| Inside Europe: Iberian Notes |
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News, politics, culture, history, languages, all live from Barcelona by John. Our focuses are Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain.
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"The Sexy Scourgers of Spanish Socialism" - Jessica Harbour
"The King of the Spanish Bloggers" - Kaleboel "A wanker...an expat loser." - Anonymous "Occasionally downright Fascist but always readable" - The Entertainer Online Saturday, November 30, 2002
This was a good question from the Comments section, and I thought it deserved a good answer, so here it is.
Just a thought, but why didn't the victorious allies get rid of that cunt Franco at the end of the war? Des | Email | 11.25.02 - 8:55 pm -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- During the war, Franco's personal sympathies were with the Axis. However, he managed to avoid openly committing himself to their side (in part he got lucky; he made major demands on Hitler in 1940 in exchange for joining the Axis, which Hitler refused. If Hitler had met those demands Franco would have entered the war and gone down for sure) and by '44 Churchill was openly flirting with Franco, knowing the war was won and not wanting to make it any longer by having to fight Spain, too. Using military force to overthrow Franco was never on the Allies' menu. Anyway, on June 19, 1945, at the San Francisco Conference, the United Nations (which was the reincarnation of the Allied Powers) voted unanimously to exclude Franco's Spain. Then, at the Potsdam Conference later that summer, Stalin proposed that everyone break all relations with Spain, a worldwide total boycott, and that the Allies should aid the "democratic opposition" within Spain; Truman was in favor, though he feared another civil war, but Churchill wasn't. (This might be the last time the Americans and Soviets ever agreed on anything.) Churchill pointed out, first, that Britain had strong trade links with Spain and the last thing anybody needed in Britain in 1945 was more people out of work due to a trade cutoff. He also said that "interference in the internal affairs of other states was contrary to the United Nations Charter." (Paul Preston, Franco, p.540; Chapter XXI in general). So Churchill made the same argument against getting rid of Franco that the anti-war people are making against getting rid of Saddam, who, to use your terminology, is an even bigger cunt than Franco was. Now, I'm not saying Franco wasn't a right cunt in many ways, but Saddam manages to out-cunt him, in my opinion. In the middle of Potsdam, Churchill lost a general election to Clement Attlee, who became Prime Minister; Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did not change British policy toward Spain. Anyway, the decision made at Potsdam was to definitely exclude Spain from the UN, but not to use economic and other diplomatic sanctions to try to force Franco out. Britain won out over the Soviets and Americans. Bevin washed Britain's hands when he said to the Commons on 20 August 1945, "The question of the regime in Spain is one for the Spanish people to decide." Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Council of Ministers, "sent a secret message to Franco to the effect that he would resist left-wing pressure and would maintain diplomatic relations with him" sometime in summer 1945; French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault was also against action against Franco. In January 1946, Dean Acheson, American Undersecretary of State, "suggested a joint declaration from France, the United States, and Britain that for Spain to be accepted into the international community, the Spanish people would have to remove Franco and set up a caretaker government to organize elections." But by then Washington was coming around to London's position, and Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, pointed out the danger of a Communist takeover in Spain to Acheson. "American pressure diminished...British policy in fact aimed at restraining the French and the Americans from taking precipitate action against Franco." (p.552) On 26 February, a month after De Gaulle's resignation, the French government closed the frontier with Spain and broke off economic relations after Franco executed ten left-wing guerrillas. France wanted to bring the question of a total economic blockade of Spain to the UN Security Council, but both London and Washington did not want to give the Soviets a chance to influence anything. On 4 March Paris, Washington, and London released the Tripartite Declaration, in which they called Franco a right cunt but said "There is no intention of interfering in the internal afairs of Spain." Franco privately accused Truman of being a Mason, which, of all things, he really was. It was no secret; it's in his autobiography. Then on 5 March Churchill made the "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, and it was all over. Friday, November 29, 2002
Good news. I went to see my shrink today with the most recent blood analysis they did on me in hand. There's no problem with the cocktail of pills I'm taking. I have to go on a healthy diet, which I don't mind doing; I've been surviving on a pizza-and-tangerine based diet and it's about time that I started eating lentils and garbanzos and rice and salads and vegetables and fruits and no eggs or dairy products or stuff like that. I actually like healthy food, I'm just too lazy and incompetent to make it every day. That's going to have to change. I need to start getting more exercise, too. I take a twenty-minute walk every morning, but I'm going to get my bike fixed so I can ride it at least on the weekends. That ought to be enough exercise, a 20-minute walk every day and two or three one-hour bike rides a week. I'm allowed to drink beer in moderation (no more wine; bummer) and, get this, I don't have to quit smoking. Cigarettes or cannabis. I'm under doctor's orders NOT to quit smoking because it would cause me too much stress. I love Spain. No wonder they live longer on average than us Americans. Your doctor tells you to eat right, exercise, relax, and avoid stress. And you can smoke whatever you want.
Hey, people, you know, the Comments section down there under each post is for you to make comments. I especially like questions. If I don't know the answer I'll make something up. Also, should you want to e-mail me, the address is crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.
Thursday, November 28, 2002
Check out Atlético Rules, who has a nice post on celebrating Thanksgiving in Spain. I don't celebrate it, because I don't like holidays. Most Americans over here do something, though. I remember a particularly eventful Thanksgiving a few years ago at our friend Jane's place. Cinderella Bloggerfeller has pulled off a hilarious spoof of the "delinking" issue that is suddenly all over Blogistan. He's also been adding to the Axis of Porcel, which should have a rapidly expanding readership after this inspired publicity stunt. And Sasha Castel and Andrew Ian Dodge have something to say, so y'all ought to go on over there and check it out. Merde in France, which you ought to be reading--it's even good French practice, since it's bilingual--links to Dissident Frogman and Sofia Sideshow, the first belonging to a rather non-traditional Frenchman and the second to an American who is apparently a movie producer. The Jedman has something growing in his belly button.
Here's a site, called the Expatriate Café, which is aimed at people living or planning to live in Spain. It doesn't appear to have a blogmeister, but is open to all posters, and some people post there a lot. I'm an Old Barcelona Hand so I already know most of this stuff, but it might be of interest to some of you. The site is rather full of youthful exuberance, and I advise anyone influenced to do something based on what he read there to check with me first. There are, unfortunately, people looking to exploit new arrivals, and I noticed a couple of them as posters to this site. (Check out Bob, who'll have $100,000 in five years because of a lawsuit, who is looking for investors in a disco-bar. I wonder if the laws regarding interstate fraud would allow the Attorney General to bust Bob, as his fraudulent ass is hanging out in all fifty states through the Net.) The great majority of the posts look legit, but you should beware of anyone who asks you for a significant amount of money no matter under what guise. I'm exaggerating a little; if you see somebody selling, say, hams over the Net, and you decide you want to buy one, that's perfectly reasonable, but "business opportunities" are clearly something very different, and anything that sounds too good to be true is.
Christopher Hitchens, a writer whom I normally like despite disagreeing with him 90% of the time, has had a falling-out with his friends on the Left over the War against Terrorism. Hitch is for it and almost all his other pals are against it. The situation has become so tragic that Hitch has had to leave the American left-wing rag The Nation; this means there is now no longer any possible reason I might have to read The Nation. He's got two posts up in Slate, one on anti-Americanism and another that I don't agree with but will link to out of fairness on Henry Kissinger; it wouldn't be fair to claim Hitch as a complete convert to the Right. Not yet. I bet he's well on the way, though, just as I figure that Orwell, his hero, if he'd lived, would have come over to the Right on economic and international issues. Orwell was too anti-totalitarian to have sided with the Russians in the Cold War, as we know from his list for the British government and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As for economics, a lot of intelligent Brits of Orwell's age were some kind of radical Socialist. They'd grown up and lived their young adulthood in Britain between 1914 and 1945, an especially rough span of years to be British. No wonder they were pissed off at the system in general. Everyone was poor, nothing worked, and it always seemed like another war was right around the corner. The most intelligent of that lot figured out by about 1956 that capitalism could be combined with a lot of social-democratic rhetoric and some social-democratic action (though most didn't come all the way over to capitalism), and that Soviet Russia was definitely an evil to be resisted. If they didn't figure that out after Hungary in 1956, they weren't smart enough to ever figure it out. Orwell would have been one of those who was smart enough to figure it out. By '56 he'd have become a hawkish supporter of Labour.
In soccer news, last night Barcelona beat Bayer Leverkusen away, 1-2. Van Gaal started a rough, defensive team with only one forward, Kluivert, in what looked like a slightly confused 4-5-1. (Four defensemen, five midfielders, one forward.)Near the end of the first half Bayer scored on a header off a corner kick. At halftime Van Gaal pulled out Mendieta, who needs a benching, and defensive midfielder Gabri, and put in Riquelme and Saviola, changing to a 4-3-3 with Riquelme playing behind Saviola and Kluivert and feeding them passes. Saviola almost immediately stole the ball and ran a give-and-go with Riquelme; Savi blasted the ball into the goal from close range. One-one. Then they fouled Kluivert in the area and Riquelme blew the penalty kick. Barça kept attacking and they put in Overmars for Motta, making the alignment even more offensive, really a 4-2-4. This was very exciting football, with two chances for Savi, one for Riquelme, and a header by Kluivert off a corner, with Bayer defending all-out but one step behind the Barça players. Then, with only a couple of minutes left, Riquelme fed Kluivert in the area, who unselfishly fed Overmars, who crossed up the goalie and drove the ball to the far post. One-two. Barça has won its last seven European games, in contrast with their extrememly mediocre performance in the Spanish League.
In Barça's Group A, it's Inter Milan and Barça with three points each and Bayer and Newcastle zero. In Group B, Valencia tied Ajax last night, 1-1; the standings are Arsenal 3, Ajax and Valencia 1, AS Roma 0. Group C: Borussia Dortmund and AC Milan 3, Real Madrid and Lokomotiv Moscow 0. Group D: Manchester U 3, Deportivo and Juventus 1, Basel 0. The fallout from the fans throwing crap on the field last Saturday in FC Barcelona's Camp Nou is hitting the fan. Some joker threw a (roasted) piglet's head at Madrid player Luis Figo. Other possibly dangerous stuff, like mobile phones and a whiskey bottle, was also thrown. You need to remember, as the National Geographic survey proved, not all Europeans know too much about geography. The most that most people in Europe know about Barcelona is the soccer team, which, until now, was highly respected in the rest of Europe. (OK, people remember the Olympics, too. Gaudí is known among those who can read.) This episode has not made either the team or the city look too good. The German papers headlined, "Achtung! The pig throwers are coming!" over their stories about Barça's visit to Leverkusen. That is not precisely the image the city fathers wish to promote. Get this, one of the Barça executives commented regarding the piglet's head, "It's a setup by the Madrid papers. Here in Catalonia we don't eat roast piglet." (It wasn't a setup. It really happened; the TV footage shows it.) Van Gaal also had a good quote when some German reporter asked him how his team was reacting to the vilification of everything regarding the Barça by the German press: "I don't think my players read the Bild am Sonntag."
In war news, the Vanguardia is reporting that the American plans for Iraq include a small, fast invasion aimed at paralyzing the Iraqi state's communication channels and energy supplies. There are some 30,000 soldiers now in position to be used and there are 45,000 more who can be deployed in the area within a few days. There are more than 1000 tanks and thousands of tons of supplies at American facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, and Diego Garcia, ready to be used. Hundreds of land-based planes are stationed in the area, and there are two carrier groups on the scene, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington. Three more are on the way: the Constellation, Kitty Hawk, and Harry Truman. Each carrier group can attack 700 targets a day, four times as many as in Gulf War I. CIA operatives have supposedly already infiltrated northern Iraq, and, we wouldn't believe this if they hadn't cited Time magazine, Israeli units have already swept Iraq's western desert looking for Scud launch bases. Meanwhile, should Iraq fire at any British or American aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, as they have the bad habit of doing, there will be retaliation--not just the destruction of antiaircraft batteries and radar installations, but also of command and communications centers and the Iraqi fiber-optic network.
This is overwhelming force. Saddam's government and army will fold up like a house of cards when it is turned loose. We just hope they get him before he can gas or infect our guys, which he will undoubtedly do if he gets the chance, since he knows the only outcome of this is his head on the end of a pike no matter whether he uses bio-chem weapons, which he certainly possesses, or not. There should be no retaliation by Allied forces with bio-chem or nuclear weapons. We'll win anyway, even without them, and it would be silly as well as inhumane to use that stuff on troops who are only a day or two away from surrendering anyway, not to mention any unfortunate civilians in the area. And how much do you want to bet they're planning some sort of Skorzeny-rescuing-Mussolini caper, ready to jump in there and grab Saddam by surprise? If they could somehow pull that off it would save a lot of lives.
Said Susan Sontag in Madrid, as quoted in yesterday's Vanguardia: "I've always been a little ashamed to be American." (I've always been a little ashamed that you're American, too. You know, if you're ashamed of it, you could easily emigrate to a country you could feel proud of. I hear there are opportunities for sugar-cane choppers in Cuba.) "This is something that comes from long before 9-11 and Bush." (Let me get this straight. 9-11 makes you embarrassed to be American?) "It's a good thing to feel uncomfortable." (Perhaps this is why Ms. Sontag enjoys autoflagellation so much.) "Now there's no political debate there." (Gee, I looked at today's Washington Post and Fox News and it looked to me like there was plenty of political debate.) "We have only one party there, the Republicans, because the Democratic opposition doesn't exist." (Doesn't exist? What party do the Baghdad Three, Maxine Waters, and Terry McAuliffe belong to, not to mention Billy "White Stain" Clinton and Al Gore? And whose fault is it that they keep losing elections? America is a democratic republic, remember, and if the Dems are out of power, it's because the people put them there.) "They're building a new, horrible imperialism." (You call it what you want, Susie. I think "national security" is a better term, myself.) "A lot of people are against this, but they have no voice or political representation." (Remember, Susie, we've had a couple of elections in the last two years, and a handful of smart people like you torpedoed Al Gore in 2000 because he wasn't quite nutty enough for you. You had to go bolt the party and vote for Nader. Now, I'm thrilled that you did, because you took enough of the Democrat vote to put Bush in. It was the Left, using its voice and political representation, that got Bush elected. As for your European pals, the French Left is so dumb, even dumber than the American Left, that they went out and did the same thing a couple of years later by wasting their votes on assorted Trotskyites and got their man Jospin massacred in the first round.) "Since 9-11 I've received death threats, in writing and by telephone. But as long as they don't shoot me, it doesn't bother me." (Susie, you're so brave and heroic. Look, you are so insignificant in the global scheme of things that it's not worth anybody's while to take the necessary risks involved to kill you. If you are assassinated, I will personally eat The Road to Serfdom at high noon in the Plaza Sant Jaume with all-i-oli and salsa brava.)
