The slippery eel waddles away!

 

Try as I might, I find myself unable to resist trawling the Guardian for news about the charlatan who is masquerading as the First Lord of the Treasury in the United (ha!) Kingdom.

     As I have made abundantly clear to anyone who will listen to me, I am prepared to pay ready money to anybody who takes the clown to court and presses charges of Corporate Manslaughter against him and his motley crew of degenerate inadequates who make up the Cabinet.

As an integral part of the evidence against the idiot, it would be good to have the crushing conclusions of an independent commission of some sort to bring into court.       The dolt has said that the process of looking into the National Disaster of Covid Unpreparedness will start during this session of Parliament.  And the gibbering loon has further been on the radio and through the usual morass of gibberish he has intimated that the process will actually start in the Spring of next year.  The World At One on BBC Radio 4 managed to find an expert who said that, given the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry it would be unlikely that the final report would be issued for a couple of years.  So, the final report will likely be published, if the corrupt money hoover actually is forced to do so, in 2024/5!  And, of course, as the commission or inquiry or whatever takes its course, the shock-haired charlatan will regard the whole question as ‘parked’ and when the report is finally issued, the nepotistic ethics vacuum will regard the whole question as “past history” – just as he has successfully managed to evade responsibility for the actions of previous Conservative governments over the last decade of which he has been part.

     I am horrified to think that he might actually get away with it – just as he has all the other misdemeanours that have littered his so-called career, both political and personal.

     The results of the council elections show that as long as you keep a straight, or in his case an “engagingly” twinkly eyed face, the electorate will swallow any old rubbish and will, in their droves act like virus voting for vaccine – a truly bad analogy as there the ‘bad’ will be destroyed by their own ignorance . . . oh, wait a minute, the so-called Red Wall voting because they believe the proven liar’s assurances; because they believe that Conservatives actually care for anything north of Watford – perhaps the analogy holds!

     Although I think that politics in England (I stress ‘England’) are rapidly approaching a Through the Looking Glass unreality as logic is divorced from proven actuality, there is always the good old US of A, to show that things could be even worse.  Republicans in Red States are behaving like unsupervised spoilt children wreaking havoc on other children’s sandcastles, except real people are being hurt by the Republicans denial of truth, and the baleful influence of the Floridian Oz is making the Republican Party simply not serious enough to take on the mantle of government.

     Any self-respecting Conservative will (or should) find it impossible to continue supporting a party motivated by a demonstrable lie.  The purging of the party to ensure that all elected party officials are True Believers in the coup inspiring and voter denying Trump means that the choice that Conservative have to make is clear.  If they do not make it, then they will be tainted by association and should be called out and condemned.

     The acceptance and adoption of “illegality” by the British Conservatives in their attempts to preserve power is not something that should comfort democrats (with a small ‘d’) in Britain.  Just as I passionately believe (based on past proof) that the NHS is NOT SAFE in Conservative hands, so I equally passionately believe that the present bunch of unprincipled Conservatives have not and will not be bound by common decency and they will use all the power of their positions to twist, distort and subvert norms and institutions to keep the party in power.

     I think that we are at a pivotal point in the history of the UK: the structure of the country is fracturing and we have a government that essentially couldn’t care less about anywhere other than England.  The small-minded nationalism and the very large lies which fostered the disaster of Brexit are going to be used to justified to change and wreck what we thought might have been solid.  The next few years are going to be a very rough ride!

 

Meanwhile, off to Terrassa for another birthday in the festive orgy of commemoration that is the first part of May!

How to keep your sanity in world that is too right-wing for, well, sanity!

 

 

 

 

For the past few years, when the political situations in Catalonia, Spain and the UK got too much to bear, I turned to the antics of Trump and the Republican party to demonstrate that there were depths that this side of the Atlantic had not yet plumbed.  Now that Trump is more of a distant malign emanation from the depths of swampy Florida rather than an ever-present daily horror show in the newspapers, one has to rely on the pathetic, yet entirely disgusting, cavorting (I can’t think of any other word to describe what should be a serious political party) of the Trumpian Republicans in Congress and the Senate to set against whatever depressing failures one sees around the political sites in Spain and the UK.

