Sacamantecas…Here Comes the Bogeyman!
The specter of something dark and frightening runs through this week’s Camino a Ítaca. Progressive politicians afraid of their own shadow look on with terror as real-life Bogeymen and women ride the wave of their indecisiveness and inaction. At least I learned a great new word out of it, sacamantecas. Click over to read the original article published in Spanish in el Hoy or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
I grew up in the 70s in
western Canada. Back then, when an authority figure, most likely your parents,
wanted to frighten children into good behavior, they would say ‘watch out or
the bogeyman will get you’. Many immigrants to the area had Polish, Ukrainian or Russian
roots and if their children misbehaved they were told that another creature, Baba
Yaga, would come for them and use their bones to build her house in the woods.
These threats didn’t only
occur in families with European backgrounds. The Inuit people of northern
Canada had a similar figure, the Qallupilluit, a
mythical creature with long nails and green slimy skin that was said to kidnap
misbehaving children.
Here in Spain you have to look no
further than Goya’s etching, que viene el Coco, to see that this figure, meant
to tame and domesticate children. is universal.
Parenting has changed since then. We
now can no longer imagine letting a child ride shotgun on your lap in the car, let
alone traveling without a seatbelt. The idea of threatening a child with an icy
death in the waters of the Artic for a small offense or suffering an eternity
burning in sulfur in hell for a sin against the Judeo-Christian tradition
borders on child abuse.
Yet if parenting has changed so much,
why haven’t political parties evolved too? If these paternalistic empty threats
are no longer considered effective or even moral, why do they continue to use
them?
After months of unprecedented
inflation, protests have finally erupted from two of the most punished sectors of the Spanish economy, the rural environment and the lorry drivers who transport their
goods. Sectors that have seen their businesses pushed to the edge by the unfair
practices of a neoliberal model whose intrinsic goal is to achieve maximum
profit, no matter the costs. Yet these protests were scoffed at, said to be
composed of far-right factions and señioritos on horseback. It’s true, they
were there, but so was the village grocer who also likes to go hunting at weekends.
What about your electricity bill?
Have you turned down your thermostat because Borell asked you to do so? Or had
you already done so because you had to choose between leaving it at 20 degrees or
eating meat twice a week?
Yet where are the trade unions? Where
are the general strikes? Has the joke of ‘just wait until the right governs and
then they will see how we protest’ become reality?
The threat of the bogeyman has
worn thin. The populist siren song of the extreme right only grows stronger
while the left continues to fret about who can access bathrooms rather than
directly confront the abusive practices that have seen petrol and energy
companies registering record gains while inflating prices.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Social democracy needs to take a firm position in this world of greedy
bogeymen before they take power and remove what remains of our labor rights.
Real life Baba Yagas exist. They sit
in places like the Kremlin and fund extreme right groups from Puigdemont’smafia to the Calle Bambu. It’s time to act before el Coco moves from myth to reality.
