always had a questionable side: because its media is so powerful, and its cultural industry so greedy, we end up knowing more about the American political class than about our own. Or even using it as a scarecrow or smokescreen. While we talk about Trump, we don't talk about the corruption of my government or my family, etc.
Now we talk more about the "scandals" of Trump's censorship of certain comedians than about the persecution of freedom of expression in Spain, and only because the scandal that comes from there is well-dressed, well-explained, well-investigated, well-reported, without any kind of servility or toll, while here we wouldn't be afraid of anything. To put it mildly: there are still people among us who know more about the Watergate case—a mediocre spying on opponents, like that practiced by Jaume Matas, no less—than about the political assassinations of the Franco regime or the shady dealings of the Bourbons to get rich with Saudi infrastructure contracts. They know more about Bill Clinton's sex (oval) than about the GAL (Spanish Armed Group of Algiers). And they now know more about Charlie Kirk than about Joxi Zabala or Guillermo Agulló. Or who laughs at the poor quality of American democracy, but ignores—because it doesn't have a journalism that explains it in depth—the entire putrid swamp that is Spain.
We look at all of this with complacency, but above all because the critical discourse about the United States comes from there, and it serves to avoid having to talk about our own countless hardships. You'd have to be very concise not to notice that Donald Trump is a much more commendable figure than José María Aznar or Felipe González, for example. But since there is a critical discourse about Trump, and films—and famous actors criticizing him—and plenty of quality journalism—and comedians pulling his ears—and suddenly his tricks are ridiculed, we think they're a bunch of lunatics, while we continue to wade through the wade. If that country seems much more terrible to us than ours, it's because its terrible dimension reaches us multiplied by its critical discourse, and by a market of the terrible—Netflix, for example—that has us hooked, but we don't end up applying the lesson.