     I have realised that I simply can’t do it anymore, by which I mean reading about Republicans with the semi-detached amazement at the jaw-droppingly callous human distain that they display on a daily basis.  I can no longer pretend that the grotesque views that Republican espouse were a function of The Orange Small Handed Horror.  Whatever the Republican Party might have been in the past, what it is now is a morass of ante-diluvian viciousness: the anti-abortion, election “rigging”, voter suppression, homophobia, etc etc etc – all the tropes of the far right coming home to roost (if they ever left) in the comfortable prejudices of an apology for a political party.  What is happening today is that the repressive idiocies of the Republicans and the super-charged language of political hatred and contempt that they use against their opponents is all too present in the life of politics here in Europe.

     The ‘comical’ lies of Trump are more than matched by the serial mendacity of Johnson.  Johnson now is a flagrant liar because he makes no attempt to correct the record when he has been found out.  And still the Conservatives are ahead in the polls.  Why should a liar change his deceit when he doesn’t seem to be penalized for the lies he tells?

     England and the USA are cursed with a two-party system: Conservative and Labour; Republican and Democrat.  Where do the votes go for those voters who look with something approaching horror at the way that they right wing parties are heading? 

     In the USA, the rhetoric of the right means that even the mildest of the Democrats is branded as extreme left wing or “Socialist”, whereas here in Europe they would be seen as just left of centre.  Old fashioned Tories must shudder to see what the party has become under the “leadership” of the third-rate chancers who now control the Conservatives, but their escape route of the Lib Dems has long since been shown to be a wasted vote and they probably will never bring themselves to vote for Labour, even with that nice Mr Starmer as leader.

     The situation is different in Catalonia, where the national conservative part PP has a derisory following and the so-called “centre right” of C’s has also been rejected at the polls.  The “”Socialist”” party PSOE and a variety of Independence and left-wing parties hold sway here, but we have no government as the parties have found it impossible to work together to get some sort of coalition off the ground.  As the days go by with a government “in functions” the frustration of the voters becomes more and more palpable.

     In a way in which I have never felt so strongly before, governments are simply not working; justice is becoming a by-word for partisanship; inequality is becoming more and more pronounced; corruption is rampant and the ordinary voter is made to feel more and more irrelevant as the tiny percentage of the rich and the powerful continue to act with absolute impunity.

     The word “Democracy” has become devalued as politicians mouth the word but ignore the concept in the ways in which they behave.

     Biden is trying to make a difference.  In spite of the torrents of abuse that he has to take as he tries to redress some of the worst excesses of his predecessor’s reign of terror, he is a beacon of hope.  But what is going on in the red states of America in the almost comical attempts to gerrymander the political situation to benefit the right is a worry.  Biden does not have his full term to make a difference.  His majority in the Senate is on a knife edge and if that is taken away by Senate elections next year then we have seen previously that a hypocritical Republican Party will be much more than willing to sacrifice country to the demands of the Party and stymie any bipartisan legislation and wait for 2024 to Bring Back Trump to win again!

     The election in Madrid will be an indication here of how the political situation is working.  The leader of Madrid at the moment is an unprepossessing Zombie of PP who has made the most remarkable pronouncements in the lead up to the voting.  We have an extreme right-wing party which is openly Fascist and revers the late Fascist dictator Franco.  The level of political debate is debased.  Threats and counter threats depress.

     It is very difficult not to be depressed at the prospects for a positive outcome to the election in the febrile atmosphere where everything seems to be tainted by Covid.

     But I remain an optimist.  

   And as long as I stop reading about red-neck, red-state Republicans and concentrate on things like the medical personnel who have worked tirelessly to vaccinate and medicate, then I can always look forward to a communal recognition that unselfish caring is also positive self-regard.

Know me and die!

