The Sanxe Dog of Alcibiades

You already know that the Senior Spy likes classical mythology more than taking a restorative nap in the middle of summer with the TV on and the air conditioning destroying the planet, or what are fables and stories from ancient times, those in which everyone went around wearing clothes that were sure to fall off after the third fold, appearing like Phryne (remember?) before the Areopagus, only to earn the latter's condemnation. And one of those was about a certain Alcibiades , who has a novelistic name like few others, and his dog. Because a dog is always good, and if not, just ask Captain Arturo Alatriste , who was even portrayed in Pavia by Don Augusto Ferrer Dalmau . But let's not go back to other, also remote, times. We're in Athens, in the 5th century BC. In a city more colorful than we imagine, and which is still recommended to visit today despite ourselves, selfie-taking tourists who don't know how to admire anything unless it's in a herd and to have it on a cell phone to make a fuss in the 2.0 Corralas of the Networks.

The fact is that this Alcibiades guy had a snout the size of the Parthenon, and whose way of doing politics was, to say the least, a bit controversial. And you can imagine what a Mediterranean city is like, no matter how much of a cradle of civilization it is. They immediately call you bossy, and of course, it gets annoying. You see, Pericles , with all the Pericles that he was, and people were already bullying him in those days without knowing English, calling him big-headed, cucumber-headed, and, of course, you can be all the strategist you want, but it sucks. And in the end, he ended up asking his friend Phidias to make him look good, but with the Ionic helmet casually tilted back, to hide a skull worthy of the Fourth Millennium .

Aware of Athenian gossip, and fearing that his spurious ways of governing would end up exposed in the agora and other gossipy squares, what did our Alcibiades do? He cut off his dog's beautiful tail! They'll tell me why, and if it was fashionable, as it was with schnauzers and Dobermans? No. Not at all. Such savagery had nothing to do with aesthetics (remember again, my faithful readers of these Notes?), but with rascality. All of Athens was left commenting on the reasons that had driven this well-known leader to cut off his dog's tail, and in the meantime, they stopped talking about his shady dealings! Curiously enough, in English, they call it a textbook "wag the dog," or what in Spanish is a smokescreen on par with the lost London smog or the beret of the Bilbao bocho.

I don't know if Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is a big fan of reading the classics. I think he must be a pain in the ass even for a Rubio primer. But the guy is clever. Or we're morons, one of two things. But it's been a while since I've seen such a clear demonstration that the fable about Alcibiades' dog is more real than the one that we're all expected to be balder than a billiard ball. And that Perro Sanxe , as his own acolytes and followers and he himself so proudly call him, is brilliant at showing us a docked tail and leaving us spellbound by it, while the dog turns purple, and not exactly from pellets of kibble. The dog, the bitch, and the entire Sanchista litter. Which isn't a party. It's a pack of dogs eagerly tearing apart an entire state, devouring a nation as if it were Purina, and everyone is like fools waiting to comment on the docking of the new tail that's invented or pulled from the rump, which this dog grows like the Herculean thousand-headed hydra. Oh, Alcibiades, what a great disciple you have had in this thousand-tailed dog! Will Plutarch end up repeating what he said about him, that he was "the least scrupulous and most imprudent of human beings" ? History teaches us that someone always comes along who surpasses someone who came before. QED