because they are very pretty

“They crept in,” some Spaniards said behind my back. “Hey, you who snuck in.” The above, natives of the imaginary Republic of Kakania or some other former Austro-Hungarian region, pretended not to understand the screams. Yes, they had been burgled, and burglary was a serious insult at this foreign airport with half the staff on strike, a screen full of canceled flights and a crowd of tourists that was hard to distinguish from a refugee crisis. People were very tense and the outrage of the Spaniards was justified, but nobody supported them. The settler girls crept in with impunity. “Of course, because they are so beautiful, no one says anything to them and they think they can do whatever they want,” concluded one of the Spaniards in a last and futile attempt to embarrass the von Kakanien, but in Kakanien Don’t they know shame.

The lady was right: we agreed because they were very pretty. gorgeous. Very handsome, with a very unashamed beauty in this magma of sweat and exhaustion. It seemed like they were floating on a Botticelli shell and made you want to close it and check it in as luggage. All others would have been thrown out of line and into a tumult, but in the face of this beauty this sea opened generously and submissively. Their cruel and arrogant antipathy made them more powerful. They seemed selfish, ignoring any sense of solidarity or compassion. They tried to go through the VIP door and showed a map of El Corte Inglés or the Kakania Public Library, any trick was enough for them to skip the wait and leave all the rabble behind. Unfortunately, the airport clerk must have been someone defeated by the administrative prose of his trade and insensitive to the Renaissance light of the Kakan girls. He didn’t let her in.

Peter Bogdanovich said in a very inspired sentence – because he was talking about his dead girlfriend – that beauty and monstrosity look the same and maybe the most beautiful faces are just monsters in disguise. The beautiful disturbs and challenges the principles of democracy, which must be blind to the beautiful. We live as if we are all the same. Living together is based on this belief. Democracy requires us to support the Spaniard’s outrage and tell the Kakanians in civilized English to stand in line like everyone else. To be a Democrat is to oppose beauty. But I gave up my ideas in that airport that afternoon and celebrated tyranny.