Mao Zedong, he of the rotting teeth, lice infested body, venereal diseases and mass murders, had a succession of young women for sex and he regarded their infection as a sort of honour bestowed by his sick wonton largesse. 

I thought back to that disgusting dictator when Covid-riddled Trump appeared on the veranda of The White House and took off his mask so that he could infect those in his immediate vicinity who had not already fallen prey to his super spreader tendencies and who, alas, would not have access to the experimental, rare and expensive medical treatment that his 750 dollars of annual tax would come nowhere near to covering.

It is astonishing, humbling and terrifying, to watch a dedicated narcissist doing what he does best: thinking solely of himself in the glorious exclusion of everyone around him.  There is a sort of Neronic magnificence to his almost complete lack of empathy, humanity and consideration.

As I watched him gibbering away in his debased form of English, he also made me think of Samuel Butler’s strange anti-Utopian novel Erewhon (1872) where illness is considered a crime and where crime is treated as an illness.  This, almost perfectly, fits the world view of Trump where for him illness is just for ‘losers’ and crime (as illustrated by so many characters in the harlequinade of depravity that constitute his entourage) is regarded as something that should be treated with leniency and understanding and is easily excused and even pardoned.

Trump’s brush (as he would like us to consider it) with Covid merely shows that all you need is strength of character to defeat the virus.  The 210,000 (and growing) dead Americans were weaklings.  And didn’t have helicopter access to the 24/7 state-of-the-art medical attention that Trump had.  But that is a minor point compared to the element of confidence that is so much more effective against viral infections than any mere medication.

After four years of not believing the degradation and mendacity that have been keynotes in the dystopian presidency of Trump I am exhausted by disgust.  I find it hard to keep up the level of contempt that Trump so richly deserves as yet another parody of leadership is beamed into our homes. 

The lies, the contradictions, the weasel words, the insults, the corruption, the vulgarity, the sheer worthlessness of the whole Trump enterprise with the loathsome Republican reptilian political power junkies that acquiesce in his continuing pollution of his role are all draining.  I know that four more years of this buffoon will be insupportable and I sincerely hope that Biden and Harris manage the landslide that they, that anyone other than Trump and his discredited troop of filth, deserve.

The trouble with the Dumping of Trump (please god) will be that all the attention, at least from my point of view, will then be focused on the end of the year and Brexit and our own home-grown liar and narcissist trying to spin it as anything other than a disaster.

Trump and Johnson are united by their lust for power and attention and by their complete lack of something coherent to do with it.  Neither has an ideology, apart from the glorification of themselves, they don’t really know what to do.  This is why Cummings is so important to Johnson because he can supply a mirage of possibilities that Johnson assumes (he is far too lazy to question and understand) will give enough direction to focus his pitifully short attention span and make him look as though he has vision.

Johnson’s linking of the present dangerous times to the post war Labour government’s belief in making a New Jerusalem is an insult to the cross-party endeavour that looked beyond the end of the war as the time to put brave plans into operation. 

Johnson has read a speech.  He hasn’t thought about what society he wants at the end of this pandemic.  He hasn’t worked on ideas, sat down with experts, felt the enthusiasm that something better must emerge from a time of struggle and danger.  Johnson uses words like thin glue on a fragile house of cards: he knows nothing and believes nothing to make plans realities.

Trump and Johnson were presented with a disaster.  Their job as leaders was to keep people safe.  They have both failed.  Failed spectacularly.  Hundreds of thousands of people have died because two empty chancers have not cared enough to give time, thought and determination to do the basic parts of their jobs.

Mao killed millions.  The only thing stopping Trump and Johnson from doing the same is opportunity.  Unchecked, shoddy populists like them will whittle away at our freedoms, will act with growing autocratic assumption and will destroy.  They have already been devastating in their negativity.  At least with Trump there is the opportunity to dump him and to start the process of normalization, with Johnson he has years and an 80 majority and Brexit. 

I weep for my country and pray that our institutions are hardy enough to withstand the onslaught that the political griffon of Johnsummings is likely to wreak on everything that I thought was secure and good.

