Dawn

Dawn

Friday, November 13, 2015

Corruption; Women again; & Local service.

CORRUPTION: There's no shortage of court cases here. The process seems to be:-
1. Media announcements of a new case and its nickname.
2. Judicial investigation - 'instruction' - over several months or even years.
3. Initiation of a case, which also takes months or years.
4. Change of the judge if he or she gets too zealous in the case of politicians or their friends in business.
5. Prosecution to either verdicts and sentences or - in the case of politicians or friends - an announcement that time has run out under the statute of limitations and so they can go free.
6. For those politicians who are bad enough to go to (a luxury) gaol, the presidential issue of one of the thousands of pardons approved by his cabinet every year. Impressive it ain't. But, anyway, the big Pokeman case has finally reached Pontevedra and our very popular mayor has been impugned. Interesting times.

WOMEN AGAIN: Writing about artists of the early 20th century, William Gaunt (a relative of mine), describes women of the WW1 period thus:- 'The new woman was a revolutionary product like the new art. She was the outcome of an active political struggle for feminine rights. She was also the outcome of force of circumstances - the necessity to work on equal terms with men at the work bench or at the office desk, or in military uniform. She was in revolt against the repressions of the 19th century and claimed, as men has already done, the right to be free in thought and in action. She dramatised her her liberty. She had the interet of a Baudelaire in access. She was promiscuous from conviction and talked the language of Freud in order to prove her emancipation and make herself attractive to lovers. She was a puzzling mixture of courtesan and bluestocking. She was intelligent and dissipated because it was fashionable to be both: and because on both scores she assumed an equality with men.' . . . I hadn't realised Germaine Greer went back so far. Later, Gaunt says Modigliani was responsible for the 1920s model of 'young women, their faces and bodies thinned by the meagre diet of wartime, whom he depicted with long, slender necks and bony thighs. It was the duty of women to look boyish. Adapting themselves physically to the demands of fashion, many took Spartan courses of exercise and starvation'. Later, Gaunt adds that: 'Slim-hipped, small-bosomed, short-skirted, behaving with the freeom of man, they turned the relationship between the sexes into a comradeship as sceptical of the old complexities of sentiment as the politically-minded were of the old complexities of diplomacy'. Sound familiar? Except for the small bosoms, of course. The final bit of déja vue comes with Gaunt's comment that young women took to verbal obscenities even worse than those of young men. Very modern.

FINALLY. . . LOCAL EFFICIENCY: I continue to take back what I said about this improving. The place where I took my digital recorder took 2 weeks to notice they had no knowledge of Humax machines. Which I only discovered after I'd visited and later phoned them. And Apple in Vigo decline to answer my emails about the repair of the laptop I took there over 2 weeks ago. A friend will go there today to try to get some info. Ensha'allah.

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