The Wrath Merchants: From a Cross in Cáceres to the Holy Litigation Machine
A few weeks ago, I found myself following yet another local controversy in Cáceres, the small Spanish city where I live.
At the centre of it was the Cruz de los Caídos (“Cross of the Fallen”), a Franco-era monument that has become the latest battleground in Spain’s never-ending wars over history, memory, religion, and identity. What began as a dispute over a monument quickly metastasised into something much larger: lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, political theatre, media outrage, and the increasingly familiar spectacle of people using the courts as weapons in cultural conflicts.
The details are local.
The phenomenon is not.
Over the last few years, Spain has seen a growing number of organisations and activists attempting to fight political, religious, and cultural battles through litigation. Some cases are serious. Some are strategic. Others seem to exist primarily to generate headlines, consume resources, and make life difficult for people whose existence, opinions, or behaviour offend somebody else’s worldview.
Watching all this unfold, I began wondering what would happen if one took that logic to its ultimate conclusion.
Not a little further.
All the way.
The result is The Wrath Merchants: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the Holy Litigation Machine, a satire that begins with a lawsuit based on emoji usage and proceeds rapidly downhill from there. Along the way there are shellfish, ham, usury, biblical dietary law, the Atlantic Ocean, exclamation marks, lawyers, and a Labrador from Valladolid who emerges as perhaps the only sane participant in the entire affair.
Although inspired by events in Cáceres, the piece is really about something broader: the transformation of grievance into an industry, outrage into a business model, and legal procedure into a form of political performance.
The article was published this week in El Salto Diario Extremadura (in Spanish).
You can read the original here:
For readers who don’t speak Spanish, I’ve included an English translation below.
As always, any resemblance to actual people, organisations, legal strategies, marine ecosystems, or emotionally distressed emoji investigators is entirely coincidental.
Probably.
THE WRATH MERCHANTS: A SAVAGE JOURNEY INTO THE HEART OF THE HOLY LITIGATION MACHINE
Dispatches from a country eating itself with a legal brief in one hand and a Bible in the other, by a correspondent who has stopped sleeping
CÁCERES — The Fear arrived on a Monday, which seemed appropriate. Monday being the day the universe reminds you it is still in charge.
Several users of one of the most popular dating applications, ordinary Spaniards, sinners of the most banal and forgettable variety, people whose only crime against civilization was having photographs of themselves next to waterfalls, received legal notifications informing them that legal proceedings had been initiated against them for suspected adultery.
Not actual adultery. Suspected adultery. Based on their emoji usage.
Emojis.
Let that detonate slowly in your skull. Really let it sit there and cook. Somebody, somebody with a law degree and a business card and presumably a mother who loves them, sat down at a desk, examined the emoji choices of strangers on a dating app, decided this constituted evidence of moral turpitude, and filed paperwork. In a court. A real court. With a judge. With clerks. With the whole humming, expensive, civilization-sustaining apparatus of the rule of law deployed against a man who used a 🍑 without sufficient theological justification.
The organization responsible for the action calls itself the Platform for the Defense of Ancient Virtues, and it has requested precautionary measures preventing the accused from attending brunch while the matter is heard. Sunday brunch specifically, which is what these people sometimes do at the hour when the Platform for the Defense of Ancient Virtues believes they should be in a pew, silent, and thinking about their sins.
When pressed on their standing, their actual, legal, human connection to any of the individuals they are attempting to destroy, a spokesperson looked directly at the camera, or would have done if there had been one, and offered the following: “We simply feel affected.”
There it is. There’s the whole rotten architecture of the thing, naked and grinning like a drunk uncle at a funeral. Not wronged. Not harmed. Not touched in any earthly, measurable, provable, peer-reviewable sense. Simply affected, somewhere in the trembling, pulsating, self-regarding vicinity of their feelings and faith, by the knowledge that other human beings exist and are doing things they personally disapprove of.
This is the new litigation. This is the product. This is what they are selling from behind the stained glass window.
Buckle in. We have not yet begun.
