Label Collection: Anathemayonnaise

Much as we did not think it possible in this here world (perhaps in the next one, provided one gets sent to the place down below…), it turned out that there did exist a Mayonnaise still worse than Heinrich Hamker (see F13.) and Uncle William (E12.), for both of which I warned you a few weeks ago. It was this liquid concoction from a supermarket in a Spanish village north of here by the name of Brion.

E82. Froiz. Brion, August 2009. € 0,85 for 450 ml.

Let me tell you the story of how I can by it. In the summer of 2009 I happened to be participating in the town’s yearly plastic art-festival (yes, dear reader: I paint… and I dare say with considerable success: my expressionist ready-mades are still the talk of the town during every reunion of the 1959 Venice biennale!) One afternoon the hotel kitchen was closed. I felt a little peckish. So I took a walk to the next intersection where they assured me I would find a bakery for bread and a supermarket for Mayo. I found them both. I bought a wonderful, steaming baguette. In keeping with my habit, I bought the supermarket’s own house brand Mayo for the label collection… And I paid the price for my dedication! It was awful. It was disgusting. It made you gag, and retch, and consider suicide, and plan re-education camps in the deepest frozen depths of Siberia for sauce manufacturers and their entire families. In short, dear reader: it was Anathemayonnaise! I could not consume even a single spoonful of this stuff!

You will not be surprised to hear that I found another use for it. After all, I am an inventive man and I learned the tricks of the trade from good old Pablo P., who used to say that one should never let a good catastrophe go to waste (which is why he painted the Guernica). So I mixed onto a single canvas ink, sand, and this Mayo, let it dry, covered it all in superglue, let it dry again, sprinkled it with oxen blood, let it dry, and then daubed it in petrol, set fire to it, extinguished it quickly, froze the painting, and defroze it in a blazing oven, and then planted mustard seeds in the available fissures of the surface.

Three days of watering it and it turned into a masterpiece (see the illustration for a detail), which I then offered to the supermarket in question as a homage to their brand name. Unfortunately they refused buy it. Which shows you that even they didn’t like their own mayo. Need I say more? Avoid this brand, dear reader, at all cost!

¡Que se jodan!

Ah… Here is a most amusing, nay: hilarious little scandal, dear reader, which may help you to understand how Spanish society works, or – alternatively – to despair of ever understanding what goes on in this weird place!

Last Wednesday, as I already told you, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy appeared in the Spanish parliament to announce sweeping budget cuts. One of those was the drastic reduction of unemployment benefits. As he spoke the relevant words, the socialist MPs from the opposition benches burst out in cries of indignation (socialist MPs are heroic defenders of the poor and the working classes as long as they are out of office…) At that point, from the other side of the house, a lady MP listening to the name Andrea Fabra of the reigning PP party exclaimed, for all to hear AND full on camera:

‘¡Que se jodan!’

I blush. I hesitate to translate. And I summon all readers of a sensitive disposition to stop reading immediately here and now, to please leave this page, and to tune back in to Metis Meets Mittington the day after tomorrow for a marvellous Mayonnaise posting. If you read on, your indignation, shock and nausea are your own responsibility! Not mine!

The best way to translate ‘¡Que se jodan!’ is by a plain, straightforward, unabashed: ‘Fuck them!’

Now, the interpretation of this sharply formulated, sophisticated, and utterly educated parliamentarian interjection leaves something to be desired. To wit: Fuck WHOM?

The Socialist opposition, lefties in the street and the furious militants on Facebook, were quick to jump to the conclusion that Ms Fabra meant the Spanish unemployed. In the sense of: ‘Them lazy bastards who refuse to work and want to lie around all day drinking and smoking at the cost of the tax-payer can go fuck themselves – not out of my back pocket!’ Their indignation was correspondingly massive. Placards calling for her dismissal were immediately seen in the streets of Madrid (already in turmoil over the budget cuts), and a civic initiative was started on the social media to collect 500,000 signatures summoning her to step down, which reached – I believe – some 375,000 within the next 24 hours.

