Spanish
(non)Government:
Are the country's leading politicos just playing at this? Or merely being Spanish? The PSOE leader – who failed to secure an
administration last week – has said he'd really like to trust the leader of his potential coalition partners - Podemos - but feels the latter's not really interested in a coalition
but is – like right-wing PP leader – aiming for fresh elections in
June. Their 'values and ideas', he laments, are
not as similar to his party's as he thought they were. Possibly the problem
is that, in typical far-left fashion (think the UK's New Old Labour
party), Podemos value purity over power. But vamos a ver over
the next 8 (long) weeks.
Gypsy
Women/Girls:
Here in Spain, gypsy kids don't usually stay in education until even 16.
So, it's admirable that one young lady is studying in nearby Santiago
de Compostela to be a judge. On the other hand, over in Italy, it's
reported that the octogenarian Berlusconi has dumped his 30 year-old
girlfriend for a 21 year-old gypsy woman. Both of these ladies are
clearly on the way up. Or up and down, in the latter case.
The
Usual Suspect: I went to the doctor's on Wednesday last, to get
the results of tests I had last December. For a minor
condition, you'll be relieved to hear. But I didn't get them and had
to go back on Thursday. The reason wasn't, as I first thought, that
the original doctor had retired or died. It was that the hospital's
computer hadn't been able to identify me. As ever, it couldn't cope
with the fact that I have 2 forenames and only 1 surname. It thought
the second of my forenames was my first surname. Down South, where
there there are lots of foreigners, this problem may have been
solved. But, up here in the (cooler, wetter) North, it's a very
regular occurrence. Spaniards around here simply can't yet get their heads round
the idea that, nowhere else in the world do people have 2 surnames.
And the children of a family have a different pair of surnames from each of
their parents. Who have different surnames from each other.
Guaranteed complexity, of course. And rife with the possibility of
errors. So, no wonder the Spaniards have a Family Book, which
contains all the details. And which they can't believe we guiris
don't have.
Finally . . The
Mamas and the Papas: I
have to admit I'd forgotten how pretty Michelle Phillips was. For
those you know this rock-folk group of the 60s, she was the
non-gravitationally challenged of the two female members.
Wiki records that Michelle's first marriage, when she was 18, produced a daughter but lasted only 2 years. Her second marriage, to Denis Hopper was shorter by 1 year, 11 months and 23 days. She tried the institution another 3 times, getting better and better at it, it seems. Her last (latest?) attempt has endured an impressive 15 years. Presumably she has mellowed. Or stopped having the sort of affair which caused her first divorce and her temporary expulsion from the group. BTW . . . The best Ms&Ps' song? Maybe My Girl. At least for us cynical romantics. Or possibly any other hit of theirs. This one features Michelle.
Wiki records that Michelle's first marriage, when she was 18, produced a daughter but lasted only 2 years. Her second marriage, to Denis Hopper was shorter by 1 year, 11 months and 23 days. She tried the institution another 3 times, getting better and better at it, it seems. Her last (latest?) attempt has endured an impressive 15 years. Presumably she has mellowed. Or stopped having the sort of affair which caused her first divorce and her temporary expulsion from the group. BTW . . . The best Ms&Ps' song? Maybe My Girl. At least for us cynical romantics. Or possibly any other hit of theirs. This one features Michelle.
Now
follows the Brexit Supplement.
But, if it's a smile you're after, scroll down to yesterday's (pay-walled) column
by the curmudgeonly Rod Liddle. Like many clever, funny people, Rod
used to be a Marxist. Like Catholicism, this gives you an eternally
cynical take on the world and the folk who inhabit it. Which is why
my daughers were both raised in this religion. Sadly, the strategy
only worked for one of them. Ironically, the one with the more
pronounced sense of humour. God's ironic will, I guess.
BREXIT
Why
am I considered a bigot or an idiot for wanting Britain the leave the
EU?
What
kind of community threatens people who want to leave it? What exactly
is this thing that we joined all those years ago – a cult? The
argument that we were persuaded into membership of the European Union
under false pretences becomes almost irresistibly credible. The
Common Market as it was then seems to have transmogrified into the
Moonies.
To
be quite clear, that outrageous claim the
French economy minister Emmanuel Macron threw out last week,
that all the migrants now camping in Calais could be pushed into
Dover, was utterly gratuitous. As responsible people in the debate
pointed out almost immediately, the agreement for allowing would-be
immigrants to be processed by UK border officials in France is a
bi-lateral arrangement between our two countries which has nothing to
do with the EU. It would not expire if we left.