It gets worse. These are strange times. That’s not pessimism, that’s field experience. Just when you think you’ve found the outer boundary of the lunacy and then you look again and the boundary has moved and there’s more of it and it’s bigger than before and it’s coming toward you, and the only honest humanistic response is to hold your ground and keep typing.
A seafood restaurant in Vigo has also been named in a complaint, this time alleging the public exhibition of shellfish.
I am not making this up. In today’s landscape there is no need to make anything up. Reality in the hands of these people achieves a grotesque creative velocity that no fiction writer could sustain without serious mind-altering substances.
Lobsters, prawns, and several crabs were observed, and here I am lifting directly from the court documents, verbatim, because I want it on record that a Spanish judge somewhere had to read these actual words with their human eyes and remain professionally composed, “openly and without shame” on a bed of ice. The plaintiffs argue this constitutes a continuing violation of biblical dietary regulations. They have requested an injunction against the entire Atlantic coastline pending clarification.
The entire. Atlantic. Coastline.
Pending clarification.
There is a special, almost clinical kind of madness that arrives dressed in procedure. It doesn’t foam at the mouth. It doesn’t pace. It files in triplicate and cites precedent. It requests injunctions against marine zoology in calm, measured legal language, and before anyone has fully woken up and located their coffee, it has litigated the ocean itself into the position of defendant because of their…faith.
The ocean is not expected to appear in person. It will be represented by counsel.
A second lawsuit targets the jamón producers here in Extremadura. Of course it does. In a country where jamón is a load-bearing civilizational institution… where legs of cured pork hang from the ceilings of bars the way crucifixes hang in schools, which is to say everywhere and without apology and as a more or less universal background condition of Spanish life, someone has found the audacity, the sheer brass-fronted operational nerve, to file against the pork.
The complaint alleges systematic promotion of pork products despite what it describes as “clear scriptural guidance on the matter.”
The plaintiffs have requested the immediate sequestration of approximately 40 million hams.
Forty million. I want you to stop and really picture the logistics of this. The warehouses. The secaderos. The refrigeration. The armed guards presumably posted to prevent ham trafficking. The whole vast national ham emergency, triggered by Leviticus. The plaintiffs have, in essence, declared war on the basic economic infrastructure of the Iberian Peninsula, and they have done it in the name of a dietary code compiled approximately three thousand years ago by people who also believed you could identify a witch by the way she walked and had conversations with burning shrubs. There is no need to make anything up.
A judge has reportedly asked whether the complainants themselves consume pork.
Lawyers for the association described the question as “deeply ideological.”
There you have it. The question do you eat the thing you’re trying to ban, the single most obvious, most forensically necessary, most primary-school-level question any reasonable human being would ask, reframed, with a straight face, as dangerous political overreach.
These are not people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. That’s what keeps you awake at 3am staring at the ceiling. They know exactly, precisely, clinically what they’re doing.
And here it is worth pausing to note a curious feature of the phenomenon. Almost all of these campaigns end up losing. Repeatedly. Spectacularly. The defeats arrive one after another like overdue utility bills. Cases are dismissed. Appeals fail. Judges roll their eyes in careful legal prose.
But winning is not necessarily the point. Delay is the point. Headlines are the point. Expense is the point. Damage is the point. The process itself is the punishment. A lawsuit does not need to win to do damage. It merely needs to arrive.
The filing against the Pride organizers runs to 2,300 pages.
Roughly 2,100 consist of exclamation marks.
I counted. I had a long afternoon and nowhere to be and a professional obligation to verify, and I counted, and it is approximately 2,100 pages of ecclesiastical rage, and somewhere in the judicial system of a functioning European democracy a court official had to initial every single one of them, perhaps wondering, somewhere in the quietest room of their mind, how their career had arrived at this particular destination.
Not content with shellfish, pork, Sunday brunch, and the general concept of gay people existing outdoors in the sunshine, another organization has launched proceedings against the leading banks of the country and seventeen regional savings institutions for the practice of charging interest on loans.
