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 .