Troubles in store

 NEW LOCKDOWN: Day 10, Sunday

 

 

 

The counting goes on.  And on.  And on.  But Biden has won and so we can put that worry to rest.

     And speculate about what old One-Term is going to do in the almost two months of lingering shame that he is going to have to suffer as, every single day, he is reminded that he has been voted out of office and from the 2^nd of January he will no longer be the President.

     We do have some evidence with which to speculate.  As Trump has shown himself to be ruthlessly concerned with money and his own status before everything else, we can expect him to continue placing his wealth and his public face in the forefront of his concerns.

     Prison is not a good look for anyone other than a Nelson Mandela and, with the best will in the world, even his most dedicated Swamp Base would not equate The Orange Monster with a South African Freedom Fighter.  If Trump is prosecuted for a fraction of the crimes that he is alleged to have committed during his time in the White House then he will be put away for a long, long time.  Misuse of public funds, nepotism, cronyism, bribery, simple corruption, tax avoidance, tax evasion, lying about virtually everything, justice – where to start with his trashing of the justice system? -  and so on ad infinitum. To say nothing of various dodgy financial pigeons coming home to roost to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

     So, one of Trump’s first concerns is going to be how to stay out of prison.  Because as soon as he is no longer the president and protected by the office various court cases are going to be reactivated.  

      The great question is, “Can Trump pardon himself”?  As far as I know, no president (even Tricky Dickie) didn’t stoop to self-pardon.  But just because something hasn’t been done before, it doesn’t mean that No Shame Trump won’t try it.   

     A more likely scenario is one that I have mapped out before which is, Trump resigns, Pence becomes president, pardons Trump, Trump becomes president again and hands over his trashed office a free man.   

     Though, to have a pardon is actually to admit that there is a wrong, so by pardoning himself, Trump will be admitting that he is a criminal.  But that won’t worry him, not with what is already on his grubby, grubby little hands!

     What scope does Trump have to Sharpie-sign yet more Executive Orders, because whatever mischief he can get up to like the spoilt child that he is, he will.  Bolstered by 70 million of his fellow citizens who voted for him, he will feel that he has a popular authority to do as he likes to make Biden’s accession as difficult and as messy as possible.

     Can anyone seriously imagine Trump graciously hosting Biden in the White House?   

     It is equally difficult to imagine Trump attending the inauguration, and one commentator has suggested that it is more likely that Trump holds a rally at the same time, so there will be a split screen of Biden and Trump and their various crowds.  Though that might mean that Trump will not do it because he will be terrified that his crowd could be smaller than Biden’s.  Though, even if it was, that would merely be an “alternative fact” which could be brushed away by the Mendacious Monster.

     This is surely one time when the “oxygen of publicity” should be denied to Trump (and yes, I am well aware of the source of that phrase and the poisoned outcome of its practical use) but if Trump continues to peddle lies he should not be given a worldwide media platform to repeat them.  But I also recognize the freedom of speech and freedom of information elements that have to be considered.   But  . . .

     I am sure that we are going to have a damn sight more than two months of pathetic interference in the political situation by Trump and his minions, but with any luck they can be swept into the dustbin of history.  Fond hope!

 

I am missing my swims.  I check the booking app that we were encouraged to download to book ourselves in for our activities to see if they are accepting reservations and the first day that there appears to be bookings waiting is for the end of this week – but they are not yet open to be made real, so I will wait a while to see if reality matches appearance.

     To compensate for my missed swim I am extending my daily (electric)bike ride and so now I cycle the entire length of Castelldefels and Gava Mar and while it is an impressively  long distance for me, my fitness app tells me that my journey is almost entirely on the level which, as it is beside the sea is logical.

 

We have started talking about Christmas and I am determined to put up my Belen (Christmas stable scene, with added people) this year as well as having a small Christmas tree.  The tree will be decorated with baubles made by SQB – just as soon as the parcel containing them gets here!

     The Christmas meal is altogether more problematical.  Toni will be devastated if he can’t see his family over the festive period and I think that we will have to make a trip up to Terrassa even if it is only a fleeting visit to bump elbows and then back again.  But time will tell just what we allowed to do.