Here in Spain we not only have the ETA, we've also got a minor-league terrorist gang called the GRAPO. They're not nationalists like the ETA, though ETA also proclaims itself to be Marxist; they're extreme leftists, like the Baader-Meinhoffs or the Red Brigades. The last really bad thing they did was a couple of years ago when they robbed an armored car in Galicia and a couple of security guards, I believe, were killed in the shootout. Their most famous recent crime was the kidnapping of prominent Zaragoza businessman Publio Cordón a few years back; the GRAPO claims that they got the ransom money and turned Cordón loose. They've been quite insistent about it over the years, but Cordón has never turned up. I'm sure they didn't kill him; killing a kidnap victim after you've received the ransom money is very bad business. The most popular theory is that Cordón died on them in captivity of a heart attack or something along those lines. Another hypothesis is that Cordón took the opportunity to disappear after he was set free and is now living it up in Rio or Bangkok.
Anyway, the GRAPO is just about finished and a good solid nail was driven into its coffin by the Guardia Civil, who busted seven of its leaders on Tuesday in Madrid. Among the arrested were two of the three members of the command troika and several smaller fish in the propaganda, finance, and communications organizations. Good. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. One of the arrestees, María Carmen López Anguita, was released from prison in 1999. She had been sentenced to 385 years in 1979 for the murder of eight people in a Madrid coffee shop. Two of the other arrestees have also done serious time. Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Here's a good piece from National Review on what college international relations textbooks are teaching about terrorism these days. If you want to read a real right-wing American hawk, check out this article by Victor Davis Hanson. And here's Jonah Goldberg's Thanksgiving column, which he had the gall to reprint from last year.
For some insane bullshit regarding the ETA check this out. Check out the rest of the site, too. These people are nuts. I hope they're too insignificant to be dangerous.
The Vanguardia has a table on the sources of petroleum pollution in the oceans. In thousands of tons of petroleum and its derivatives spilled into the oceans per year, these are the six biggest sources:
Sewers (urban and industrial waste): 1,343. Ship maintenance (cleaning, etc.): 466. Atmospheric emissions (carried by rain to the sea): 340. Natural sources (undersea geological releases): 229. Tanker accidents: 126. Oil drilling platforms (maintenance and accidental spills): 51. What the chart shows is that tanker spills have a disastrous effect but only in small, specific places. The best thing that can be done to protect the environment in general from petroleum pollution is to build water treatment plants and hazardous waste disposal sites and to stop dumping the stuff straight from the sewers into the ocean. This kind of pollution is concentrated in poor countries, since the rich ones have already built the necessary facilities. Barcelona has barely started on its water treatment plants; they've built a small one on the Llobregat south of town, but they have to build another to take care of all the crap from the Barcelona suburbs out there. As for the Besós north of town, they're building a big plant right now which will go into operation within a couple of years. But, right now, of the crap that Catalonia dumps into the Mediterranean, only about a fourth of it is treated; this hasn't been permitted in America since the Seventies. The other thing that really needs to be done is some enforcement of the international maritime standards on when and where you can clean the bilge out of your ship. Again, this kind of pollution tends to be concentrated in the Third World--the Equatorial Guinea harbor police, say, probably aren't nearly as efficient, or existent, as those in Copenhagen. After that, doing things to reduce emissions into the atmosphere, like mandating unleaded gas and getting cars with primitive, i.e. pre-Nineties in America, emissions systems off the road is important not only for air quality but for water quality, too. If I were to put my anti-pollution money where my mouth is, the first thing I'd do is get rid of my 1988 Renault and buy a new car with a catalytic converter. (The Spanish government runs a successful plan every few years to get old hunks of junk off the road, giving you a big tax break if you buy a new car and junk one that is more than, say, ten years old. They also have a strict vehicle-inspection program, and crappy old cars just don't pass it. We applaud both measures.) The second thing I'd do is demand that my taxes be raised in order to build bigger, better water treatment plants so that my poo will no longer just float on out to the Mediterranean. Well, I'm all for spending lots of my tax money on water treatment plants. That should be a major governmental priority. I'm just against spending it on some of the other dumb stuff they currently spend it on--not so much the conservative central government, which has balanced its budget three years in a row, but the Catalanist regional and Socialist municipal governments, neither of whom even bother to pretend not to be lavishly spending our money on toys.
Note on American sports in Spain: Basketball is very popular. The Spanish league is one of the two or three best in Europe, and many former NBA players play over here. The Catalans are very proud of their homeboy Pau Gasol, who plays for Memphis in the NBA. The Spaniards just don't get the concept of baseball, perhaps justifiably. As for American football, the Barcelona Dragons of NFL Europe are not precisely a hot ticket. A common Spanish complaint is that it's exciting when there's a nice pass or a good tackle or a long runback, but the game is just too slow and has too many interruptions.
What I'd do to get rid of all the damn interruptions is to set up a very simple rule: Allow no substitutions during a series of downs and allow only thirty seconds between plays. Substitutions during a series could only be made if a player was injured, and that player couldn't return to the game. This would reduce the time between plays and would force the team to always have a player who could kick on the field, since you wouldn't be allowed to bring in specialist kickers and punters. The all-around player would have a big advantage over the specialist; you'd want decathletes instead of sprinters and weightlifters. You wouldn't see nickel backs or designated pass-rushers or third-down backs or deep snappers or quarterbacks who can't do anything but throw. Teams would go for it more often on fourth down and a 40-yarder would become a long field goal again. If you proceeded to get rid of TV timeouts, allow the same 30 seconds for a change of possession as for any other break between plays, get rid of the two-minute warning, get rid of video replays, and cut rosters to 40 players to force everyone on the team to be able to play both ways and in several positions, that should bring the game down to a little over two hours and make it a lot more exciting, much more like the glory days of the late fifties and early sixties that old-time fans remember as the best years of the NFL. As for TV commercials, there would be a lot fewer, sure; that would make them more valuable so the networks could charge more for each one--and if the game became even more popular because it was faster and more exciting, the ad spaces would cost advertisers that much more. Will they do this? Naah.
Spanish Cannabis Slang:
hashish: chocolate, costo, grifa. marijuana: maría, hierba. a joint: un porro, un canuto, un petardo. a hit: una calada. stoned: fumado, colocado. a stoner: un fumeta. to light (a cigarette or a joint): petar. to roll (a joint): liar. La Ley del Fumeta: El que lo lia lo peta. The Smoker's Law: The guy who rolls it lights it.
I felt like getting out of the house last night so I went down to Miguel's bar downtown. It's sort of like a speakeasy--it doesn't have a sign, you have to push a button outside that lights up a bulb inside, so they know to let you in. It's all stone inside, what used to be the stable and the basement storage rooms of a large fifteenth-century house. The effect is kind of like that of an opium den with heavy metal on the stereo. It's not like an exclusive place or anything; I've never seen anyone turned away, but you do have to know where it is. Miguel sells, uh, herbacious and other organic substances. He has a code that I think is more of a joke than anything else; you ask for, say, a twenty-five euro ticket to the Al Green concert. This will get you six or seven grams, which is a pretty good deal. You can also ask for tickets to James Brown or Barry White. I don't do Barry White. It's a lot easier to get James Brown around here, since we're so close to Morocco. The Rif is the world's number one producer of hashish, and smoking hash is really very traditional among those social classes along the margin of respectability in Spain. People used to pick up the habit doing military service in old Spanish Morocco, the Spanish Sahara, Ceuta, and Melilla. Al Green is so much more bulky than James Brown that they don't ship Al in from Morocco--it's all locally-grown. When you can find Al, which isn't always, it's available at a better price-per-puff than James since it only passes through one or two hands between the grower and the seller. But you can always find James at reasonable prices. The supply is guaranteed.
Miguel's place is interesting because not only is it an emporium for organic substances, but it's a regular bar that people come to for regular bar reasons. There wasn't much business last night, so I sat down with Miguel, this guy Lluís, and this Dominican guy named Mike who lived in New York for a few years. He likes me because he can speak English with me--he's justifiably proud of his good English, and I understand his English better than his Spanish anyway because his Dominican accent is so thick. Dominicans drop word-final S, among other consonants, and they don't distinguish between the Y and LL; both sound like an English ZH. Mike pronounces the name Lluís "zhoo-EE", while a Catalan would say something like "lyoo-EES". We engaged in mild substance abuse and watched the soccer on TV--Milan beat Real Madrid in Champions' League play, 1-0, and Deportivo tied Juventus 2-2. Both games were very good, and in deference to this blog's 75% American readership, I shall speak of soccer no more today, except for this TV note: All Champions' League games on the same day are played simultaneously, so they show one game live on the main Televisión Española channel, TV1, and don't tell you anything about the other one. Then, when the live game is over, you switch over to TV2 and they show the other game as if it were live, and since you don't know the final score, it might as well be. This is why, when Miguel let somebody into the bar during the second game, the first thing he said was "SSSHHHHTTTT!" just in case the guy was going to spill the beans. It's a great, compressed, three-and-a-half hour sports extravaganza, the best teams with the finest players in the biggest stadiums with the loudest fans, and you can see two whole games in the time it takes you to watch just one NFL game.
Here's the first paragraph of a piece by Miguel Ángel Aguilar from today's Vanguardia. Aguilar is not an idiotarian, though I've never found him too interesting in general. Anyway, check out what he's got to say.
Some American journalists are running around Europe digging into the environmental level of anti-Americanism. This search in Spain is completely useless. Here anti-American feeling died fifteen years ago. During decades it fed on two sources. The first, the defeat of 1898 in a war touched off by the falsehood of (American accusations of Spanish guilt in the sinking of) the Maine, which was perpetrated through the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a true man-before-his-time. Since then, all wars have been preceded by the necessary media preparation, destined to promote warlike ardor, spread hate, and foster antagonism. The second, the support provided by the United States to General Franco. The Americans say because of the necessities of the Cold War. But there is a contrast: in so many European countries the Americans were liberators from the Nazi-Fascist yoke, while here they appeared as a support for a dictatorship that without them and the agreement of the Holy See would have lacked the necessary oxygen to survive. Aguilar's point about the Spanish-American War is dead on. That was, realistically, a naked American power grab; the only possible excuses are the fact that other countries at the time were even more rapacious in their search for colonies and influence and by the fact that the Americans treated their colonized peoples better than anyone except the British. Aguilar, I think, is mistaken about the Americans and Franco. Franco had been in power by 1953 for fourteen years and he had no serious opposition within Spain. The Americans had tried being unfriendly to Franco between 1945 and 1953--Truman hated Franco and America refused to have anything to do with the Spanish government during that time. For example, America vetoed Spain's application to join the UN in 1946. Spain was not admitted to the original Marshall Plan. But a civil war was raging in Greece between the Communists and the Western-backed anti-Communists, and the Russians had just finished their own power grab in Eastern Europe, culminating in the 1948 coup in democratic Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Airlift. Then the Russians tested an atomic bomb and Franco began looking not so awful. When Eisenhower became President in 1953, replacing Truman, the last obstacle to a Hispano-American rapprochement was gone; Churchill had become British Prime Minister again the year before and he, too, was in favor of an aperture to Franco. The deal was made that same year: America would get bases in Spain and Spain would get American economic aid. The international acceptance of Spain coincided, probably not randomly, with the softening of the Franco regime. In 1950 Spain was desperately poor, internationally isolated, brutally governed, and dependent upon Argentina's Perón for food shipments. In 1960 things were clearly looking up. Spain was more prosperous than before, in touch with the modern world, and Spaniards could pretty much do what they wanted except express themselves politically in public. Not a great situation, but better than before, and by 1970 democracy was clearly on the horizon. Anyway, Franco would not have been overthrown by the Spaniards themselves, and American aid didn't change that; Franco had already been in power for fourteen years in 1953 with no serious attempts at removing him, and the choices for America were 1) hold your nose and use Franco as an ally against the Russians, or 2) maintain Franco as an enemy and hold the moral high ground. There are good arguments for both possible choices, but everybody needs to accept that choice 3) get rid of Franco was not on the menu, unless the Spaniards did it themselves. And that they didn't do. Many Spaniards, like Aguilar, blame America for Franco's long dictatorship; they might do better to look in the mirror. Paul Hollander says that there are four causes of European anti-Americanism: historical grievances, Marxism, fear of the cultural threat, and nationalism. Aguilar is correct when he says that Spain's historical grievances against America are mostly forgotten in Spain today. That's largely true. If they're not completely forgotten, they're no longer deeply felt. As far as historical grievances go, the Spaniard-on-the-street is more likely to be anti-British (over Gibraltar) than anti-American. He is, however, obviously wrong on the other three counts, as our recent series of translations and dissections should demonstrate.
The French cops have done it again. They made eleven arrests in the Paris suburbs over the weekend of people affiliated with Al Qaeda, including Slimane Jalfoui, an Algerian who is a main connection between various European Al Qaeda cells. These guys are suspected of being behind a planned attack on the London underground which was foiled and also the Frankfurt cell's plot to blow up Strasbourg Cathedral at Christmas 2000. We do a lot of France-bashing, but we've always paid our dues when it comes to the French police and security services. They've been doing good work rounding up both Al Qaeda and ETA terrorists.
