La Vanguardia's line on Zap and the Iraq pullout is that Zap was right when he said that there was no chance that by June 30 for the UN to take over Iraq politically or for the Americans to turn command of their military forces over to the UN or some other organization. Therefore, Zap did the right thing, especially since Spain is now going to line up with Paris and Berlin rather than Washington and London. Carlos Nadal says that Zap is an "open and dialoguing man" who with "the complete right" has "changed the direction of Spanish foreign policy". He adds that the Madrid-Paris-Berlin should elaborate a real foreign policy alternative to America's.

So much for the alliance. See, when your newspapers are saying that Spanish foreign policy has been correctly and appropriately changed in order to oppose the United States, and that your government should and will ally with others in order to provide an alternative to (i.e. sabotage) American policy, and when you yourself set non-negotiable conditions that are clearly prima facie unacceptable before taking the unilateral decision to pull out of a allied military operation, it seems to me that you don't want to be an ally anymore.

If that's true, Zap, if you want to bail out of the Western alliance, just say so, and then don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Spain will likely be treated by Washington with more respect if its government becomes an out-and-out opponent of America rather than a weaselly undependable pseudo-ally, which is what it is right now. Better to be honest, open, and disliked than scorned, laughed at, and disliked, which are the two choices open to Spain regarding its policy toward the US at this point.

The big news today, though, is the Real Madrid-FC Barcelona soccer game tonight. Although Valencia is in first place, tied with Real Madrid at 70 points with five games left, the Madrid-Barca games are the two big events of every Spanish soccer season; it's the biggest rivalry in Spanish sports. What we all have to do is go down to one of the various local bars if we want to see the game, though, because it's on pay-per-view. The bars, completely illegally, show the game on their TV and fill the place with beer drinkers. It's actually kind of fun to go down there, if you can deal with the drunken screaming of idiots who know even less about soccer than I do hollering at top volume "Falta! Penalti!" every time a Barca player kisses the turf. That and drinking warm beer. They always sell out of cold beer by the end of the first half or so.

Anyway, Barcelona is making a serious comeback. They started the season horribly, but since about Christmas they've been winning steadily. They're in third place on 63 points--but if they win tonight (of course therefore Madrid would lose), and if Valencia loses to Athletic Bilbao, which is entirely possible: Athletic's in fifth place and playing at home, and they have a pretty good team--then they'll be four points behind Valencia and Madrid with four games to go. That, my friends, is an end-of-season pennant race; Deportivo de la Coruna seems to have fallen by the wayside and will likely come in fourth.

The lineup will be Valdes, whom I don't particularly like, in goal; a defense of Reiziger, Puyol, Oleguer, and Van Bronckhorst, which has finally stabilized and allows surprisingly few goals; Cocu, Xavi, and Davids in midfield, all of whom are solid team players, Xavi more of an attacking player and Cocu and Davids more defensive; and Luis Enrique, Ronaldinho, and Saviola at forward. Luis Garcia, who normally plays left wing, is out and Luis Enrique, who is over the hill and playing out his last season, will sub him. Notice that Kluivert doesn't get to play anymore. He's gone. I bet he winds up with some mediocre Italian or English team, one of your Middlesbroughs or Brescias. Madrid will play their standard lineup except with Solari in for Ronaldo. I predict a pretty good game. Barca has nothing to lose, and I'm sure they are going to come out at full speed and bombard Madrid's area with every decent ball they get. Madrid, on the other hand, is nervous; they've been slumping lately and their fans are angry. They need a win badly, for psychological reasons, though a tie would probably be enough to knock Barca out of the race for the title, leaving them seven points back with four games to go.

Here's a call for protectionism from the business pages of the Vangua today; it's by Pedro Nueno, in response to what they're calling "delocalization" around here--that is, companies moving high-wage, low-skill factory jobs to places where the wages are lower and the skills are equally low. This is something that's been going on, I dunno, since the enclosure movement in Great Britain at the very least. Probably it's been going on since as soon as the division of labor began.