     Amazon is going to make a fortune, sorry, an even bigger fortune this Christmas as everybody in the world decides (especially if they have Amazon Prime) that it is worth getting the presents from Amazon if only for the fact that postage will be free!  But we will worry about that much, much later.

     In a bout of what might be described as Gourmet Porn, I slathered my way through pictures of M&S hampers and noted with something approaching wistful regret that many of the high price items in some of the more expensive hampers are alcohol related.  As I now do not drink alcohol (I say for medical reasons, but what my doctor actually said was, “You can allow yourself one small glass of red wine a day” – as if that was possible! Better to recognize weakness in self-control and give it up entirely!) bottles of Champagne and Vintage Port do not attract.  Well, they do, but as I am not going to drink them, it would be fairly pointless to buy them and just look at them, or even worse, sniff them and retexture what they taste could be like from past experience of drinking.  And if that sounds like something I have indeed done, then you would be right in so thinking.

 

My new watch continues to please, though I have adjusted the always-on element of the watch face to turn off for the hours of deepest darkness.  My watch also startled me, by suddenly playing music, not a ring tone, real music.  It took me a while to work out where the sound was coming from.  If you had been watching me then you would have seen me taking out my mobile and being confused by the fact the more I tried to hear the music from it the more it wasn’t coming from it, and yet the music was tantalizingly near.  I am sure that my confusion only lasted a couple of seconds but it was deeply disturbing.  And frankly even more so when I found it emanated from my watch as I had done absolutely nothing to encourage it.  Honestly.

     It turns out I have one tune on my phone and I have little idea about how to put more there.  I will leave downloading the full manual for a sunnier day when I am feeling gadget strong.

 

I have downloaded an app or something called The Fussy Librarian which is supposed to provide a series of free or bargain downloads of books that you can read on Kindle.  My first choice of a Sci-Fi novel turned out to be short story length and to be part 1 of 7, and I can’t find the other six.  I fear that yet again, what appears too good to be true, is too good to be true.  Though I will continue to investigate and report back later.

 

Meanwhile the writing, apart from this blog, is not going well.  And the fact that some of the letters on the keyboard are misbehaving is irritating.  And the fact that one of the worst behaving letters is the ‘e’ is even more unbearable.

     Cotton buds and wet wipes must be called into play, because the cost of a replacement Apple keyboard is not to be thought about this close to Christmas.

AMERICAN GOTHIC!

 

NEW LOCKDOWN: Day 8, Friday.

 

 

As we continue to fret our way through the no-man’s-land of the space between the counting of the votes and some sort of definitive result from the interminable American election, I have mused over the future not only for America but also for the rest of us.

     What seems likely to happen is that Joe Biden wins the election and becomes President of the United States.  The Blue Wave of support for the Democratic Party has not happened and so the new president will be faced with a reduced majority in the House of Representatives and a Senate controlled by the Republicans.

     Already Republican slime in the human form of Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell have stated that they will make it as obstructively difficult as possible for the new president and for the Democrats.  The Slime will have been emboldened by the fact that the election did not sweep away Trump and his sick ethos, rather it will now allow itself to be entrenched in Republican ‘thinking’ for the foreseeable future.  This means that Biden (if elected) will be faced with a frustrating period of government where every truly Democrat idea is frustrated by the Senate.

     At the end of four years (if he lasts that long) Biden will have little in the way of positive achievement to look back on.  He will also be four years older.  So, he will be fighting the 2024 election as an 81-year-old.

     This is where the choice of Kamala Harris as a running mate and vice president comes into play.  If there had been a Blue Wave, then she could have played her part in overturning the discredited actions of Trump and enacting a whole slew of legislation to bring the country back from the brink.  She could have been well-placed to become the candidate for the 2024 election if Biden was unable or unwilling to take on the next four years.

     But after four years of frustration and limited achievement she would be handed a poisoned chalice.  And remember, Trump was NOT trounced, a terrifyingly large percentage of the population saw four years of a grotesquely dysfunctional presidency and voted for four more years of it and Kamala Harris, a coloured, left-leaning, woman is going to tick all the bigot boxes to limit her election.  The incredible numbers of non-white voters who supported Trump, with a special call-out to those Latinos who respond to the word ‘socialist’ with instinctive horror, all combine to suggest that Kamala Harris would be a disaster at the polls in 2024!  And can you imagine either Biden continuing at 81 or the in-fighting in the Democrats in looking for someone else in the lead up to 2024?