I've been listening to this "Internet radio" station out of East Tennessee that bills itself as playing "Americana and bluegrass". They play good stuff, real down-home music, not slicked-up country-pop. In case any non-Americans want to hear real hillbilly music, check these guys out. And you'll love the disk-jockeys' accents, some of which you don't hear all that much anymore now that American culture has become so homogenized.
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
For those of you interested in the Gibraltar controversy, here's the appropriate section of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Article 10, which deals with the cession of Gibraltar to the British Crown. Note in particular the first paragraph, which puts the lie to the canard that by treaty no civilians were to live in Gibraltar, and in which it is specified that Gibraltar is to be ceded to Britain forever. Also note the clause on Jews and Moors, who according to the treaty are not to be permitted to live in Gibraltar. During the Franco years Spain demanded the return of Gibraltar on the ground that the British had broken this clause. They no longer use this particular argument, at least not publicly. The last paragraph does specify that Spain is to have the first right of refusal if Gibraltar is to be sold or granted to another nation, but it doesn't say anything that conflicts with the current state of affairs, though it might be used to impugn the possible independence of Gibraltar.
National Geographic has this survey on geographical knowledge that you might want to take. You really ought to get a perfect score if you're smart enough to read this blog, or any blog. We won't beat you too severely if you miss a couple. The fun part is that the survey was given to 300 18-24 year-olds in each of these countries, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, and to 500 Americans in that age group, and you can compare your scores to theirs.
The disgraceful thing is not so much the Americans' lousy performance, which is pretty awful, worse than anyone except Mexico. Canada and Britain didn't do any better than America. It's everyone's lousy performance. People around the world are geographically illiterate. That doesn't mean you guys, it means the Great Unwashed out there. We suppose the story is this. Most people retain information that is useful to them and forget information of marginal or zero utility. If you don't travel and have a typical office job, if you don't read much and watch a good bit of TV, if you don't keep up with a newspaper or use the Net to get the news, you don't need to know much geography except for that of your immediate area, no matter where you live. So you forget it and are never reminded of it again in your life until you see it on a goofy test like this one. It's like the necessity of knowing a foreign language; if you stay in your country, don't need a foreign language for your job, and don't read much, you'll never need to know a foreign language in your life, so you forget what little you learned in school. And I sure don't remember the quadratic theorem, not having used it since Math 101 in fall semester 1984, in which I got a B. About the most I can do mathematically is simple algebra, because that's the maximum I need to know--that and enough about statistics to have some idea of whether they're legit or not. It's still pretty disgraceful that significant percentages of people got any of these geography questions wrong. Typical slackers. Monday, November 25, 2002
I love the Crime Library. Check out this story about this idiot, getting paid eight hundred bucks a trip in order to smuggle in leather goods from Pakistan. How smart is that?
The Jedman shares his views on personal space, current fashion, and personal hygiene.
James Taranto let his readers write his column today, on the theme of reparations for slavery, and the results are hilarious. Check it out.
A lot of the knowledge we take for granted among our readers, like basic Spanish geography or who the various political parties are, is really not particularly interesting to casual readers. Every now and then, though, we think we need to update basic information for the benefit of new readers. The following is a list of the 17 Spanish "autonomous communities", which I usually just call regions, with their approximate locations, their populations, their political tendencies, their economic levels on a 1-10 scale, with 1 as Morocco and 10 as, say, Southeast England or Holland or Western Germany, and anything else of interest. These are the three nationwide political parties: the PP is the conservative, centralist governing party in all of Spain, the People's Party, the PSOE are the Socialists, now "socialistas light" , and IU are the Communists, the United Left. In Catalonia we have conservative Catalanist CiU, Convergence and Union, and lefty Catalanist ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia). They have the conservative but weird Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and the pro-ETA Batasuna in the Basque Country, the leftist nationalist BNG (Galician National Bloc) in Galicia, and the conservative and not-too-bolshily-nationalistic Canary Coalition (CC) in the Canaries.
Northwest Spain: Galicia. Pop. 2.7 million. Economy: 6. Politics: PP, PSOE, BNG (in order). Most speak Galician. Asturias. Pop. 1.1m. Econ: 6. Politics: PSOE, PP. Strong regional identity. Cantabria. Pop. 0.5m. Econ: 7. Politics: PP, PSOE. Basque Country. Pop. 2.1m. Econ: 7. Politics: PNV, PSOE, PP, Batasuna. Some speak Basque. Navarra. Pop. 0.6m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. A few speak Basque. La Rioja. Pop 0.3 m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Aragon. Pop. 1.2m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some regional identity. Mediterranean: Catalonia. Pop. 6.3m. Econ: 9. Politics: CiU, PSOE, PP, ERC. Most speak Catalan. Valencia. Pop. 4.2m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some speak valenciano (Catalan). Balearic Islands. Pop. 0.8m. Econ: 9. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some speak Catalan variants. Murcia. Pop. 1.2m. Econ: 7. Politics: PP, PSOE. Central and South: Castile and Leon. Pop: 2.5m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Madrid. Pop. 5.4m. Econ: 9. Politics: PP, PSOE, IU. Castile-La Mancha. Pop. 1.8m. Econ: 7. Politics: PSOE, PP. Extremadura. Pop. 1.1m. Econ: 6. Politics: PSOE, PP. Andalusia. Pop. 7.4m. Econ: 6-7. Politics: PSOE, PP, IU. Strong regional identity. Canary Islands. Pop. 1.7m. Econ: 7. Politics: PSOE, PP, CC. Somewhat distant from Peninsula. Ceuta and Melilla. Pop. 0.15m. Econ: 5. Politics: Unpredictable. Not an autonomous community. Cities on N. Moroccan coast.
I got into a friendly discussion a few weeks ago with a guy from London; he said the BBC were a trustworthy source because they were unbiased. I said, "Aw, come on," but he wouldn't back down (he kept repeating, "It's like gospel," which I didn't think was a British expression at all to refer to the undisputed truth) and I had to admit that I had no real evidence to back up my doubts, except that the BBC showed a patently absurd documentary that maintains that O.J.'s son did it which was rebroadcast on Catalan TV. Well, a group of British bloggers, among them the estimable friend-of-Iberian Notes Patrick Crozier and the indefatigable Natalie Solent, have set up a site to give us plenty of ammunition that's called Biased BBC. Check it out.
I noticed in Jay Nordlinger's column in NRO that Republican ex-football star Steve Largent got beat by the Democratic candidate for Governor of Oklahoma largely because Largent was in favor of a proposed ban on cock fighting. As Nordlinger said, "Cock fighting! In America! In 2002!" Well, the pro-cock fighting lobby seems to be pretty powerful in Oklahoma. I wonder if there's a fish-dynamiting or stop sign-shooting lobby; I guarantee you there's a snake-handlers' organization of some kind. And then these foreigners accuse us of having no respect for rural tradition. Hit's aggravatin', Ah kin shore tell ya.
The Vanguardia instituted a new policy a few months ago. The paper, which is fun to read because of its many local quirks though often maddening, has been around since 1881 in the hands of the same family. Anyway, they started printing letters to the editor in Catalan. Before, even if you had written your letter in Catalan, they printed it in Spanish, I suppose because they'd always done that way. The following letter from today's Vangua breaks a trend. For about the last eight consecutive days they'd published at least one thing that was horribly anti-American. Today there's no Yankee-bashing; today it's the Brits' turn. The interesting thing about this Brit-bashing letter is that it's written in Catalan. Anyone who would use Catalan to write to a publication that's 99% in Spanish must be a pretty serious Catalan nationalist; that person is using Catalan out of context and you only do that if you want to make a point. But this letter upholds Spanish claims regarding Gibraltar, which is really weird for a Catalan nationalist, since being pro-Catalanist automatically implies being anti-Spain around here and often implies being either a Francophile, a Germanophile, or an Anglophile. I'm confused. I think the letter-writer is, too. Here goes. It's in italics.
After the English betrayal of Catalonia (1714), as payment for their services, Castile ceded them the occupation of Gibraltar so that they could defend the Strait with their powerful Navy as long as they considered it necessary, and then return it without transferring it to a third party. This was confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht, in which it was specified that Gibraltar could only be occupied by the British Army and Navy and that no civilian could reside there. Therefore, the current inhabitants are squatters with no right to self-determination or anything else. And even less so the Moroccans, the Indians, et cetera, who the British brought there when Franco closed the frontier in response to Churchill's new betrayal; he had promised that if granted a little more Spanish territory to build an airport, when the war against Nazism ended, they would return the Rock to Spain, but they forgot about it. And now Spanish airplanes are not even allowed to land there, while they illegally overfly Spanish territory whenever they feel like it. In the end, Gibraltar has become a cave of Ali Baba, where, without paying taxes to anyone, every souvenir stand gives out the address to open up hundreds or thousands of fictitious companies that launder money and traffic in drugs and then invest the enormous profits in land all over the Costa del Sol. If the British had any common decency (vergonya, literally "shame"), something they've never had, they wouldn't have a colony within a European state like theirs which is even in NATO. JOSEP-ANTON GELI PUYOL Platja d'Aro Note the entirely made-up history--France was Spain's ("Castile's") ally in the war that ended in 1714, not England; the war ended with the French royal house, the Bourbons, on the throne of Spain. The English had given some support to the Catalans, many of whom opposed the Bourbons, but when the general war ended in 1713, a peace treaty was signed at Utrecht, England got Gibraltar (among other things) as a victorious power, and the Catalans obstinately held out. The British washed their hands and the Catalans got stomped. Some betrayal. And I seriously doubt Churchill promised Franco anything other than a swift kick in the ass if he didn't do as told, since after it became obvious in 1943 that the Nazis were going to lose Franco was hanging by a thread. The Allies seriously discussed ousting Franco as a consequence of World War II. Also note the conspiracy theory about Gibraltar as an important nexus of cash and illegality, the ridiculous resentment at the English "illegally overflying" Spanish territory, the antidemocratic assertion that those who live in Gibraltar have no rights, the racist-sounding statement that "Moroccans and Indians" have even fewer than no rights, the persnickety legalism about strict adherence to insignificant clauses of a 1713 treaty, the intemperate insult about the British lack of vergonya, and the nationalist fury behind the whole letter. This guy is angry because Britain has dissed Spain by not giving up Gibraltar when politely requested to, so he hates the entire British people, in his eyes just a bunch of poca-vergonyas and hijos de la Gran Bretaña. In Spanish, hijo de la gran puta means, literally, "son of the great whore" and figuratively "motherfucking son-of-a-bitch". Hijo de la Gran Bretaña is obviously a play on this. That's what they call you guys around here, Des. Do you like it?
The Spanish Mediterranean coast is very similar in a lot of ways to Southern California. The climate is more or less the same; Barcelona gets a bit colder in the winter than LA does and also gets a bit more rain. Like Southern California, this very pleasant climate area wasn't densely populated in the pre-technology days; the huge booms in population in both places occurred only after the locals got hold of enough capital to attract extensive outside investment, which happened about the turn of the last century in both California and Catalonia. One of the things they had to do in both places was assure a supply of water, and aqueducts (much larger in LA than in Barcelona) formed the basis for the further expansion of those areas. I would figure that nearly half the people in Spain live along the Mediterranean--figure six million in Catalonia, four million in Valencia, a million in Murcia, seven million in Andalusia, and a million in the Balearics for a total of nineteen million out of Spain's forty million.
Anyway, the Mediterranean regions of Spain desperately need more water. There are millions of people living along a narrow coastal strip with a dry climate. The small rivers in southeastern Spain, the Júcar and the Segura, just don't provide enough water, especially with the drought that's affected that area over the last few years. So what they want to do is spend a bunch of government money on what's called the National Hydrological Plan, which would ship water from the Ebro River, the only large river in Spain that flows into the Med, south to Valencia and Alicante, and would purchase water from the Rhone in France, which carries an inexhaustible supply of fresh water out of the Alps, to be carried to the Barcelona area by aqueduct. (They say in Barcelona that the Rhone is the river that empties the most water into the Med. That would imply that it carries more water than the Danube, the Nile, and the Dnieper. I don't know whether this is true, but the Rhone is certainly an impressively big river when you see it at, say, Avignon. The Ebro's really not too much of a river by American standards; it's wide but shallow. The Rhone is deep.) A good many people are against this plan, mostly Aragonese from the Ebro Valley, who want the Ebro's water to be used for irrigation in Aragon itself rather than farther south. The Catalans from the Ebro Delta are against it, too, because they fear that the rich Ebro Delta rice-growing area might dry up--the Plan says that won't happen, that only excess water unnecessary to sustain the lower river valley and delta will be sent south. The Ebro Delta Catalans don't particularly trust the government, though. This plan has created beaucoup de political problems. The conservative governing PP has lost support in Aragon, maybe even enough to put Aragon in Socialist hands at the next elections. The PP never had much support anyway in Catalonia, but the Plan serves as something for enemies of the government to rally around. But in Valencia, a PP stronghold, the Plan is quite popular, and the Valencian Socialists are in trouble, since they can't oppose it like the Aragonese and Catalan Socialists can. The Valencian Socialists' support base is in favor of the plan, so they're left with a dilemma: support the Plan, which would imply supporting their enemies, the governing PP, or oppose the plan and anger their base. The Greens are agitating against the Plan, which makes sense, and the Communists are too, which doesn't. Both groups might pick up some single-issue support in the next elections but I doubt that either will make anything more than minor, very short-term gains. Sunday, November 24, 2002
Since we're moving into the world of Internet porn translating, I figure it's my business to do some research into the sector. There are several websites devoted to marketing and sales in the Internet porn industry, all of which make fascinating reading. We liked this one here, called Adult Webmaster Consultants--sounds pretty professional, right?--with a long list of articles. Another one we liked was Cozy Frog, which takes rather a frat-boy approach to the whole thing. Another very complete and detailed page is X-Biz. It's quite clear that the objective of all these sites is to persuade people to set up porno websites and to sell them the necessary products. AWC and X-Biz take a rather more professional approach, while Cozy Frog, which bills itself as "your buddy"--reach for your wallet now and hold onto it tight!--uses an "it's fun and easy" approach and is directing itself at the first-time porno webmaster, maybe a college kid without much money. If you want to take a look at the innards of the industry--rather a sanitized version, and all on the marketing, sales, and distribution side of the porn industry rather than the production side--you might want to check these websites out. If you do, remember that they're trying to sell you the idea of being a porno webhost. Resist that idea. I have a feeling that a whole lot of people get skinned thinking they can just jump into the clannish porno industry.