All to no avail and totally unjustified, of course. You see, Ms Fabra did not mean the Spanish unemployed. She merely meant the Socialist MPs in the opposite benches of the house. In the sense of: ‘We of the PP are only forced, much against our will, to solve the problems which those assholes over there caused in the seven idiotic Zapatero years, so they can stick their protests you-know-where and go fuck themselves!’

Now, as the above Facebook illustration shows, there are some minor grammatical minefields around this interpretation. The usual way to tell off a bundle of unappreciated folk you are looking at is ‘¡Que os jodan!’ – literally: ‘May they fuck you!’, without specifying precisely who will be performing the punitive carnal activity. ‘¡Que se jodan!’, in the third person plural, usually refers to a third party of unappreciated people who are not present in the room. As I understand it, it is just possible to use ‘¡Que se jodan!’ for a collective of unappreciated people who are present, but this then supposes that the speaker is employing the Polite Form to address her interlocutors, fully written out: ‘!Que se jodan Ustedes!’ (although ‘¡Jodanse Ustedes!’ would actually be more idiomatic), which would translate somewhat in the vein of ‘May Your Right Honourable Graces kindly go fuck your worthy selves!’

This then, Ms Fabra claimed she had been using.

And strangely, there are people who do not believe this.

Yes, dear reader, unbelievably, there are people who still insist that she ought to step down for insulting the Spanish unemployed, even after she explained what she really meant by an – admittedly somewhat impulsive – interjection. When the mayhem did not stop despite her apology, a scandalized Ms Fabra protested such lack of faith with the following words:

‘[Es] indignante [que el PSOE] haya aprovechado un drama social que afecta a 5 milliones y medio de parados, por los que siento absolute respeto, para orchestrar una campaña falsa y de difamacion contra mi persona’.

I translate:

‘'[It is] outrageous [that the Socialist party] has been abusing a social tragedy that affects five and a half million unemployed, for whom I feel the deepest respect, so as to orchestrate a false campaign of defamation against me.'

Indeed. Spanish business as usual. Simply one more instance of nobody really caring one iota about the issue at hand, and simply blowing up a minor gaffe to a mammoth scandal by way of suggestion and falsehood, so as to damage a political opponent.

For a full appreciation, you may wish to know something more about Ms Fabra. Although it does not do to visit the sins of the parents upon the children, it so happens that Ms Andrea Fabra is the daughter of Mr Carlos Fabra, the PP party’s political boss in the fief of Castellon (on the Spanish east coast), and probably – how shall I say this? – one of the more controversial politician alive in Spain today. Mr Fabra is a character (even he will surely admit so much!) It is he who built that world-famous airport, to the tune of some 150 million €uros, which has no license and where no airplanes land or take off, one of the most outstanding examples of needless Spanish prestige projects at taxpayers’ cost. It is he who then ordered to be built a 24 metre high monument to himself and his governance, at the site of that airport, for another 300,000 €uros.

Mr Fabra, who always sports dark sunglasses, which I fear lend him an eerie Godfather appearance, has been investigated several times for all sorts of corruption, fraud, bribery, shady dealings and embezzlement; but I hasten to add that none of these investigations ever came to anything. They were invariably dropped or shelved by the investigating magistrates (for one thing, because Mr Fabra could perfectly justify where his wealth came from: he explained that he had won top prizes in the Christmas lottery at no fewer than three or four occasions.) The latest of these judges, who is at present engaged in yet another fruitless investigation, recently cried out for help from the country’s top judicial authorities, because he was receiving all sorts of pressures to drop the present case as well… This judge, I have no doubt about it, is only one more fellow-travelling pinko who is ‘abusing a social tragedy so as to orchestrate a false campaign of defamation against' a political enemy. And is it any wonder, I ask? There is nothing more frustrating to them socialists, than that they fail to bring down the members of so prominent a clan of Popular Party big shots, pillars of conservative Spain, solid hopes for the democratic future of the land…!

And Mr Rajoy? What is he doing about all this?

The answer is: nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just as he has never asked Mr Fabra or any other tainted party member to step down, he has not asked Ms Fabra to renounce her parliamentary seat. You see, in Spain, giving a moral answer to a political scandal means that you publicly recognize that One Of Your Own may have been wrong, and that would be a sign of weakness. It is much better to ignore whatever transgression was committed, dismiss it as a cynical political conspiracy of The Other Party, and close ranks.