     So, this is my horror scenario. 

     The period 2020-2024 is a disaster for Biden and the Democrats. 

     The Covid horror continues as anything that Biden says is immediately construed as an attack on basic liberty by Republican and far right (is there now a difference?) elements.  Covid therefore continues as an ongoing disaster with Democratic attempt to cope with the pandemic seen as anti-democratic (!) and as ineffectual -. Biden will be blamed for the mounting deaths in a way that Trump never was.

     Obama Care is struck down by the Supreme Court, this is seen as a triumph for the wrongly and unjustly forced from office Republicans.  Biden is blamed for the increased deaths and misery caused by the increased numbers of Americans who will no longer have any form of health insurance.

     Tax rises are implemented to pay for the financial disaster of Covid.  Biden is blamed for making ‘ordinary Americans poorer’.

     And so, it will go on, unfairly, with Biden being blamed for things that just seemed to slip off Trump.  Biden, emphatically, could not walk down 5^th Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it.  No way!

     And then, the final horror of 2024, when Trump returns as the ‘wronged’ President and stands as the Republican Party’s nominee to become the 47^th President of the United States of America.  And wins!

 

I fairly obviously hope to god that none of this (apart from Biden winning) comes to pass.  But 69 million bitter ‘disenfranchised’ (!) Tump voters is an awfully large proportion of the population to take with you if Biden (as he surely must) puts himself forward as the healing president trying to bring warring sides together after a more than bruising campaign.

     Trump will have lost the popular vote by millions.  Again.  But who seems to care about that?  The vagaries (or idiocy) of the American Electoral College is what decides, and the Trumpian Hordes are going to be a complicating factor in American politics for the foreseeable future – a future in which a hamstrung Democratic president, unable to count of both houses of Congress is going to fight a losing battle with the Trumpian Hordes baying for his blood.  I do not envy him his task.

 

What can help Biden now is that all the court cases which have been held in abeyance because the President could not be prosecuted are now all activated.  As should be court cases against the nepotistic scum with which the President surrounded himself.  Conflicts of interest should be examined and those suspected (!) of wrongdoing should be prosecuted.   

     Trump has done so much wrong that it is essential that all of his wrongdoing is prosecuted: for the sake of the Republic, he must not be allowed to get away with his trashing of legal norms.  Justice must show that no one is above the law, up to and very much including Trump.  It is essential that any member of his family who is suspected of corrupt wrongdoing should also be prosecuted so that their feelings of indemnity that have characterised the last four years are brought back into some sort of legalistic focus.

     By the way, I am not sure of the legal position of Trump in the period from whenever the final result is called until Biden takes over, but could Trump give presidential pardons to all those who have aided and abetted him in his occupation of the White House?  He has, after all, mooted the idea of giving himself a pardon!  

     Is it still possible for him to resign, have the odious Pence take over and then as president Pence (I refuse to accord even the hypothetical suggestion of office for that man a capital letter) give Trump an open presidential pardon for any and all crimes committed during his ‘presidency’?   

     Given how many of the norms of decency Trump has already broken with impunity, such a devious Get Out of Jail Free process would not be beyond his depths, so to speak!

 

As I type, we still do not know if Biden has been able to gain the 6 votes he needs (assuming Arizona is safe) to gain the presidency.  Presumably, if he is able to, Trump will demand a recount in all the knife-edge states, not to gain power, but rather to give him more time to spread further unfounded rumours and conspiracy theories.   

     Even if Trump eventually goes, his leaving behind a tarnished presidency and a ‘suspect’ accession will be enough for him and the shaeless Republican Party to work with for the next chapter in the sobering tale of Modern Political American Gothic.

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 13

Get your recriminations in early, list them, remember them and throw them at the guilty when the crisis is over and they are brought to justice.  As if!

