Makinavaja and the Law of Multiple Recidivism in Television

I often compulsively buy books while reading articles. A quote or an allusion to a title pushes me to the consumer vice, but this week I have broken all my records: after soaking up the chronicles on the law of multiple recidivism that Junts has forced the PSOE to swallow (which has swallowed it without making a face, with Patxi López defending it as if it were perfectly natural that her party, that of the poor of the world and the slaves without bread, tightens the shackles on the thieves more tightly); After reading the chronicles of this latest infamy, I say, I felt the impulse to buy the four volumes that compile all the comics of A razor published between 1986 and 1992.

There is no more because Ivà, that is, Ramón Tosas, died in 1993 without ever seeing or the TVE series in which Pepe Rubianes played his hero in 1995nor how the pre-Olympic Barcelona that he portrayed, as absurd, brilliant and hungry as Valle’s Madrid, disappeared among anglicisms, horn-rimmed glasses, tacky architecture and contemporary art museums.

I have bought the four volumes so as not to forget that there was a time when Spain felt compassion and even sympathy for the chorizos who – in those years, yes – operated in all the streets, beating and living badly. Makinavaja is the Iberian version of the Mackie Messer from The four-quarter opera Brecht, and at the same time he is the archetype of all the rogues with shipwrecked lives, tightrope walkers on the margins and known in all police stations.

There was a time when we distinguished big crime from unhappy retail, portrayed in series like Thieves go to the office, contemporary adaptation of A razor (which, in the cinema, was played by Andrés Pajares). Now we want to put them all in jail for repeat offenders, even if they steal little or nothing each time. Your Honors believe that a strong hand will put an end to this nuisance, when experience has shown that it is useless. There has not been more police deployment than during the Franco era, where the golden years of shoplifting and low-intensity crime are located. We have known for a long time that the only way to achieve an urban landscape without chorizos is through social action and care: a chorizo needs schools and jobs to stop being one, not more dodgy police officers with a license to distribute firewood.

Everything is explained in Ivà’s books. As always, this story has already been written.