I understand the urge. I understand the principle. But what I do not understand, dear reader, is how this country is still afloat today with people caring so very nothing about truth and honesty…

Elected Lackeys Right and Left

Day before yesterday, Mariano Rajoy, prime minister of Spain, appeared in parliament to announce he would do everything he had solemnly sworn would never take place on his watch. Claiming that there was no other choice and no other way, he listed the greatest government spending reduction that Spain has ever seen, budget cuts and tax increases to the tune of 65 billion €uros over 18 months.

The list reads like the ludicrous exaggeration in a comic novel. VAT will be increased from 18 to 21 % in the top rate, and from 8 to 10 % in the ‘low’ rate. Unemployment benefits – never exactly lavish in Spain – will be drastically reduced after 6 months. The salaries of civil servants, who work little for scant money, will be cut, starting with their Christmas bonuses (i.e. a fourteenth part of their income or 7 %). Interest on mortgages will no longer be tax deductible (which really ought to help the prostrate real estate market get back on its feet…) Sin tax on tobacco and alcohol – surprise, surprise - will go up some 10 to 20 %, ‘in the interest of health’ (of course, that’s what it is all about…) And, more poignant still: the very lean compensation given to housewives who – after the children have left home – get to take care, day in day out 24/7 and 365 days a year, of invalid elderly relatives (one of the VERY few laudable measures of lame-brained Mr Zapatero) will be severely limited and reduced. They had become, Mr Rajoy said, ‘too general’; which is small surprise, since Spain has no old-age homes, except for the filthy rich…

An untranslatable cartoon starring the minister of economics

What strikes ye, reader, in all these measures of ‘reform’? Yes, indeed: they all fall on the poor and the middle classes. Those who had nothing to do with causing the crisis, but are now supposed to pay for the damage, so that the rich and the unscrupulous, the developers and the bankers who did cause the mess, may receive their 100 billion European slush fund and the fiscal amnesty over their tax-evading fortunes. For this is the linguistic irony of this whole disreputable Euro-adventure: the word Reform – like the word Drugs - has now acquired two distinct, even contradictory, meanings, depending entirely on the context and who is getting Reformed. Reform of the fiscal- and banking system means that billions of Euros are tossed into the plutocrats’ bottomless pockets; while Reform of the working classes means they get robbed. The Robin Hoodlums who pretend to be our leaders steal from the poor to give to the rich. It is sufficiently nauseating to become a communist again, in spite of our better judgement and the lessons of the past.

Robin Hood Reversed

Let me be clear about something: as Spanish politicians go, I kind of like Mr Rajoy. He has a wry, undercooled sense of humour, he seems to be an earnest man, and I never caught him committing cheap innuendo about the Other Party to save his own face, as most other Spanish politicians, of both camps, are wont to do and fond of doing. But, this I must also say: more and more Mr Rajoy reveals himself as the elected lackey of the Brussels Beurocracy, something like a cowardly, comic manservant in a Molière farce, who scores a few cheap victories by cheating and hustling, but when push comes to shove humbly does the bidding of his masters to the letter since he simply has no balls… Even his language, once so proud, bore witness to his loss of pride. ‘We Spanish no longer have the choice whether or not to make sacrifices,’ Don Mariano whined on the rostrum. ‘We no longer have such liberty.’ A long way has he come from the triumphant figure who last week boasted of having made Mrs Merkel blink…

And Don Mariano is not alone in this. He is not the only one to drag his pride and principles through the dust. Here is another mystery which I fail to solve no matter how hard I try: why in the world is it that Socialists all over the continent are so very much in favour of the continuing European Project? No matter where you look – Britain, Holland, Spain, Germany… - it is they who are the most enthusiastic supporters of fast-track further integration and heaving over ever more say and sovereignty to the unelected Beurocrats in Brussels. It is as if they think that Brussels is a left wing project… Which it obviously is not at all.