Usury. Deuteronomy 23:19. Right there. Clear as a motorway sign. “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother.” The banks, argues the complaint, filed with what appears to be genuine sincerity by men who presumably have mortgages, have been systematically and flagrantly violating scripture for the entirety of their corporate existence, enriching themselves through a practice condemned in no fewer than three books of the Old Testament while the authorities did nothing but cash their dividends.
The plaintiffs maintain they suffered severe spiritual distress upon receiving their last interest statement.
Compensation is being sought.
The amount has not been disclosed, although sources close to the case suggest it may be “all of it.”
Spain’s banking sector has declined to comment. The Euro, contacted separately, referred all questions to legal counsel. This is where the wheels come off. You spend a thousand words mocking people for enforcing Bronze Age ideas and then some bastard hands you a mortgage statement and suddenly you’re leafing through Deuteronomy looking for enforcement mechanisms.
But here, and I need you, dear reader, to stay with me, because this is the part where the roller coaster leaves the track and goes briefly sideways into the dehesa, here is where the catalogue opens to pages that the wrath merchants have not yet reached. Pages they are perhaps saving. Pages that represent the full, magnificent, catastrophic logic of where all of this is heading if no one slams on the brakes. There is no need to make anything up.
Because the Bible, the actual Bible, the same one being wielded against the prawns and the interest rates and the emoji adulterers, does not merely permit the ownership of slaves. It provides a detailed regulatory framework for the practice. Exodus 21. Leviticus 25. Step-by-step. Who you may purchase. From which nations. How to pass them on to your children as property. What to do if you beat one so severely they take two days to die (answer: no punishment, because they are your money). The scripture is unambiguous. The scripture has opinions on this matter.
It also, for that matter, mandates the correct market rate for selling your daughter.
The plaintiffs have not yet filed against the abolition of slavery.
They have not yet requested the reinstatement of debt bondage.
They have not yet targeted the child labor laws, Proverbs and Exodus, the whole apparatus of a Bronze Age agricultural economy in which children worked in the fields because the concept of childhood as a protected developmental stage wasn’t one of the commandments. They have not yet submitted the 2,300-page brief demanding that Spain return to a labor market last seen in some theocratic caliphate.
But the logic is there. The logic is sitting right there on the same shelf as the shellfish complaint and the ham sequestration order and the injunction against the Atlantic, next to an emergency application for the compulsory remarriage of several million unwilling Spaniards, grinning.
If scriptural compliance is the standard, you don’t get to pick and choose which scriptures. That is not how standards work. That is eating at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
And then there’s this: not to be outdone, a regional hospital has become the subject of legal proceedings because, and here we arrive at what I can only describe as the purest distillation of the entire project, it continued providing services that other people used voluntarily, in private, for their own reasons, and about which the plaintiffs knew only because they went looking.
The complainants maintain they suffered severe emotional distress upon discovering that strangers were making decisions they personally disagreed with.
Compensation is being sought.
The amount has not been disclosed, although sources close to the case suggest it may be “all of it.”
The wave does not crest. It does not crest because it is not a wave. It is a methodology. It is an industry. It is a machine that has learned that the democratic legal system, built precisely to protect citizens from each other, from the state, from power, can be run in reverse like a stolen car.
Secondary schools have received legal threats regarding sex education. A theatre company faces blasphemy proceedings. A museum has been reported for a nude statue, a stone goddess, motionless for four centuries, suddenly a defendant. A carnival association is in court over a papier-mâché dragon. A weather presenter narrowly avoided proceedings for referring to Friday as “glorious.” The complaint alleged possible theological overreach.
A local weather presenter. Glorious Friday. The weather itself is not safe.
Among cases reportedly under review: yoga classes. Horoscope columns. Halloween decorations. Divorced people who have been photographed smiling. And a Labrador in Valladolid whose owners have been accused of exhibiting insufficient respect for the Sabbath when they took it for a walk.
The dog has declined to comment. The dog, at this point, is the sanest entity with standing in any of these proceedings. The dog should probably be representing someone.
One court clerk, speaking anonymously and with the eyes of a person who has been processing exclamation marks for six consecutive months and has begun to question not merely their career but the entire post-Enlightenment project, described the current workload as “a sort of administrative rapture.”