Any
suspension of it would be a unilateral act of vindictiveness by the
French government as deliberate punishment for our withdrawal. In
fact, as the responsible people also noted, such a move would be
maniacally counter-productive since transferring the processing to
Dover would simply mean that those aspiring migrants who are now
stuck in Calais would be refused entry to Britain and sent promptly
back, with even more chaotic consequences.
But
there was an even nastier sub-text to that
histrionic warning.
Not only was it designed to be shamelessly scarifying, but it
implicitly condoned the most unpleasant form of xenophobic anxiety:
“You know what we can do to you if you pull out? We can dump all
this scabrous human detritus on your doorstep – and you wouldn’t
like that much, would you?”
Hardly
surprising that the migrants will endure anything to avoid having to
stay in France if this is the official attitude toward them. Indeed,
the first thought that came into my head when I heard of Mr Macron’s
delightful remarks was that if those unhappy hordes were to be sent
to Dover they would be handled with more decency and competence than
they have been at Calais.
And,
I suspect, that would have been the nature of much British reaction:
by playing on what they confidently expected to be fear and loathing
of migrants, the EU bully-boys risked inciting fear and loathing of
themselves. I don’t know about you (well actually, maybe I do) but
I find myself wondering what sort of people we are in league with
here. Are they prepared to say absolutely anything – however
hysterical or unfounded – to get the result they want?
The
spirit of “communitaire” – of social solidarity – was
supposed to be about mutual support between states and the
institutionalising of decency and fairness across the populations of
Europe who had fought each other to a bloody standstill twice in the
last century. How is that to be reconciled with the unforgiving
vengeance handed out after any member’s resistance to central
diktats – let alone conscientious doubts about whether a country’s
membership is in its own best interests?
If
this project was constructed to heal wounds and dissolve historic
resentments, it seems to be going about it in a very odd way. But
perhaps this is all just a phenomenally misjudged clash of political
cultures.
The
original European project was designed, to put it bluntly, by and for
nation states which had disgraced themselves in the 20th century.
Some of them had made criminal use of the democratic process to put
demagogues and murderous tyrants in power. The great irony is that it
is precisely these countries that should be most aware of the danger
of promulgating fear and loathing: once you set these forces alight,
you have very little control over where they lead.
But,
needless to say, Britain’s historical experience is rather
different. It has no reason to doubt either the judgment or the
courage of its own people whose most remarkable national
characteristic is their willingness to stand up to bullies. So when
the EU message appears to be an orchestrated attempt to coerce – or
frighten – the British electorate, why should anyone be surprised
when it has the opposite effect? That brings us to the question of
who is doing the orchestrating. The prevailing wisdom – which is to
say, the almost universal assumption – is that Downing Street is
behind it.
This
theory is based on the remarkable coincidences of, say, a visitation
by the Prime Minister to Francois Hollande in France or the
Chancellor to a G20 summit, miraculously producing startlingly
similar warnings – sometimes from people you’ve never heard of –
about the very terrible (unspecified) consequences of a referendum
vote for Leave.
Such
coincidences do not escape the notice of those who are paying
attention (who are the ones most likely to vote) and they lead to two
possible conclusions: one is that this is a conspiracy of the elites
who hold the concerns of ordinary people in contempt, and the other
that it is a calculated deception devised by David Cameron with which
his EU colleagues are co-operating.
In
short, if Downing Street solicited the Macron intervention and the
more amorphous Hollande warning that followed, then this is an
unedifying cabal with its own self-serving motives. If it didn’t,
then we are in a club that has some very unscrupulous members who are
prepared to exploit prejudice and anxiety for the sake of an
immediate goal.
Both
of these possibilities rely on the assumption that the public is so
inclined towards Leave that it will not be persuaded to vote Remain
without being scared out of its wits. Again, there are two possible
reasons for this assumption: Mr Cameron and his EU friends may have
concluded that anti-EU feeling is so irrational that reasoned
argument and the setting out of a positive case will never be enough,
or there is, in fact, no overwhelming, completely convincing,
evidence-based case for staying in.
Maybe
that is the answer to this whole perplexing cycle of events. The best
way to avoid losing an argument is not to engage in it at all: just
threaten and alarm those who might be inclined to listen to the other
side. Could this be why the Remain campaign has become so vicious and
personal with so little apparent provocation from its opponents?
Might it be relentlessly negative because it has so little to offer
that is actually positive?
Its
more moderate spokesmen do not tell ugly horror stories about hordes
of migrants arriving in Kent but even they murmur fearfully of
“uncertainty” and the amorphous danger of economic instability.
