Who are they?

 New Lockdown: Day 6, Wednesday

I admit it. I got up very early, in the darkness and, under the subterfuge of going to have a pee, I had a sneaky look at my mobile to find out the state of play in the American election.  What I read was not exactly comforting and my attempt to go back to bed and sleep until daybreak did not work.

     So, up before dawn and reading my Guardian app on the phone while listening to Radio 4, I had a consolatory cup of tea and pondered on the sheer unadulterated differentness of people.

     People like me are going to have to come to terms with the fact that Trump got more votes than he did in the election in 2016.  Whatever the outcome of the election, and, as I type nothing at all seems even remotely settled, over 50 million (probably nearer to 60 million by now) people watched Trump be ‘president’ for four years and still voted for him.  I will not recite Trump’s glaring faults – perhaps they trip too easily off liberal tongues, like mindless repetition of rosary prayers.  I am tempted to say that the repetition has the same empty efficacy, serving merely as sonic balm to hide the fact that they are merely words with no further function than mouthed sounds.

     I listened to a Trump supporter say that she had her doubts about the character of Trump but felt that she shared his ideas and values.  She obviously didn’t mean the repulsive ideas and values that I see in him, but presumably some hazy version of what being a Republican means.  She was affluent and had higher education, but she mentioned the disturbingly left-wing policies of Biden (!) and the fear that he would limit freedom in some undefined way as justifications for her instinctive rejection.

     Obviously, this woman was on camera, felt under an obligation to ‘justify’ her support of Trump and, as far as I could tell in the fairly unnatural position of a televised interview, she seemed sincere and content with her choices.  She seemed decent enough, but had obviously put aside, or perhaps rejected as False News, much of the negative (factual) coverage of this depressing presidency.

     It is certainly tempting, from my point of view to dismiss Trump supporters as self-deluding idiots, and some of the choices that non-American commentators make in their choice of Trump supporting interviewees seem to fit that category, but 60 million Americans (and counting) voted for this person, and they cannot all be idiots, and to continue to think so will ensure that the divide in the country will never be healed.

     Some of the Trump supporters are in it for the money and for the power, or are the immediate nepotistic-sweetened family, but that only covers a fraction of the voting electorate.

     The four years of Trump have led some people who seem to live fairly coherent lives to say that, “He is the best president we have ever had!”  To say, “He really understands people like us!” or, “He cares!”  They see his public speaking, which I see as cringe-makingly embarrassing, as “natural” and “welcoming”, that he is, “really speaking to us!”  His free association of incoherent and contradictory meanderings allow Trump supporters to see the wealth-inherited billionaire (he claims) as one of their own, chatting to them in a way no other ‘politician’ can - or would dare to.

     Even as I try and be fair-minded, I can feel my bitterness and contempt seep through into my writing.  But astonishment at his continued ‘success’ will do nothing to stem the toxic populism that he represents and fosters.

     People on the left have a duty to understand how it is that so many people reject what seem like age-old standards of human decency for a strident self-defeating national selfishness.  And where do we start?

     Only one of my friends has admitted (that is an important qualification) to voting for Brexit.  None of them admits to voting for the Conservatives.  I read The Guardian and study the History of Art and live in Catalonia, not the obvious background to a right-wing populist, or a background likely to bring me into contact with other populists.  But my point is, that if the numbers of those voting for Trump or Johnson can be taken as a guide to how widespread their ‘ideology’ is then I must know a fair number of people who vote for what I regard as the disturbingly right-wing, and they are the people I need to understand and interact with in the expectation of bettering not only my own understanding of what is making people tick at the moment, but also of bettering our national dialogue.

     The problem, of course, is what to do next.

     I reject the idea of living in a Trumpian world: virtually everything he does and says is anathema to me.  But how do you change what seems to be a perniciously attractive way of looking at the world and one’s place inside it to many whom I have been able to regard (and I mean in an observational sense) as ‘other’?

     Perhaps, as part of our ‘Family Wisdom’ has it, “Anything is better than nothing!”  Speaking, conversation, writing, participating in political life, sharing thoughts, ideas - who knows what might eventually help, but an awareness of the divisions within society and a sensitivity towards them must surely be a step forward.

     And, when I get up tomorrow, perhaps Biden might have garnered the requisite number of Electoral College votes to start the process of the reinvention of the New Normal Politics, and then we can work on the New Normal during/after Covid without worrying what the so-called Leader of the Free World might tweet off the top of his head!

 

Unity?

Spain is a divided country: that is a fact.  The only point of discussion is how you think it is divided, and by whom.

This division was brought home to me by the reaction of a lady I spoke to this morning when going for an early morning swim before my first Catalan lesson of the week.  She remarked my yellow ribbon badge and we had a whispered conversation about those of the country who are opposed to the attitude that the ribbon represents, and who, to use her words, have the brains of mosquitoes.

