Kiss your career good-bye, muchacho

Never since that little incident at Gethsemane has a kiss caused such an upheaval.

Riotous demonstrations, ringing protests, passions running wild, even the odd hunger strike – Spain is aflame. It’s all for a worthy cause: the kiss Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish Football Federation, planted on the lips of Jenni Hermoso, one of the players who had just won the women’s World Cup.

Once the final whistle sounded, señor Rubiales was so overcome with triumphant emotion that he rushed to the players, and Hermoso was the first one he reached.

The two embraced passionately, and Hermoso proved that her weight training hadn’t gone to waste by lifting Rubiales off the ground in her muscular and heavily tattooed arms. But then, instead of decorously kissing the player on the cheek, Rubiales went straight to her lips. Caramba!

Now, Rubiales is obviously a hotblooded Spanish man who expresses joy both genuinely and genitally. For example, it has been pointed out that immediately before that incident he had grabbed his crotch in the royal box, sitting alongside Queen Letizia and her 16-year-old daughter Infanta Sofia.

However, outrageous as that gesture might have been, at least he grabbed his own crotch, not that of Queen Letizia or Infanta Sofia. But the lips he so brazenly kissed belonged not to him but to Jenni Hermoso and, according to modern sensibilities, that act constituted sexual assault – at least. Let me tell you, Rubiales won’t forget that osculation in a hurry.

By way of a historical aside, as the march of victorious modernity gathered pace in the second half of the 19^th century, the Catholic Church in Spain was doing its best to block it at the country’s borders.

Various governments went along with that reaction, which produced a number of revolutions evenly spaced every few years on the time scale.

The Church suffered heavy casualties, with many priests, monks and nuns killed, and many religious buildings destroyed. The Civil War that broke out in 1936 was the bloodiest and best known of such outbursts, but far from the only one.

The side that preferred to kill communists rather than Catholics won that war, and Spain managed to keep progress at bay for another 40 years or so. But once Franco died in 1975, progress broke banks and flooded Spain. Still, there was a lot of ground to cover and a lot of time to make up.

Hence Spain hasn’t often advanced in step with the aforementioned march. At times, she lagged behind the progressive throng, at other times she outpaced it.

For example, in 2008 the Spanish parliament passed a resolution granting human rights to apes. The apes currently residing in Spain thenceforth have enjoyed the legal rights to life, liberty, freedom from torture — and presumably to the pursuit of bananas.

But some other manifestations of progress were slower in coming. The MeToo movement, for example, waited for a widely publicised precedent to come out in force. Meanwhile, it was rather sluggish, with Spanish men stubbornly reminding the world that the word ‘macho’ is of Spanish origin.

Anyway, how do you say MeToo in Spanish? Do you leave it in English or translate it as something like YoTambién? The time to decide is now, for that frisky reprobate Rubiales got the ball rolling.

Hermoso, picking up the lingo as she went along, said the kiss wasn’t consensual and she felt “vulnerable and the victim of an aggression”. The term ‘sexual assault’ began to scream in large bold type off the front pages of newspapers.

Though Rubiales has so far refused to heed the thunderous demands that he quit, he has been suspended by FIFA, which probably makes his position untenable. And the sack isn’t the worst trouble he is facing.

Spain’s top criminal court has opened a preliminary investigation to establish which rubric Rubiales’s transgression fell under. Sexual assault? Rape? Attempted murder? Hell hath no fury like a woman kissed without prior and duly notarised written consent.

The regional presidents of the Spanish FA joined the battle by issuing a statement saying: “We will urge the corresponding bodies to carry out a deep and imminent organic restructuring in strategic positions of the Federation to give way to a new stage of management in Spanish football.”

However, Rubiales still hasn’t run out of fight, and neither has his family. One of his cousins said that, though Rubiales “made a mistake”, he “has a good heart”. This is what defence attorneys usually say in their appeal to the jury at a murder trial.

And Rubiales’s aged mother has locked herself in the local church and started an “indefinite, day and night” hunger strike, to continue until “justice is served”. I do hope she doesn’t suffer the fate of Bobby Sands, the IRA terrorist who in 1981 starved himself to death in prison.

That death also has a football connection, invoked as it is whenever Glasgow Rangers (a Protestant team) play Glasgow Celtics (Catholic). The Rangers fans like to sing, to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain: “Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands? Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands? Would you like a chicken supper, you filthy Fenian fucker, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?”

I wonder if a similar vocal masterpiece will be created by Spanish feminists and, if so, which tune they’d use. La Cucaracha? Meanwhile they are out in force, marching through the streets of Madrid and bringing the city to a standstill.

As a participant in one such demonstration, I can assure you Madrid won’t come back to normal soon. When the Spanish get going, there is no stopping them.

(In case you are wondering, Penelope and I had a rather liquid lunch in the Salamanca area of Madrid. When we came out, we found ourselves in the midst of a huge crowd marching, waving flags and shouting. Having made inquiries, we found out the occasion was the recent release of several ETA terrorists from prison. Hence I felt duty-bound to join in and shout things like “No más concesiones a ETA! Viva España!” However, my fellow demonstrators began to look at us askance, suspecting a touch of mockery in my badly accented enthusiasm. Penelope dragged me away in the nick of time.)

This whole commotion will definitely rate a longish footnote in the book yet to be written, with the provisional title of A Chronicle of a World Gone Mad.

In case my longish digressions have distracted you from the main point, the whole county is up in arms over a kiss. Verily I say unto you, when it comes to wounded modern sensibilities a kiss isn’t just a kiss. It’s a declaration of war, and one has to expect the shooting to start at any moment.