 

I really can write myself into an apocalyptic frame of mind, typing fingers dance to depression.  So, let me lurch out from the darkness and find something lighter on which to end – whoops, there is a negative word if ever there was one.

I was phoned today by a very pleasant lady from the Liceu who gave me some details of how the new opera season is going to happen.  We have previously been told that there will not be as many people in the theatre and that we will not have to sit next to anyone and we cannot be guaranteed ‘our’ normal seats. 

It will be like joining the audience for a little-known ‘difficult’ modern opera where most people vote with their feet and reject any attempt to experience anything about the more esoteric and atonal music of the present day. 

There is always an audience when I go to the opera because I have a season ticket and therefore all the other holders of Torn A are in their seats whatever the opera actually is.  The first opera (actually on my birthday) is not obscure at all, it is Don Giovani and therefore it would normally have a full house.  It will be odd sitting in a performance of so famous an opera with Christopher Maltman as the Don with a sparse audience, it will be interesting to see if the ‘spaciousness’ affects the experience.

I cannot say that I am entirely jocose about going to the theatre at all.  The cases of Covid in Spain and Catalonia are, frankly, terrifying and I find it difficult to imagine how the Liceu is going to organize things so that they are even marginally ‘safe’.

To take a single example: the average age of opera goers is high and that puts us in the ‘at risk’ category and, most importantly, we also need to pee.  The toilets for our particular section of the Liceu are small and are usually crowded during the period before the performance and during the intervals.  Quite how this is going to be regulated without increasing the risk of infection (and middle-class violence) is going to be fascinating to observe!

As we will have to wear our masks during the performance, it will be important to chose a mask that is comfortable to wear for long periods of time and one that doesn’t steam up my glasses too much!

But these are problems that have a gloriously musical ending, so I don’t care too much, and look forward with what positivity I can muster to enjoy myself.

A crumb of happiness!

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It shows how low the bar for ‘political satisfaction’ is set that the fact that a homophobic, racist, unconstitutionally acting, twice fired judge, bigoted, accused paedophile Roy Moore fails to make it to the American Senate as representative for Alabama.  By just over 1% of the popular vote.

As Alabama is a deepest red Republican state, a Democrat successfully elected is a triumph, no matter how small the margin of victory.  It has been estimated that over 70% of the white vote went to the Republican, no matter how vile a candidate was standing to represent them!  And they call themselves God-fearing Christians!

Well, amid the unrelentingly awful progress of Brexit in the hands of a group of Conservatives who, at cabinet level have yet to even discuss what sort of Brexit they are actually working towards, a little ray of reason in the form of the wrong person NOT being elected to office is something to relish.

 

As is the fact that the failed Republican candidate was enthusiastically supported by pussy-groper-in-chief, good old kiss-of-death-to-reason 45, POTUS.  In an astonishingly polite and reasonable twitter 45 actually congratulated the new Democrat Senator!  Could it have been written by 45 himself, or is there someone in his office with a shred of decency who managed to get in first? 

45 has, of course, started to twitter a ‘justification’ (sic) saying that he knew that the Republican would lose which is why he supported his opponent in the Primaries and . . . hold on, I am not going to repeat the mendacious Jesuitical (not that 45 could ever rise to the height of sophisticated casuistry that the Storm Troopers of Roman Catholicism reach) rubbish that spills from his mouth and dribbles from his small handed typing fingers.  He lost.  He backed a loser.  Who lost.  Like him.  Tarred with the same brush of failure.  Sad.

This loss of a crucial vote in the Senate should make the passing of the shameless tax grab by corporations, big business and greedy donors more difficult to pass.  Does anyone truly believe that the new tax cutting laws are going to be revenue neutral, or that they are going to create an economic miracle, just like the similar plans in Kansas didn’t?  One waits and hopes.

But, above all, congratulations to the voters of Alabama for doing the right thing and rejecting a clearly obnoxious bigot from high office - and that is something that I did not expect to write in my lifetime!

