I've found myself in recent days experiencing a mix of feelings I would be hard-pressed to describe. Reflecting things happening in my little life and in the world at large, both micro and macro, both wacky and worrying (that last the legacy of a family-of-origin method of dealing with life, something I'm long into the process of freeing myself from). A kind of emotional brew that would have had me feeling mighty low in earlier years. Now I'm mostly grateful to be alive, processing it all. I'd much rather be awake -- wading through this world of ours in all its gorgeous pomp and squalor, my nervous system firing away on all cylinders -- than numb.
Because it's a hell of a show, you know? An impressive array of the wild, the bizarre, the savage, the tender, the hopeful, the mundane, the sometimes quietly/sometimes thrillingly, extravagantly beautiful.
Spring has put on the brakes a bit here, resulting in days that are the spitting image of September/October -- cool, fresh, the sky a dramatic blend of clouds and light. So that cold weather gear -- never completely discarded by the more cautious locals -- has become normal once again. And life goes on, to the accompaniment of occasional bitching about the discrepancy between the calendar and the actual conditions outdoors.
Introversion/extroversion -- la Plaza de Santa Barbara, Madrid:
Meanwhile, the new Spanish government has been quietly busy, producing a noticeably different atmosphere in the process. Less rancorous, more focused on simply doing the work, less on producing discord. A major change from the previous administration, a marked easing of a kind of tension that had become normal during the last two, three years.
As promised during the campaign, half the cabinet-level posts are now held by women, including the active, influential post of vice president. Also as promised, a law pushed through by the previous administration re-imposing mandatory classes in Catholicism or religion in public schools has been reversed. Channel 1, the more high-profile of the two government television stations, has been undergoing a makeover, become less partisan, more balanced in its news broadcasts, its programming changing to reverse a major drop in ratings experienced during the last couple of years. (Hallelujah to that, say I, the channel 1 I knew having become more or less unwatchable.) The administration is now actively working with the French and German governments to ratify a European constitution.
All, on the face of it, major changes in direction, all apparently more in tune with the wants of the pueblo. Absent in this are the chronically ugly parliamentary confrontations that had become the norm during the last couple of years, the result of the 180 degree turnabout in the composition of el Congreso de los Diputados. Not that the parliamentary chamber doesn't produce plenty of noise, just that the PP does not now have the position or power to impose their will on everyone else, a drastic change in situation.
One of the hallmarks of the previous administration was its tendency to stonewall and block investigations into various incendiary happenings (i.e., the sinking of the Prestige, the lack of evidence to support justifications given for participating in the incursion into Iraq, numerous scandals around the country involving PP officeholders). The last of those happenings was the government's handling of the three days between the Madrid bombings and the national elections. The country's two largest daily newspapers have been running stories detailing how the administration continued to insist on the involvement of ETA in the bombings despite all investigations clearly pointing to Islamic extremists, contradicting the PP's post-election PR offensive, revelations that resulted yesterday in the PP doing a 180 to support calls for an investigation into what exactly happened during those three days. (El País, the lefty daily and largest selling national paper, says that "The secretary general of the PP, [defeated presidential candidate] Mariano Rajoy, accepted yesterday that a parliamentary commission would investigate the events of 11-M, as demanded by other political groups." El Mundo, the center-right daily and second-largest national paper, portrays it differently, stating that "Mariano Rajoy... took the political iniciative to demand a parliamentary commission into 11-M.")
The current government has taken pains to assure everyone that the purpose of the investigation is not to pin blame on any individuals, and while that may be a bit ingenuous, their general way of working since taking power has been conciliatory, not vengeful. Which raises the hope that though the results of the investigation may portray the PP unfavorably, the Socialist administration may walk softly through it all, actually working to reduce the sting of it rather than twist the knife.
Time will tell. But the simple possibility of less abrasive, less mean-spirited outcomes in the political world comes as soothing relief to me.
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 6:21 AM [+]