Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly
loveable.
-
Christopher
Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain.
Cataluña
- El País takes issue here with the 'false' promises and excuses of the separatists. In English.
- Predictably, President Rajoy insists the Spanish and Catalan economies will be be boosted by him emerging totally victorious
- Meanwhile Sr P will stay in Belgium until after the regional elections later this month, fighting extradition.
Spain
- According to a survey in Prospect magazine, the number of books published in the UK per capita exceeds that for Spain - 2,875 per million people v. 1,626. But for books read the positions are reversed - 5.49 hours spent reading per week v. 5.18. I have to admit that - generalising from the very particular - this rather surprises me. I'm the only person I ever see reading in Pontevedra. But maybe everyone else in Spain only does this at home.
- Another article from Prospect - on Bilbao's success in regenerating itself and setting an example for other major cities around the world. Or some of them, at least. The others have white elephants.
The USA
- Is President Fart mad or bad? Or just as crass as the age he lives in? See the article below for one answer to this question.
- His 2018 visit to the UK is not as postponed as reported it seems. He's still slated to make a brief appearance to coincide with the opening of a new US embassy in February next year.
Galicia
- A few more of those endless comparisons I mentioned the other day:-
- There are now twice as many people over 50 in the social security system here than those under 30. So, big trouble brewing.
- Galicia is 2nd or 3rd from the bottom of lists which rank the regions by the quantity of 'professional training' available.
- Galicians are the most unsatisfied folk in Spain, despite being above the national average when it comes to good health.
- The region's GDP is now 1.2% up on that of pre-Crisis 2008. But there are 190,000 fewer people employed.
Pontevedra
- It's reported that people on hoverboards and electric scooters are breaking the law. Especially when forcing pedestrians off the pavement. But the police are merely giving them warnings and not fining them. Hmm. Why this preferential treatment? Possibly the police do fine them if they're wearing auriculares so they can listen to music while terrorising pedestrians.
Finally
- In my RSS feed, I regularly see messages which run along the lines:- Hi. I'm going be spending x days in Spain/Galicia/Andalucia. Any recommendations? Given the amount of information on the net, this is always something of a surprise. Even more surprising is that people frequently send helpful replies. But, then, I'm occasionally one of these . . .
Today's Cartoon
THE ARTICLE
Theresa’s trouble
with the rudeness of King Donald: Niall Ferguson
Trump’s crassness
fuels general incivility and masks his economic success
In Alan Bennett’s
play The Madness of George III, a political crisis strikes Great
Britain when the monarch loses his marbles. You may recall Nigel
Hawthorne’s riveting performance in the role of King George in the
film version, at first indefatigable, if irascible, in performing his
royal duties, then suddenly struck down by wild, raving lunacy.
“I talk and talk and
talk,” he tells the queen forlornly in a moment of lucidity. “I
hear the words so I have to speak them.” And the more the king
raves, the more plausible the case becomes that his place should be
taken, if only as Prince Regent, by his paunchy eldest son.
Historians continue to
debate whether George III’s madness was the result of porphyria or
some other affliction. Bennett suggests — doubtless
fancifully, but it makes for good drama — that the root cause was
shock at the rebellion of the American colonies (“a paradise . . .
lost”).
Well, what goes around
comes around. For these days it is in America that the question is
asked with increasing frequency: is the head of state off his head?
In a new book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, 27 psychiatrists
and other mental health experts — including Judith Lewis Herman of
Harvard Medical School and Bandy Lee of the Yale School of Medicine —
warn that “anyone as mentally unstable as Mr Trump simply should
not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency”.
Forget about special
counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry and the prospect of Trump’s
impeachment should the Democrats win the House of Representatives in
next November’s mid-term elections. These days liberal America is
poring over article 25 of the constitution, which states that if the
vice-president and a majority of the cabinet inform Congress in
writing that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and
duties of his office”, then Mike Pence takes over. And if Trump
insists he is fine, just fine, he can be overridden by a two-thirds
majority of both houses.
