Spanish life is not always likeable but it is
compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher
Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Cataluña
- Sr Rajoy continues to ridicule Sr P. As if this helps anything.
Spain
- So, turning up your nose at menial jobs doesn't only happen in the UK. Though there's a lot more unemployment here, of course. Especially in Andalucia.
Madrid
- Not many folk on the streets of Malasaña at 9.30 in the morning. Just me and the very efficient street cleaners essentially. But, anyway, here's a foto of a facade not a stone's throw away from my daughter's flat. If you look hard - or even not so hard - you'll see why it's famous. And it's not just for the masculine items:-
A one-time brothel, I believe. Which I might have featured before . . .
- And here's another famous frontage, even closer to her flat:-
The EU
- Here's the BBC's take on the coming year.
The USA
- Fart, says, Ben Macintyre is the Greatest Showman reborn. See below his amusing article comparing him with the infamous Barnum.
The English Language
- While researching the answer to my own question - Why is English softer than both Celtic languages the Teutonic languages of the post-Roman invaders? - I came across this wonderful - and often hilarious - page of views on the languages of others. All done with good humour and civility. And in excellent English. I particularly liked this exchange between a Norwegian and a Dane:-
Norwegian: Danish sounds like
drunk Norwegian.
Dane: Can confirm. That's the way it sounds to us also.
Nutters Corner
- Ghanaian footballer Mohammed Anas earned a man-of-the- match award after a game between Free State Stars and Ajax Cape Town yesterday. He began his post-match interview with: “Firstly I appreciate my fans. And my wife. And my girlfriend."
Finally
- Reader Maria has commented on the craziness of English. So, she might appreciate this article as much as I did - on why it's so weird. Incidentally, it rather endorses my guess as to why English is not as harsh as German or Dutch. It's thanks to the common-sense Scandies of the 9th century.
Today's Cartoon
- Blame my sister for this. The non-Catholic one, of course.
THE ARTICLE
Trump is the Greatest Showman reborn: Ben Macintyre
Like
the
impresario P T Barnum, the president is a master manipulator who
values entertainment over truth
The
release of The
Greatest Showman,
starring Hugh Jackman, has provoked an intense historical tussle in
the US over whether Donald Trump is, or is not, the modern embodiment
of Phineas Taylor Barnum: the Victorian theatrical impresario,
sometime politician, fixer, circus owner, occasional bankrupt, real
estate magnate and skilled manipulator of the news, much of it fake.
Salon
website called Trump “the second coming of P T Barnum”. Samuel L
Jackson described the president as “more P T Barnum than
politician”. The Financial
Times called
him a “huckster-president in the Barnum mould”, whose “mix of
deal-making nous and showbiz brazenness is one reason he won the
election”. Trump’s family welcomes the comparison between the
president and the most notorious showman in American history:
“He is P
T Barnum,” says his sister.
The
similarities are striking. Both Trump and Barnum exhibit the skills
of born salesmen, more concerned with profitable entertainment than
strict truth. Barnum said that he did not care what people thought of
him so long as they talked about him, a principle Trump lives by.
Both men became more famous and popular with every fresh gust of
notoriety.
Like
Trump, Barnum poured his cash into gaudy architectural excess and
built numerous monuments to himself, including a Moorish palace that
he named Iranistan, a blingtastic multi-storey monstrosity with
turrets.
Trump’s
detractors claim he has sold America a fraud, based on Barnum’s
apocryphal dictum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” But
his supporters also welcome the comparison, pointing out that Trump,
like Barnum, symbolises a part of the American Dream: the self-made,
hard-driving extrovert, deploying entrepreneurial and theatrical
gifts to appeal to the common man.
Like
the Apple founder Steve Jobs and music impresario Jay-Z, Barnum and
Trump melded hype, swagger and business acumen into myth, making them
almost unstoppable, infuriating to contemporaries and, to many
Europeans, incomprehensible.
Barnum’s
obituary in The
Times in
1891 described the showman as a “noteworthy and almost classical
figure, typical of the age of transparent puffing through which the
modern democracies are passing”.
Throughout
his life he sold everything and anything: as a teenager he was
hawking oysters, illustrated Bibles, ale and lottery tickets. Mostly
he sold fantasy, including tincture of bear fat as a cure for
baldness, and a plant that could turn black people white. One of his
earliest human exhibits was Joice Heth, a black woman who claimed to
have been George Washington’s nurse. This would have made her 161
years old. She was a sensation.
Then
came the rope-dancers, midgets, albinos, Siamese twins, Jumbo the
Elephant, and the famed Feejee Mermaid, which appeared to have a
human head on the finned body of a fish, a masterpiece of taxidermy,
fakery and false advertising. His American Museum offered hoaxes —
which he called humbugs — alongside bona fide marvels. He imported
the Swedish Nightingale, the singer Jenny Lind, who was greeted by
40,000 fans at New York docks and played to 93 packed houses with
rapturous reviews (Barnum had more than two dozen journalists on his
payroll).
He
took his menagerie on a world tour: Queen Victoria was amused when
2ft-tall “General Tom Thumb” play-fought with one of her poodles.
Barnum
wrote The
Art of Money Getting;
Trump brought out The
Art of the Deal. Both
men were brazen in their pursuit of profit and both books were
bestsellers. Barnum was a product and reflection of his age, just as
Trump reflects our own. In the words of the historian David
McCullough, “Barnum was loud, brassy, full of bombast, vulgar,
childish, surely just a little crooked — the ultimate, delightful
phoney from a delightfully phoney era”.
Barnum’s
audiences were less interested in reality than spectacle. They were,
as this newspaper’s obituary writer noted, “willingly deceived”.
The same is true of many Trump supporters. The show is what matters,
not its literal truth.
“No
one,” Barnum declared in his autobiography, “can say that he ever
paid for admission to one of my exhibitions more than his admission
was worth to him.” He was right: the lure of his shows lay not in
whether they genuinely lived up to his extravagant claims but in
their ability to draw audiences into a magical, half-real exhibition.
The
same is partly true of Trump. Many in his audiences do not care
whether his claims are strictly accurate or not, any more than
Barnum’s spectators were concerned whether the Feejee mermaid was a
hoax. They wanted to believe, and no amount of scoffing by the elite
was going to shake that conviction.
The
so-called Barnum effect has been coined to describe the psychological
phenomenon in which people tend to believe positive depictions of
their personality even when a description is so generalised it could
apply to anyone. The technique is common in astrological predictions
that are interpreted as “personal” by the reader when they are
actually deliberately vague: “You are coping with insecurity this
month . . .” and so on.
The
effect, also known as the Forer effect, is said to have derived from
Barnum’s observation, “We have something for everyone”, but it
should not be confused with mere gullibility: we all tend to extract
particular, individual relevance from the most sweeping and imprecise
information, particularly when this reinforces our self-image.
Part
of Trump’s success lies in the Barnum effect: millions of Americans
hear his broad slogans about putting America First and believe the
message is directly addressed to them. “It’s a Barnum and Bailey
world,” sang Ella Fitzgerald. It still is, and no one knows that
better than Donald Trump, the Greatest Showman in modern politics.
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