Abdication of Juan Carlos, and Accession of "los Príncipes," Don Felipe de Astúrias y su Principesa, la Doña Letizia, announced today

Sometimes the news is all good and makes you want to cry for happy.  If anybody deserves to be king and queen of Spain it's the astonishingly handsome, well qualified, competent, "intachable" Don Felipe (who will reign as Felipe VI) and his lovely, stunningly beautiful, extraordinarily intelligent wife, Doña Letizia.  They are both in their own right remarkable people, devoted to one another and to the welfare of their country.  Let's hope that, for once, the Spanish people, while quietly decapitating all the many hydra heads of Fascism (voting them into oblivion), will grasp the opportunity, offered them as subjects of this profoundly democratic constitutional monarch, to realize all their many distinctive national characters in one civilized, democratic republic, Andalusian, Castillian,  Aragonese, Gallician, Basque, and Catalanese alike.  (Did I forget anybody?)  Don Felipe's own word for a Spanish nation so constituted is "diversa."


¿Did I forget any Autonomous Regions or Cities?  Hah!  Of the former (Autonomous Regions) there are fully 17:  Anadalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Basque country, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile-la Mancha, Castile-Leon, Catalonia, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Madrid, Murcia, Navarre, Region of Valencia; of the latter (Autonomous Cities) there are 2:  Ceuta and Melilla.   Sometime very soon I'm going to get me a geographical history of Spain and spend a week or so reading it.  Do they all have their own dialects and local customs--these regions, and districts and cities and "countries"?  What makes them all Spanish?  At what point does diversity become stiff-necked recalcitrance?  How in the world could you tax them all?  What made them (¿all?) so Gay-friendly?--some of them, I would guess, more, and some of them less so.  The Greek Queen Sofia, soon to be "dowager," we know, is as homophobic as, in all Christian charity, she dares let herself be--and her naughty subjects, at least in the Zarzuela district of Madrid, say that that's about what they'd expect from a Greek Queen.  Indeed, even "la Corte" (¿Doña Letizia?) is at some pains to distance itself from Sofia, almost seeming to shush her--and it appears that only when she gets to far St. Petersburg, among the decorous, "anti-Carthaginian" Russian orthodoxy, schmoozing with the ever-pleasant, ever-polite Medvedev, that she can really let her hair down and say what she wants about "esos exhibicionistas pervertidos."  At any rate, the vast majority (89% at last count) of the Spanish people seem to find Sofia's outspoken homophobia offensive, and presumably make some sort of connection between it and Juan Carlos's appalling propensity for butchering elephants.