Well, we went down to the bar to watch the soccer game last night. We wandered around at game time, 9:00, looking for a bar that wasn't packed, and finally found one down on Calle Providencia. Remei ate a hot dog and a whole ración of patatas bravas, which in their nasty form, which these were, are frozen fried potatoes with mayonnaise, and in their delicious form are fresh double-fried potatoes--they put them in the deep-fryer for a couple of minutes till they're golden-brown and then let them cool, then put them back in for a couple of minutes, which makes them super-crispy--with a spicy sauce, sort of like KC-style vinegary, hot barbecue sauce. The best in Barcelona are at the Bar Tomás on Mayor de Sarrià below the Plaza de Sarrià. So, they ran out of bottled beer and we had to drink some pretty foul stuff out of the tap. Avoid tap beer if possible in Barcelona. This isn't true in Madrid or the País Vasco or Old Castile. I have no idea why. Perhaps it's just that Estrella, the dominant beer in the Barcelona market, is gross out of the keg, and that the brands in Madrid and the North are simply better keg beers. Estrella is fine out of the bottle; it's a standard, fairly strong Pilsener.
Anyway, we had to stand up at the back but at least it wasn't crowded and we could see the TV pretty well. I keep thinking somebody ought to introduce the sports-bar concept into this country; they could at least put in several TVs, invest a thousand bucks, so everyone could see better. But no bar has more than one, and that one is often no bigger than 21 inches. The game itself wasn't very exciting. The first half was quite dull; both teams were playing scared and couldn't put anything together on the attack because they were both playing on the defensive so much. Barça coach Louis Van Gaal changed his standard 3 defensemen-4 midfielders-3 forwards formation, an attacking setup, for a more balanced 4 defensemen-2 defensive midfielders-3 attacking midfielders-1 forward formation. The guys who were supposed to be attacking midfielders played defensively during the whole first half. Mendieta, who is not having a great year--he may be too old at 29--was especially static and Kluivert, the forward (Van Gaal benched the small and rather one-dimensional forward Saviola for the bigger and more multifaceted midfielder Motta) was all by himself in the middle of about eight Madrid guys. Ronaldo didn't play for Madrid, he's sick or something. Figo played and he stood up to the pressure very well, with all 108,000 fans yelling for his scalp. The very first thing Cocu, who was marking him, did was to foul him. By minute two Cocu had fouled him twice. And the next forty-three minutes went more or less like that, with the sole exception of a very nice bicycle kick (what they call a chilena here) by Cambiasso that Barça's goalie Roberto Bonano stopped with no problem. Raúl was never a factor. Neither were any of the other Madrid players for the rest of the game. The closest they got to the Barça goal for the rest of the match was a corner kick, a very eventful corner kick, for sure. Barça came out for the second half fired up and in a 3-4-3 formation, and after three minutes Mendieta, from the point, made a very nice first-touch pass with his heel for Gabri, who had burned his man Iván Helguera and who was onside on the inside of the box, and who just as quickly fed it to Kluivert charging into the small box, who was wide open and blasted the ball into the lower-right corner of the goal well outside the reach of a diving Casillas. The ref annulled the goal, incorrectly, saying that Gabri had been offside. In the ref's defense, the play was very fast and I'm sure his error was unintentional. On the other hand, I'd like to strangle the son-of-a-bitch. The Barça players then began bombarding Casillas, Madrid's goalie, with long shots that he stopped without much trouble. Then Cocu muffed one when he was wide open in front of the goal, and then Motta injured Makelele with a vicious tackle for which he should have been red-carded. Then, with twenty minutes left, Figo went to take a Madrid corner kick and the fans began throwing shit at him, including an empty J&B whiskey bottle which might, with a little bad luck, have killed somebody. A couple of people threw mobile phones, which is pretty stupid when you figure that if you throw your own phone, the cops can probably figure out who it belongs to. On the other hand, the kind of guy who throws a mobile phone at an defenseless opposing soccer player's head is quite likely to have stolen said mobile phone. So the ref, quite rightly, suspended the game for ten minutes while the crowd got calmed down. Nothing much happened during the last twenty minutes except that Riquelme bounced a free kick off the crossbar that had Casillas beaten. It ended up 0-0 and with only one fairly serious bit of rioting. Let me make something clear about European soccer hooligans. The Spanish hooligans are considered soft by the Brits and perhaps by the Dutch, maybe even the Italians, but they're plenty violent by American standards. These Spanish guys, Barça's Boixos Nois, Madrid's gang of openly Fascist wealthy skinhead toughs Ultra Sur, the Frente Atlético, Español's wealthy and Fascist Brigadas Blanquiazules, that mob of squatter thugs that roots for Seville, Bilbao's pro-ETA Abertzale Sur, would all eat the Oakland Raiders' fans for lunch. That bunch of fat middle-aged drunken idiots wouldn't last a minute against these young guys who know how to fight and who carry weapons, often knives. Remember, the Frente Atlético murdered a Real Sociedad fan, stabbed him to death, only three years ago, and the Boixos Nois stabbed a French supporter of Español to death not so long ago, either. Earlier this year a lynch mob of Seville fans had a security guard at their mercy and beat him bloody before the TV cameras. Not even American hockey fans would stand a chance in a square-go with these thugs. Not even Detroit Red Wings fans. Not even those animals in Philadelphia. Saturday, November 23, 2002
Tonight is the big game and all of Spain is gearing up for it. In possibly the biggest rivalry in the world in club football, Real Madrid comes to Barcelona tonight. The game is only on pay TV so we're going to have to go down to the bar to see it and jam in there with everybody else. The etiquette is that you can show up early, like a couple of hours early, and get a table, but you are obligated, more or less, to start buying drinks and keep them coming. You can wait a few minutes between drinks, and they don't have to be alcoholic. If you show up late, about game time, you'll have to stand in the aisles and at the back. Etiquette prohibits blocking the view of those seated. You also have to buy drinks, of course. They don't change the prices on game nights, so each Coke or beer or cup of coffee will only cost you a buck or a buck and a half, as usual. It's great business for the bar owners; this is all totally illegal, of course. They're not allowed to publicly exhibit pay-TV programming. No one ever enforces it, though; in fact, you'll see cops in the bars watching the game. (That's actually a good thing, since the bar becomes a small, crowded space with a lot of people whose emotions are flying and who have been drinking all evening. That's where the cops need to be; there's nobody on the streets anyway, since everyone is watching the game.)
You can't predict what's going to happen since both teams' players get so pumped up for the game. The stadium, the Camp Nou, is packed with 108,000 fans screaming for blood. They especially want Figo's blood, since he played for Barça for many years and then suddenly jumped to Madrid for more money after promising eternal fidelity to the Barça and its colors. They'll want Ronaldo's, too, though he won't get nearly as much abuse as Figo. Ronaldo only played with FC Barcelona for one year and if was obvious that he was a hired gun--his play was brilliant but he didn't pretend that his emotions toward the Barça were the same as those of the fans. They don't feel nearly as betrayed by Ronaldo. He's just a mercenary in their eyes. When Figo came to the Camp Nou for the first time as a Madrid player two years ago, they virtually booed him off the field. He refused to (or was ordered not to) take the corner kicks from the right side, which is normally his job because he's the right wingman, because he or somebody was afraid they'd lynch him if he got that close to them. One of the local sports papers printed up phony 10,000 peseta notes with Figo's picture on the front instead of the King's and the Barça fans showered the field with them, like confetti. Then, last year, Figo didn't play when Madrid came to Barcelona. This year he's going to play, though. So is Raúl, who is nursing nagging injuries and isn't in top form, and Ronaldo. Zidane is out, though, as is Hierro. Both Barcelona and Madrid have suspect defenses, and Fernando Navarro's suspension won't help Barça out. Van Gaal, Barça's coach, will substitute Gabri as a central defenseman for Navarro; Gabri is a good, utilitarian player who is a good defender for a midfielder but a bad defender for a defenseman. Luis Enrique is still out, injured, for Barcelona, and Barça could use him since he's the team leader on the field. He's a former Real Madrid player who considers himself shabbily treated by that club and its fans and jumped to Barça when his contract ran out about five years ago. He hates Madrid and they hate him. When he plays in Madrid they chant "¡Luis Enrique, tu padre es Amunike!" Amunike was a Nigerian player with the Barça a couple of years back. I imagine the more brainless and racist Madrid fans find this very funny.
The oil spill off Galicia is out of control. The coast between Corrubedo to the south and Cariño to the north, including two protected natural areas, has been polluted already and it looks like the oil is moving north, which is good for the marine life in South Galicia's Rias Baixas and for Portugal but has the French worried. The government is not well prepared, as they don't have enough contention barriers or cleanup boats, and they're getting smacked around some politically. About 6000 tons of oil was spilled in the first leak and 5000 tons more escaped when the tanker Prestige sank. There are 70,000 tons more of oil within the tanker 10,000 feet down; they're now saying that oil will solidify. Let's hope so because if that stuff gets out the "black tide" will suddenly be seven times worse. Meanwhile, the price of percebes has doubled in the Madrid markets.
The Vanguardia has a table of the fifteen worst oil spills of all time; this one so far, with 11,000 tons, is comparatively still very small. Even if all the oil in the sunken tanker gets out, this one would probably place about 25th in history. The biggest spill of all time was 1991 when the Iraqis sabotaged the Kuwaiti oilfields and dumped 800,000 tons of crude into the Persion Gulf, and the second was 1979 in the Gulf of Mexico when those Mexican oil rigs blew out and spilled 450,000 tons. The biggest tanker spill ever was number three on the all-time list when the tanker Atlantic spilled 280,000 tons into the Caribbean in 1979. What I found interesting was that none of these top 15 spills have happened since 1991. The Vanguardia's reporter, Antonio Cerrillo, who has done his research, says that after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989, which was not among the top 15, by the way, the Americans passed laws prohibiting single-hulled tankers from docking at American ports and establishing that tanker owners must contract an unlimited-liability insurance policy, to pay off in case of accident. This means that if you want to do business with the Yanks, you have to play by their rules, and their rules have done a lot to reduce oil spills. It's not the American government on your ass to keep things safe: it's the insurance companies, and they're a lot meaner and tougher than Uncle Sam because it's their asses on the line if you screw up. In contrast, EU laws on the subject have not even gone into effect yet and contain a limit on the liability of the tanker owner. The single-hulled Prestige would not have been allowed to carry oil to the US and no American company would have insured it. Score one environmental point for the US. Greenpeace is complaining that the strict American laws concentrate the less safe tankers in Europe.
This article from the Weekly Standard on the Florence anti-global demonstration earlier this month is well worth a read. The Standard also has a short piece by David Brooks that, among other things, puts the lie to Eulàlia Solé on conditions in Afghanistan, and Brooks's piece has, like, facts and stuff in it! Slate has a quite amenable piece on Charles Barkley, his new book, and his political ambitions.
Friday, November 22, 2002
OK, here's a "Six Degrees of Separation" meme trace for you guys. A couple of days ago I linked to Sasha Castel's (fully credited, she wasn't pretending to have made it up) reproduction of the Bush-Condi Rice "Who's on First" conversation. You may have read it. It's pretty funny. If you haven't read it, go read it. Anyway, this meme, if I can be a pompous ass, is suddenly everywhere. It's exploded all over the world. Yesterday at about 8 AM their time I was listening to KSJO (the most obnoxious radio station I know) in San Jose through Internet "radio" and their morning Drive Time Zoo Team Wacky DJ's Dipshit Dave and Fuckwit Frank, or whatever their names are, did this routine, which they didn't credit but which they certainly didn't make up themselves, as I'd read it beforehand on Sasha's blog and already linked to it here. She got it from one V.C. Darte, who apparently e-mailed it to her. What I'd like to see is where this meme came from and where it's going to. Sasha, where did V.C. Darte get it from? Everyone else, where did you first come across this if it wasn't through us and / or Sasha?
Baltasar Porcel is really letting us down. He's just boring again today, he's been boring all week. But never fear, Eulàlia Solé, sociologist and author, is here! The thing about Lali Solé is that her column only appears once a week rather than every day like Porcel's, and her idiocy / dullness ratio is about 1 : 1 while Porcel's is about 1 : 10. That is, for every joyfully imbecilic Lali column, there's merely one boring, stupid one. You have to read through ten boring, stupid Porcelazos before you get one that shines with the intense glowing imbecility that Porcel is capable of. We know a guy who spent a couple of years in the sociology department at the university before switching to philosophy and getting his Ph.D.; he says that Lali is far and away the dumbest professor in the sociology department and one of the three or four dumbest at the whole university. Anyway, Lali's text is in italics below; our comments are in standard type. The title is "The fruits of war".