The madness of King
Donald is not news in Washington. But until last week the story in
Britain was Trump’s badness, not his madness. Then, on Tuesday and
Wednesday, the president retweeted three posts from the deputy leader
of the fascist splinter group Britain First, each featuring a video
purporting to depict Islamic violence.
When Theresa May
expressed her disapproval, Trump shot back: “Don’t focus on me,
focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking
place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine!” (Fine,
just fine.)
Unfortunately, Trump
addressed this response to @theresamay instead of @theresa_may. With
one tweet he thereby directed the attention of his 44m Twitter
followers — and hence the entirety of the world’s news media —
at the hapless Theresa May Scrivener, 41, of Bognor Regis, West
Sussex, along with her husband, children and six Twitter followers.
(Some readers may believe that the last words of George III were
allegedly “Bugger Bognor”, but that was George V.)
Not having read The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the British political class reacted
in the old-fashioned way. In the Commons, opposition MPs lined up to
denounce President Trump as a “fascist”, “stupid” and
“racist, incompetent or unthinking”. The British ambassador in
Washington, Sir Kim Darroch, made representations to the White House.
Plans for Trump to visit London in January were shelved.
Do keep up. The
president is mad, not bad. Or, if he’s bad, it’s because he’s
mad. Just the other day he was telling people that the infamous
Access Hollywood tape is fake. Last weekend he was fantasising that
he had turned down Time magazine’s proposal to make him — for the
second year running — Person of the Year. It’s only a matter of
time before, like Hawthorne’s King George, Trump is seen running
around the Rose Garden in his nightgown trying to rescue Melania from
an imaginary flood.
The counterargument to
all this comes from my good friend Bret Stephens. Far from being mad,
he argues, Trump is cunningly exploiting the power of social media to
drive his political opponents into their own form of madness, to
mobilise his loyal supporters in Middle America — who love all this
— and to distract everyone else’s attention from all that is
going wrong on his watch.
I have a slightly
different view. Like Bret, I don’t think Trump is nuts — not as
nuts as King George, at any rate. He’s just crass and always has
been. Unlike Bret, however, I don’t think Trump is failing. He has
just secured a major legislative breakthrough, a package of corporate
and personal tax cuts that are as popular on Wall Street as they are
hated by Democratic economists.
Yes, I know. Fewer than
40% of Americans approve of the president. The Democrats are ahead in
the polls with a reasonable shot at electoral success next year. But
the US economy is growing at about 3.5%. The stock market is at
record highs — up nearly a quarter since Trump’s election. And,
although I have my doubts about adding to the deficit, respectable
economists insist the Republican tax bill will benefit not just the
rich but also working and middle-class families by boosting
investment and growth — and that the Trump administration’s push
to reduce burdensome regulation will have even more positive effects.
As for foreign policy,
the moment of truth in the North Korean missile crisis draws ever
nearer after Kim Jong-un’s long-range missile test last week. China
must act or America will. In the Middle East, meanwhile, Isis has
been defeated and, as part of an astounding revolution from above,
the Saudi crown prince has turned on the jihadists.
The problem is that, in
his incorrigible crassness, Trump consistently drowns out the signal
of meaningful policy achievement with deafening yet inconsequential
noise.
In this, unfortunately,
he is not abnormal in the least. On the contrary, he is the
incarnation of the spirit of our age. His tweets — hasty, crude and
error-strewn — are just one symptom of a more general decline in
civility that social media have encouraged. Fact: according to a
recently published paper by researchers at New York University, a
tweet is 20% more likely to be retweeted for every moral-emotional
word (such as “hate”) that it uses. On Twitter and Facebook
extreme views are second only to fake news.
One of many problems
with the decline of civility is that uncivil discourse is so
difficult for the remaining civil people to take seriously. As a
result, serious issues — such as Islamic extremism or the North
Korean threat — become trivialised and civil people assume,
wrongly, that it is Trump we should really worry about.
Mahatma Gandhi is said
to have been asked once what he thought of western civilisation. He
replied, wittily, that it would be good idea. In these days of
western un-civilisation, I find myself in agreement. The problem is
not the madness of King Donald, nor even his badness. By George, it’s
his infernal rudeness.
No comments:
Post a Comment