     The latest piece of absurdity to surface here in Spain is that 650,000 Covid-19 test kits have been ordered that are not fit for purpose, it even says as much on the side of the packs!  They were ordered from China from a supplier not approved by the Chinese authorities who had previously provided a list of recommended suppliers - ignored by the Spanish health officials.

     A plane left Barcelona airport for Malaga packed with people who were not the regulation distance apart – how was this allowed?

     Couples are walking dogs together.  People are coming and going (using the back entrance) of the house next door as if there is no crisis to limit their actions in continuing the building work.

     There is no uniformity about travel and keeping a distance.  We have death figures higher than China and many of us fear that the commitment to total lockdown as the only solution to rising numbers is not entirely accepted by the government.  We MUST remember and hold them all to account.

Listening to The Now Show on Radio 4 last night, we were left in no doubt that the participants had all followed guidelines and were broadcasting the show from their respective homes.   

     As it was radio we do not know just how they were dressed and consideration of that factor is perhaps best left to imaginations more prurient than mine, but the major difference between the normal show and the crisis show was the lack of a live audience.  With humour this can be something of a disadvantage when the listener sometimes needs to hear the audience give a more audible response to the inward chuckle.  But it was a good show, with a few wry digs and a competent set of comedians.

     Other shows are also being broadcast where the participants are not in studio but are at home and if the show is for television, that is where the Crisis (capital ‘C’) comes into play.  News broadcasts now regularly feature experts and politicians who are ostentatiously following the rules and self-isolating, but such exposure presents them with a real problem: what, in a Crisis, to have in the background.

     For most people who wish to present a professional vision (literally!) of themselves, the problem is solved by having a background of books.  Books add gravitas, they show knowledge, they are Culture.  But.

     If I had an HD television and a recorder and had a way of enlarging the background, I feel it would be very interesting to see exactly what books these people have chosen to put themselves in front of.  There is a post-crisis PhD thesis there!

     Perhaps ‘chosen’ is the wrong word to use for some of them, in so far as they are perhaps sitting at their desks in their home ‘office’ and the bookcase is the one that happens to be behind them.  Or is it?

     There is a low-ish bookcase behind me as I type and I’ve just turned around to look at it.  It is not the background that I would choose to be televised against.  There is an unsightly collection of mismatched books on the top shelf (together with a garish money box inscribed “Para mi gran viaje”) and the other shelves are filled with a variety of tatty box files with hand written titles and a sellotaped piece of paper reminding me that Palm Sunday is on the 5^th of April this year.  This last is because I write a poem-a-day during Holy Week.  Because I do.

     To my right is another bookcase, one shelf of which is filled with reference books.  Now these are far more photogenic: not only are they solid looking hardbacks, but also one of them has the word IDEAS in big capital letters along the spine.  Importantly, the word is large enough to be read by an appreciative watching television audience, or one that might be subliminally impressed!

     The problem with these books is that they are all too new looking, a little too superficial.  You need older books to make it appear that the shelves' contents have been read; that the books are old companions, not window dressing.

     I have a lot of books and, although I have tried, I have failed to get all of them into a coherent order on my shelves.  Most of my shelves are a voyage of discovery rather than a pattern for the Dewey Decimal System.  There are unexpected juxtapositions so that (and I have just reached up for a couple of books from another bookcase) The Nations of Wales 1890-1914 by M. Wynn Thomas is next to Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus by Sir Thomas Browne, both of which are worth reading in their different ways and whose proximity is pleasing.  Give me time and I will work out why they deserve to be together!  But my point is that for most people with a large book collection the organizing principle is chaos not order.  Or perhaps that is only true in the Arts rather than the Sciences.  Or perhaps it’s just me.

     Now some people are chaotic in their organization and some have chaos thrust upon them and some others play at chaos: the casually strewn and oddly placed as artful indicator of the eccentric genius.

     The Book Backgrounds have ranged from the pitifully eked out shelves to the deep alcove floor to ceiling plenitude, but I just wonder how contrived it all is, and how long the ‘players’ in the television game have thought about how to present themselves.

     Now you might well say that I must have too much time on my hands to be concerned about such things, but what an individual places behind themself is a clearer indication of how they want to be perceived than anything they might have to say.  I think.