Is it so hard, I ask, to see whom Brussels serves? Whom Brussels hurts? Is it such a well-kept secret that Banks and Big Business are all in favour of the Divine Euro and its Eurogue High Priests? Frankly, I cannot blame our plutocrats for that stand. A single currency saves them tons of money in their commercial dealings; open borders and free trade stimulate their sales; the shiploads of European regulation, which big companies with their staff of lawyers easily know how to deal with, elbows the competition by small family firms out of the arena… All of them things that large companies profit by. Small wonder they love the federal project so ardently…

But to the poor and the humble? To the poor and the humble, the European Union has now simply revealed itself as a machine that produces poverty, unemployment and Dickensian conditions. Strange bedfellows are the European socialists and the Brussels’ beurocrats therefore! And small wonder that those pseudo-socialists are losing ever more votes to genuine pro-worker parties who tend to be ‘euro-critical’! These elected lackeys on the left deserve everything they lose!

Mayhem Now: Yesterday's miners protest in Madrid

Ah, there is much mayhem to come this summer before the whole house of cards tumbles in next October, dear reader! People are beginning to stir in most unpleasant ways. Even those you least expect it from. Here you have one which I overheard yesterday in a bar on the Portuguese side of the valley, from a normally calm middle-aged farmer only slightly tipsy:

‘Nuke Brussels; guillotine Barroso and his lot; lock up all our politicians in the madhouse, and let’s just start all over again…’

I am sorry. Much as I try, and much as I know I should, I cannot say I disagree with him.

[PS If after the above you wish to read some more informed background which is enough to make you shudder for things to come, read this article from old Ambrose.]

Beggars can be 'Chulos'

A traditional Spanish money plant (harvested long ago...)

Ah yes: the farce continues…

I guess you did not know this, but Spain and Italy have an inalienable birth right to all the northern tax money they can swallow. At least, that is now the outspoken position of Mr Rajoy and Mr Monti. Having pried lose the concession that they would get bail out funds with no strings attached last week, the two gentlemen are now insisting that the money has to be forthcoming and SOON. Europe must fulfil its promises, insisted Mr Rajoy this weekend. And Mr Monti just came out with some angry remarks about certain northern countries (he meant Finland and the Netherlands) being irresponsible in their critical statements of this deal, and thus causing the high interest rates that the Mediterranean lands have to pay over their debt.

Ah yes: you give them a finger and they chop off your arm at the shoulder… For while beggars, as the proverb says, cannot be choosers, in these places, beggars cán be chulos. Go look it up in the Spanish dictionary. The mildest translation is ‘brazen’.

And if all of it goes wrong with the €uro in the end (as it looks it will), then whose fault is it? No, not of course of the disorganised, corrupt, maffia style, wasteful and freeloading Latin lands, who simply do not know how to produce wealth in a reasonable manner and then administer it responsibly, but of those selfish, egoistic northerners, who refuse to shake their money tree (which they stole from us some hundreds of years ago…) so as to shower us with the alms we deserve…

I foresee that soon there will rise a new Berlin Wall, running roughly along Rhine and Danube, from Dunkirk on the Channel, to Sulina on the Black Sea, and hopefully straight through the vile, disreputable city of Brussels!

Spain Bountiful...

So here we go today for the bad news about Spain. Or at least some of it. 

News bit nº 1: during yesterday’s auction of government bonds, the interest Spain had to pay returned to the impossible level it had before last week’s miraculous Eurotop. Surprise surprise… It has now happened about ten times that the miracle cures which Brussels designs last about as long as it takes to swallow the bitter pill...

Worse than this, however, is the news from the north of Europe. The north is stirring. The Dutch and the Finns are balking at the notion that Spanish banks be bailed out directly from the European Funds which they are supposed to fill with their hard-earned cash, or that those funds buy up southern government bonds to appease the markets, without they having a say in or a veto over it. The Finnish minister of finance today went so far as to say that Finland might leave the Eurozone unless the country be treated with more respect. In Germany, meanwhile, no less than 75 % of the population is against the bailouts and there is talk of holding a referendum, which Brussels is certain to lose. At the same time the CSU – the Bavarian branch of Mrs Merkel’s CDU – has threatened to withdraw their parliamentary support of the Kanzler if the bail outs continue; which would mean the Merkel government falls…

They can have our cup, but not our credit rating....
(A telling Dutch Facebook posting from last week)

