Has Italy come to its senses? The Italians I know always seemed to be mildly surprised at how Silvio Berlusconi got the job, and even more surprised at how he stayed there. Meanwhile, talking about politics (call it that), it seems that Juan Antonio Roca, the man at the heart of the Marbella mafia soap opera, had apparently amassed the fourth largest fortune in Spain through his property wheeling and dealing (his mentor Jesús Gil, the late former Marbella mayor and former president of Atlético de Madrid, is pictured above in all his Brad Pitt-like glory.) Roca seems to be a combination of cleverness and amorality who covered the possible paper trails as the cash stacked up: Spaniards seem already to be resigned to the notion that he'll get off lightly. He had stuffed animals, including a giraffe, in his house (and the ecologists are on his tail, too); he had an original Miró hanging in his bathroom. He declared a mere €150,000 a year to the taxman and was investigated a couple of years ago by a team that found nothing untoward. If a scriptwriter showed this story to a producer, they'd laugh him out of the office. But that's Marbella.

I spent a few minutes in a taxi today listening to the taxi driver berate Manuel Fraga as a dictator and a murderer. A couple of days ago, Fraga, the recently re-elected 82 year-old president of the Xunta in Galicia and a former Minister of Information under Franco, is well-known for his volatile temper, which exploded a couple of days ago as an image advisor was making a comment about his jacket (click on "se estaba grabando" to see him in action). "¡Tóqueme usted las narices!" ("You're really annoying me"), the elderly gent exclaims in a video clip which was distributed over the Internet. Now it's being reported that the employee, an Antena 3 journalist, who released the clip has been fired for "boycotting" the computer system. Meanwhile, the Internet is also being used to disseminate information about the greed of a London lawyer whose secretary accidentally spilt tomato ketchup on his trousers and who duly received a four pound dry-cleaning bill from him. I wonder whether she'll be sacked after sending emails about it to her friends, via whom the story got onto the Net. I doubt it: it would be too obviously vindictive, too obviously an abuse of power. The taxi driver was also of the opinion that it'll be a long time yet before democracy is fully implanted in Spain.

is apparently what has been decided at a big-name forum that's just taken place in NY, convened to compare the experiences of Madrid after the March 11 attacks with those of New York after Sept. 11 and featuring (on the Spanish side) lawyer Baltasar Garzón, a kind of Hispanic Elliot Ness, and philosopher Josep Ramoneda. A bit too much expensive blathering that you suspect won't come to much, but at least Paul Berman apparently made a few feisty, provocative comments, and it's good to see that Spain and the US are on speaking terms again after the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq.
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"The Government may feel relieved: the worst, turnout below 40%, did not happen. However, results are close enough to that threshold to make the most pro-Europeans worry. Inside Spain, the Government is questioned because it did not efficiently manage a communication strategy to get more than half of the voters to the polls; abroad, the Government does not have much more capital than it would have been afforded by a parliamentary ratification; from the collective standpoint, the people have confirmed the existence of a gap between them and the political class in regard to Europe."

Post-referendum reflections, part of a longer piece from the bi-lingual Real Instituto Elcano. For language and culture issues, this is the most useful part of the site.
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On Feb 11, ANECA, the organization responsible for implementing the reforms to the Spanish university system, passed a resolution to divide language and literature teaching at Spanish universities into the following categories:

1. Lenguas y culturas del Estado español
a. Lengua española y sus literaturas
b. Lengua y literatura catalanas
c. Lengua y literatura gallegas
d. Lengua y literatura vascas
e. Lengua y literatura asturianas
2. Lenguas y culturas modernas
3. Lenguas y culturas orientales
4. Lenguas y culturas clásicas
5. Lingüística teórica y aplicada
6. Estudios literarios

"Lengua y literatura en inglés" is nowhere to be seen, which is perhaps strange given the way the world is today (whether you agree with it or not). It has been subsumed, I suppose, under "Lenguas y culturas modernas". Now I'm all for pluralism. But isn't it strange to have a degree called "Asturian Language and Literature" and not one called, for example, "Language and Literature in English"? The English department where I teach at Madrid's Complutense University has prepared a manifesto which sets out our views on the matter, starting with the fact that almost half of the people studying in the Philology department at the Complutense are studying English - considerably more than are studying even Spanish philology. They would like to have a degree called "Language and Literature in English", but if this goes through, that won't be an option for them. If you are interested in seeing and perhaps signing the manifesto, then send a comment to PdS Blog with your e-mail address in the following form - "jack at hotmail dot com" - and I'll send you the manifesto (in Spanish).

And while we're on philology, and to show that I'm a pluralist, here's someone who thinks that Francis Bacon wrote Don Quixote.
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That's it, then. Never have so few voted for something so little understood. Now let's see whether the rest of Europe follows. Apparently the King forgot to show his ID card before voting. I wonder if this will make any changes to the world of such mindless bureaucracy we've made?
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The Madrid attacks of March 11 2004 are commemorated in a potent documentary film called Todos íbamos en este tren (We Were All on That Train), which consists of 24 short pieces offering different perspectives on the tragedy. It is showing in only one cinema in the capital, and that cinema is in the barrio of Vallecas, far from the city centre, but close to where one of the trains was blown up. I saw the film at six o'clock tonight - and I was the only person in there. In theory it's good and necessary to remember tragedies - but the thought struck me, as I sat there alone, that perhaps nobody, least of all those close to the victims, actually wants to. See it if you can.