Anyway, get this. "So while we can still think (and have ideas thanks to God), we workers should not take our jobs lightly and the politicians should not touch anything that works. Just the contrary: they should be sensible and facilitate everything that the industries we still have ask." Boy, if that isn't a petit bourgeois call for the protection of the position their small businesses currently hold, then I've never seen one. "We" workers should work hard and the government should give companies tax breaks and tariffs and subsidies and restrictive anti-competition regulatory laws. Never mind that all this protection comes at the expense of the Spanish consumer, forced to pay higher prices due to the lack of competition on the supply side of the market.

Mr. Nueno's attitude is not uncommon over here, and it shows several traits of Spanish thinking that Americans often find a little strange. One is the idea of the small-company boss as patron of the workers, completely dead in America but still alive over here. The state is also thought of as the workers' protector rather than the people's servant. Second is the curious contradiction between the utter economic conservatism (NOT liberalism / capitalism) of the Spanish people--they want mercantilism, protection, low growth and low risk, above all security--and their professed leftism. If the tradeoff for what they want is delayed innovation, frustrated entrepreneurship, fewer individual opportunities, weaker long-term performance, and a second-rank position in the world, they're willing to pay those prices. Third is the idea that no matter what a public question is, the state should take at least some role in deciding what the response is going to be.

Friday was Sant Jordi, a pleasant holiday here in Catalonia. As you probably know, the "tradition" is that men give women a rose and women give men a book. Some enormous proportion of the books bought in Catalonia every year are bought for Sant Jordi. And the gypsies and homeless people put up flower stands and sell roses all over the city. It's kind of nice. People get out in the streets and there are Catalan flags and roses all over the place.

On Saturday Remei's cousins had the annual reunion out in Cervera; a good time was had by all. We went to this restaurant that's inside the storeroom of an old bakery under the city walls, and the food was excellent this time. (Once they all decided to go to this place in Odena where they served rabbit paella, which half the people wouldn't eat, and this nasty sweet local wine. It was just awful. Another time we went to this dump in Igualada that specialized in deep-fried frozen food, or at least that's what they served us.) Course one was various platters of salt shrimp and steamed mussels in a vinegar sauce, steamed small scallops with olive oil and garlic, xato (pronounced sha-TOH), which is a salad with escarole and salt cod and a spicy peppery sauce called romesco, and roast artichokes and mushrooms with olive oil and black pepper. I wiped out a whole platter of artichokes and mushrooms and let the others eat the mollusks, which kind of gross me out. Simple, excellent quality food. Course two was ternasco, which is more or less a beef rib with a huge chunk of greasy meat on the end, slow-cooked in the oven. (This place's specialty is stuff they cook in their big old oven, of course). As a non-mammal eater, I got escalibada, which is a salad of roast red pepper, eggplant, and onion, roast setas, which are wild mushrooms, and a big old roast potato "al caliu" with garlic and olive oil. Good stuff. Course one came with "vino turbio", a young white wine from Galicia that goes well with seafood. It's called "turbio" because it's not clear. Course two came with a very nice red wine from the Cervera area. I'm no wine expert but this was pretty good stuff. It's made with Tempranillo grapes, the Spanish red standard, and it's hard to go wrong with a good solid Tempranillo wine. Dessert was a cake, which was very mediocre as usual--I don't much like Spanish pastry, it's too dry and too sugary for my taste, and they don't use butter--but the brut cava that accompanied it was good. Coffee and brandy after dinner, of course, and if you'd wanted a cigar you could have had one, though only Tio Jesus did. Get this. Thirty bucks apiece. Everything but the cake top-notch, and the cake was prepared correctly and pleased everyone else; I just don't especially like Spanish cakes.

Also, of course, the family doesn't hassle me about being American or foreign or talking funny Catalan. They hassle me about why we don't have any kids and stuff like that.

I think the best Catalan cooking is the simple kind, with first-class ingredients and tried and true recipes and cooking styles. They've got these fancy places that charge a couple of hundred bucks, like Ferran Adria's restaurant, serving whatever's the latest Nuevo Wavo, and that's fine if you like that and can afford it, but it is hard to go wrong in a down-to-earth real Catalan place.