politics – Page 5 – don't confuse the narrator

political polemic

I know I try and keep away from politics on the blog, but because of the Catalán elections, there have been a couple of Spanish stories in the news this week and they are really too good to ignore. The first, reported by the BBC under the headline Spain outrage over migrant bombing game centres on a video game – Rescate (Rescue) – that the Partido Popular launched a few days on their website.

I haven’t played the game, which seems to be no longer available on the website, but have read a few of the reports in both Spanish and UK national press. The tag line for the game appears to be:

Ayuda a Alicia y a Pepe, su gaviota, a rescatar a Cataluña de la crisis

and it features Alicia Sánchez-Camacho (President of the PP in Catalonia) as Alicia Croft, perched on a great white seagull shooting at illegal immigrants and symbols of Catalán nationalism.
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duties and impositions

As shown in the photo, there’s a poster taped to the church door in the village.

When I saw it, I thought it must be particularly important or they would have simply put it on the notice board along with the other general announcements.

So I went closer to have a look.

And this is what I found:
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political ambiguity

It’s the first time in decades that I’ve been in the UK for a general election, and I’m finding all this uncertainty absolutely fascinating. Maybe the fact I don’t have to live with the aftermath – at least not as a resident – helps.

I liked this quote from the BBC lunchtime television news today:

[The Liberal Democrats] must decide who they want to govern.

In normal speech, at least, that is delightfully ambiguous, and conjures the idea of the Lib Dems keeping their coalition partners, whichever party they might be, on a very short leash.

Technically, that interpretation probably demands the use of “whom”, but how many of Britain’s electorate would distinguish the grammatical forms?

magnificent

Political commentary is a bit dry, so I’ll add this photo to brighten the page up a bit.

The tree was grown from seed and although it’s about twenty years old, it’s been kept small and is only about six foot tall. It has around ten flowers each year.

The slightly strange framing here is because the photo was taken ‘blind’ from underneath with just a phone camera.

The photo prompts me to post a fragment of a collaborative poem from a couple of years ago. I really should go back and worry it into some kind of shape, but, for the moment, these are the last few lines:
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political priorities

On the BBC lunchtime news today they were talking about the new MPs at Westminster whose attempts to find their way around would be hampered by the fact they don’t know if they are part of the government or the oppostion.

I was particularly taken with the comment that they’d be:

learning how to use their new laptops, learning how to use their new phones and learning how to do their expenses.

Just think how much more confident the public would have been in the political system last year if MPs had been taught how to claim their expenses correctly.