The results of the war for the Afghan people could well be called rotten fruits. It's because of this that Afghanistan has stopped appearing on the news, that no one has heard anything from Karzai, his government, and the warlords, nor about the promised reconstruction of the country, nor about the supposed liberation of the women. Just as the capture of Bin Laden has been a failure, the makeup used to beautify the military operation, as if that were possible, has been too. There is nothing farther from being fulfilled than the obligations acquired by the US regarding the political, economic, and human development of the country. Profundity Score on a 1 to 10 scale, with ten representing, say, Immanuel Kant and one representing, say, Tipper Gore: -3 for getting all her facts wrong. From health to food, from education to freedom, everything is shamefully lacking. Many people have to walk for days in order to reach a health center, in which the most basic services are lacking. Sometimes it's even worse and they find the health center levelled by bombs. Food is scarce for the immense majority of people, dreadfully poor after 23 years of military conflicts and finished off by the last one. As far as the refugees returning home, they find themselves with a panorama of destruction, unemployment, hunger, and lack of clean water. Lack of personal safety is also permanent, with the warlords doing as they want. Very few women have access to work, and very few have managed to free themselves from the burka, still submitted to the will of those in charge and frightened of being attacked. Profundity Score: -5 for expecting the US to have already turned Afghanistan into Denmark and for not blaming at least some of the Afghans' problems on, say, the SOVIET invasion which started all this off back in 1979. While some things are just the same as before the last war, the rest have gotten worse. If the bombings have borne any fruit it is that of mass poverty for the population, as we have already said, and that of becoming even more evil (envilecimiento) for those who have gotten rich off the conflict. Profundity Score: -9 for blatantly lying, for accusing the Americans of having profited off the Battle of Afghanistan, and for calling the United States evil without mentioning a single scrap of evidence. When we get down to it, there's nothing new under the sun when it comes to war. The landscape that weapons leave behind is always monotonously the same. This reiteration does not only not faze those who make money off devastation, but encourages them to probe its possibilities even more deeply. A man as lucid as Gabriel Jackson denounces, in the last issue of "Vanguardia Dossier" the attempt of the Bush Administration to revoke the ABM treaty, signed in 1972 to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. To the entire deadly arsenal that threatens the survival of defenseless civilians, they want to add the radioactive weapons that new countries may make. Insanity which we'll have to put the brakes on in some way. Profundity Score: -17 for not having any idea of what the ABM treaty deals with, for thinking that the US wants more countries to have nuclear arms, and for accusing the Americans of making war to make money again. The way is not starting another war, this time against Iraq under the pretext that it has dangerous armaments. It makes no sense to accuse someone else of having weapons of mass destruction when you have even more of them yourself. It's true that it's urgent to put an end to the potential danger that threatens the future of humanity, but that will only be possible if the weapons accumulated in every single country, including the one that claims to dispense justice, are eliminated. Profundity Score: -13 for failing to see the difference between nukes in American or British hands and nukes in Iraqi hands, for being a pacifist imbecile who actually thinks that weapons can be abolished, and for gratuitously insulting the US. Civil society must become aware both of the risk it is running and of the pressure it can exercise to remove from power the enemies of both peaceful development and a democratic distribution of the wealth of the world. Profundity Score: -21 for claiming that Communism is the answer. I've been accused of being too sensitive to anti-Americanism. But when faced every day with this kind of blind hate, it's kind of hard not to be. And don't believe the anti-Americans when they claim to hate the American government but respect the American people. They don't. They hate Americans as individuals, too. It's pure racism. And many Europeans like Eulàlia Solé, whose face I will cheerfully spit in if I ever get the chance, are chock-full of anti-American racism. Like, for example, the above column. No European has ever had to listen to his country reviled in the way that I have to every day. Thursday, November 21, 2002
Horologium has an excellent Fisking (they call it a "dissection") of a genetically-modified-food terror-monger. Check it out. It has, like, actual facts and stuff in it. Also check out the Belligerent Bunny Blog, if you haven't already. No Replacement for Displacement has three, uh, rather aggressively nontraditional carols we can all sing around the fireplace the night of Christmas Eve after we get home from church and get oiled on eggnog. Samizdata has a hilarious bit that fans of Viz comic will appreciate on how exactly the Brits are going to contribute to the war on Saddam. The Jedman gives his opinion on tailbone tattoos.
The sage who gets the back-page interview in today's Vanguardia is a real moral guy whose name is Denis Halliday. Mr. Halliday is an Irishman who was once the Adjunct Secretary General of the UN and who is so moral that he resigned in 1998 because he thought we were being too mean to Iraq. Mr. Halliday is very proud that his father was a pacifist who worked to keep Ireland out of NATO. We've excerpted it. The questions, of course, are Q. Mr. Halliday's answers are A.
Q. The CIA says they were making chemical weapons. A. The first UN inspection was done with some rigor, but Butler's was working for the CIA, the Mossad, and the secret services of various countries. That wasn't serious. Q. I suppose that you don't support the mission that is beginning now. The mission is impossible: they have to find weapons of mass destruction and, if there aren't any, the United States will attack anyway. We all know that. Q. Why is it going to do that? A. Iraq is the second-largest oil producer in the world. It's simply that. The United States wants absolute control of the oil market. Q. Oil is an obsession of the Bushes. A. And Bush is ready to do whatever it takes to get control over it. And once it has absloute control, you can be sure that Europe will pay a very high price for that oil. Q. So why didn't they take over Iraq after they won the first Gulf War? A. Bush Senior pulled back at the possibility of an explosion of the Kurdish powder-keg and an Iranian intervention. It's a very complex area, very much so. Q. And what will they do after Hussein? A: A protectorate with military bases, as in so many other countries. A puppet government and an informal occupation. Q. That won't be easy. A. It will be bloody... Q. What do you think will happen? A. The worst. We'll attack Iraq, with the shameful complicity of the UN and of its secretary general, and we will commit genocide. And, after thousands of deaths and much suffering, the Bushes will finally have their oil. We won't comment too much, except that we wonder which star system this guy is receiving on his tooth fillings. Where did this pathological hatred for the Bush family come from? Where did he get this paranoia about the CIA and the Mossad controlling the UN? Why does he blindly believe, so simplistically, that America plans to attack Iraq in order to grab the oil after this canard has been debunked eight million times? And why is he so sure that America is acting in bad faith and its goal is to grab all the oil and then extort the Europeans? And who's the guy at the Vanguardia who keeps printing all this anti-American stuff, day in and day out? How about a little balance?
On the oil tanker thing, the Vanguardia says that the Times of London says the tanker that sank off Galicia had been in port in Gibraltar for six hours a few months ago, and that was the only connection the tanker had with Gibraltar: that one visit. The tanker had, of course, called at dozens of ports both before and after its docking there. Any connection the more rabidly nationalistic Spanish press (ABC, La Razón, El Mundo) has been trying to draw with this mess and the existence of Gibraltar as a British colony is bogus.
Bush, in Prague at the NATO summit, promised to consult with America's NATO allies before any armed action against Iraq, which he said was avoidable--we assume by means of a total capitulation by Saddam. He also called on the nations of the world and the NATO countries in particular to openly show their diplomatic support for America and stated that if Iraq did not comply with a strict regime of inspections, America would form a coalition to be sure that Saddam is disarmed. Bush also called on the NATO allies to increase their defense budgets; America's defense budget is double that of all the other allies put together. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria will be formally invited to join NATO today. This will be the first admission of ex-Soviet republics into NATO, and also the first admission of an ex-Yugoslav republic. It serves as the official seal of approval on Slovakia, which took a good bit longer than its more advanced cousin, the Czech Republic, to democratize, and it's especially important for Romania and Bulgaria, who also took longer to democratize than their Hungarian neighbor. Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to join the EU in 2007 and joining NATO will be a big boost to their credentials. (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Greek Cyprus join the EU in 2004). Interestingly, both Romania and Bulgaria are very pro-American and have volunteered help against Iraq; so has Poland. Croatia, Macedonia, and--get this one--Albania are the candidates for the next expansion of NATO. We're all for it. Get them into the official clubs of civilized countries. That'll help make sure they never slide back out. NATO also agreed to extend its current peacekeeping mission in Macedonia six more months. The French got all into a snit because they want a European Union force to replace the NATO force in Macedonia. It was agreed that this will be discussed later. Meanwhile, the British are ready to roll on Iraq. They've got 20,000 men, a complete division, all set to go, the largest contingent except for the Americans. Among the units to be sent is the famous Seventh Motorized Brigade, the Desert Rats. Dirtbag ETArras José Ignacio Krutxaga, Fernando García Jodrá, and Lierni Armendáriz are on trial in Madrid for murdering municipal cop Juan Miguel Gervilla in Barcelona. Seems that what happened is that they were going to carbomb the radio host Luis del Olmo on Dec. 20, 2000, but the red Fiat Uno they'd stolen and loaded up with twelve kilos of explosives--they were going to park it and blow it up by remote control when del Olmo passed by on his way to work, they knew his habitual routes--broke down on Avenida Diagonal, the main street leading into the central city from the west. The car was blocking a whole lane and it was eight in the morning, rush hour. The cop, who was directing traffic, came over to see what was up; Jodrà was pushing the Fiat from behind. The cop noticed a screwdriver in the ignition and immediately sussed the car was stolen. He went for his gun but Jodrà jumped him and they both went down to the ground. Krutxaga jumped out of the car with a gun and shot Gervilla, the policeman. Jodrà got up, grabbed his own gun which had fallen to the ground in the fight, and shot Gervilla in the head as he lay on the ground holding up one arm to protect himself. This cell of terrorists is also responsible for the murder of former Socialist cabinet minister Ernest Lluch; they got 33 years each for that. I personally wouldn't mind at all using the death penalty on them. I imagine most Spaniards agree with me, but it's very politically incorrect to say so, especially if you want to be considered one of the enlightened, solidarious, and hip. Also, some jackass etarra named Urtzi Murureta Gondra blew himself up with the explosives he was manipulating as part of an ETA training course being held in a remote area of central France near Limoges. Unfortunately he didn't die, though he was badly wounded in an arm and a leg. He is thought to be one of the cell that murdered Judge José María Lidón. Wednesday, November 20, 2002
From the Culture supplement to today's Vanguardia is this paragraph from a commentary by Ana Nuño on a novel by one François Emmanuel, a--no, you're wrong! So was I. He's Belgian. Anyway, the plot of the book is that the narrator, an industrial psychologist with the French subsidiary of a German firm, is assigned to treat the boss, who has freaked out. Nuño's text is in italics below.
The plot develops, cleanly and linearly, this analytic process (Oh, great, another French...well, Belgian novel that takes place on a psychiatrist's couch) and, at the same time, introduces another motif that ends up becoming the obsessive self-exploration of the narrator-psychologist: the discovery of a hidden truth that concerns not only the boss, but the whole company. This hidden truth, which the author never explicitly mentions, allows us to relate the logic of the business world--with its restructuring plans, its search for maximum profit, and its increases in productivity--with the universe of the Nazi concentration camps, the brutal form taken by the bureaucratic rationalizationation of the largest systematic business of the destruction of human lives in History. WHAT? The logic of capitalism is that of the Nazi concentration camps? Is this chick smoking better dope than I am, that stuff that you take one hit of and instantly see how to rearrange the world, or is she on a crazed ditchweed headache high? The Nazi concentration camps were first cousins of the Soviet gulag, honey. Oligarchical collectivism and all that. Totalitarianism. Not capitalism. Socialism. Remember, the Nazis were National Socialists, not National Capitalists. ...(This is the first) work of fiction that explores the survival in our world of the logic that made possible the death factories of Auschwitz and the other extermination camps. A logic that continues its labor among us, hidden among the folds of the most poswerul and apparently innocuous instrument of creation and modification of the world: language. Must be a crazed ditchweed headache high. She's going off on a Chomskyan tangent, as Chomsky believes that language is the most important tool that the capitalist oppressors use to keep the rest of humanity enslaved. I'd shout "Run for your lives," but for some reason the article comes to a dead end here, so there's no more Chomskyan crap. Vocabulary note: "Chomskyan" means "a person whose ideas are within the current of linguistic and philosophical thought founded by Noam Chomsky." Steven Pinker is a Chomskyan. "Chomskyite" means "a person who is a political follower of Noam Chomsky." Those morons in Rage Against the Machine are Chomskyites. Also, here we go again with "hidden truths". Spanish leftists, and a lot of Spanish non-leftists, are Gnostics: they believe that there's a hidden structure behind everything. Secret powerful forces run the world and manipulate everything. Everything happens for a reason, though we may not understand that reason; the powerful do, however. Nothing is true, since all knowledge is manipulated by those in charge. It's all one vast conspiracy, and the Americans / Jews / oil companies / arms manufacturers / CIA / cattle mutilators / crop-circle aliens / los que tienen muchas intereses are behind it. This is, of course, straight-out paranoia, and it's a distressingly common way of thinking in Spain, and I think in the other Latin countries as well.
This article from the Weekly Standard demonstrates exactly why I am a small-L libertarian but not a big-L Libertarian. My nitpick: there are a lot of people who are, in general, libertarian on social issues, free-market on economic issues, and hawkish on foreign policy and defense. Andrew Sullivan calls them "eagles". I guess I'm one, though I think the name is dorky.
