The Gospel According to Groucho
Here’s the blink-and-you-miss-it summary: my latest Camino a Ítaca column dives into the Groucho-grade absurdity of political morality in Extremadura — a tale of ironclad vows that dissolved in record time, the machinery of hypocrisy grinding everything to paste, and the saints of this land who may be scarred but are no longer innocent. Read the full piece (in Spanish) here:
https://www.hoy.es/opinion/troy-nahumko-evangelio-segun-groucho-20251115225718-nt.html
English translation below.It began with a lie — not the usual low-grade political fib, that greasy, habitual deceit that seeps from campaign buses like exhaust fumes. No, this was a full-blown moral car crash. A betrayal so pure it should be preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in the Museum of Political Taxidermy.
This wasn’t the predictable con of promising roads and hospitals in exchange for sweaty handshakes and photo ops with retirees. That’s standard-issue bullshit, the civic folklore we all tolerate like bad weather. No, this was deeper — an act of spiritual arson.
Because Mariola Guardiola had sworn, with a kind of trembling moral fervor rare in her species, that she would never — never — open the door of government to those who deny gender violence, dehumanize immigrants, or toss the LGBTQIA+ flag into their bonfires. She said it loud, righteous, with the fire of someone who still believed decency had a pulse in this torpid corner of the country.
These weren’t campaign promises. They were commandments — an oath carved into the public record by a woman who, for one brief, blinding moment, seemed immune to the corrosive acid of party politics.
It lasted ten days.
Ten short days before the great machinery of hypocrisy ground her down into a fine grey paste — the kind that coats the marble floors of parliaments and sticks to the soles of the truly shameless.
By the end, she was blinking through the haze like a deer in the crossfire of a political firing squad, muttering something about “responsibility” and “unity” while her handlers smiled that reptilian smile of men — yes, men — who’d already sold her conscience by the kilo.
You could smell it: that peculiar odor of political decomposition — cheap perfume mixed with ambition and rancid meat. The kind that seeps into curtains and never really leaves, no matter how many speeches you make about “dignity.”
The worst part? She did it sober. No drugs, no madness, no hallucination of the Virgin Mary whispering orders from some dehesa hideout. Just the cold, bureaucratic treason of someone who once believed — or pretended to — that decency mattered and fascism was not a virtue.
Within days she handed the keys of Extremadura’s public health system to a man suckled by private insurers and fattened in the backrooms of Adeslas — like naming a vulture Minister of the Morgue. It wasn’t governance; it was a daylight organ trade, and she was smiling through the blood mist.
The descent became biblical. Nursing homes sold off like cattle; private chains gorging while the public ones gnawed at bones. Nascent transparency vanished in a puff of bureaucratic smoke, the ledgers sealed, the rot perfumed. Memory — real memory — became a bedtime story.
And what does the PSOE do? They could win the upcoming election easily — just by standing for what Guardiola sold: decency, defense of the public, politics that don’t reek of hedge funds and cowardice. Instead, they’ve chosen a candidate who did exactly what she did — betrayed his own words before the ink was dry. Both reflections in the same cracked mirror, pretending to care while feeding from the same trough.
This isn’t opposition; it’s choreography.
Extremadura has seen this movie before — the bowing, the meek lining up for crumbs while the same surnames toast above them. The ghosts of Paco and Régula still haunt the table, but their descendants experienced the exorcism of secular, public schooling. Saints remain, yes — battered, scarred — but innocence is long gone. We’ve seen the masks slip, the vultures feed, the same sermon from these 2.0 señoritos. The earth remembers every lie, and it’s beginning to stir. This land is full of saints — but no longer innocent. And God help whoever mistakes silence for surrender.