I considered writing a lengthy new piece on the differences in point of view between the North and the South of Europe… But then I decided I had already said all there is to say on the subject, with typical Mittington Foresight, more than two years ago. So I republish here my piece, posted on Colin Davies’s blog on 23 February 2010, titled

Bounty is in the eye of the beholder

As the Brussels Farce and Greek Bail-out Tragedy unfold, I couldn’t help thinking of several worthwhile contributions which recently appeared on Thoughts from Galicia, because they are so very illustrative of the grand emotional clash between North and South which is now in the making. One of them is the piece on Spanish lotteries posted in last December 21^st by this Danish (?) gentleman Peter Missler. As readers were quick to point out: it is a pretty outdated piece and sometimes ill-informed. Yet it also contains a diamond in the mud, a notion worthwhile to remember as the North-South conflict is taking shape; to wit: the observation that Mediterraneans are in the habit of relying on Luck or Loot for their riches.

 

This is, I think, essentially correct. Due to the great insecurity of wealth over many centuries, Spaniards and other Latin nations have come to feel uncomfortable with petty middle-class wealth, have begun to question the usefulness of hard work and slow saving, and hence made their dreams gravitate to that One Stroke of Luck, in the shape of a hidden treasure, a business Pelotazo, or a winning lottery ticket. Yet the emotional evolution does not stop there, and its further consequences are going to play a pivotal role in the coming months. So it makes some sense to spell out the positions.

Let me try to put it in a nutshell. Without meaning this as any sort of moral judgement, I think it is not unfair to say that our Mediterraneans friends do not perceive wealth and knowledge as a result of virtue (hard work, study, saving, thrift) but rather as a Gift from God, a coincidence, a stroke of Good Fortune tossed somebody’s way for no explicit reason. Having been brought up, furthermore, in an environment of strong family cohesion and solidarity between the dispossessed (both of them admirable fenomena in my book!), they next feel deeply that any such Boon ought to be shared with friends and family. The lottery makes a fine example once again. John Hooper, in his book on modern Spain [The New Spaniards, chapter 12], described somewhat baffled how one winner of the Christmas Gordo spoke perfectly naturally, and without any hard feelings, about dividing up his winnings evenly among his brothers and sisters and in-laws. The man did not grudge this at all. It was his duty, what was expected of him. And what he might expect from them in their turn if the roles were reversed.

Colin Davies’s own hilarious anecdote from his English conversation class shows how this sacred principle even pervades the realm of knowledge and learning. When one of his students showed up, after she had milked a well-placed friend for the secret surprise subject of tomorrow’s English writing exam (the friend has landed an advantageous job - how can he refuse to share his fortune with his pals?), she wanted a ready-made text which she could then learn by heart and pass off as her own on-the-spot improvisation… What any northern puritan would regard as a scandalous case of double fraud, the Spaniards in the class took with good cheer. They showed neither surprise nor indignation, but set to work to provide her in her hour of need. Skill in English, you see, is just another random coincidence which one has the solemn duty to share with the less fortunate… The system is rigged against you anyway, see? And this is a legitimate way to gain your diploma and your next career-move…

What does all this have to do with the Greek bail-out? Well, more than appears at first sight. Anyone who over the last few weeks has read around and listened up a little for café conversations may have noticed a touch of irritation creeping into comments Spaniards make about Europe. Essentially the annoyance comes down to this: ‘If Europe does not bail us out when we’re in shambles, then what’s the sense of being a member of the club?’ What you see here is the projection of the Gordo-winning nephew who refuses to share his prize with in-laws onto inter-European relations. Germany, Holland and the Scandinavians are not rich, so the latent feeling goes, due to their hard labour, work ethic, savvy or sacrifice. No: they are super-wealthy because some unexplained voodoo mechanism made money float their way (enquire insistently and you may hear vague suggestions about colonies, slavery and collaboration with dictatorial regimes). Hence they ought to share their Good Fortune with their less lucky Club Med primos, and if they don’t, they are being very bad neighbours.

A grinding grudge is born….