Xavier Basora from Buscaraons has a good post on Kyoto and a couple of well-worth-reading responses to things we've said on this blog. Definitely check it out. Don't confuse Xavier, who runs the blog, lives in Canada, and has a Catalan name, with the other guy, Xabier, who lives in London and has a Basque name. I'm not sure what's eating Xabier. He's been reading this site for a while and once sent a quite friendly letter. I really didn't think that we'd said anything particularly offensive recently. Patronizing I have to admit to, but not unfair, I don't think. Also, it's only fair to point out that the Anglo-Americans outshine the French in business, war, and government, the Low Countries folk and Swiss have them beat at business and government, and the Germans are superior in business and war, but next in line come the French in all those categories. We could debate exactly where to rank every culture on everything, but you'd have to put the French ahead of the Spanish, Italians, Poles, and Russians at business, war, and government, not to mention every non-Western culture. The French outstrip everybody else in fields from painting and poetry to cooking and lifestyle. (You heard right. The Latin lifestyle really is more pleasant than the Anglo-American. I'd give the four big Latin countries top rank in way of life, tied perhaps with the Dutch and the Belgians and maybe even the Catholic Germans. Then the Anglo-Americans.) I'm not quite sure why they can't accept that their country is the nicest place in the world to live, but that it isn't quite as strong as some other Western cultures at some other things.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller gives the Maoists well-deserved hell. Check it out. Sasha Castel, who has been kind enough to link to the Monsieur Stinky Cheese Psychologist interview, has a hilarious bit that she found somewhere, President Bush and Condi Rice doing the old "Who's on First" routine. Atlético Rules keeps you up to date on the Galicia oil spill, which is turning out to be a huge mess. The Galician coast is beautiful and teeming with life, much of which ends up on tables all over Spain. If you like fish and seafood, you'll love Spanish food, especially up on the north coast, anywhere from Tuy to Fuenterrabia. If you go to Las Peñucas in the Puerto Pesquero in Santander, you can get paella de marisco, gambas a la plancha, and merluza a la vasca for literally twenty bucks, I am not exaggerating, and that includes the house wine or a pitcher of beer, all recently dragged out of the cold Atlantic. Not the wine, the fish. Galicia is famous for percebes, a mollusk that looks so gross that I refuse to eat it. It's said to be delicious, so if you can bring yourself to actually put such a thing in your mouth, you'll probably love it. Coquilles St. Jacques, the scallop dish, is really of Galician origin. Galician-style octopus is famous throughout Spain; any real Gallego bar has a large pink octopus under the glass on the bar. They also serve tiny octopi in olive oil, parsley, and garlic sauce. Most people think they're delicious. Octopus in any form also grosses me out, though I have tried it. I feel sorry for them; I've seen documentaries of scientists making friends with them and of octopi solving problems, like figuring out how to open a jar with food inside it. After you've seen an octopus using a tentacle to caress a guy in a diving suit who is scratching the big mollusk's "nose" above its beak, it's hard to want to eat one. (Full disclosure: I'm a speciesist. I won't eat mammals, birds, reptiles, or amphibians, and I generally avoid seafood--I eat it once a month or so. Anything lower than amphibians is probably too dumb to have a consciousness, I figure.) Anyway, back to Galicia. The fisherpeople are doing everything they can to haul up all life forms before the ship's oil tanks blow. The ship has cracked in half and sunk, and its oil tanks are under extreme pressure since it's sunk to the bottom, which is like ten thousand feet down. Many places along the coast have already been contaminated by oil washing up on the beaches, and when the rest of the oil comes out, the whole Galician coast south of El Ferrol and maybe some of the Portuguese coast, too, is going to be a mess. No more percebes from there for a few years. This is ridiculous. There has got to be some way to make oil tankers generally safe. I can't think of an oil tanker that belonged to a big company that's caused a big mess like this since the Exxon Valdez. They must have the capability to make their tankers virtually unsinkable, and I'm sure they do it, since safety measures have got to be cheaper than cleaning up cormorants. Oil tankers that do not meet the highest standards of safety should simply not be allowed to do business. This is one place where the good of the commons (a non-oily sea) is more important than the individual right of Joe Blow to sail whatever kind of ship he wants wherever he wants. America and Britain and Canada and Australia ought to get together with the rest of the European democracies and anyone else who wants to sign on and simply not permit any tanker that does not meet the minimum standards to take on or unload oil in their countries. I don't think that ought to be too hard to do. Tankers are pretty big and easy to spot; it's hard to be sneaky with something like that. And, no, there's no comparison with the Kyoto Treaty (which the Europeans are never going to abide by, either), since the science behind the global warming theory is still under question. There's no dispute about the bad stuff that spilling oil into the sea does.
Here's another article from Front Page on the history of Islam which is right on target with the facts. For the full horror of the history of slavery within Islam, check it out. Also, you ought to read this interview with Stephen Schwartz, an American Islamic journalist, on why Wahabism is a fanatical current within Islam. We have a nit-pick with Schwartz: he overestimates the presence of the Islamic heritage in Spanish culture. In fact, everything Jewish or Islamic in Spain was ruthlessly crushed, between Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews in 1492--400,000 Spanish Jews were affected, of whom about 150,000 converted to Christianity and stayed. The rest mostly went to North Africa, and their descendants are now called Sephardic Jews. (The Catalans had already killed off all their Jews in the 1391 pogrom. One thing we must say in favor of the Spanish Muslims is that they did not treat Jews particularly badly most of the time, unlike the Spanish Christians.) The Muslim inhabitants, the moriscos, were pushed out of Castile into Muslim Granada during the early 1400s, and they were finally expelled from Valencia, Aragon, and Andalusia in 1609-10, 400,000 of them. The moriscos also mostly went to North Africa. Everything Muslim or Jewish was stamped out by the Inquisition--whose horrors affected relatively few people, mostly Jews who had converted to Christianity (conversos), but those horrors were pretty horrible. The only thing left in Spain of the Muslim heritage is the architecture, though it's said that the complicated water-rights and irrigation laws of Valencia are left over from the Muslim days. Some say flamenco music is of Muslim origin, though others say it's gypsy. Probably it's some of both mixed in with some plain old Spanish.
Comment on flamenco: What you hear in the States is generally pop-disco flamenco, of which the most frightening recent example is "Macarena", though "Aserejé" has some flamenco influence in it. (The girls are named Ketchup because their flamenco-pop dad's monicker is Tomate. Get it?) Flamenco and its cousins sevillanas, copla española, rumba, and the like fulfill the same role in Spanish society as country music does in American. Both of them are musics of rural people who emigrated to the city, and they've both been heavily influenced by the technology available there. Both flamenco and its cousins, and country, have adopted synthesizers, drum machines, electric guitars, and the like; they are urban forms of music based on traditional rural styles but using modern technology and influenced by international pop. The traditional rural styles still exist, but only in flamenco's heartland and among modern middle-class hipsters, just the way that traditional gospel and folk music can still be heard in America--but most of its fans are the NPR crowd. (Should you, while in Barcelona, want to check out a bar with old-style flamenco, hit the Galpón Sur on Calle Guilleries in Gràcia and ask the bartender to put on something good. Every couple of weeks they have concerts--it's either flamenco, jazz, or South American. Everybody who goes there is some kind of Communist or worse but they're friendly enough if you can take a little joshing.) The most critically-acclaimed modern flamenco musicians are Camarón de la Isla and Tomatito. Their stuff is influenced somewhat by rock, but it's definitely legit. These guys have soul. Camarón died relatively young a few years ago and there's now a Camarón cult, kind of like the Jim Morrison cult. A flamenco-rock band, mostly rock, that's worth checking out is Ketama. The Gypsy Kings are probably the most famous "Spanish" musicians; they're actually French. They play rumbas and they're a great party band. True flamenco aficionados look down on the Gypsy Kings as inauthentic and too poppy, but I like them. Another Frenchman is Manu Chao, whose political ideas are idiotarian supreme but who's a damn good musician, a rumba-rocker. He used to be the frontman for a group called Mano Negra, whose album Puta's Fever will get your next bash hopping. He had a song that was a big hit a few months ago called "Me gustas tú", which was the only thing that made the radio tolerable during the hellish "Operación: Triunfo" summer of 2002. All of these guys ought to be easy to find on one of those music-sharing sites, in case you're interested. Manu Chao is really hip right now because he's one of those anti-globo wackos and plays shows at their demos, so if you want to tell your friends you're into what's cool in Europe, give Manu a listen. Comment on Jim Morrison: I went to Jim Morrison's grave once when I was in Paris. It's in the historic and really quite beautiful Pére Lachaise cemetery, where dozens of French notables like Voltaire and Chopin are buried. When you walk in the front gate, you can see tombs vandalized with signs that say JIM with an arrow pointing to his tomb. Just listen for "The End" blasting out of a boom box a hundred or so yards away and that's where you want to go. When you get there you'll see a bunch of freaks drinking beer, smoking pot, and communing around Jim's tomb, which has a small bust of Jim on it that's been painted and repainted over and over. One guy ceremonially poured a beer over Jim's head, which seemed like a waste of a perfectly good beer to me. Graffiti like JIM BROKE ON THROUGH FOR YOU AND ME and JIM IS THE LIZARD KING FOR EVER are scratched all over the neighboring tombs. Based on the graffiti, I'd say a lot of the pilgrims to Jim's grave are Italian. Are the Doors especially popular there? Anyway, a few years ago, whoever's in charge of Pére Lachaise announced that Jim's lease on the tomb was up and that he had to go somewhere else, and it was easy to get the impression that they didn't care where somewhere else was as long as it was a long way away from there. I don't know if they ever moved his grave or not. Interestingly enough, Jim Morrison, if he had any political ideas at all, which I doubt, would have been a rather unpleasant sort of conservative. He hated hippies, thought they were a bunch of idiots. He hated homosexuals. Though he'd take anything he could get hold of, his drugs were alcohol and speed, not pot and acid. He hated San Francisco; L.A. was much more his style of decadent. Though he hated his father, a lifetime US Navy officer, he was not against the war in Vietnam and thought the protestors were morons. He didn't really like anything too much except getting really fucked up and freaking out other people with his Lizard King crap. His death was suicide at age 27; he killed himself intentionally bit by bit rather than all at one go.
Check out Atlético Rules for the scoop on the oil spill off the coast of Galicia. Someone said on TV3 that if the spill had been crude oil instead of fuel oil it would have been even worse, since fuel oil is slightly heavier than water and tends to sink whereas crude oil floats on top of the water and is more easily carried to shore. I don't know whether this is true--could someone who knows basic physical science tell us? There's also been some complaining about Gibraltar, as that was the oil tanker's destination. The tanker was apparently substandard and in violation of several laws, one of which was that it was supposed to be double-hulled but was only single-hulled. Those responsible should, of course, face the consequences; the captain of the ship is in jail in Galicia. Seems to me that it ought to be the shipowner in there if anyone's going to jail. I'm really not sure what Gibraltar has to do with anything, but certain sectors of the media seem to be trying to draw a connection between the existence of Gibraltar as a British colony and this oil spill. I don't get it.
Thanks to Patrick Crozier from CrozierVision and UK Transport for adding our new slogan to the template--we're too astonishingly untechnological to figure that out, though we have figured out how to add links to the blogroll at least, and thanks again to Jessica from The Blog of Chloe and Pete for being so quotable. Check 'em all out. UK Transport is, despite its title, interesting; Patrick explains how things work from an informed perspective and throws in lots of libertarianism and economics knowledge as a bonus. If he called it something like "Next Stop: Disaster. Mind the Gap", he'd get a lot more readers. Jessica is an awfully good writer.
Check out this story about three European kids and their swell behavior; one of them is a Spaniard. (We found this through Best of the Web.) Are we surprised? Unfortunately, no.
First, you need to remember who European exchange students are. They are rich kids. Participating in an student exchange is not free. Also, your English needs to be good before you get to America or you're going to have real problems. Only rich kids have the money to go to the kind of private schools where they make sure you learn English. The father in the story said they were spoiled, which I have no problem believing with a Spanish kid, especially a boy, who really is the king of the house. These rich kids are super-hip; they're from big cities and are used to hitting snazzy discos on weekends and going sailing and the like. They have every kind of electronic gear imaginable and they use it, so they're absolutely up-to-the-minute on what's in and what's out in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York. Also, these kids drink and use recreational drugs. They can afford it. The absolute last place to send them is Utah, for God's sake. Of course they're going to hate it. America, unfortunately, except for New York, is not hip in the eyes of the rich kids. What's hip now is being anti-globalistic and solidarious and the like. The children of the wealthy are always the first to jump on every trend--they've got the motive, social competition, the opportunity, being able to find out instantly what's hip in Tokyo, and the ability, since they have tons of dough. Anyway, the trend now is pretending you're a squatter. Walk through rich parts of Barcelona like La Bonanova and Sarrià and you'll see fourteen-year-old kids dressed like Sixties hippies and with shit stuck through their faces. But almost all of America is square; high schools in Utah ask you to do silly stuff like take the homecoming game seriously and rent a tuxedo to go to the Prom. These Euro-kids are just going to be bored with that. And they're going to be bored in school, too, since European private schools are at least two grade levels above average American public schools. It shouldn't be too surprising that they should get into mischief--they're used to getting away with everything anyway. Also, part of being hip is being anti-American. You can't be hip and like George Bush, not even in America and especially not in Europe. What it's really hip to do, in fact, since being a squatter is so hip, is to mouth the squatters' ridiculous political slogans, which usually have something to do with smashing capitalism or justifying the ETA and other terrorists. Sixteen-year-old kids never see the contradictions between their lifestyles and radical politics. So you've got three immature though worldly rich urban European kids who think America's uncool and that Utah is especially uncool--the poor kids begged to be taken to Ogden, for God's sake, for a little urban atmosphere! And they do something really dumb and in rotten taste instead of, say, going back home when they decided they didn't like it. Nobody should be at all surprised. Also, I'm not surprised that the FBI checked them out, either--they damn well should have, with these morons filming themselves with a gun and yelling infantile squatter stuff about how terrorism is cool. You never know what the hell they might be up to. I have had several Spanish students in my Proficiency-level classes who had done an exchange in high school in the United States. They all had very positive experiences; I'm sure it helps a lot that these were nice rich kids whose parents hadn't spoiled them. These were kids who were interested enough in learning English that they continued trying to improve though their English was already very good. And none of them could remotely be described as hip. Thank God. Really, I think people who have friends over for dinner and go to a movie or maybe for a few drinks on Saturday night probably have a lot more fun, and are certainly a lot more fun to be around, than people who care so much about how others see them that they go out of their way to do silly crap so that other folks will think they're hip. Like stay out until seven in the morning in expensive discos listening to crappy music that's so loud you can't hear what people are saying and they have to yell in your ear while swallowing pills whose contents you're really not too sure about. This has been today's Startlingly Obvious Sermon. Thank you. Tuesday, November 19, 2002
We assume everyone has by now heard the so-called news that John Kennedy was in very poor health and took a whole pile of drugs, some consciousness-altering. Here's a link from Fox News. These findings (they certainly seem to be completely legitimate) are interesting but not new, though they certainly do serve as confirmation for what was previously reported.
