People long for connection to the past, to culture, to something received, as opposed to things perennially new, created, artificial. The whole thing about men using women’s bathrooms: that is manufactured. It is perhaps the deep rooted fear of realizing the manufactured nature of this controversy which creates so much anger. The cost of losing is realizing that they have become fully rootless, and utterly lost in a present which has nothing for them, and a future that has less, at least on that path.
I do feel even they process the coming digital future as mean, cold and uncaring. I certainly do, but even if people don’t see this directly, I feel that these images appeal instinctively on a mythic level.
I will add that the Spaniard seemed latently to evoke the “Republicans” (crypto-Stalinists in my own phraseology) in the Spanish Civil War. If there was ever a romantic–and utterly misguided and foolish–rebellion, it was that in Spain. And it was brutal on both sides. They got that much right.