The trouble here is that the Northern nations feel a little differently about such matters, and those feelings are bubbling rapidly to the surface now that the financial consequences of Euro-foul-ups are becoming tangible. Other than Latin Mediterraneans, the Germans, Dutch, Danes and Finns do believe that Fortune may be forced to come your way by hard work and cunning organisation. Naturally, misfortune does exist, and if it truly strikes someone, that person deserves our help. But he ONLY deserves our support if he has done all in his power to avoid penury; if he has worked as hard as we have, been earnest and careful, denied himself all indulgences and did what he could to avoid blunders. If he’s been lazy, or spendthrift, or gambling, or drinking, or bull-fighting on working days, he has lost his right to our alms. One might say that Rights are a function of Effort in protestant eyes, not of the Human Condition.

Would you like me to give you the corresponding Germanic attitude to family sharing? Here goes: I once knew this nice, middle-of-the-road, perfectly representative Heidelberg family in which the siblings were in the habit of selling each other their old cameras, study books and sweaters! Nobody found this odd in any way. And when I asked my then girlfriend if she didn’t feel it was – well - a little mercenary that her brother would sell her an old sweater, she shook her head vehemently and assured me that Certainly Not, for he had only asked her the fair price… Go talk to these people about the Deserving Poor; and you’ll come away with a definition of ‘Deserving’ which is about as narrow as a razor’s edge.

Hence Northern thinking on hallowed European ‘solidarity’ takes place along the lines of the old Ant and Grasshopper fable: we have worked hard, sacrificed much, denied ourselves luxuries and swallowed bitter pills so as to first build and then safeguard our wealth and our well-fare. Meanwhile, them Southern bastards have lived big, overspent, fucked up and worried not about Tomorrow. So now let them rot. Because - as one ominous NYT article said some days ago with so many words - why should I tighten my belt so that some lazy Greek may retire at 63? It is their own dumb fault. We already sponsored them forever in the past. And now we have to fund their frivolous behaviour once again? No Way José!

Another grudge is born…

So there. One half of Europe thinks it is a solemn obligation of its richer neighbours to come to their rescue. The other half that its southern primos are bloody freeloaders who plan to sponge off them forever. You may think that such barstool-rancour is marginal to the Progress of Nations, but it is not. It is, on the contrary, a simmering subsoil fire, which will burst to the surface once the going gets tough enough. And it seems that the going is now getting pretty darn tough.

It is often said – and more often forgotten in practice – that we ought to learn from history. So let us learn a little here. Must I remind my readers what was the fuse that brought about the Lutheran Reformation? At that time, the most visible grudge against the Church of Rome was the selling of Indulgences for every possible sin, in exchange for huge sums of money which were then lasciviously spent on the building of St Peter’s in Rome, so that corrupt, philandering Popes might parade a prestige-object to the world. Not from my back pocket, cried the thrifty Germans, and cut their ties with Rome. A little later, the tiny Dutch nation got mighty tired of being taxed by their Spanish overlords, so that an Escorial might be built and ill-conceived religious wars might be waged forever. They rose in revolt, all seven muddy gin-drinking herring-stenching peat bogs of them, standing up against the greatest empire the world had so far seen. And… They won…!! Talk about the strength of a goodly grudge… (if fuelled by some sturdy glasses of jenever, that is!)

If things of such magnitude have happened in the past over a few Peter’s pennies, you may imagine what we are in for, speaking in terms of collective anger, as the full size of the bill presented by Brussels to the Northern taxpayer gets revealed over the coming weeks (there is already mention of soft loans to the tune of 25 billion Euros!). Must we be afraid of furious street-protests in Athens and Madrid? Don’t be. Look instead to the barricades of Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vienna, I say! That is where the real tea-party will take place. And after that? Who knows? For what was once merely teeth-gnashing popular Euro-scepticism in the spoiled Northern electorate, will turn into outright hostility to the EU and all its minions now that injury gets added to insult. And then the seething Shopping Masses, once victorious in their own capitals, may well march on Brussels to file a complaint with a meat-cleaver. Beware, thou Beurocrats and Europutados! The chicken that used to lay the golden eggs are coming home to roast. You!