Paul Johnson wrote in A History of the American People, published in 1997, "(Joseph Kennedy's) lies centered on certain areas. One was Jack's health. Old Joe had learned many tricks in concealing the true state of his retarded daughter, Rosemary, buried alive in a home. He used them to gloss over the seriousness of Jack's back problems and his functional disorder, eventually diagnosed as Addison's disease. Strictly speaking, Jack was never fit to hold any important public office, and the list of lies told about his body by the Kennedy camp over many years is formidable. The back pain Jack suffered seems to have increased after he became President, and his White House physician, Dr. Janet Travell, had to give him two or three daily injections of novocaine. Jack eventually found this treatment intolerably painful. But he did not fire Travell, fearing that, though she had hitherto been willing to mislead the media about his health, she might now disclose his true medical history. Instead, he kept her on the payroll but put himself into the hands of a rogue named Dr. Max Jacobson, who later lost his medical license and was described by his nurse as 'absolutely a quack'. Known to his celebrity clients as 'Doctor Feelgood' , because of his willingness to inject amphetamines laced with steroids, animal cells, and other goodies, Jacobson started to shoot powerful drugs into Jack once, twice, even three times a week. Although he turned down a request to move into the White House, he had succeeded, by the summer of 1961, in making the President heavily dependent on amphetamines." Johnson says later that Kennedy's chubby cheeks, which he only developed after becoming President, were the result of all the cortisone that was being injected into him.
Find out if your blog is banned in China! We're not, unfortunately; we've done too much France-bashing and not enough Commie-bashing. Here's our position. China is a dictatorship but from what we read things could be a lot worse there, and were a lot worse pretty recently. Still, things could be one hell of a lot better, and one of the reasons is that, despite all the economic growth along the coast from Shanghai to Hong Kong, China is still a Communist state, and Communist states suck to live in. The West should do everything possible to encourage the development of human rights in China, though besides issuing firm protests whenever the Chinese government decides to treat somebody unpleasantly, I'm not sure what else we can do. This does not extend to cutting off trade with China or slapping sanctions on them or going off on some military adventure. China's simply too big and important to be ignored, and all we can do is deal with them at a level of diplomatic courtesy. We are not China's friend, nor do we want to be, but it would be reckless folly to turn China into an enemy. This does not apply to, say, Cuba. Cuba is, fortunately, not so important that we have to deal with the Castro regime. We can shun Castro and we are right to do so. But we just can't shun China, no matter how much we'd like to. Is this enough to get us censored? Anyway, click here to find out if you're banned in China. (Thanks to Horologium for the link.)
Monday, November 18, 2002
Iberian Notes scoops Reynolds! InstaPundit says that Bush is going to snub Gerhard Schröder at the upcoming NATO summit in Prague. We wrote about this back in October! Check our old website if you don't believe us. It's still up at www.johnandantonio.com/InsideEuropeIberianNotes.
This story from the Onion is just plain hilarious, besides being politically and economically dead-on-target.
In the financial section of yesterday's Vanguardia, there was an interview with unpleasant arrogant French marketer and psychologist Clotaire Rapaille. M. Rapaille "lives in a mansion in Tuxedo, New York. His consulting firm has branches in Europe and the United States and advises 50 corporations out of the Fortune 100. He bases his theories of psychoanalysis and archetypes on the work of Freud, Jung, and Levi-Strauss," so you can see just how up-to-date and visionary M. Rapaille's ideas are. M. Rapaille brags about his use of focus groups to determine that Nestlé should emphasize how good its coffee smells in its advertising and that General Motors should give its cars an aggressive image. M. Rapaille is definitely pushing the creative envelope and showing his general state-of-the-artness here. The questions, of course, are Q., and M. Rapaille's answers are A.
Q. What is American culture like? A. You can sum it up in one word: adolescent. Obsessed by violence, sex, and food. In reality, since it's adolescent, there's not much sex and a lot of violence. Q. Why adolescent? A. Because the US has never had a father. It has an enormous Oedipus complex. They never had to kill the king or the aristocrats, which are paternal figures in Europe. That's why there's so much obsession with age in the US. They think they can be "forever young", like the song. Q. And since 9-11? A. 9-11 has had a profound impact on the American mentality. They've never been invaded. The only wars were the ones in Hollywood. The answer is fear and the desire to fight. People want to say, don't mess with me! We've seen an incredible increase in the security budget. The US is becoming a militarized country. Q. How does this influence consumption? A. Things like the adaptation of a military vehicle, the Hummer, or bullet-proof vests have become fashionable. Executives from one of my clients, DuPont, have remarked to me that they are selling huge quantities of Kevlon, a material five times stronger than steel. I think we're going to see a comeback of bomber jackets. And military boots. Q. But "military chic" already existed. A. This is no longer military chic. This is real, much more visceral. Q. In what sense? A. I divide the motivation of the consumer in three categories. The cortex, which is intellectual. The limbic, which is realted to emotion. And third, the reptilian: an instinct for survival and reproduction. The reptilian is winning out. Although it may look for an intellectual alibi, power is reptilian and in the US, now more than ever, it is what's in charge since the events of 9-11. Q. Like the Hummer, for example. A. A car is much more than a vehicle to get from point A to point B. A car is a message. There's no need to have a Hummer to go shopping at the mall. But I think there's a reptilian instinct under the surface, in the depths of the mind, the message they want to emit is something like "Don't mess with me. If there's a collision, you're going to die and I won't." In Europe this would be perceived as too simplistic. But the United States is simplistic. Q. Will it stay like that? A. In reality, I think that 9-11 should mean the coming of age for the Americans. And this should express itself in respect for other cultures. Until now, the United States has had no foreign policy becuase they thought that the rest of the world was nothing more than a bunch of small countries that would wind up becoming little Americas. Q. How will this affect the strategies of the big corporations? A. Look at McDonald's. It's a symbol of old-time globalization. One product for the whole world. But this model was already being questioned and it died definitively on 9-11. Now they have to diversify, recognize that in France we like cheese as something alive with a smell, that's not dead like pasteurized American cheese. Q. Give some examples. A. A good one is L'Oreal in Japan. They've been very successful because of their respect for Japanese aesthetics, so different from the French. To do this you have to be sure of yourself. And L'Oreal has this because it's French. American companies can't rely on their culture because it's so poor. That's their problem. We won't comment too much here, except to say that we're shocked that DuPont, General Motors, and forty-eight of the other top Fortune 100 companies are actually paying this guy enough money to live in a mansion for spouting this drivel. We are also shocked that these companies are paying this guy to talk shit about their own country. We don't need to hire any Frenchmen to do that. We already have Chomsky, Vidal, Sontag, Lewis Lapham, Bill Moyers, Ramsey Clark, Susan Sarandon, Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin, and Woody Harrelson. We suggest that if you, the reader, work for a company that hires Monsieur Clotaire Rapaille, or if you own stock in such a company, you might gently propose to someone on the board of directors that the company save some money by no longer hiring said unpleasant arrogant anti-American French psychologist to tell them crap they could have picked up from an intro marketing book, a bad Psych 101 textbook, and a couple of Naomi Klein manifestoes. We'd also like to point to good old nationalism as a reason for M. Rapaille's anti-Americanism. This is clearly visible in his last three answers. He thinks America doesn't respect other countries, like France, where we mistakenly tried to sell them non-stinky cheese. Such an affront to la belle France! Meanwhile France, so superior, is "successful in its exportations" because it respects other countries' cultures; it can do this because it has a rich culture, not a poor one like the American. M. Rapaille would not fall into such obvious chauvinism were he not a nationalist, blinded into thinking that his culture is superior to the adolescent American. He just can't understand why America is richer, more powerful, and more successful than his own beloved France, and he refuses to admit it just may be because American culture is superior to French in several important fields. Now, we'd prefer to say that America, as a culture, excels at some things, and France, as a culture, excels at others. Two of the things that America excels at are marketing in particular and business in general, and these are two things in which the French have always been weak. They have even historically turned up their Gallic noses at such matters; remember Napoleon's jibe that the British were "a nation of shopkeepers"? Well, the shopkeepers kicked Napoleon's superior French ass when it came down to the real fighting. British culture won out over French, and don't think the French don't know that and don't resent it (which is why they can be so snotty about French--they can't stand it that English is the world's first language rather than French), especially since France was, until the mid-1800s, the most populous country in Europe except Russia and should have been able to beat the English militarily, as with more inhabitants they should have had both more men and more money than the British. Yet since the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended in 1713 and in which France took a serious loss, France has been on the winning side in only one important war: the War of the American Revolution. Since then, they've lost all the big ones; I would hand them a loss in World War One since they'd have been conquered again if it hadn't been for first the British, for four long years of trench warfare, and then the Americans, with their 1918 contingent of fresh fighting men. They're clear losers in World War Two, no matter how much the postwar settlement tried to disguise that fact. Face it, Frenchmen: you're lousy at business and war. Be proud of the good things about your culture instead of bashing the British and Americans for being better at some things than you are. Sunday, November 17, 2002
Check out Merde in France, who claims to have spent "20 years behind enemy lines" and has quite a lot to say.
My pal Murph came over this morning and we got cranking on the porno translations; if this job turns out well, which we think it will, we have a lot more similar work coming. We got them finished in record time, it isn't difficult at all. What we are figuring is that the most important part is to make sure the pervos correctly understand how to pay. We were very careful about getting that exactly right, as we were about the various legal disclaimers. We actually don't think the rest of the text matters too much at all. The site we translated is one of those "Barely Legal" ones that feature young-looking girls; the owner proclaims that all models are 18 or over and openly offers a list of the modeling agencies that he hired the girls from, several of them in Hungary and the rest in Britain, so we figure he's legit and that nothing unethical is going on here. We have no ethical problem about providing the necessary material that pervos need as long as no minors or animals are involved and nobody really gets hurt. As Remei says, "If it's legal, money is money." Her very Catholic dad used to be the doorman at a cabaret, which was the thirty-years-ago equivalent of a strip club, so I bet that's where she came up with that expression.
Ali of True Porn Clerk Stories says that 100% of the pervos that rent barely legal videos are men over 45, so we figure that's the market our translations are aiming at. We did a little "research" with Google for barely legal sites in Spanish and discovered that they contain a lot of diminutives, especially to refer to parts of the female anatomy. The plot of the text that accompanies the photos always contains some reference to not being ashamed or embarrassed, which we figure is supposed to reassure the pervos, who are quite likely ashamed of themselves. The text emphasizes that the girls in the photo like to "play", which reminds the pervo that these girls are young and contains connotations of innocence, but it also emphasizes that the girls are inviting you, the pervo, to come and play with them. They are willing partners. They want to play with you. They like to play. It's OK because the girls like it. So you're not a bad person if you like it, too. At least, that's what the website is telling the pervo. Also, there's always a section in which the model "addresses" the viewer directly and explains how much she likes taking off her clothes and how sexually excited it makes her. This section is always full of juvenile slang, as if it had really been written by a teenager. Somewhere in here the girl "says" that she's always wanted to be a porno model and she's so happy that she's old enough now. The price of the service, by the way, is $35 a month, so they're not aiming at the "let's look up a porno site for fun" market here. They're aiming at real porno fans who have enough money to pay thirty-five bucks to look at pictures of 19-year-olds with pigtails wearing Catholic school uniforms exposing their genitals. The masturbating-with-a-stuffed-animal motif is also popular, as is playing with a hose, I suppose because of its connotations, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Thanks to Horologium for linking to us. It's a good site. Check it out. In other blog news, the always avant-garde Sasha Castel and the boys from Dodgeblog have merged into one single blog, giving you not one but four good reasons to click on Sasha's site. This is quite likely the beginning of something new. Blogs are no longer a trend; they've matured. There's been a shakeout of a lot of the warblogs that started up post-9-11 or post-Sullivan, Kaus, and Reynolds. The blogs that had just one thing to say, that they were angry about 9-11 and wanted justice to be done, have mostly folded. Only the polyblogs (I think it's a better term than "warblogs"; it implies that you deal with many subjects, and "poly" sounds like the first half of "politics", which is one of the subjects that a true polyblog deals with) that had many different things to say have stuck around. For examples, look at the way such bloggers as Jane Galt and Sgt. Stryker have constantly expanded the number of subjects they write about, and they both changed the formats and names of their blogs when their lives changed. Jane and the Sarge, of course, are committed bloggers, but most people would just give it up when they got a challenging new job or moved all the way across the country. For instance, I quit for a month, in August, when I was on vacation in Kansas City. I think a lot of current bloggers are going to give it up in the next few months, or certainly years. We're going to get married or get new jobs or move to Seattle or have a kid and "full-time" blogging will become impossible. I mean, blogging is cool, and if it didn't exist a lot of people would be a lot worse-informed than they are, but if your blog's more important than your life, your priorities are wrong.
Sasha and the Dodgeblog boys have come up with a solution to this problem by merging their already well-established blogs. I imagine that we'll see a lot of mergers within the next few months as people who want to continue blogging come to see it as a solution to the problem of not being to post at least every couple of days. Merging looks like a very convenient way of assuring that there are always a lot of high-quality new posts up on a blog and that traffic will remain high, as the new merged blog will reap the collected goodwill of both established blogs. Anyway, I think that there will be a continued influx of new polybloggers to take the place of those who just plain drop out, and established polybloggers will increasingly merge with others instead of simply giving up their blogs altogether when their life situations change. I really think mergers will provide more and better blogs, as people who post less frequently will average higher-quality posts. I don't know what the rest of your bloghabits are, but I find I can't keep up with more than about thirty blogs. I check in with all the ones on my blogroll at least once a week, and there are a few others that I look at occasionally that I really ought to link to. I check InstaPundit and the Spain-Europe oriented blogs every day and four or five others--Jane Galt, Steven Den Beste, Sullivan and Kaus, Samizdata--at least every two or three days. I imagine most blogreaders are sort of like me in their habits: there's a limit to how much of blogdom we can absorb at once. Merging blogs will reduce the number of blogs within our personal bloglimits, without giving up and allow us to read and keep track of more new, up-and-coming blogs. Saturday, November 16, 2002
I am an idiot. My favorite writer on the NFL is Gregg Easterbrook, the Tuesday Morning Quarterback. He'd been writing that column over the last two years in Slate and it didn't come back this season. I thought, Well, too bad, he's doing something else (Easterbrook is a very level-headed issues and politics journalist who in the past has been a frequent contributor to the New Republic, which is where I picked up on him during TNR's Andrew Sullivan-Michael Kelly period, back when TNR was really good), maybe writing another book (I read a terrific one by him, the name of which I have unfortunately forgotten, on the environment; his conclusion was that the market and improved technology have been the major causes of today's much-cleaner-than-25-years-ago environment and should be allowed to keep doing their work, and that overregulation is not only economically unsound but in the long run environmentally harmful, since it causes resources to be wasted that could be more productively employed elsewhere. He's a be-concerned-but-don't-panic guy on environmental issues, which I consider moderate and reasonable.) Anyway, the reason I like his football writing so much is that he doesn't pretend to be a sportswriter; his point of view is that of a generally well-informed, amused but rather detached TV spectator who uses the reasoning skills he developed writing about politics and issues to give readers a perspective that you never see anywhere else. I just found him. He's on ESPN and he's still writing on football; he's just getting paid more for it, I hope a lot more. Check him out.