The yellow ribbon badge is a signal to observers that I support the political prisoners that we have in Spain.  The leaders of two organisations that were involved in the referendum about Catalan independence have now been in prison awaiting trial since October 2017. 

 

The charges that the Spanish government has brought against some Catalans, via their politically appointed judges, have signally failed to convince any other European government to extradite Catalans who have been charged with “rebellion, sedition and misuse of public funds”. 

The continuing humiliation of the Spanish government in the eyes of other Europeans and the hugely negative impression that has been left in the collective mind since the police violence that attempted to suppress the referendum combine to force those supporters of the Spanish state into ever more ludicrous justifications to bolster up their positions.

For me, there has clearly been mismanagement (at the very least) and judicial corruption (at the very worst) and there seems little chance of a satisfactory solution to a problem that polarises and divides. 

 

The last (disastrous) PP government of Spain took a pugnacious and absolutist attitude towards Catalonia and refused negotiation and manufactured ugly confrontation.  The new “socialist” government of PSOE is little different, while it has said that it will talk to the Catalan government, it has made it clear that the unity of Spain is of absolute, paramount importance. 

 

They have also authorised the expenditure of something like half a million euros of public money to finance the legal defence of Llarena (the appalling Supreme Court judge heavily involved in the (il)legal opposition to independence) even though the case being brought against him by our President in Belgium is a Civil issue.  And the Spanish government has delighted in accusing the Catalans of the misuse of public funds!

We are coming up to the anniversary of the referendum and, as you would expect, demonstrations have been planned.  Each demonstration hardens attitudes on both sides and makes a negotiated settlement even more difficult.

I have even had the, “Why are you learning Catalan?” question thrown at me, as I start the new academic year in my Beginners Catalan class.  With the supplied accusation that, “Catalonia is part of Spain, and Spanish is the language of Spain, not Catalan!” 

To which you might reply that Catalan is the language of Catalonia and is an officially recognised national language in Spain itself – though try speaking it in the Senate or Congress and you will get short shrift!

I think that one of the problems about the language in Castelldefels is that the linguistic make-up of this particular part of Catalonia is one where Spanish is the dominant language.  There are many people in the city who are not native Catalans so it is natural to hear Spanish as the language of general use.  Get away from the coastal strip of Catalonia and you hear Catalan much more.  All Catalan speakers also speak Spanish and it is fairly common to hear conversations where one person will speak Catalan while the response will be in Spanish: there being a clear difference between understanding and speaking.

It is inevitable that there is a political dimension to the language.  Statistics vary, but 70%-80% of the Catalan population speak Catalan and more than 90% understand it – figures that Welsh can only fantasise about! 

These are not proportions that can be dismissed and they have to be taken seriously.  Quite how you define “seriously” is, I suppose, part of the problem.

I have not been in Catalonia for very long.  Years, yes, but not very long in the history of Catalonia and the generations of resentment about the way that they have been treated  by the powers in Madrid!  But in the (relatively) short time that I have been here I have seen a marked difference in the attitudes of people to the concept of independence. 

 

For reasons that I do not entirely remember: firstly, I went to a football game of Catalonia versus China in Camp Nou, and secondly, I went alone!  I remember looking around at the Catalan supporters and seeing Catalan flags waved vigorously.  These were the ‘ordinary’ Catalan flags of a plain ground and four bars. 

There were very few Catalan independence flags, that is, the ordinary Catalan flag with the addition of a star within a triangle of blue.  When the Catalan national anthem was played, one person near me raised his right arm in a clenched-fist power-salute until his clearly embarrassed companion told him to put his hand down!

Now, in any mass gathering of Catalans, the independentist flag is in the majority

and you hear talk of the founding of a republic and cutting links with Spain as an ordinary topic of conversation.  How times have changed!  And those inept politicians who find is so hard to ‘do’ politics are to blame for the present on-going disaster.

So, my determination to learn ‘some’ Catalan is not only a recognition of one of the cultural values of the area in which I live, but is also a political statement that sides with the Catalan desire to be seen to be different from the suspect government from Madrid.

In some ways I realise that I am emphasising the political dimension of my attempts to learn Catalan to counteract my horror at having been introduced to the first verb we have to learn in Catalan, by making the learning of it some sort of political/cultural activism!

My only fear is that this blog will be read by my friend Dianne whose first language is Welsh and has, in the past, threatened all sorts of trials and tribulations if I dare learn Catalan before I learn the language of the country I profess to come from.  With an even deeper irony, it turns out that there is another Welshman in my Catalan class.  And he does speak Welsh!

We shall see how far I progress.  And we shall also see if the idea that learning more than one language at a time is somehow easier, with the brain responding to informational overload with compartmentalized ease.

We shall see!