Is faith dead?

Some people think that the title is merely rhetorical, as the answer is most obviously and resoundingly, “Yes!”  But that ignores the evidence of simple, everyday observation.

Admittedly, in this Roman priest ridden, yet strangely non-church going country, faith in a caring (or indeed malign) divinity is largely absent, yet simple acts of faith are plain to see.

Especially where zebra crossings are involved.

I am constantly amazed, as a driver, at what blind belief pedestrians display in the power of painted black and white lines on a road.  They stride onto the crossing as if there were adamantine walls along the edges of the passing to save them from the most determined of massive lorries – of course without looking to see if any juggernaut is coming their way.  They know, in a way which demonstrates their complete belief, that as soon, nay! before their foot has touched the black or white, they are protected from anything up to and including tactical nuclear weapons.

We may not see the devout walking across roads telling the beads of their rosaries nowadays, but we certainly see the modern equivalent which is the ‘telling’ of the elements of social media interactions on their mobile phones, with their eyes glued to the small glowing rectangles (in portrait mode) and their ears plugged in (wirelessly or otherwise) to the relentless musification of Spotify.  Completely involved in the mobile word they have, they believe, complete immunity from the slings and arrows of outrageous driving that as a pedestrian terrifies me on a

daily basis too.

It is a known fact (that I once looked up on the Internet and so it must be true and not fake news) that Spanish drivers are more dangerous than the French.  OK, we are not talking about the suicidal/homicidal driving of nations like the Greek or Turkish (I am still having counselling to mitigate the deleterious effects of a traumatic taxi trip from the centre of Istanbul to the Airport many years ago) but the standard of driving here is abysmally low.  And since most pedestrians are drivers, they know how little concern those drivers have for those not in cars when they are in them – so to speak.  And yes, the transcendental equanimity, or crass stupidity, with which they stride onto a busy road putting their trust in fading paint is astonishing.

And strangely humbling, of course.

Would that I had could share their faith in anything to the same degree of absolute trust that those walkers display each time they ignore the possible (fatal) consequences of uniting for a brief moment with a fast-moving large metal ram on wheels secure in the fact that they are protected by a painted series of road mounted post-modernist glyphs at their feet!

How wonderful to live in a world in which opportunities for the affirmation of faith are to be found along every road, where devotion is as painless as a few seconds of walking.  No need for the Camino de Santiago with its length and privations to show belief, all you have to do is cross the road: if you survive you will have demonstrated the Truth of your Faith; if you do not, then you will have been taken in an Act of Faith and will therefore, assuredly, go to your reward.

However, belief does not equal truth, and in the reasonable world it would be more advantageous for everyone if crossings were not regarded as challenges.  If zebra crossings could be regarded as courteous requests for passage rather than opportunities to exercise unalienable rights; where stopped cars could be invariably thanked for their allowing passage, I can’t help thinking that we would live in a happier, safer and richer world.

I should be congratulated by not using the dreaded word that haunts my waking hours and depletes my pound-paid pension – but it is not difficult to see the approach to the zebra crossing (albeit via a non-British population) as a clear metaphor for the March-approaching act of self-harm that my ‘government’ seems hell-bent (sic.) on inflicting on us in another act of unreasonable ‘faith’.

I enter 2019 with no great feelings of positive progression on a national scale, but I reassure myself that the personal possibility is always hopeful.   

Please!

Deja vu - again!

 

There was a time (I’m sure that there was a time) when Corporal Jones’s hysterical injunction in Dad’s Army “Don’t panic!” was funny.  We could laugh at his over reaction to all and every situation as he blindly staggered around in all directions!  Now his gibbering proclamations seem to be the absolute norm as each new day brings in news of yet another backward, self-harming, political disaster.  The seemingly inexorable slide to the right of people as they feel that traditional politics has done nothing for them is horrific.

The latest backward step has been taken in Spain, to be specific in Andalusia in the south of the country.  This region is the most populous in Spain and has been ruled by PSOE (the so-called Socialist party of Spain) for over thirty years.  As with all political groupings that have had power for so long, Andalusia is full of crony-corruption and the word “socialist” is the title of the party is a grotesque misnomer.

Years of mismanagement came to head in the local elections on Sunday.  Added to mismanagement of the region, you could consider the fact that this is the first real opportunity to give a reaction to the “Socialist” Prime Minister who has taken over from the irredeemably corrupt PP group of conservatives; an opportunity for disenchanted (ha!) PP voters to move over to another right-wing party like the sluttish Ciudadanos party who will link with anyone if they can get a whiff of power and, for the first time since the demise of the dictatorship in Spain, an extreme right party Vox.

Both PP and PSOE have lost seats, so the only way that the party can retain power is by joining with another party.  Podemos is the most left-wing mainstream (sort of) party in Spain, but even if PSOE and Podemos joined together, they would not be able to gain a majority.  On the other wing, the three parties of the right and extreme right would have a majority if they decided to work together.

Seats
PSOE–A			30.28%
PP			23.85%
Cs			19.27%
AA			15.60%
Vox			11.01%

Popular vote
PSOE–A			27.95%
PP			20.75%
Cs			18.27%
AA			16.18%
Vox			10.97%
PACMA			1.93%
Others			2.38%
Blank ballots			1.58%

In response to the situation in Catalonia and the strength of the independence movement there has been a marked growth in nationalistic politics in Spain with much waving of the Spanish flag and chanting of ¡Viva España!  Both PP and Ciudadanos have moved substantially to the right with the new leader of PP actually saying that colonialism was not a bad thing, but was the creating of a Greater Spain!  Ciudadanos has become more stridently anti-immigrant, and I am ashamed to admit that this discredited party actually has the largest number of seats in Castelldefels – though no majority and they are therefore not in power as all the other parties have combined to keep them out.  Quite rightly too!