I know what they mean. When everything arrives at once and none of it makes sense and the documents about the hams and the Atlantic coastline and the children and the slaves and the usury are all stacked on the same desk under the same fluorescent light, you begin to suspect that this is not, technically speaking, about God at all. That God is perhaps not following these proceedings with particular enthusiasm. That God has, like Elvis, in fact, left the building, and what remains is something much more earthly and legible and familiar:
Power.
The will to annoy, delay, exhaust, and bankrupt anyone who behaves differently.
The Peeping Tom’s fantasy of acquiring subpoena power. Dressed in vestments. Filed in triplicate.
Here is the structural problem, and I want you to follow the logic because it goes all the way to the bottom and the bottom is not somewhere you want to end up surprised:
The catalogue is very long.
It is not a pamphlet. It is not a greatest hits. It is a vast, sprawling, internally contradictory, historically layered document compiled across centuries by dozens of earthly authors operating in wildly different political contexts, and it contains, if you are committed, if you are thorough, prohibitions against shellfish, pork, interest, mixed fabrics, planting two crops in the same field, cutting the hair at the sides of your head, touching a pigskin (which, given that every Spanish child plays football, opens up a litigation front of cosmological scope), and the whole detailed, specific, morally unambiguous slavery apparatus, and the child labor provisions, and the correct procedure for selling your daughter, and an exhaustive regulatory framework for the handling of menstruation that would, if applied to the national health service, require the immediate restructuring of a significant proportion of Spanish gynecology.
Why stop at pride marches?
Why stop at the banks?
Why stop at the ham?
Why not the polyester? Why not the haircuts? Why not sequester every football in Spain pending a scriptural review of the relevant pigskin jurisprudence? Why not reinstate the field labor requirements for children, since the relevant passages are right there and just as clearly written as the ones about shellfish? Why not restore the slave market, chapter and verse, friends, chapter and verse, since we are apparently doing this now, since we are apparently treating a Bronze Age legal compendium as binding contemporary statute, since the courts of a modern democratic state are apparently open for this particular kind of business?
And why not, while we’re working through the document, file proceedings against the courts themselves? Roman law. Pagan origin. Modified by Visigoths. Cross-pollinated with Napoleonic reform. The entire legal architecture of the Spanish state is built on foundations that would not survive a rigorous scriptural audit.
The whole thing is one long complaint waiting to be filed.
The distinction between defending tradition and suing reality itself is no longer a philosophical nuance. It is the whole question. It is the only question.
These organizations are not defending anything. You do not defend marriage by threatening a man for his emoji choices. You do not protect children by filing against the Atlantic. You do not uphold sacred values by submitting 2,100 pages of exclamation marks to a court and then billing the state for the privilege.
What you are doing, what this entire baroque, metastasizing, scope-creeping operation is doing, is using the machinery of a free society as a weapon against the very society that machinery was built to serve.
And the machine, being a machine, processes it.
It processes the lobsters. It processes the hams. It processes the interest rates and the nude statues and the papier-mâché dragon and Friday’s weather and the Labrador’s attitude toward the Sabbath. It processes the crosses lost in roundabouts.
It processes.
And processes.
And processes.
Until the clerk looks up from the 2,100th page of exclamation marks with the expression of a person who has seen something they cannot unsee, somewhere behind their professional composure, and quietly wonders whether this is really what Montesquieu had in mind when he separated the powers. Whether this is really what centuries of legal philosophy were building toward. Whether the endpoint of the Western tradition is, in fact, a sequestration order against forty million hams — and, while we’re here, a court-mandated prohibition on the latex sheath, which the same organisations consider an affront to natural law, presumably on the grounds that the Almighty intended every 🍑 emoji to have consequences.
The dog in Valladolid is not available for comment.
But the dog, one senses, already knows the answer.
The dog has known for some time.
The dog is not optimistic.
The author is currently subject to precautionary measures preventing attendance at Sunday brunch. He is represented by counsel. His emoji usage is under review.
