Here I am, tired as if I had been digging up a trench. All I have been doing is studying for my exams. Sociolinguistics on Wednesday and Literary Criticism on Friday – which has not been much of a success, if I am sincere…-. I am dog tired, plumb-tuckered… And there are two exams left! My mind is still full of data, and I am feeling a bit defeated because of my failure to spot Derrida in my exam on Friday. I really find this man difficult to read. He sounds very scholarly and expert. I mean, when you finally get to understand what the guy is actually saying, you really find it interesting and intelligent, but reading Derrida gives me a headache. I was much more keen on reading Roland Barthes. Above all “Mythologies”. R.B. makes a very clever analysis of society through popular culture such as Hollywood films about the Roman Empire, Pressing-catch or propagandistic photography in politics. It is clever, enlightening and great fun. The article on propagandistic photography is great and while you are reading it, you see what Barthes actually means, as this is daily stuff that you experience in your life whenever the elections time gets close.

It would be great to have elections now in my country. As I witness how people are thrown out of their homes, how no one seems to be able to find a job anymore, how my own boss is drowning in debt, how they make it more and more difficult here for you to create your own company and people apply in other countries, how I may become one of the nearly six millions of unemployed people any minute now, politicians here keep lying and spending money from our taxes we pay and from the E.U. bailout in becoming filthy rich. The same politicians who filled our walls with posters, with photos in which they had that “dreaming-of-an-ideal-future”gaze, or this face-to-face sincere look in their eyes, or that family guy air about them, must be laughing their heads off at us for having put them in such an advantageous position.

The fact is that corruption has always been endemic here. It is very sad that the rules to the game are so dirty that everyone who gets near the power-centre  starts emitting a characteristic stench of putrefaction due to their systematic disregard of the people, of the base of the pyramid of power.