Here's one for you. In last week's Culture section, the Vanguardia printed a piece by Eliot Weinberger. They bill him as "one of the great contemporary essayists in the United States." Now, Mr. Weinberger is a notable translator and expert on Latin American literature. He has written acclaimed poetry. He's also completely insane politically--this guy is beyond mildly paranoid. He needs treatment, therapy, counseling, or maybe just a smack upside the head. And boy, does he hate George Bush. Here are just a few excerpts:

George Bush is the first unelected president of the United States, installed by a right-wing Supreme Court in a sort of judicial coup d'etat. He is the first to actively subvert one of the bases of American democracy: the separation of church and state...

It is the first Administration that has declared a unilateral policy of aggression, a "pax Americana" in which the presence of allies (whether England or Bulgaria) is nice but not necessary; in which international treaties no longer apply to the United States; in which--for the first time in histroy--the nation reserves the right to launch "preventive" attacks, not defensive, against any nation in the world, for any motive it feels like...

It is a government similar to the Reagan era, and its main dedication to helping the rich and ignoring the poor has converted the surplus from the Clinton years...

But most of Bush's legislation, even more than Reagan's--whose policies tended to favor the rich in general--enriches specifically his inner circle, from the petroleum, mining, logging, pharmaceutical, and construction industries...

But above all the United States does not seem like the United States. An atmosphere of militarism and fear, like that of any totalitarian state, pervades everything...

The war in Iraq has been the most extreme manifestation of this new United States and almost a case study in the history of totalitarian techniques. First you create an enemy repeating ceaselessly flagrant lies until the people believe it...in this case, that Iraq was linked to the attacks on the World Trade Center...

This is, to get right down to it, the most terrifying American administration of modern times...democracy is an obstacle for it.

Now, this guy is clearly deluded. He is not hitting on all four cylinders. There's a monkey wrench in the works somewhere. Electroshock might be a good place to start. Or we still do lobotomies over here in Spain; I know a guy who had one. It sure did calm him down. Didn't make him any smarter, but at least he was able to pass "gets along with peer group" after he got his brain lubed.

The question I've got is why the hell the Vanguardia considered this extremist rant, too far out for even the Nation or the LA Times, worthy of publication. Or why they print pieces by Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein and Gabriel Jackson all the time, but they never get anybody from the center, much less the right, to opine or respond.

The only answer I can come up with is that they are biased against the United States and its government, and they want their readers to believe that the highly colored view they present is actually factual. And they succeed quite well. Everybody in Barcelona believes what they say is true. Well, maybe eighty percent of everybody. Just strike up a conversation with a Barcelonese about politics. Odds are good you'll regret it after about two minutes. I'm tired of regretting it, so I don't talk politics with people I don't know. Or with a lot of people I do know.

This is why I know a lot about sports and rock / blues / country music. You've got to have something to talk about, and I don't watch much TV or see too many movies, and you usually can't talk about books because the other person hasn't read any, and I don't give a crap about cars and motorbikes, and nobody else gives a crap about my writing, so I don't talk about that either.

Getting back to the point, though, what you find a lot is Barcelonese opining based on very sketchy and usually wrong information they've picked up filtered through the Spanish media. That's why you can't argue with them. They actually believe that in 1983 there were no Cubans on Grenada, and that in '86 we bombed Libya just to spite them (they'd just voted to stay in NATO), and that America has South-Africa-like apartheid, that sick people are left to die outside hospitals if they can't pay, our diet consists of hamburgers and chewing gum, and that millions of hungry and homeless litter the streets while smug but cowardly middle-class whites with guns hide in their suburban homes. These are things people have actually told me in the past week or so. And there's just no point in saying, "Look, everything you know is wrong."

Besides, a lot of what they know they got from TV or movies or, rarely, books. Just one example: There's a revival of Glengarry Glen Ross at the Teatre Lliure, one of the most important, starring our friend Joel Joan and directed by Alex Rigola. Here's La Vanguardia's review:

"Do we really want to follow in the footsteps toward a sort of American society?" wonders Alex Rigola in the program. And that society is what David Mamet depicts in Glengarry Glen Ross, a drama or tragicomedy set in the world of real estate based on this idea: "What you have is what you're worth / And that's the pure and cruel truth" (lyrics to a reggae song by Ska-P), and for this case "What you sell is what you're worth". Mamet wrote the play in 1984 with Reagan's neoliberal (sic; foo-foo European for capitalist) agenda going full blast and the consequent reduction of the welfare state. I'm afraid, Mr. Rigola, that the exportation of triumphant neoliberalism has been a complete success, thanks to Aznar, in our country, so the path is already well-beaten. Except for the distance and the manners, the commercial world, and especially that of real estate, is a perfect metaphor for the law of the jungle: only the strongest survive. And although the tactics the salesmen use have changed, the spirit of the play is still completely contemporary, since the new economy understands nothing about humanistic questions.

Yep, that's what America's like: a cutthroat, ruthless, dog-eat-dog world where everybody's only interested in money and cares nothing about humanistic questions. David Mamet certainly captured everyday life in America. Everybody I know back in Kansas is a sleazy real-estate salesman, except for the ones who are psychopathic serial murderers. And it's too late for Spain, we've already spread it to you!