Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Thoughts from Galicia, Spain: 21.4.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 
                  Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain
  • It had to happen . . . Water that tastes of wine. Made right here in Galicia.
  • Before the horse bolts . . . Santiago cathedral is going to install fire alarms.
  • One way to tackle the urban pigeon nuisance. I believe it's been tried in Pontevedra, apparently without much success. Perhaps it's early days.
  • More on those Iberians/Galicians who settled the UK and Ireland.
  • Spender on Spain, as of March 1975: Whereas Italy and France impress me with a history which recedes into the past, history in Spain seems a past which forces itself on the present. Art and even landscape are still locked in past conflict. How, in Southern Spain, can the relationship of the European and the Arabic seem so fertile and productive – in this the country of fanatical Catholic orthodoxy, of the Inquisition, and of the savage conflict between Spanish and French, depicted in Goya's disasters of war? The landscape, the literature, art, and architecture all seem to ask these questions.
  • Oh, dear. Those terrible Dutchies.
The UK
  • Despite hiccups in the short-term targets, Britain has still managed to cut emissions by a greater amount than any other G7 country. That’s something that should be recognised and even celebrated, surely. Eco-activists are perhaps unaware that the government was grappling with climate change many, many years before they were born. And yet they behave as though they alone have been suddenly privy to the threat it poses, and now they must alert the wider world. 
  • Britain’s emissions over the last century are the equivalent of  less than a single year’s emissions from modern day China, our own efforts, impressive as they might be, are placed in shocking perspective.
The USA
  • What makes Fart unfit for office is not so much that he’s petty, malicious and bullying. God knows, those aren’t uncommon traits amongst powerful politicians. What’s unusual about him is how inept are his efforts to conceal facts and control people.
  • Fart may well be unfit to be president but would Democrats be wise to try to impeach him? See the first article below.
The Way of the World/Social Media/Nutters Corner
  • See the shocking article by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, below. You don't have to be a theist to agree with him.
Spanish
  • Word of the day: Vodevil (Pronounced bodebil). Vaudeville(US); Music hall(Brit)
Finally . . . 
  • In a crossword puzzle I did yesterday, the final answer (which I didn't get) was hoosegow. I wonder how many people know this is a prison.
ARTICLES

Democrats divided over impeachment of President Trump:  David Charter, Washington

Hillary Clinton’s closest aides led calls to impeach President Trump over the contents of the Mueller report yesterday, but they came in the face of resistance from Democratic party leaders who fear that it would rally voters to support his re-election.

The Clinton team was joined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young congresswoman who is the face of grassroots left-wing Democrats, and Elizabeth Warren, a progressive candidate for the presidential nomination, as two wings of the party united in urging a political prosecution of Mr Trump in Congress.

Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker and most senior Democrat, will host a conference call of senior party figures on Monday in which she is expected to try to shelve the impeachment issue.

Mr Trump, who is on holiday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, resumed his attack on the “crazy Mueller report” by targeting officials for producing “fabricated & totally untrue” notes of meetings for the investigation.

Far from unseating the president, as many Democrats had hoped, the report has deepened splits in the party after it handed to Congress the decision on whether to prosecute Mr Trump over 11 instances of trying to obstruct justice.

The row threatens to spill over into the Democrats’ 2020 primary contest despite most of the 19 candidates trying to focus on policy, convinced that voters are much more interested in “kitchen table” issues such as healthcare than impeachment.

“Mueller got us this far. Now it’s Congress’s turn to weigh the evidence . . . decide what merits a response and act in the best interests of our democracy,” John Podesta, 70, Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman, wrote in a push for impeachment. Brian Fallon, 36, a former press secretary for Mrs Clinton, tweeted: “If all this same info were coming out for first time, it would be an earthquake. Impeachment hearings would be a no-brainer.”

Mrs Clinton, 71, has not called publicly for Mr Trump to be impeached. She sidestepped the question when asked last year on CNN. “That will be left to others to decide,” she said. “I want to stop the degrading of the rule of law.”

Impeachment talk has usually been avoided by Ms Ocasio-Cortez, 29, who prefers to focus on her policy agenda, especially her plans to tackle climate change. She tweeted: “Many know I take no pleasure in discussions of impeachment. We all prefer working on our priorities: pushing Medicare for All, tackling student loans, & a Green New Deal. But the report squarely puts this [impeachment] on our doorstep.”

The Democratic leadership is trying to urge rank-and-file members to be patient and allow House committees controlled by the party following its success in November’s mid-term elections to continue examining Mr Trump and his closest aides.

Jerrold Nadler, 71, chairman of the House judiciary committee, issued a subpoena yesterday for the full, unredacted Mueller report, including background testimony, an act the justice department later said was “premature and unnecessary”. Mr Nadler has demanded that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, appear before his committee and also wants to interview Don McGahn, the former White House counsel who refused to follow the president’s orders to have Mr Mueller fired.

Ms Pelosi, 79, has previously insisted that no impeachment effort is worthwhile without bipartisan support.

There was little of that in evidence yesterday, with the Easter break allowing Republican senators and representatives to avoid reporters’ questions. One Republican calling for impeachment was George Conway, 55, husband of Mr Trump’s close aide Kellyanne Conway. He has become an outspoken critic of the president. “There is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J Trump,” he wrote in The Washington Post. “Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay.” His was a lone Republican voice, however.

On Twitter yesterday Mr Trump called some of the statements in the Mueller report “total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad)”. He also wrote: “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes’, when the notes never existed until needed.”

One of the notes he may have had in mind was provided by the former chief of staff of Jeff Sessions, then attorney-general, on how the president was reported to have said “I’m f***ed” when the Mueller inquiry was announced.