Alfred B. Mittington

(Winner of the 1988 Von Humboldt Award for the essay ‘From Weber to Webber, or: Evita against the Spirit of Capitalism’)

Spain Blissful

Well, I guess there is good news and bad news from Spain. Let’s do the Good News today. After all: it has been a while since we could enjoy reading a headline here.

The first bit of good news is, of course, the splendid way in which the Spanish soccer team won the European championship last Sunday. They played beautifully, it was a convincing victory (not one of those lamentable penalty shoot-outs that you see too often nowadays) and it boosted the country’s morale, of which the place stands in great need. Congratulations boys! Shows you how far you can get if you set your mind to it.

Then day before yesterday, there was a surprisingly uplifting update from the employment front. Last month, unemployment went down with nearly 100,000 (from roughly 4.7 to 4.6 million). Much of this is of course seasonal, due to the summer tourist boom; but it so happens that it is the largest seasonal reduction in a decade and a half. As gift horses go, let us be grateful for the present.

Then, yesterday, precisely a year after its disappearance from the innards of the Santiago de Compostela cathedral, the famous 800-year old Codex Calixtinus was recuperated. It turned out that the thief was a former electrician of the cathedral, who began to steal manuscripts and jewelleries after he was fired from his job after 25 years. He simply walked in, and knowing from experience where to go, picked the ripe fruit from the showcases. You may astound, dear reader, but I happen to know the place since some years ago I used to do research there, and I assure you that just about anybody can walk in with some lame excuse, and never gets stopped. More remarkable still: the man had an entire treasure of stolen objects (and more than a million Euros in cash!) in garbage bags in his garage, and it seems nobody ever noticed anything until he absconded with a piece so famous that it would be missed. Tells you something about his intelligence, and about the manner in which the cathedral people guard their treasures… And this in a place which has been mentioned on the websites of jihadist fringe groups as a possible target for attack since it is one of Christianity’s most emblematic sites… And you still wonder why Spain is poor…?

Lastly, from the economic front, I may mention that in the wake of last Friday’s Eurotop decisions the interest rate on Spanish government loans went down somewhat, to a mere 6.5 %, and stayed there over the week, hovering up and down in a far from convincing manner, but, oh well, you know: absence of catastrophic news is reason for grand celebration these days. We shall see if it holds out. I fear the worst.

Tomorrow for some lesser news. 

Saturday Snapshot: Eben Emael

Just a little light relief today, dear reader. Some people live in villas, others live in hovels. And then there are those who live in a fantasy world all of their own. This picture is of an old tower at a stone's throw from the famous fortress of Eben-Emael in Belgium. Decades ago an artist moved in and transformed it into... Well... Something special, let's say.

I guess the fellow never needed to give his guests detailed directions as to how to get to his doorstep...

How to sink Spain for its sin

The man who understood nothing of such matters

Winston Churchill once wrote that to tax yourself into prosperity is like standing in a bucket and trying to lift yourself by pulling the handle. Ah, if only he had used the word ‘growth’ instead of ‘prosperity’, then his wise dictum might have applied to today’s situation in Spain.

Now it will be obvious to all that it doesn’t; which must be one of the reasons why the unholy coalition of the EU Commission from Brussels and the Spanish Government in Madrid have decided, in fine mutual agreement, to tax the country into growth. 

You probably expect me now to tell you of an awful tax-hike on the wealthy which the Spanish government is planning. After all it is they who are largely responsible for the Spanish housing bubble and the miserable banking practices. But no: that is not the idea. The wealthy, more particularly the tax-evading wealthy, have already received special treatment. They were slapped with a scandalous 10 % surtax over all the black money which they have kept hidden from the Treasury for the last few decades, which neat little sums thereby get whitewashed forever more. Never mind that they owed the Treasury ten times that sum. Crime pays in times of crisis.

No, the solution is to tax the poor and the average working middle classes. The Rajoy government, back against the wall, sabre point into its stomach, is going to raise the low VAT rate of 8 %, levied over essentials like food, drink, rent, heating etc., to the high rate of 18 %. Never mind that retail sales have been dropping for 23 consecutive months already. Never mind that they are dropping with some 5 % a month this spring (in comparison with the same month last year). Never mind either that this is a dagger in the back of the ONLY sector of the economy which was still performing properly over the last few years, namely tourism (the unrest in yesteryears popular holiday destinations like Greece, Egypt and Tunisia is a godsend for the sunny land).