But it is a national disgrace that a party like Vox has managed to gain seats in any regional parliament.  The Constitution of democratic Spain (flawed though it is) is only 40 years old.  Franco died in 1976, this is not ancient history, how has the reality of the dictatorship become so blunted that people can vote for a party like Vox?  But they have.  And we will have to deal with the movement that could well become a national phenomenon.

As in so many countries around the world politics is now so divisive that reasonable discussion seems to be beyond virtually everyone.  Fact based evaluation seems to be passé nowadays as we live in a post-truth environment where opinion is valid and is proof enough in itself without relation to the wider world of reality.

Vox is the shadow of fascism rising again.  Their hate filled rhetoric utilizing all the tropes of the extreme right are depressingly familiar with anyone who has read the history of the twentieth century.

 

I suppose that one of the major differences between past situations in the twentieth century and the here and now is the abdication of the “leader” of the free world from a collaborative engagement as an ally with the people of the democratic world, to a detached, petty, Twitter dominated, isolationist nationalism.

And as if the world situation was not dire enough, I get the results from my first Catalan examination tomorrow!

Goodbye to all that

 

Who would have thought that Prime Minister of the (presently) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would turn out to be such a fire-brand radical.  Those of us who thought of her as merely the malicious bitch of the “zero tolerance” policy which continues to poison the workings of the Home Office, could not have imagined that her mindless destructiveness in support of the continuance of the hopelessly divided and self-regarding Conservative Party would espouse the most left-wing anti-imperialist views about the destruction of empire! 

But today, after her capitulation to fellow minority politician leader, Prime Minister Sanchez of Spain, she has signed away the concept of nationality as it relates to an overseas possession.  Gibraltar, whatever the mendacious May says about it, has now lost its British character as it becomes in future subject to a foreign country deciding aspects of its existence.

Let us not forget, too, the fact that Northern Ireland and Scotland also voted for Remain and the Brexit self-harm is making these countries’ futures inside the laughably “united” Kingdom more precarious.  Whatever happens now, the divisions inside the country are not lines of demarcation but gigantic fissures that no amount of mealy mouthed platitudes from a letter to the British people by a desperate and increasingly irrelevant “Prime” Minister of nowhere will be able to bridge.

It is supremely ironic that the party of Empire and National Unity, a party in whose title is the concept of conserving what is excellent in the past, has turned out to be the modern wreckers of the institutions that they formerly maintained they existed to serve.  They have placed party politics above national interest and, including the most fanatical of doctrinaire Brexiteers, they know and have admitted that the country is going to be worse off with Brexit, a price they say is worth paying for the freedom and liberty for our country to advance into the unicorn filled grassy uplands of future long-term prosperity. 

 

As someone rightly said, in the long-term we are all dead, and in the medium to short term most of us do not have the millions safely stashed away in European funds, like the ever-odious Rees-Mogg, to make the difficult times ahead just a little more manageable.

Realizing that Brexit is a disaster is not rocket science and there are politicians on all sides who know this.  I do not paint the whole of the Conservative Party in one colour, there are people in the party who must be desperately worried that their party is going to be accused of national destruction in the future, and they know that the present policy is not one that will benefit the people of Great Britain – to say nothing of Northern Ireland.  I also know that there are Brexiteers in the Labour party, some, like fox-hunting Kate Hoey (who to me seems to have no place in the party) and others who, with some justification, are deeply suspicious about the workings of the EU.  But, as with democracy (a questionable quality in many aspects of EU governance) so with the EU, it is not ideal, but it is better than the alternatives. 

 

And remember, my father and grandfather fought in World Wars, both started in Europe, and I am of the generation that has not had to suffer that obscenity.  Unity in Europe has been tenuous enough and has not eliminated wars on the continent, but the situation is not going to be made better by a major country in Europe withdrawing to its insular boarders.

Today the minsters of the EU will sign the “agreement” and then May will have to go, metaphorical begging bowl in hand, to try and get support for a document that does not seem to settle any of the major questions that make leaving the EU so problematical.  It has been suggested that May has already been stooping to dangling knighthoods in front of those MPs who might be tempted to change sides and support this insupportable agreement.  The next few weeks are going to be catastrophically unedifying - and those are two words that I have never had occasion to put together before.

I am fed up with being a citizen of a country that is now regarded with bemused contempt by those who have bothered to look at our mare’s nest of a national situation.  I am fed up with having to try and explain why my country is doing things that are absurdly out of kilter with rational thought.  And I am fed up with my situation as a British Citizen living in an EU country being used by MY government as a negotiating chip in a no-win game at MY expense.

It is at times like these that I wish I could use the “Delete all and insert” approach of General Body meetings in my University, where one motion could be amended to its opposite by the “Delete all and insert” gambit.  The trouble is for that to work today for the absurdity of Brexit, there would need to be an addition to those four words – the word “forget” between “all” and “and”, so that the revised amendment would be “Delete all, forget, and insert”.

In real life, unfortunately, amendments like that don’t work.  However absurd and dangerous Brexit actually is, we seem to be stumbling, blindly towards our doom.  And even if, by some miracle, we were able to reverse the absurdity, there would still be the corrosive memory of what has been said and done during these two years of governmental paralysis.

Whatever happens, Britain has changed and there is no going back.  My only hope in the chaos that I foresee in the near future, is that something positive will be salvaged by politicians who finally realize that their responsibility is to the country and not to their parties.  Hoping for politicians to “do the right thing” is, clearly, desperation! 

 

But, I am an eternal, if cynical, optimist and the historical precedent of the Conservative Party of Peel and the Repeal of the Corn Laws shows the way!

Do your duty!