On television this evening there was a snatch of an interview with a solitary walker who was accosted and asked why he was breaking the regulations and his response was that he did not know that there were any regulations to break!  Not only have we have the Spanish Government paying for ads on the television, we have had the Generalitat in Catalonia and various advertisers who have tailored their messages to include reinforcement of the restrictions on behaviour.  How could the man have missed everything?  If, of course, he was telling the truth about his ‘ignorance’!  All it needs is a man like that who is also infected to cause another spike, and kill people.  Inconsideration is fatal, not funny.

As we come to the end of the second week of isolation, it is sobering to think that we may well have only passed one seventh of the time necessary for the sequestration to work on the virus.  One hopes that is a pessimistic forecast, but I fear it is a realistic one. 

     What are we going to be like by the end of this time?  One friend in the UK says that we are headed for civil unrest and riots; a friend in Catalonia says that the restrictions are too lenient and if they are not tightened then the situation will get much worse.  As time goes one and people who are not sick think that the restraints are too irksome, will they become freer in their actions, and will people who see others breaking the rules feel entitled to follow them?  And then . . .

     The real problem for us is that this situation is unparalleled and we are winging it, following advice from deeply flawed politicians, with failure illustrating their lack of forthrightness.

     One of the free MOOC courses that I am following at the moment is using some of the writing of Kant and I am sure that he would say that the restrictions on our behaviour and actions that are the most satisfactory are those that we would impose on ourselves if we had the freedom to do so.  Are the restrictions the sort of restrictions that we would think necessary in the circumstances?  I will stick to the rules come what may because Kant tells me to!  And I have managed to prevent myself from making a jocose comment using the name and adding an apostrophe and changing the K to a C.   

     Such restraint in the time of Corona!

    

Spanish shame!

So, as we wake up to another brightly dull day where rain is threatening even if it is not actually falling, what have we achieved in Catalonia after the referendum?

Most importantly, a clear indication of the signal failure of Rajoy and his authoritarian government.  They pledged to stop the referendum and it took place.  They used every trick in the book short of sending in the army and it failed to stop 42% of the electorate turning out for what Rajoy called an “illegal” vote.  Given the obstacles put in the way of voting, the fact that over two million people in Catalonia turned out to vote is a triumph of the people over an uncaring repressive central authority.

The actions of the Spanish National Police that have left at least 844 people injured, two seriously, will haunt the popular imagination for years to come.  When you see pictures of armoured baton-wielding policemen laying into young and old alike; women being pulled by the hair along the streets; people thrown down stairs; voters being kicked and thumped, the adjectives to describe such scenes that come to mind are not those used by our ridiculous President of “firmness and serenity”.

Rajoy must resign at once. 

He won’t of course because he and his corrupt party feel themselves to be above the law and indeed they create their own reality.  Rajoy spoke to the nation and explained that, “there had been no referendum today”.  Rajoy is a master of Political Photoshop where uncomfortable reality can be rejigged through his own weasel words into something more in keeping with his distorted world view.

I have just been informed that an older man who had heart failure in the disturbances caused by the Spanish National Police has now died.  While he was being given resuscitation the voters who had formed a protective ring around those giving assistance were attacked by an armoured police officer who smashed his way into the cordon and people fell on the injured man.  All of this was captured on film and it joins a series of unacceptable views of violence.  Perhaps more significantly, I can find nothing on television to suggest that this story (found on Twitter) is actually correct.  The violence towards the man has been captured on film and I have seen it, but the death is perhaps one of those rumours that we are going to have to get used to during the next few days and weeks as what is a volatile political situation feeds on the truth and half truth that has the potential to rip Spain apart.

If you have not seen what violence Rajoy and his PP government encouraged against peaceful voters then check the link below, and then write to your MP demanding that they condemn the behaviour of a WESTERN EUROPEAN NATION, a member of the EU and UNO, against its own citizens!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2017/oct/01/catalan-referendum-hundreds-injured-as-police-attack-protesters-video?CMP=share_btn_link

Swimming and thinking

Sometimes I think too much.

