HOW TO GO ON STRIKE WITHOUT REALLY STRIKING OR WITHOUT LOSING A DAY’S PAY.

This week is a week of strikes in Spanish education. Students will be striking for three days while teachers at all levels will be striking on Thursday, in some cases whether they want to or not.

But first, why the strike? The strike has been called to protest against the right-wing Spanish Government’s latest educational reforms. I will not bore you with the details, apart from saying that this one, like all such reforms, is a proverbial curate’s egg – good in parts and stinkingly rotten in others. Educational reform, promoted by whichever party in whichever country will always be divisive and will always (obviously) serve party dogma. Like hurricanes and other such phenomena, educational reform is cyclical. All that the long-suffering populace can do is simply batten down the hatches, mumble and grope around in the dark and endure stoically before emerging blinking into a new, strange panorama. They will then try to make a good fist of the wreckage until the next one hits.  

The “democratically elected”[1] powers that be of the august educational establishment for which I work are, obviously, against the government’s proposals, but to be fair on them, they have also opposed decisions taken by the previous left-wing government too. Basically, they are a bunch of grandstanding progressives. Indeed, so progressive are they that strikers lose no pay!!!

Surely the legitimacy of a strike lies in the fact that the workers sacrifice a day’s pay to voice their concerns? Where the reward for those whose conscience dictates that they  disagree with the call? Working or not, we will all get paid and thus the decision to strike or not loses all credibility. Evidently however, the figures will look good on the news. This Thursday I will be “striking” because the centre where I work will be closed down, not because I particularly want to.

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[1] Our glorious leaders are elected by vertical democracy. This was a wheeze used by the the Franco régime in order to give itself a veneer of democracy. It consists of different collectives, in this case, let’s say, teaching staff, unions, students, administrative staff, &c. electing various representatives who then elect the next tier of representatives &c., &c. &c. until we arrive at the Rector and his Cabal. The idea of a directly-elected team is somehow anathema – perhaps for the same reason that Franco and his mateys didn’t like direct elections: the result might not be the “correct” one. 

Plebgate; Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies? Or, My Own Tuppenceworth

Someone I know once voiced, rather sententiously, the none-too-original opinion that anyone who wants to join the police force shouldn’t be allowed to. Obviously, there are many selfless bobbies out there whose vocation is to serve the common weal and who, tragically, lose their lives so doing. There are also many who forget that it is not their person, but their office which demands the respect of the public. Thus it is in all public service. When a court rises as the judge enters, it is to honour the judiciary as a whole and not the individual in the robes and wig.

I AM THE LAW!

And so it should be with the police. Unfortunately, it would seem, many officers demand that the rest of us respect their office while they themselves do not, as the latest Jimmy Savile revelations would appear to demonstrate. The police seem to think that they can act with impunity or worse. they sometimes delude themselves into thinking that they are the Law, like the post-apocolyptic Judge Dredd from the excellent 2000AD comic, and not its servants.

I think that a lot of people are getting tired, even the Prime Minister David Cameron, with the illegitimate interference of the long-cossetted police and the Police Federation in the political life of our country.

The breathaking arrogance of the police is in the news yet again with the treatment of the three Police Federation officers who after a meeting with Andrew Mitchell MP gave a false account of the content of the meeting. Their  reprehensible behaviour has resulted in their being… erm, told they were naughty boys and not to do it again? Here is my own personal experience of certain officer believing that being a copper conferred upon him/her some sort of superiority over the rest of us mere mortals.

Last year, when surfing Twitterdom, I came across a private tweet written by a police officer at the Northampton Police Cells who tweeted about life there. The tweets were written during working hours and gave the impression that they were, at the very least, tweeted with the knowledge of superior officers.  Apparently this was not the case.

I eventually protested to the Northants Police when the tweeter boasted: “Called in to start work early. Bed to office in 25 mins! I impressed myself.” When I asked the officer if s/he had respected the speed limits and traffic lights I got no reply.

The officer also tweeted this picture:

A none-too agreeable mugshot

It looks extremely like a mug, and if so was probably produced in quite large numbers and sold to correspondingly large numbers of police officers. The background wording tells us this is a British, not US, police mug. Don’t you find the message in black arrogant and insulting? I do.

If we speculate that large numbers of this mug were produced and sold, what dear reader does this tell us about our police forces? Nothing good, I fear. 

As a result of my complaint, the officer was told to shut down the twitter account, @NorpolCustody. Apart from that I don’t know if, except for a good talking-to, the officer was in any way disciplined. No rubber hoses or falling down the stairs in this case! 

STRAWBERRY FIELDS, or Steak is Lentils

Probably one of John Lennon’s best and most iconic songs is the starting point of today’s post, a post in no small measure inspired by Silver Tiger’s recent blog, Out, Out, Damned Internet. 

Here is a link to a rather toe-curlingly embarrassing video of the Fab Four prancing and cavorting around pretentiously in what would now be classed as an early (excruciatingly wince-inducing) pop video of Strawberry Fields.  I wish I had never seen it.

And never have a song’s introductory lines been more topical. Here's a reminder (my italics):

“Let me take you down, ‘cos I’m going to Strawberry Fields,

Nothing is real.”

