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Sunday, March 02, 2008 [continued from previous entry] One good thing about campaign season: it makes reading the newspaper much easier, much faster. Skip over the ever-increasing number of pages devoted to politicians, manufactured campaign events, and hot gas disguised as polls, predictions, etc. Wade through everything else in slightly more leisurely fashion. Meaning, essentially, I end up with the arts, sports and a few other stray bits. The gun went off for the official local campaign season about ten days ago, but since the pre-official season had been underway for many weeks, the only real difference I noticed was the sudden appearance of television ads for candidates/parties. Normal commercials are bad -- political ads are so bad that they could drive me to beg loved ones to pick up the nearest implement of destruction and end my suffering. The last two weeks brought two different political debates. The first: a match between the current Minister of the Economy, Pedro Solbes, and he who would like to elbow Solbes aside, Manuel Pizarro. As far as I can tell, the dislike and disrespect that the opposition -- the national right-wing party, el Partido Popular -- feels for Solbes is second only to the outright loathing they manifest toward the current president, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Pizarro had been announced with big fanfare by the PP, like he was the ace up their collective sleeve, their new star, an addition to their team big enough to push them over the top. Which must have made their disappointment especially bitter when he didn't hold up in the debate. The day after the event, the media declared Solbes the clear, incontestable winner, and the folks from the PP responded by mentioning nothing about Pizarro or the debate for the next 2-3 days. (Confirming what they have shown on a daily basis since being kicked out of office in 2004: they are not good losers.) Why, you might ask in an attempt to keep me from starting in on the second debate, am I going on about all this? My pathetic reply: it's a simple, blatant attempt to get my wheels turning again, because since I coughed up the last paragraph of that last entry, I've avoided producing anything more. I've known I've been avoiding, at times I've tried gently prodding myself to sit down and dig into it, but the feeling of not wanting to has been so strong that I have not pushed too hard. In earlier years of this life, I likely would not have been so patient. More likely, I would have told myself to buck up, would have plowed ahead and churned out a bunch of blather. (This in line with my birth-family's mode of living: when facing a situation that produces lots of emotion, don't take time to feel your way through it -- put your head down and stumble forward. An excellent way, I realized a while back, to accumulate a whole lot of scar tissue.) My perspective on the suicide thing is not in line with the conventional wisdom. I recently saw something out on the web written by a smug half-wit that affirmed (1) we all go through times of considering suicide, meaning, (2) it's not only not the big deal it's made out to be, it's the easy way out, and (3) it's not only the easy way out, it's the act of a coward. My feeling: we may all pass through moments when we toy wishfully with the idea of getting the hell out of this loony bin (and i say that with affection) we call life, but we do not all pass through the place of seriously considering the real item. Once you go through the kind of intense passage that could actually lead one to consider shuffling the hell off this mortal clownshow, it should leave you with an increased capacity for empathy/understanding and an intimate knowledge of an especially deep, often very dark, species of life evaluation. "Easy" is not a word a sane individual would apply to any of that, much less to the act of severing one's tether to this life. Calling it the act of a coward is the kind of facile, kneejerk b.s. that often gets spewed about individuals who have chosen to punch their last timecard. The major buzzword is 'selfish,' and my experience has generally been that when someone trots out that word what they really mean is 'you're not behaving the way I want you to behave.' Yes, I know this is a complex issue, so deep that it can't be easily quantified. A suicide impacts family, friends, acquaintances in enormous ways. Some see it as a big 'fuck you,' and there may be times when that's the case. Other times it's a gauge of indescribable pain. And other times it may simply be the result of a process of evaluation, leading to a decision most see as inconceivable. Blah, blah blah. The strange, simple truth: learning that I.'s death had been a deliberate choice on his part felt better to me than if it had been something more apparently random -- cancer, getting flattened by a truck or hit by an errant golf ball, etc. In many ways it squared with things I knew about him, things we'd talked about, and things I'd felt from him, not expressed verbally. He was no dummy, he was no coward. He went through a process and came to a decision, and whatever the ripple effects, I cared for and respected the person he was, and I respect the process he would have gone through in arriving at that big, final choice. This is too huge a subject to deal with in a handful of paragraphs -- a better writer might be able to go more deeply into it and produce something worth wading through. I would just bore the bejeezis out of everyone. So I'll leave it at this. And the first presidential debate? Mariano Rajoy, the PP's candidate, came out of the corner like a bearded attack dog, dropping the pretense of smiling congeniality he'd adopted for the campaign season, reverting to the politician of the last four years who rarely smiled and did nothing but attack, attack, attack. Zapatero countered with not especially inspiring equilibrium, responding to Rajoy's continuous claims of national crisis/catastrophe with talk of economic strength, social progress, forward movement. Both apparently fudged figures and facts. Next day, polls and the media proclaimed Zapatero the winner by a slim margin. Enough that his side could claim victory, slim enough that the other side could see it as a pyrrhic victory they could ride until the second debate. That second dabete happened last night. The general consensus: Rajoy crapped out, Zapatero prevailed. The elections take place on Sunday. Can't wait until it's all over. -- runswithscissors: young, tender, with such an adorable bum España, te quiero rws 6:03 PM [+]
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