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Spain - Ven vill vee see you again? |
Regular readers of the El Real Thing blog (okay, that really just means you Mrs C) will have noticed lots of "F"s featuring in our recent posts. Not wishing to visit undue wear and tear on the laptop F key, we have decided to switch allegiance to the letter V for this latest post. With this blog supposed to be all about Spain, real beer in Spain and real football in Spain then you could be excused for thinking that Viva (Espana), Valencia, Voll Damm and Valladolid might all be candidates for inclusion but you would be wrong, and you would be wrong because we haven't been able to undertake any of our planned activities - in fact we're not even in Spain at the moment - because of the freedom-curtailing, liberty-restricting actions of politicians in thrall to the so-called experts in dealing with the CoVid19 virus.
Consider this.....................the Secretary of Defence launched a bioweapons programme which resulted in the creation of a virus. The virus killed more than 100,000 people and was blamed on a terrorist organisation. The ruling party used the fear and chaos to win an overwhelming majority in Parliament and profit from the cure for the virus. Vaguely familiar? It is of course part of the plot line for the cult 2005 dystopian political action film V for Vendetta which ironically(?) is set in 2020. Any similarities between the film's St Mary's virus to any actual coronaviruses living or dead is purely coincidental although, to be fair, would probably still be picked up by the not-fit-for-purpose PCR tests which drive the "case" numbers the politicians are using to scare us. The vigilante hero "V" is possessed of superhuman capabilities, not least of which his articulateness, eloquence and poetic verbosity. For example his salutatory address includes 47 words beginning with the letter V whilst also, mid-address, finding time to carve the letter "V" into a poster on the wall with his knife. V impressive!
The film is based on the comic book of the same title by Alan Moore, originally published in the early 1980's although it is the film which has brought the V for Vendetta storyline to the consciousness of the wider public and, most recently, prompted comparisons between the dystopian UK of 2020 in the film to the, errr, dystopian UK of 2020 under CoVid19 restrictions. Some of the quotes from V for Vendetta are remarkably thought provoking, particularly at a time when the denial of our rights and freedoms is apparently the price we have to pay in order to "protect" a health service which we previously and naively thought was actually there to protect us.
"Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly fascade".
"You wear a mask for so long, you forget who you were beneath it".
"Equality and freedom are not luxuries to lightly cast aside. Without them, order cannot long endure before approaching depths beyond imagining".
"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of the people".
Three weeks to flatten the curve. Protect the NHS. Lockdown. Fire-breaks. Wind breaks. Tiers. Teenage mutant ninja virus. Cases. Suit cases. Nut cases. It would almost be funny if the UK government strategy on CoVid19 wasn't destroying lives and livelihoods but that is exactly what it is doing. And they know it. "Words and figures differ" as the bankers used to write on the unpaid cheques where the amount of the cheque written in long-hand did not tally with the amount written, in figures, in the amount box. Government officials tell us one thing whilst the official data, should you choose to analyse it, tells us something quite different. In reality, here in the UK we are months past pandemic stage. What we find ourselves in now is a plandemic, a cynical government plan to cover its disproportionate actions throughout 2020 and to drag matters through to late Spring 2021 by when millions will have been vaccinated and the combination of seasonality and move away from the PCR testing will bring about reduced "case" numbers allowing the government to claim vindication. In the meantime we can all look forward to continued denial of our rights and freedoms whilst thousands more businesses and their employees are consigned to the scrapheap. But at least we can console ourselves with the knowledge that various chums of goverment ministers have made millions reacting quickly to meet government requirements for often un-used and/or not-fit-for-purpose items of PPE, Track and Trace Apps and CoVid-related propaganda.
Don't get us wrong. We are not CoVid deniers. We don't particularly want to catch it but, just like other respiratory illnesses including the seasonal flu, we choose not to have our actions dictated and freedoms removed by government for an illness which data proves is not life threatening for the vast, vast majority of healthy people.
So instead of V for Vendetta we now have V for Vaccination, set in a dystopian 2020 UK where a bioweapons programme in China resulted in the creation of a virus and................
.............and you know the rest, although in this version the vigilante hero (for that is, in all modesty, El Real Thing) is no more than a vigilante zero, possessing of no particular superhero powers other than that of verbosity, railing against the withdrawal of basic democratic rights and freedoms whilst noting, regrettably, that most people still appear willing to mask-up, lock themselves away from human interaction - including that with loved ones - and trusting of a government, indeed a complete parliamentary system, whose members instinctively believe that they know what is best for you. That is not how we roll at El Real Thing.
On reflection we think we prefer the letter F to the letter V because there certainly ain't no (coherent) "F" in Government CoVid strategy. And now that we've giving up on the letter V, the politicians can have this one on us.