Tonight I saw a film called The Bridge of San Luis Rey, based on Thornton Wilder's novel. It stars Robert de Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathy Bates and several other big names, but it doesn't so far have a U.S. distributor, and one reason for that might be that it tries to grapple with some complex truths. It doesn't do what it should with such fine source material, and it has the air of a magnificent folly about it, but neither is it terrible, and and at least it tries to say something, and chimes oddly with the times. It's about how we respond to disaster; it tries to find what it means when five innocent, loveless people plunge to their deaths from a broken bridge.

Yesterday I heard the rational Richard Dawkins and the spiritual Bishop of Lincoln slugging it out on the radio about whether the tsunami means there's no God. Very interesting it was, too. (The answer is that there is - but on the other hand, there isn't.) Surely, however, this is not the time or place for such debate - God or no God. What's the bishop doing on the radio at such a time? Surely it can't hurt to have your faith shaken occasionally.

Here's Hermann Tertsch, writing on our unreasonable responses to tragedy in a piece titled “Cesspits” from El País (translated by El País English Edition):

“It is not very daring to predict that the year now beginning is going to be marked by the terrible death-rattle of the year that has just ended. An implausible, unbelievable catastrophe has just shown our vulnerability as a species. It has been made quite clear to us that the ship in which we cross the sea of our existence, amid tears or laughter, may sometimes seem to be a patched-up fishing boat from Sri Lanka, or sometimes the first-class staterooms of the Titanic, but a shipwreck is always a possible ending to the cruise. We in the developed world live with our backs turned to the fact of death, so that when it bursts massively into our lives it produces not only horror but an abysmal imbalance, which has to be compensated with garrulous explanations, so as not to cause too much alteration to our ongoing lives. When faced with immense or entirely inconceivable tragedies such as this one, a legion of simple spirits bustles about busily trafficking in causes and culprits. Apart from the usual religious and millenarian messages, we have heard some “explanations” that cast the blame (why not) on the United States — for making secret experiments in the atmosphere and under the earth’s surface, for failing to inform the regions in the path of the wave, and for sabotaging the UN aid effort. The Yankees, the bourgeoisie and the military appear once again in league to sow death and misery among the disinherited. Bullshit in the cesspit. This chatter, however, is fairly innocent compared to the remarks of some tourists, which reveal the degree of degradation that has set in amid the rich societies of the world, who live with their backs turned on death and on human limitation. “I’ve lost everything: passport, money, all my clothes,” said one German, surrounded by corpses, both indigenous and Teutonic. “I don’t understand the tour operator’s total lack of foresight,” whined a Swede. “Nobody is looking after us,” protested a father, in spite of his huge luck in recovering his wife and children. “I’m going to complain to the Ministry. They can’t treat us like this,” barked other tourists. Shame in the cesspit. It is true that, against these deplorable examples, there is the immense tidal wave of solidarity that is beating all records, the mobilization of states large and small, alongside millions of individual contributions and gestures. The solidarity is sincere, though short-term. It is now the living who demand consolation and help. To palliate the pain and to generate hope are the main objectives. We have to make it possible for life to go on there, if the tsunami is not to be followed by a cultural and political tidal wave that could turn southeast Asia into a cesspit. Amid the effects of a catastrophe of biblical proportions, it seems almost obscene to speak of our immediate worries here in Spain...”

Unfortunately, Tertsch almost obscenely goes on to do so, but surely he's spoken well so far. Peter Singer would say that not helping - not only now, but always - is the ethical equivalent of walking straight past a drowning child in a pond. More of that kind of thinking, please, and less complaints to the Ministry. (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, incidentally, cost $24m, and it's a strange world.)
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If you're a British resident in Spain, and were wondering about whether or not you can vote in February, well - you can't.
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No.
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This photograph of Hell, taken earlier on this evening in Madrid, is pretty typical of what happens when thousands of people all leave the city at around the same time, as they do whenever there's a public holiday (which there is this weekend). So when ETA decides to set off five bombs at petrol stations on the main highways leading out of Madrid, as they did at around 6pm this evening (two policemen slightly wounded, little material damage) to provoke chaos, they're actually only provoking further chaos. Joining in the fun, as it were. There's been no ETA activity in Madrid since 2002, unless we believe the theory that they were in on the Atocha atrocity, which has been revived in certain quarters of late: presumably they've been feeling ignored. Here they are centre-stage again, for a few days at least, and let's hope this isn't the start of their Christmas 2004 campaign.

Anyway, the point of all this is that it confirms my own personal conspiracy theory that there must be ETA infiltrators working in the Madrid City Council. Otherwise, how do you explain the fun-spoiling traffic jams in and around the capital, 365 days a year?
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This from John Naughton's excellent site. Whatever your inclinations, you have to admit it's clever.
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If you go to this National Public Radio page and click through, then you'll hear a neat little on-air plug for this extremely trendy PdS-produced item - a set of U.S. election English/Spanish audio flashcards. Rarely can have a blog have been hijacked for such brazenly commercial purposes: PdS Blog promises to get back to being pure, moralistic and thoroughly un-hijackable very soon.
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