We Can Be Together: The case of "L'Estel"

When it comes to insults, it doesn't get much worse than "hijo de puta". The literal translation is bad enough, but it also means something rather more unpleasant, a word I fancy I first became aware of when Grace Slick and Marty Balin were proudly proclaiming their anarchy in song at the end of the 1960s. "Up against the wall, motherfucker." It was astonishing that Jefferson Airplane could get away with such subversion (in that their record label did not censor the record, despite having censored other Airplane material), but they did, and the word has passed into subversion folklore, now revived - in a different language - in Mallorca.

Jefferson Airplane were reincarnated as Jefferson Starship (later, simply Starship). They acquired the stars and lost their subversiveness. There is a star in Mallorca that hasn't. "L'Estel" (the star) is a fortnightly magazine. It is the centre of a real old row, having called President Bauzá "hijo de puta". The government has instructed the legal authorities to take action against the magazine because of the insult.

Are the government and the president being over-sensitive? Yes. But the insult is only part of the story. The magazine also had a go at the Partido Popular in general and at "forasteros" (Spanish "foreigners") who don't speak Catalan. Furthermore, it suggested that the Obra Cultural Balear (OCB) should be the Balearics shadow government. You might, therefore, detect a bit of a theme here. Let's put it this way, had a magazine written in Castilian called Bauzá a "hijo de puta", chances are that it might have caused little more than a ripple.

To add fuel to the fury that is apparently steaming from the ears of the PP is the fact that the magazine has enjoyed government and Council of Mallorca funding; at least it did so during the four years of the previous administration. The magazine hasn't quite bitten off the hand that has fed it, given that it was most unlikely to still be on a government grant list, but the insult does show a bit of ingratitude to the taxpayer.

The row comes hard on the heels of the government's withdrawal of funding for union worker representatives. For the public, that part of it more inclined to be sympathetic to the PP, both the grants for the representatives and for the magazine have been indicative of a pandering to the left, to the unions and to Catalanism.

And the left and Catalanism are very much what you find in "L'Estel". One of its main contributors, for example, is a member of the Ibizan wing of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Catalonia Republican Left). Another, Miquel López Crespí, is one of the usual suspects to be found behind banners at gatherings in favour of independence and the "Catalan lands". Its publisher is Mateu Joan i Florit, one more to add to our growing list of spectacularly bearded lefties. He outdoes both the Solzhenitsyn of PSOE's Alfredo Rubalcaba and the prolific grey growth of the UGT union's Cándido Mendez. To get an impression, think Rowan Williams with a suntan or even Fidel Castro.

Despite the unpleasantness of the insult and despite the grant, this has all the feel of a political agenda. There is of course clearly an agenda on behalf of "L'Estel", certainly with its suggestion that the ostensibly independent but very much pro-Catalan and pro-the Catalan lands OCB should somehow be forming an opposition, but is the government right to go after a magazine in what might be construed as an attack on the freedom of speech? It runs the risk of creating a "cause célèbre" in seeking a prosecution - that could be made to be seen as a persecution - of a publication that claims to work "in favour of the independence of our nation" (by which one guesses that Florit, who uttered this, means the Catalan nation).

Whatever the rights or wrongs of the insult and of the government seeking recourse to the law, what we have here is a case of the tensions being ratcheted up. It was precisely this that concerned many, including myself, prior to the regional elections. It was a question of how long it would take for these tensions to start to surface. They now appear to be.

Jefferson Airplane's song was called "We Can Be Together", the "we" being those who opposed the American government. There is always another "we". And in Mallorca, we are all likely to become more and more aware of who the "we's" are. Because one thing is for sure; they aren't all together.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.