Although the song was released in the UK on February 13th 1967, the above lyrics reflect our contemporary society perfectly. Today we are living in a society where a large part of our daily lives is conducted with a virtual interface. Let me explain. If we buy a concrete article, or indeed a virtual service, we will probably pay with plastic, with our phones or with an electronic transfer. No real money changes hands. We can shop for real groceries in virtual supermarkets – we can even buy unreal books to download onto our e-books. This in fact is a rather nice circularity. The immaterial thoughts of an author, once exclusively recorded on physical media – paper – for transmission to the reader’s own mind can now be transmitted through virtual systems. A form of mediated telepathy, I would venture to call it.

Let me give a more personal example: mobile telephony. Here in Spain there is no such thing as a Movistar shop actually run by Movistar; they are all franchises, as I suppose is the case of all other mobile phone companies. I know someone who recently had her mobile stolen. Needless to say the SIM card was immediately cancelled, but to kill the phone she had to go to the police and report the theft. The police report was then sent by email to the phone company and the phone was duly killed. Most of the process was carried out remotely and at no point did she actually see any employee of the phone company face to face. And the phone? €400 down the drain. €400 that she neither saw in her hand nor in her pay packet as all of this money only ever existed virtually. It only existed because we are told and believe that it exists. All rather Buddhist I think. It is one of modern life’s great paradoxes that as we are all more interconnected, we all shrink more into our own little personal carapaces and pay less attention to the world around us, all rather Buddhist I think. 

And so to Buddhists. A question: have you ever seen a poor working class Buddhist? I haven’t. In my experience, Western Buddhists tend to be well-off middle-class people, usually retired, on some sort of pension or, as they used to say, with a private means of income. In other words people who in the past would have been flâneurs; people who have nothing better to do.

Those who do have things to do range from peddlers of their own type of Buddhism to peddlers of death-dealing weapons. I know one who teaches you (for a modest consideration) how to prepare for your physical death and transition to the next step in your existence by relating to a pebble sold to you at a rather extortionate price from the great collection with which Karma has blessed his rather large goat farm. He sells the goat’s milk. I never did find out what happened to the kids. Perhaps they were all loaded into a nice comfy cattle truck and taken to other, greener, pastures to live out their lives into a venerable old age in caprine contentment. More probably, they were shovelled, panic stricken, into an old van, trundled off to the abattoir and hung upside down to have their throats cut and bleed to death.

I know of yet another who spends half the year as an arms dealer and the other half eating lentils (no meat please, it involves the killing of sentient beings). Then again, as the ideologues of US National Rifle Association never tire of telling us guns don’t kill people; people kill people.  

And so to the subject of food. A Buddhist once told me that although the eating of dead flesh is a no-no, if that’s all there is to eat, you can eat it no problemo. How? Simple. You tell yourself that the mouth-wateringly delicious, juicy steak in front of you is in fact a bowl of lentils and hey

The biggest bag of lentils ever?
Photo from grammyshouse-susan.blogspot.com

presto!  Lentils it is. As everything is merely an hallucination that our perverse senses call into being, then logically if your upper consciousness tells your senses that steak is lentils, then steak is lentils. Pass the mustard, please. I wish it were a trick that worked in the other direction – good steak is hellishly expensive, or as they say here in Andalusia: mu, mu caro.

This rather surprising denial of reality has other benefits for Buddhists; they don’t really need to engage, for good or for ill, with what we poor benighted creatures call the real world. We do of course know that the Buddhist monks in Burma tend to make life more than a little uncomfortable for Burmese Moslems, yet as this is all a dream, does it really matter? Indeed, in the Buddhist mind, is this reality in Burma really real at all?

As reality does not exist, then neither do Buddhists have to help their fellow men. They prefer to help animals instead, animals that have survived for millions of years without the interference of Man – even dead ones. I have actually been witness to a dead pigeon (it was found expiring by a Buddhist of my acquaintance) being kept in the family freezer along with the peas, carrots veggie burgers &c. for months until it was finally laid to rest in a peaceful wood some miles outside Seville. Luckily it was a moribund pigeon she found and not and Alsatian as there would have been no room in the freezer. Unless it was chopped up.

"Instant Karma's gonna get you"
From Instant Karma, John Winston Lennon.

Karmic Brownie points can of course be accumulated by helping people. As long as it doesn’t cost too much money or effort. As the main aim of the Buddhist is to navel gaze and improve his or her own soul, little time is set aside for the improvement and well-being of those around them – unless of course there’s money to be made helping them along their route to Nirvana. Indeed, in the case of the arms dealer, maybe the unfortunate involved may not exactly wish to be helped out of this vale of tears, but hey ho.  Never in my life have I met such a smug, self-deluded bunch of people. Nice people in general, but very, very, very mistaken. They are definitely up there with the Moslems and Christians.

Finally, if there are any Buddhists reading this, don’t worry. It’s nothing more than a corrupt figment of your basest imaginings created by your oh-too fickle senses. After all, nothing is real. 

Footnote:
Since writing this, I have re-watched the Strawberry Fields video and have decided that although a bit naïf, it does in fact communicate the theme of mental disassociation that runs throughout the song. In other words it's rather confusing and confused