Take my first view in the original production of Omen II.  A decent enough film I thought, and the superior sneer of Damien at the end of the film was masterly.  But not really frightening enough for me.  Until I went to bed.  There, in the false comfort and snide warmth of a snuggly duvet I began to think about what I had seen.

In my half awake, half asleep state I imagined a much more graphic film than the one I had seen and my mind decided that there was no way that Damien could possibly be stopped.  None.  No way at all.  Evil was unstoppable.  The end.

Luckily I woke up and life seemed altogether brighter and much less evil-orientated.  My rock solid atheism could re-assert itself and the demons could retreat back into fantasy literature.  But I still remember that night of reimagining the film and I can still retexture the sense of lost helplessness that I managed to create for myself.  And the sense of dissatisfaction at the ‘real’ end of Damien in Omen III or IV or whatever.  Not convincing!

 

Brexit and 45 are not things from which I can wake up.  The demons associated with both those grotesqueries seem more and more real as time goes on. 

Boris,

Gove,

45 and The Mooch seem like overdrawn characters from some Grand Guignol pulp-fiction pot-boiler, but they live and have being in the real world, even when that world is composed of salted, filtered water in a swimming pool.

I used to say that I swam in college because the pool was the one place where I did not think.  That wasn’t really true, or perhaps accurate enough.  What I think I meant was that the pool was the one place where my brain could be truly unfocused and whatever was playing on my mind could be, and usually was, lost in a welter of stream-of-consciousness kaleidoscopic disassociation - so to speak.  In other words my mind was released from early Gothic Novels, or Don Juan, or The Magic Mountain or the horrors of William Faulkner, or whatever it was that I was supposed to be studying and it could bounce along in whatever funny little ways scraps of remembered experience took it.  Then, once out of the water, showered and changed, the real world (or at least what passed for it in Swansea University) was able to reassert itself.

It is rather like my ability to sleep. 

I can be set about by the circling creatures of Goya’s sleep of reason awake, but head on pillow all of them slip into the velvet darkness of oblivion.  True, I sometime awoke in the morning with the immediate and startling realisation of what was there when I went to sleep, but the period of rest was release.

So my swim this morning was much more centred (yes, I am aware of the pun with swimming up and down along a line in a lane) as my mind refused to bounce in its usually happy manner and my thoughts stayed resolutely with the UK leaving the EU, and the POTUS behaving like a kitschy lout.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have written about these two disasters yesterday, adding the joke that is Spanish politics and Justice to leaven the mixture: but my concerns are present in my mind and my mind juggles these awful realities trying to find a modus vivendi.

I am reminded, as I often am, of a millionaire with whom I was once on a committee who once gave me wise advice about money.  “The Great Trick,” he said, “is to keep money moving, keep it moving, juggle it.  Borrow, spend, buy, keep it moving!”  I nodded as sagely as someone who didn’t really know what he was talking about could do, when he added, “And the Second Great Trick, is to know when to start running!”  Which I did understand.

As someone who was sort-of brought up in the Protestant Work Ethic with added Delayed Gratification, I could respond to, but not understand what my millionaire friend was talking about in terms of high finance - but when retribution was invoked which obviously indicated that the “juggling” was a euphemism for cheating, and the “knowing when to run” was away from the police, I knew.

It is like the films of my youth.  In films, in all films, the baddies never won.  Even if the baddies were the ‘heroes’ of the film, they had their comeuppance.  Thieves did not get to keep the cash, murder always came out, Justice had a capital ‘J’.

But that was films.  This is real life.  Where is the Justice with a capital J for 45?  What precisely does he have to do to suffer the punishment that he so richly deserves?  Given the size of his ego, nothing, absolutely nothing is going to dent his own inflated idea of his own self worth.  It doesn’t matter if he is impeached, imprisoned, bankrupted (again), derided, voted out of office, shunned, demonstrated against - nothing, will dent his own belief in himself.

