Baltasar Porcel is on a roll! He's been to New York, or maybe he's still there. All New York readers, hunt him down and slap him silly. Anyway, he's been writing about his impressions. I've excerpted his columns from Saturday, Monday, and today.

...I must return to New York, where in the United Nations the face of the world is being decided...This does not interest the United States or Bush, a man educated by and a politician paid for by Texan oil, which wants to control the Iraqi deposits, second in the world in production. And with another plan hiding behind that: the oil won't last, while the water of the great rivers that cross Iraq is eternal and even more necessary so the Middle East can develop: whoever controls it rules.

I've spoken with two personalities who do not count among those who will decide the war, but do among those who are consulted about its probability. And they think we are facing an unavoidable warlike resolution if Saddam doesn't surrender or go, which he won't do. And they explain something mediatically key: CNN, specialized in sensationalism, is suffering a serious economic crisis which can only be palliated by war, which it has been preaching for more than a year...

Porcel then tells us he doesn't like New York except for its skyscrapers, that he ate badly as usual except in an Italian restaurant full of Mafiosos, that he went to Chinatown...

...among thousands of Chinese families, without any mixed couples visible. It's not in vain that Chinatown, which goes back to 1870, is the most numerous nucleus of this race outside China. How many people are there, and how many are illegal, in these shacks, basements, shops, multiplied in the dirty alleyways, that often inside are revealed as elaborate, mysterious, and wealthy mansions. Besides, one can buy quality fish, fruit, meat, vegetables, at reasonable prices; it's the only New York market not controlled by the Mafia, or that's run by the Chinese Mafia: the real sovereignty of Chinatown is greater than that of the Catalan statutory autonomy.

I also approach, in Williamsburg, the orthodox Jewish neighborhood, another hermetic and endogamic microcosmos with a rigid exterior. But its antennas are open to the entire world: does it constitute the greatest existent concentration of economic power per square meter? New York is, besides startling for visitors, the capital of Jewish power. Saddam Hussein will have a bad time.

...in the great bookstores of New York or in the airport there are the same books, though in different quantities. And with a particularity: they've all been written by American authors, whether a historical study, a tourist guide, or a fish-factory manual. Translations are only seen in the literary section: Isabel Allende, Proust, you can conut them on the fingers of one hand. The European bookstore, full of translations from many languages, one of the most absorbing spaces that exist, is impossible here: the country lives enclosed and euphorized within itself. It's not strange, then, that Bush, when he acceded to the presidency, had not traveled nor owned a passport, that mass blind psychoses happen, and that its foreign policy is as arrogant as it is ignorant.

Comments: 1) I don't know what bookstores Baltasar went to. Good ones do exist. Even in New York. 2) Mass blind psychoses? Is this, like, say, when Americans all got mad because three thousand of us got murdered at once? 3) He certainly has a vibrant imagination. 4) It's not the oil, it's the water! You heard it from Baltasar first. 5) The war is a CNN plot. You heard it from Baltasar's informants first. 6) The Orthodox Jews who live in Williamsburg are mysteriously wealthy and powerful...hey, Baltasar, you failed to footnote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for that one. You're busted for plagiarism.