10 The Christmas lights have been coming on for days, and with them comes that curious effect where traffic in cities seems to intensify and become even more difficult, more aggressive, more—precisely—impassable. Traffic jams without tone or sound, cars blocking the way wherever they belong, congestion on main roads, horns, horns, horns. A dissonant symphony of horns, loudly proclaiming one of the characteristics of this time of year: the surge in all forms of incivility. People calling out, people pushing, people fighting in the street, in entertainment venues, in shopping centers. "It's the Christmas spirit," they proclaim, while then hurling insults at someone who has just passed by or walked in front of them. Meanwhile, the Christmas lights adorn the streets and avenues, the facades, the shop windows, and even the trees on the street, with those absurd condom-shaped lights that are screwed onto the trunks. Globalization makes the landscape more or less the same in all large cities of the Western world, and Palma, which thanks to tourism has all the disadvantages of a large city but none of the advantages, is an exception.

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