I can imagine 45 (and I like doing so) as a down and out tramp, loose folds of flesh hanging from his gaunt face (making WH Auden look like a picture boy for face cream); his tattered clothes clutched about his lank flanks; his thin weedy hair hanging in lank dead twists; his tiny hands weaving around in what he imagines to be imperial gestures still telling the other homeless waifs of how he once won a great election, of how he was the most powerful man in the world and that he re-made the world in his own image, of how women threw themselves at him in ecstatic adulation and of how he was betrayed by the men, women, judges, voters, Democrats, Republicans, Americans, Germans, Intellectuals, newspapers, television, The Swamp, non golf playing people, friends, family, everyone but himself.  But, of course, he still had it.  He was The Great Negotiator (how almost like a Dalí title that is!) and that he was still, and always would be great.

I then imagine the Great Germaphobe washing his tiny hands and tucking into a salvaged Mac meal.

But the reality is that 45 will be even richer by the time his disaster of a period of office comes to an end.  He was never realize how he was despised.  He will never appreciate the damage he has done to his country.  He will die happy, realizing that he had been the president and “knowing” how great he had been and how he had made America Great Again. 

Not even justice with a small ‘j’.

I realize that writing like this does not really make a difference.  I always hope that somewhere there is a reader who responds, who relates to what I write and spends a passing moment thinking about the issues.  But with Brexit and 45 - what can one do?  One feels that there must be something practical, something real that must be done but what?

I am linked to campaigns in Britain and in Spain about Brexit and holding the government to account - especially with regard to we Brits who live abroad.  I sign any and every petition that comes my way and is sympathetic to my point of view.  I read and respond to the idiocies that I see taking place in the places that I call home.  But I fear that it is not enough.  Brexit seems to be powering (!) its way along, helped and fostered by the selfish nasty party that caused it and a crazed popular press; 45 panders to his debased base and sinks ever lower in his discourse and actions and seems unstoppable.  What is a wishy-washy liberal (with a small ‘l’) like me to do?

Perhaps this recognition of helplessness is stage one.  Determination to move one to something practical might be stage two.  I live in hope and search for the reality that allows this to happen.

S C A N D A L !

The treatment of the sister of the king, the forgetful ignoramus of a bank worker who apparently knows nothing of finance, should have prepared us for the treatment of her criminal husband.  He was found guilty of a range of crimes for which he was given a prison sentence of . . . wait for it . . . no time in prison!  Today he has walked from court and is able to go back to his home in Switzerland!  Just when you thought that PP (let’s not pretend for a moment that the justice system in Spain is separate from the political parties) could do nothing more to take the breath away, they encourage the degradation of justice by allowing this glaring piece of toadying, fawning favouritism AND they have replaced some of the most honest fiscals (the legal characters who are leading investigations into the rampant corruption of the systemically corrupt PP and its unsavoury associates) in the hope that the scandal of the incredible treatment of the husband of the sister of the king, will deflect attention from the other disgusting activity that they are indulging in to ensure their escape from the punishment they richly deserve.

            Although it seems like overstatement, this country is looking more and more like a dictatorship in which the MINORITY government’s cynical scratching of the already thin veneer of democracy is looking more and more determined in their ruthless determination to stay in power.  The previous local PP government of Valencia shows what a cesspit of fiscal corruption is revealed when a sitting government is forced to relinquish the reins of power: presumably our national PP government must be terrified about what might come out of any other than themselves is able to see the true situation in this country.  I feel nothing but contempt for most of the political system and for almost all of the questionable characters that run the justice system.  There are, of course, notable exceptions who plough an increasingly lonely furrow in trying to get the truth into the public arena – but in my view, it is easier to think of Spain in terms of a banana republic than as a modern democratic state.  And, what is more depressing is that the government thinks that it can get away with it.  No, they know they can get away with it, because that is what they have been doing, with impunity.

            This is a bad day for democracy, justice and the reputation of Spain.  The actions of this government must be rejected by anyone who cares about the future of the whole country rather than just for one political party.  This should be a wake up call for people to reject the debased ethical stance of a systemically corrupt government and ask for real separation of powers between the judiciary and the legislative in this state. 

The political farce that we have watched with fascinated horror for the past umpteen years as generations of politician and constructors fleece the public purse and get away with it must be stopped.  Most of our present political caste seem unwilling or unable to offer anything more than more of the same.  This is intolerable, and it is up to that part of the disgusted population of Spain to teach their political ‘masters’ the true meaning of that word.