Sajid Javid who seemed last week to be trying to restore his
reputation as a sound Eurosceptic, said that uncertainty “was the
enemy of jobs and growth” – which in the very short-term it may
be. Markets particularly do not like uncertainty of any kind and will
plummet precipitously at the mere suggestion of something unexpected
– only to recover as soon as the momentary fright has passed.
But
what Mr
Javid calls “uncertainty” goes by other names:
flexibility, fluidity, innovation. The capacity to adapt to
unpredictable circumstances is what makes free economies strong and
productive. It is essential to long-term growth and mass prosperity.
Certainly nobody wants to face an immediate future of insecurity but
how does remaining in the EU address that worry: by permitting the
importation of infinite cheap labour with all the pressures on
housing, schools and NHS resources that that involves? By supporting
the interests of big corporations to the detriment of small
entrepreneurial businesses which actually create more local jobs?
If
there is a reasonable, substantial case to be made for Remain, then I
would, seriously, like to hear it. In the meantime, I will continue –
along with many of you – to be enraged by people who think that I
must be a bigot or an idiot to want to vote for Leave.
Rod
Liddle, The Sunday Times:-
Yeah,
sure, chimps are believers — and my dog’s Pup Francis
Skipper,
the half-breed dog I had when I was a child, was a practising Roman
Catholic. Let out of the house of a morning he would make his way to
St Bernadette’s Church and sit in the porch with a peaceable,
slightly smug expression on his face. I know, because on several
occasions I followed him. Always ended up at St Bernadette’s.
Maybe
he was angling to go to confession: “Shagged a peke, was sick in
the kitchen, unable to resist eating other dogs’ excrement.”
Three Hail Marys, Skipper, and ponder long on your behaviour.
My
mother, when I told her about the St Bernadette’s stuff, was
convinced our dog’s motives were different from those I had
assumed. “He is there to bite any taigs that come along, and quite
rightly. He is as affronted by the Whore of Rome as the rest of us,
Rod. Perhaps more so.”
But
that did not fit with the serene expression on Skipper’s face. He
did not resemble the Reverend Ian Paisley. He did not froth or snarl.
He was at peace when in St Bernadette’s, both before and after we
had his balls cut off.
The
possibility that some animals believe in God and perhaps have
developed primitive religious rites and ceremonies is back in the
news. Last week a biologist revealed that she saw chimps worshipping
at a tree.
Next
week some anthropologist will argue, with great force, that voles
follow the Nicene Creed or that beavers are monogamous because of
their strict Presbyterian upbringing, rather than because it is
evolutionarily advantageous.
The
chimp stuff was noticed by an Irish scientist called Laura Kehoe. She
was in Guinea watching chimpanzees. She noticed a scarred tree, in
front of which there was a pile of stones. What’s all that about,
she wondered.
And
then she saw the chimps approach the tree. Some hurled stones at it
with fury, others built a “primitive cairn” next to its trunk.
Ah, it is a sacred tree and they are making a shrine of it, she
concluded — a little peremptorily.
I
suppose throwing rocks at a tree does resemble, a little, the Muslim
ritual of “stoning the devil” on the hajj during Eid al-Adha, in
which pious Muslims pelt three walls with seven stones apiece. Laura
did not make this connection — perhaps because buried within her is
a certain valuable instinct for survival. I have mentioned it
because, of late, I have become bored with my head and do not much
mind being separated from it.
Cue
a certain amount of hysteria. The scientists are supposedly “baffled”
by this strange chimp behaviour. But not sufficiently baffled to
prevent themselves from reaching the most unlikely of conclusions —
that chimps might believe in some form of vengeful and boringly
static deity. All hail the not-very-tall African tree god. The notion
that the chimps enjoyed throwing stones at a tree and also enjoyed
building small piles of stones because they are lovable cretins does
not seem to have occurred to them.
It
does not matter how eminent the biologist or anthropologist, there is
always a tendency to anthropomorphise animal behaviour. The most
eminent of them all — the Canadian anthropologist Lionel Tiger —
was not immune. He wondered if chimps held religious services of a
morning after breakfast when they sat down quietly for a while,
rather than thinking they were simply letting their food digest in a
sensible manner.
The
suspicion is that the more narcissistic we become in our behaviour,
the greater our propensity to insist that these idiotic traits are
shared by animals, as if this exculpated us all. In 1930s Germany a
school was founded to “realise” the potential of dogs: the
Hundesprechschule. These dogs did amazing things. One of them, when
asked who Adolf Hitler was, responded in fluent German: “Mein
Führer!” According to the SS, at least. If you bend your ears hard
enough all dogs say “Mein Führer”, or something close.
We
are the only mammals possessed of those arguably interconnected
concepts — wishful thinking and religious belief.
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