Raise taxes, lower salaries, cut benefits without a thought for the sick, the elderly, the unemployed, the under-educated children, or the 20 % of the Spanish population which (according to the UN) live below the poverty line. Behold the recipe for struggling out of the present European crisis. And the worst of it is that it shows no signs of actually working… In fact, it must be obvious to all those willing to look at the situation with no ideological glasses on their pinched noses that it is making matters worse.

What in the world is wrong with our leaders, one wonders? Are they really so stupid? Are they really that evil? One or two may be. But it is inconceivable that all of them are. Something else must be at work. And perhaps the following quote from a biography of old Winston – to end with him as well - gives us a minor clue into the deeper nature of the trouble:

In any crisis of this nature the historian, however well equipped with information, is at a disadvantage. Any crisis generates its own momentum and its own personality. The stress of events; fragmentary information; the characters of the individual ministers; physical tiredness; sheer chance; all these play their part, and contribute to the character and development of the crisis to an extent of which even the participants are often unaware. And thus it is that follies are committed and a sense of proporti­on is lost for reasons which are impossible to specify with any exactness. Thus, however complete the documentation may be, the true causes are usually absent. [Robert Rhodes James, Churchill: a study in failure 1900-1939, Part IV.]

This weekend yet another Eurotop to stop all Eurotops, dear reader. Spain’s 10-year interest rate stands at 7 % again ten days after its magnificent banking bail out. Italy’s is getting close to 6.5 %. Cyprus has just become the 5^th country to be put into receivership. Unemployment in Germany is on the rise. The medicine is working splendidly…

The Eurotop (Rompuy and Barroso on the lower right)

Velvet Poetry from our Iron President

‘Haiku Herman’ van Rompuy, our Europresident, did it again! The man is amazing! Even in that shady collective of Eurogues and Beurocrats who often are as shameless as they are overpaid and fault prone, he stands out as a veritable champion, a Lancelot, a Cid...

The other day, in an interview with a German newspaper, Mr van Rompuy proposed that Europe be granted a greater influence over the pension plans of the EU member states. The commission, he said, ought to be able – listen closely now, dear reader! – ‘to make economic recommendations of an obligatory nature’!

Recommendations of an Obligatory Nature! Aaah, what a phrase! A boozing novelist on peyote couldn’t make it up! Now of course I know you are a poet, Mr van Rompuy. Your haikus are legendary throughout the Union. So I grant you that coining new phrases is your privilege. But I, sir, am a poet too (you may wish to take a look at volume xvii of my ‘Collected Works of Alfred B. Mittington’, particularly pp. 343-357 for my 1958 cycle of haikus on the Sputnik launch). So, from one fine poet to another, I ask you: would you not agree that the best word to employ is usually the shortest one that does the job? And there is already a brief and crystal-clear word for ‘recommendations of an obligatory nature,’ sir.

To wit: Diktat! And I suggest you use that in the future, instead of this wordy, lame-brained euphemism which will hide your true intentions from no one.

But was this merely a slip of Mr van Rompuy’s double-pronged tongue? No, not all the way, by the looks of it. Rather, it is policy, a new verbal approach of our European Commissars, preparing the citizens for what comes next. For what did Mr Joaquin Almunia (the Spanish Eurocommisar for Competition, and yet another example of a national politician who moved to a splendid career in Brussels after losing every election he ever tried to win) tell his own countrymen yesterday in the context of their Bank bail out? He said, and watch the wording, now: ‘las recomendaciones de Bruselas son obligaciones para España’, i.e. ‘the recommendations of Brussels are Obligations for Spain’. What a most remarkable coincidence of terms! Did we not know better, we might think that some coordination had taken place between Supherman and his buddy Don Joaquin…

Brace yourselves, you Europeans! For the pretence is over. The colours are hoisted and the true intent revealed. The shameless Brussels Beurocrats, unelected by anyone, controlled by no parliament, embarrassed by no moral qualms, are making sure not to let this fine crisis go to waste. They are aiming for autocratic power the like of which not even Bismarck ever enjoyed!