If you've received an email from an unknown Nigerian sender, it's likely you've been marked for a current version of The Spanish Prisoner con. Don't bite. Delete the message and cease despairing, you're in exalted company.
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Watching the latest instalment of The Borgias the other day, I wondered how many of our lawmakers experience life in a manner akin to Jeremy Iron's Pope Alexander VI. Surrounded by fawning minions (even family members are required to employ the ironic "Your Holiness") how many have more than a passing concept of existence under their rule?
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Life is tough for the up-and-coming pope. Vikram Seth's gargantuan A Suitable Boy1 is definitely small "m" monstrous compared to the monstrosity committed by the Borgia boys to secure their sister's wedded bliss to the equally illegitimate Giovanni Sforza. Being a little short of the ready, the gotta-do-what-you-gotta-do situation of murdering their Turkish houseguest provided a cool 400,000 ducats.
The value in today's money? Put it this way. There was a war to fight and a reluctant groom. How much would an aristocratic you demand to wed the illegitimate child of a despised foreign upstart religious leader rumoured to have failed the minimum requirements2 for his position?
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Similar to today's rulers, Alexander VI wrestled with divided loyalties. Father to his flock and his biological children, he was faced with the usual bunch of fools and ingrates. They talk back, but they grudging obey his orders. To the minimum extent possible.
Unlike Colonel Cathcart of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, who volunteers his squadron for any mission that might interest Newsweek (or was it Life?) and thus propel him into a general's uniform, Alexander's contemporaries acquiesced to less subtle manoeuvring. The Borgia sons could step in and have the most annoying troublemakers poisoned, or otherwise eliminated. Some of Heller's military brass would have approved.
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I quite enjoyed reading Catch-22 after having watched the film. Movie-book comparisons are sometimes disappointing, but in this case, the reading provided additional background to the movie. I loved the movie adaptation, Catch-22 (1970), with its cast of characters I've never forgotten.
Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) who first describes the non-existent "catch". Singer Art Garfunkel in the role of Lt Nately. Jon Voight playing 1st Lt Milo Minderbinder, the amoral black marketer who arranges for the squadron to bomb their own base. Comedian Bob Newhart as the aptly named, but ineptly promoted, Major Major Major Major. I can't remember the actor, but the image of Hungry Joe and the flathatting plane are forever burnt into my retinas.
Legislation tends to be the solution for governments today. Of course the courts, like Cesare Borgia's inept assassins, manage to foul things up with unexpected and unwelcome interpretations.
Don't weep too many crocodile tears for our so-called public servants3. We're the ones jammed between a rock and a hard place.
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1 A monstrous omnibus of a tome that's actually a trilogy. Lata's family search 1950s India for a suitable spouse. Everyone has an opinion, even the bride-to-be. More than a simple soap opera, take it to the seashore and lap it up. I loved it.
2 The Spanish Borjia (Italianized as Borgia) family was rumoured to be Moriscos, or descendents of Spanish Muslims who converted during the Reconquista. This led some contemporaries to ask, "Is the Pope Catholic?" These days, Granada celebrates the end of the Moors in Spain annually in the Alhambra. Its US counterpart is known as Columbus Day.
3 Don't worry if the link's broken. It was just a T-shirt. Only Diamonds are forever.
3 Don't worry if the link's broken. It was just a T-shirt. Only Diamonds are forever.
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Part Deux refers to the rhetoric spewed by the political classes. |
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Take a peek at Charles Cumming's The Spanish Game. British expat and former spy, Alec Milius, doesn't dare return home from Madrid. Paranoid, he knows the CIA's out to get him. MI5 and Six are probably still on the warpath to.
Not that Milius doesn't deserve a bad rap, seeing that he's cheating with his British employer's beautiful Spanish wife. After a Basque kidnapping and torture, it doesn't take much for Milius to agree to cheat on her as well.
In this wheels-within-wheels espionage thriller, who's the reader to trust? And why is Milius suddenly so much in demand? A most enjoyable read.
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Books mentioned
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