There is nothing quite like the arrival of a hereditary ornament to make a pile of twisted metal feel like a state-sanctioned event. King Felipe and Queen Letizia, the primary beneficiaries of Spain’s longest-running reality show, have finally graced the site near Adamuz where two high-speed trains decided to exchange kinetic energy in the most permanent way possible. At least 42 people are dead, but thank goodness we have two exceptionally well-dressed individuals to stand in the dust and look vaguely disappointed at the laws of physics. It is the ultimate exercise in otiose theater: the arrival of the symbols of the past to validate the failures of the present.

The crash itself was a masterclass in modern systemic collapse. An Iryo train, that sleek silver dart designed to whisk the bourgeoisie from Malaga to Madrid at speeds that make the soul lag behind the body, simply forgot how tracks work. It derailed, crossed into the path of an oncoming train bound for Huelva, and transformed into a multi-million-euro accordion of human misery. This is the deadliest rail accident in more than a decade for a country that prides itself on its high-speed infrastructure—a shining example of the European dream where we can travel at 300 kilometers per hour right up until the moment we stop forever because a sensor blinked or a budget was trimmed.

Enter the royals. One must admire the sheer, practiced vacuity of the royal visit. They arrive in a motorcade that likely cost more than the annual maintenance budget of the track switches in Andalusia, stepping out with that carefully curated expression of 'solemn concern' that they teach in the higher echelons of the aristocracy. They are there to 'mourn,' which in political terms means standing in the way of actual investigators and recovery crews so that photographers can capture the light hitting the King’s mournful brow. It is a pantomime of empathy. The state, having failed in its most basic duty to transport its citizens without liquefying them, now sends its most expensive puppets to offer the comfort of their presence. One wonders if the families of the 42 dead find solace in the fact that a man who lives in a palace once stood near the spot where their loved ones were crushed by the weight of corporate and regulatory negligence.

Then we have the 'three days of national mourning.' This is the bureaucratic equivalent of hitting the snooze button on a ringing alarm. By decreeing a period of collective sadness, the government successfully shifts the conversation from 'Why did the train derail?' to 'How sad are we?' It is a tactical deployment of emotion used to mask the structural rot of the institution. While the flags fly at half-mast, the various stakeholders—the private operators at Iryo, the state-run infrastructure managers, the regulatory lapdogs—are all busy drafting press releases that ensure the blame is spread so thin it becomes invisible. The mourning period isn't for the dead; it’s a buffer zone for the living to scrub their hands of the gore.

The irony of the location, Andalusia, is not lost on anyone with a functioning frontal lobe. This is a region where the gap between the gleaming high-speed future and the stagnant, neglected reality of the working class is wide enough to drive a derailed train through. We have built these monuments to speed—these steel veins of the EU—while the actual heart of the system is suffering from an arrhythmia of incompetence. The Left will blame the privatization of the rail lines, ignoring that their own oversight was as porous as a sponge. The Right will defend the 'efficiency' of the market, ignoring the 42 bodies currently being identified in a makeshift morgue. Both sides will eventually use the tragedy as a cudgel in the next election cycle, turning the Adamuz wreckage into a campaign stop.

In the end, the royals will return to Madrid, their shoes cleaned of the Andalusian dirt, and the news cycle will pivot to something less demanding of our limited attention spans. The trains will eventually run again, perhaps a few kilometers slower for a week or two, until the memory of the 42 fades into the background noise of 'acceptable risk.' We live in a world where the spectacle of sympathy is prioritized over the mechanics of safety. We are a species that finds comfort in the sight of a King standing in a graveyard, never stopping to ask why he was allowed to own the graveyard in the first place, or why we keep filling it with the victims of our own celebrated progress. It is a pathetic, cyclical farce, and the only thing faster than a Spanish train is the speed at which we forget the cost of the ticket.