The report also records his reaction to the fact that Mr McGahn took notes. “The president then asked, ‘Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes’,” the report stated. “McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a ‘real lawyer’ and explained that notes create a record.”

Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said the Trump administration was not concerned about attempts by Democrats to look further into whether the president committed a crime of obstruction. “We already know how the book ends: no collusion,” Mr Gidley told Fox News.

2.  After my own dark night, the importance of love, renewal and redemption have never been clearer:  Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton was dismissed as the chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission on April 10

Fully to understand the Easter story it helps to be hounded by the mob, to know that nothing that you say or do can deflect the hostility, and that in any case the distinctions between true and false, just and unjust, good and evil have all been suspended. Some can undergo this experience in a spirit of charity, and one in particular rose above his suffering to forgive those who inflicted it.

The Easter story tells us of the redemption that comes into the world, when such torment is willingly undergone for others’ sake. But it also tells us of the time of utter darkness, the time of nothingness, when the light of creation has gone out. St John of the Cross called this the dark night of the soul. The world lay in such a darkness on the first Easter Saturday; and at the end of this most terrible week a similar darkness fell on me.

Reading the outrageous articles in the New Statesman, the Times, the Sun and elsewhere, in which things that I have never said and attitudes that I have never entertained are unscrupulously pinned on me, seeing all my work as a writer and philosopher scribbled over with ignorant and groundless accusations, I have had to take stock of my life, and for a moment it seemed that it amounted to nothing. It was as though I had been ceremonially stripped of all my assets, and shut away in a box.

This has happened before, but never with such an orchestrated clamour for my destruction. Dismissed without explanation from my government position, it seemed that I was even unwanted by the Conservative Party, to which I have offered a lifetime of intellectual support.

Philosophy is the pursuit of truth, and this has been, for me, a source of consolation in a difficult life. But in the real emergencies, truth is not enough: we stand in need of examples, and of the stories that make suffering bearable, by showing that without it there is no redemption. Hence, in times of darkness, we turn to religion, in which another kind of truth is given to us. Experiences like the one that I have just undergone, however ordinary and human, have a part in the Easter story, and it is the genius of the Christian faith to make such easy room for them.

The root sentiment of Christianity is not triumph but defeat. It takes what is worst in human nature – the hounding of outsiders, the delight in cruelty, the betrayal of friends and the hatred of strangers – and winds these things into the story of Christ’s passion. You too, it tells us, are members of this hate-filled mob. But you too can turn your hate to pity and your pity to love. That is what redemption means.

That, to my mind, is the way to understand Easter Saturday. The world lies fragmented at the foot of the cross, as though un-created. We are shown the opposite of creation, a place of desolation where the light does not shine.

According to the old Christian story Christ spent this day in the underworld, harrowing Hell. But we can understand the Easter message without that particular metaphor. In all of us there is a creative and outgoing principle – a principle of love, through which we renew our attachments and make a gift of our lives. When we cease to love we are as though hollowed out, deprived of the force that sustains us in being. We become a void, a negation, a thing that should not be. And into the void flows the mob, eager for victims and ardent to destroy.

That psychic mechanism is present in all of us. In the world of today, however, its effect is amplified. Twitter has made morons of us all, sweeping us along in a storm of rumour and spite. But Christians, contemplating the crucifixion, can still switch sides from the triumphant mob to the defeated victim. Through the bleakness of Easter Saturday they can experience the true meaning of the Cross, as the dark negative ushers in the Resurrection, and the light once again shines.

Indeed, the habit of focusing on the defeated victim, rather than the triumphant mob, is Christianity’s strength. In the face of destruction the Christian opts for renewal. As Notre Dame burned, the crowd of agnostics in the street below recovered for a moment their Christian faith, looking up to the Angel of the Resurrection, who stands as though shivering above the roof far above. As the angel promises, Notre Dame will be reborn. Despite all that has happened to weaken Christianity in France, the Christian spirit remains, embodied in this cathedral dedicated to the protector of Paris, where she is prayed to by few but loved by many.

The Easter Saturday encounter with nothingness is a demonstration that the world must be constantly re-created. For many would-be Christians, however, the Resurrection is a sticking point. Christ’s death makes sense only on the assumption that he survived it, else he is simply one more in the endless stream of victims. Yet how can we believe in such an event, which so completely defies the laws of nature and for which we have only the sketchy evidence summarised in the Gospels, in the Acts of the Apostles and in the letters of St Paul? Leaving aside all learned theology, but taking inspiration from the poets, painters and composers who have treated this subject, I would say that Christ’s resurrection, like his death, is an event in eternity.

It occurs in me and in you, just so long as we put our trust in the possibility of renewal. It is a re-affirmation of the creative principle, and of the love that brought about Christ’s death. The darkness that came over the world on that first Easter Saturday could be dispelled only by a renewal of this love, and this renewal comes through us. The Cross is a display of supreme forgiveness, which invites us to forgive in our turn.

Seeing the Christian mystery in that way we open a path to reconciliation with the other Abrahamic faiths. Christ’s death is not a once-off event in ordinary time but, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words, “the point of intersection of the timeless with time”. The wonderful concretion of the Gospels, which give us the shape and feel of Christ’s earthly life, show love shining from a source beyond those vivid moments. To translate that idea into theological terms is not necessary. It is enough to see that there is a love that overcomes all suffering, all resentment, all negativity, and that this love is the source of our own renewal.

Which returns me to my ordeal. No sooner had the smears been published than I was inundated with messages of friendship and support. The life that I assumed to be over was now being renewed. I had undergone a death and a resurrection, and the gift of Easter had been laid on me even before I had asked for it.

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