Is it just me, or is the triumph of May in the Brexit negotiations anything more than mere words?  Try as I might I can see nothing concrete about any of the three elements of Payment, NI Border, EU Citizens in Britain and we poor British buggers in EU countries.  Yes, vast sums of magic money, billions of pounds have been metaphorically waved in the air (presumably to the sound and rhythm of Boris’s whistling); the Invisible Border has been made concrete (so to speak) but the implications for the rest of Britain, following NI’s lead would suggest that we have no Brexit at all; the gambling chips of EU lives are still being thrown towards the baize table as the wheel revolves.   

It’s an unreal combination of the Emperor’s New Clothes and ghoti.

For those not aware of ‘ghoti’ I should explain that it spells the word ‘fish’.  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from enough

Take the ‘o’ from women

Take the ‘ti’ from nation

Put them all together and you have all the sounds to make the word ‘fish’

But it doesn’t end there, ‘ghoti’ also has no sound at all!  And here’s how:

Take the ‘gh’ from night

Take the ‘o’ from people

Take the ‘t’ from ballet

Take the ‘i’ from business

Put them all together and you have . . . nothing.

And that, if you still remember what I was talking about, is like what has been ‘agreed’ about Brexit and what the British government (I use the term very loosely) have stated/promised/negotiated/said/suggested/mentioned/insinuated - or any other word you might think of to explain exactly what they have done, because for me, I feel that we are dealing with the second pronunciation of ‘ghoti’ and that we have a wordy nothingness to get on with.

The trouble is, of course, that ‘wordy nothingnesses’ while they might keep the perennially warring EU factions of the Conservative Party momentarily apart, they do nothing for life as it is lived in the real world where real people have real needs.

Living in Spain as I do, what does this ‘triumph’ of negotiation say about my entitlement to healthcare in my adopted country?  What does it say about my ability to travel on the continent on which I live?  My right or not to stay in Spain?  My rights as a Brexit blighted citizen in a re-defined country relationship?

You try finding concrete reality in the vacuous mouthings of dithering, incompetence from the British government, added to the astonishingly lazy arrogance of Davies as he ‘negotiates’ by the seat of his pants with no apparent need for projections of what his airy pronouncements might mean.  Because the Spanish government is going to ask all the hard ‘W’ questions like: What?  When?  Why?  Which?  Who? and so on.  To these our government has no answers, mainly because they have not had the wit to think of the questions themselves.

So, what about the Spanish government?

After the stealing sequestering of art works from Catalonia and sending them to Aragón in defiance of the natural course of law yesterday, the powers that be have today declared that the number of political prisoners jailed at the moment is woefully inadequate and there are plans to incarcerate 40 more of the officials who participate in the dangerously democratic referendum held on the 1^st of October of this year.  You remember, that was the referendum when the world saw pictures and film of members of the Civil Guard and National Police smashing their way into polling stations and into the people who were in them.

Our President is in exile in Belgium and, while the craven Spanish Government has withdrawn the international arrest warrant for him, because it was likely to have been thrown out of court and humiliated the government by its rejection, it has retained the Spanish arrest warrants.  So, if our President were to step foot on Spanish soil he would be immediately arrested.  For the time being our President continues to canvass and participate in the Catalan election via video from Belgium. 

Our President speaks a number of languages including French and English and so he is more than able to communicate with the International Press.  The Spanish President speaks one language, and his command of Spanish has been, um, a little individualist at times.  He has also rejected questions in press conferences which have not been in Spanish.  It is almost sad to watch Rajoy at international gatherings as he attempts to show that he is chums with people who look mildly irritated and embarrassed when he approaches.

We are now only eight days away from an election that could define the course of Spanish history for generations, and indeed the course of European history.  The election in Catalonia involves us all.  What happens to Catalonia will be seen as an indication of the strength of democracy not only inside Spain, but also within the EU and the wider world.

You are involved in what happens on the 21^st.  Keep watching!  Your future is at stake!