In the sun-baked sprawl of Andalusia, where time usually moves with the lethargic grace of a siesta-drunk goat, the Spanish rail system has decided to pick up the pace of its own disintegration. It wasn't enough to have one lethal collision on Sunday—that would be too singular, too amateurish for a modern European state. No, Spain’s transport authorities evidently believe in the ‘double-tap’ theory of infrastructure management. If you’re going to fail, do it with a sense of rhythm. At least thirty-seven people are currently discovering the various ways a high-velocity metal tube can rearrange human anatomy, while the family of a deceased driver is being initiated into the grim reality that their loved one died for the sake of a schedule that wasn't even being met.

Sunday’s crash was, apparently, just a dress rehearsal. We are told that the 'European project' is built on the pillars of connectivity and efficiency, yet here we are, watching two trains in Andalusia play a high-stakes game of chicken and losing. The first crash was a tragedy; the second, occurring just days later, is a punchline delivered by a god with a very dark sense of humor and a resentment for public transit. Five of the injured are in 'serious' condition, a sterile medical term that fails to capture the sheer, vibrating terror of being liquidated by a locomotive because some signaling system—likely maintained by a committee of bureaucrats who haven't seen a railway track since the late nineties—decided to take a permanent coffee break.

The political reaction has been as predictable as it is nauseating. The Left-wing grifters will inevitably crawl out of their mahogany offices to moan about 'underfunding' and the 'evils of privatization,' despite the fact that state-run entities are perfectly capable of incompetence without any help from the free market. They’ll call for more 'investment,' which is code for throwing taxpayer money into a bottomless pit labeled ‘Safety Consultants.’ Meanwhile, the Right-wing ghouls will pivot to blaming the unions or the general decay of national character, as if the moral fiber of a train conductor has anything to do with two tons of steel occupying the same physical space at the same time. Both sides treat the dead driver and the thirty-seven broken bodies as convenient data points to be weaponized in their next stump speech. Neither side actually cares that the trains are colliding; they only care about who gets to hold the microphone at the funeral.

Let’s look at the broader picture of this European 'utopia.' We are promised a seamless, green future where we glide across borders on whispers of electricity. Instead, we get the Andalusian demolition derby. This is the reality of modern technocracy: a thin veneer of digital sophistication plastered over a crumbling foundation of 20th-century neglect. We have apps to track the trains, but we don't have the basic competence to keep them from hitting each other. It is a perfect metaphor for the human condition in the 2020s—we are all passengers on a vehicle we don't control, being told we’re heading toward progress, right up until the moment we hear the screech of braking iron and realize the driver is just as doomed as we are.

And what of the thirty-seven? They were just people trying to get from point A to point B. Perhaps they were going to work, or a date, or simply trying to escape the stifling heat of the Spanish plains. Now, they are the 'injured,' a collective noun used to sanitize the horror. They are now evidence. They are the collateral damage of a system that prioritizes the appearance of functionality over the reality of it. The driver, meanwhile, has achieved the ultimate in railway efficiency: he no longer has to worry about the inevitable third crash. He has been released from the contract of existence, leaving the rest of us to wait in the terminal, staring at the departure boards and wondering if the next arrival will be a train or a catastrophe. In Spain, it seems, there is increasingly little difference between the two. The machinery is tired, the politicians are lying, and the tracks lead nowhere but the morgue.