Trumped up

I was hop­ing to write a cheery, even cute, piece about Cata­lan Christ­mas tra­di­tions for this De­cem­ber issue. But on the day this ar­ti­cle was due, an avowedly sex­ist, xeno­pho­bic, tax-evad­ing, cli­mate-change-deny­ing, gram­mat­i­cally chal­lenged and solip­sis­tic multi-mil­lion­aire be­came one of the most pow­er­ful men in the world thanks to his im­prob­a­ble claim - swal­lowed whole by his vot­ers - that he is the her­ald of an anti-es­tab­lish­ment rev­o­lu­tion. The Ma­jor­can au­thor Miquel Bauçà (1940-2005) wrote - in his vast 1998 mas­ter­piece 'El canvi' ('The Change') - that the whole world, for rea­sons he con­sid­ered too ob­vi­ous to men­tion, should have the right to vote in US elec­tions. Bingo. If war, as the say­ing goes, is too im­por­tant to be left to the gen­er­als, it stands to rea­son, as of No­vem­ber 2016, that the United States are too im­por­tant to be left to their na­tion­ally cir­cum­scribed, first-past-the-post vot­ing sys­tem. And Amer­ica isn't the half of it: if we now have a men­da­cious vagina clutcher in Wash­ing­ton, we also have a war crim­i­nal in Moscow (many of his crimes, and they are le­gion, hav­ing been com­mit­ted against his own cit­i­zens); and a close-to-to­tal­i­tar­ian party in China which laughs off human rights as if they were noth­ing but a west­ern­ised run­ning gag. So much for the three most pow­er­ful coun­tries in the world. Closer to (our) home, we have a cor­rupt, right-wing cen­tral gov­ern­ment - put in power, oddly enough, by a party thought to have been so­cial­ist - that is play­ing ju­di­cial cat and mouse with hun­dreds of elected of­fi­cials in Cat­alo­nia, from hum­ble coun­cil­lors to ex-pres­i­dents of Cat­alo­nia and the cur­rent speaker of the par­lia­ment, all of whom, ac­cord­ing to rules made up on the spot by Spain's Con­sti­tu­tional Court, can now be de­tained at any time for such blood­cur­dling mis­de­meanours as hang­ing out pro-in­de­pen­dence flags, pay­ing dues to pro-in­de­pen­dence as­so­ci­a­tions or going to work on Span­ish Na­tional Day. Closer to my ex-home, the Brex­i­teer supreme, he of the French sur­name and Ger­man wife, was one of the first Eng­lish politi­cians to con­grat­u­late the fledg­ling wall-builder now en­sconced in the Oval Of­fice, beaten to the adu­la­tory punch only by the boss of a racist Dutch party and Hun­gary's anti-im­mi­gra­tion prime min­is­ter. And Ma­rine Le Pen. And while it is lead­ers of this tim­ber who are start­ing to hold sway over the West­ern World, we are left with lit­tle al­ter­na­tive but to watch, stom­achs churn­ing and hands tied, as civil­ians are pum­melled to smithereens with im­punity in parts of Iraq, Syria, and Turk­ish Kur­dis­tan. Christ­mas is tra­di­tion­ally a time to eat, drink and be merry. This year, to be hon­est, I think I'll just stick to the drink .