The Vanguardia's Saturday TV magazine includes a two-page section on what's happening in the celebrity social scene around the world. This week they include photos and explanatory test about Gerard Depardieu. Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, Vincent Pérez (he's a European actor), fatherhood and Phil Collins, Guy Ritchie, Ethan Hawke, Michael Douglas, Andre Agassi, and Jude Law, Woody Allen and that poor girl, the Ketchup girls, Edward Burns and Christy Turlington, Chelsea Clinton, and Caroline Kennedy. That's three Europeans and a whole lot of Anglo-Americans; the Kennedys are reported on in Europe as if they were a royal family, and they're trying to do the same with Chelsea Clinton, to establish her as some kind of American princess. Poor Chelsea. It's not her fault her parents are who they are.
This horrific murder case in Wichita and this equally horrific one in the Kansas City area are why Kansas voters brought back the death penalty: so it can be used on these psychopaths who have amply demonstrated that they are not fit to live.
Friday, November 15, 2002
We just found this site called Bartleby.com which absolutely rules. It provides you with access to hundreds, literally hundreds of canonical Great Books. You can no longer say, if you've never read Aristophanes, that you always wanted to but never managed to get hold of a copy, because here it is. Along with everything else we've never read but sure have run across the title or author of a lot. "Oh, yeah, Pico della Mirandola. Italian Renaissance. Uh, what else.....?" Real readers will love this site. (No, we're not some kind of super-intellects who normally spend hours of our spare time reading Greek theater, though perhaps we should. We came across it by accident while searching for info about H.L. Mencken.)
Here's one from National Review Online showing that enviro-nuts and peace freaks, who are generally the same people, fall into a massive contradiction according to their own alleged reasoning when they oppose a good Saddamizing of Saddam. Jerry Taylor, one of the authors, is someone who's written other articles, all enviro-nut-bashing, that I've read. He generally has the goods, as far as I can tell; that is, what he says as far as the facts go almost always checks out with what other writers and sources I know and trust also say. My problem with him, though, and let me emphasize that I generally agree with what he says, is that he's such an anti-enviro partisan that I sometimes feel he'd be capable of twisting evidence, of making the facts fit the theory, just to score a few debating points. Maybe it's because of his style. I can't but help think that he's a lawyer, and if I remember right he used to be a lobbyist. It seems like there's a little drop of Three-in-One on everything Taylor writes, he's so slick. Just not quite slick enough; if your slickness shows, you're not really slick. Now how's that for an unfalsifiable hypothesis?
Check out this article on the false, multi-culti belief in a great Islamic civilization from Front Page; the author has the facts right and his conclusion is, sadly, quite correct, with the partial exception of Muslim Spain, which was actually a pretty decent place between about 750 and 1000 AD..
Antonio says that the majesty of Islamic civilization is stressed in Spanish schools, or at least was when he was there; he thinks the real reason is that Spain was conquered by the Muslims from the Christians and then reconquered by the Christians after a war that lasted, on and off, for almost eight hundred years. Spain and Christianity look quite heroic as the vanquishers of such a powerful and rich culture, so said culture's real level of power and wealth tends to be inflated.. Also, several of the finer moments in Muslim history did occur in tradition-rich Córdoba under the Umayyad Emirate, which continued holding power in Muslim Spain long after the Abbasids had overthrown them (750 AD) in the rest of the Muslim world. Islamic Spain was thus politically independent of the rest of the Muslim world, the only independent Muslim state outside the Baghdad Caliphate, and it shouldn't be a surprise that Muslim rule in Spain was different from Muslim rule across the Straits. Spanish Islam under the Umayyads was rather tolerant, the emirs and later caliphs established a functioning government and promoted agriculture and commerce, and Córdoba was genuinely cosmopolitan. This generally happy state of affairs crashed after the death of Almanzor in 1002, when Islamic Spain broke up into tiny warlord states which were rather similar to the feudal duchies and counties of Christian Europe. Everything in Islamic Spain then proceeded to go straight to hell and only got worse until the Muslims finally got the boot from their last little enclave in 1492. The Spaniards quite reasonably feel somewhat proprietary about the accomplishments of Muslim Spain, since the number of foreign Muslims who came to occupy the land that is now Spain was small. Most Spanish Muslims were the same old Celt-Iberian-Roman-Visigothic people who had always lived in Spain who got converted, though there's no question that occupying Muslims left plenty of their genes to be passed down along with those of the folk who had already been there. (Also, the occupying Muslims brought many Slavic and black African slaves to Spain, where they of course reproduced and blended in with the already-existing mix.) There is still a definite tendency in Spain today to distinguish the noble Moors who fought against El Cid from the nasty Moroccans who pick lettuce. Source: Atlas histórico de España y Portugal.
Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a translation of an interview with Alain Finkelkraut, another intelligent French intellectual, much as that might strike you as four words that don't fit together. Check it out. And check out "Jesus Gil" at Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora at Buscaraons while you're at it.
Baltasar Porcel has been merely dull of late, not completely imbecilic, but for imbecility there's a regular Vanguardia columnist named Eulàlia Solé who outstrips even him. She's billed as a "sociologist and author", which right there ought to send chills up your spine. Back on Nov. 1 she published this screed in the Vangua, and I've been saving it for a slow day. Here goes. The title is "Badly Governed". Sole's text is in italics.
Those who govern should be more intelligent and reasonable than those they govern. Those who direct a society must not be incompetent and, in addition, greedy and insensitive to the misery of others. This shouldn't happen, but it does. Profundity Score, on a scale of 1 to 10, with a ten score going to, say, Aristotle and a one score for, say, Jimmy Carter: 1.5. Their spokesmen try to distract us by waving around the crimes committed by small-time crooks who steal their victims' wallets. They try to ignore the fact that real insecurity comes from other sources. From the risk of catastrophic nuclear wars or accidents; from terrorist actions that can strike anywhere; from the constant war ultimatums. These spokesmen do not mention that after 9-11 the method used to put an end to terrorist attacks has failed. They refuse to recognize that the violence of war in Afghanistan, the deaf ears turned to the violence between Palestinians and Israelis, do nothing but generate more violence. Profundity Score: 1.2. As if human beings did not know how to communicate and negotiate, the most important of those who govern only promote the use of force and completely ignore the possibility of reaching a negotiated settlement. Is this mere short-sightedness or a reflection of an execrable moral status? Profundity Score: 1.1. Bush and his sidekicks want to assure themselves of the power of petroleum and they are ready and willing to massacre human lives. If they haven't done so yet, it is because those who are governed have declared themselves against it in many demonstrations and those who govern have been obligated to ask the permission of a UN that is not behaving as docilely as on other occasions. In Russia, President Putin prefers to prolong the war against Chechenia instead of signing an agreement similar to those reached with other ex-Soviet republics, while he responded to the terrorism personified in a Moscow theater by provoking more than two hundred deaths. Profundity Score: -8 for calling Bush and Powell and Rumsfeld and Rice and Cheney murderers, as well as for thinking that the anti-war left has accomplished anything significant and for comparing apples and oranges in the case of Bush and Putin.. No, they are not governing us well. And what does humanity do? What do the voters do in democratic systems or the oppressed under political or theological dictatorships? They distract themselves from their impotence with consumption, small thefts, religious fanaticism. But, are we really impotent? In the streets and among intellectuals and scientists there are more and more voices that question the established order and demand a different use and distribution of the wealth that comes from industry and nature. Profundity Score: -6, since this paragraph includes a defense of Communism. Against those who want to get drunk on petroleum without caring about the blood that must be spilled, more intelligent people of good will are promoting hydrogen as a clean source of energy, affordable by all countries and a generator of peace. Those who govern badly are those who refuse to modify their actions. What would then happen to their war-making arsenal, to the weapons factories, to the power that they accumulate by terrorizing the whole world? But hydrogen is there, unlimited, equitative. Clearer, less-selfish heads are already advancing its use. Profundity Score: -5 for grave scientific and economic stupidity and ignorance, as well as for the repeated "blood for oil" canard. We want to open this up for a vote. Who is a more ignorant fool, Baltasar Porcel or Eulàlia Solé? Where does Haro Tecglen rank? How do they compare with such Anglo-American jackasses as the Baghdad Three, Maureen Dowd, Eric Alterman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, or the Noamster himself? By exposing these clowns as what they are, are we just wasting our time? I'm not trying to convince the clowns themselves they're wrong, of course; they're unconvincible. I hope, though, that more people will take these ridiculous arguments these clowns make and refute them to their faces. We just may be able to convince a few bystanders that the clowns are just that. On this blog, however, we sometimes feel like we're preaching to the choir, that we're making the band laugh but not the audience. Well, there's nothing we can do about it except keep plugging away and hope that a few undecided bystanders fall into the clutches of the Blogosphere where we can grab them and slap some sense into their heads.
Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar spoke with President Bush yesterday by telephone for 25 minutes. The two leaders agreed that they greatly distrusted Saddam. Spanish government insiders are filtering the official line, "If Baghdad hasn't paid any attention to the UN for years, there's no reason to think that this time will be any different." Aznar repeated to Bush that he will of course give permission for the US to use its bases in Spanish territory as part of a war on Saddam. They also discussed the upcoming NATO summit in Prague and the Turkish situation; Aznar will be meeting with the new Turkish leader on Monday and will transmit a message from Bush.
Aznar's calm and patient diplomacy and his strong support for Spain's ally, the United States, have made him one of Europe's key movers and shakers; don't forget that Aznar is the elder statesman of European Union leaders, in office since 1996. Spaniards generally do not know about the high regard in which Aznar is held internationally; they often underestimate him as a little man with a silly mustache who lacks charisma. That's his external physical appearance, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the man's brain.
Not all Frenchmen are idiotic jerks like the guy who wrote the book about how the attack on the Pentagon is a fake or Hubert Védrine or Lionel Jospin or Robert Hue or Jean-Pierre Chévenement or José Bové--or those two horrid Hispano-French hybrids, Ignacio Ramonet and Manu Chao. Here is a laudable and noteworthy exception, along the lines of our man Jean-François Revel. Writer and philosopher André Glucksmann has been writing interesting stuff for years, and while we don't agree with everything he says, he very often makes intelligent comments. He gets the back page of La Vanguardia today for an interview; the interviewer is Víctor M. Amela. We've excerpted the interview; Q is the interviewer and A is Glucksmann.
Q. When Bush bombed Afghanistan, was that terrorism? A. No! He supported the Afghan moderates against the terrorists. Good for him! He didn't raze Kabul. People died, yes; there is no such thing as a clean war, of course. Look, sometimes it is necessary to use violence against terrorists. Q. Is Saddam one? Should we attack him? A. Didn't Saddam gas the Kurds? And there are hundreds of nuclear plants and oil production facilities that are impossible to defend; horror is coming closer and closer. Q. Tell me, what is Good? A. The absence of Evil! Good can not be conceived in a universal or absolute way. Good is relative. But Evil is absolute: it is the destruction of humanity. Q. So who wants Evil? A. I'll give you three exterminatory ideologies: Nazism (in the name of a superior race), Stalinism (in the name of a sole social class), and Islamism (in the name of a god). In the name of different things, yes, but with a nexus in common among the three: nihilism. Q. Define nihilism. A. Easy. "Everything is permitted; everything is right." Q. (Nihilism) is then a sort of suicidal destruction, like the 9-11 pilots. A. The awful thing is, after that happened, many people thought, "It's horrible, but the Americans deserved it for their historical bad behavior." Q. Isn't that true? A. Look, if we start reasoning like that, will any nation be saved? And blaming the victim is a form of being nihilistic.
We were reminded of the old Tom Lehrer mid-Sixties song about nuclear proliferation, "Who's Next" by the latest French bolshiness about how Saddam has "accepted" the United Nations' terms and there will thus be no war; Saddam hasn't accepted a damn thing and the UN has no say over whether the US will eventually go to war with Saddam or not. Many things have changed in the world since Lehrer wrote the song; virtually the only one that hasn't is France.
First we got the bomb and that was good 'Cause we love peace and motherhood Russia got the bomb but that's OK 'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way Then France got the bomb, but don't you grieve 'Cause they're on our side--I believe China got the bomb but have no fears They can't wipe us out for at least five years Japan will have its own device Transistorized at half the price South Africa wants two, that's right One for the black and one for the white Egypt's gonna get one too Just to use on you-know-who So Israel's getting tense, wants one in self-defense The Lord's our shepherd, says the Psalm But just in case, we better get a bomb Luxembourg is next to go And who knows, maybe Monaco We'll try to stay serene and calm When Alabama gets the bomb
Thanks to Eamonn from Rainy Day, who just gushed with praise for Iberian Notes. His blog is pretty cool itself; he's an Irishman writing from Munich and he has lots of interesting stuff posted. Check it out.
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Here's an excellent piece from the New Republic on Nancy Pelosi written from a moderate Democrat (i.e. the ones you can reason with) point of view.
This is only interesting if you already knew what "sabermetrics" was before now. In case you're still reading and didn't know, it's an arcane statistical discipline devoted to measuring the true ability of baseball players. Sabermetricians will tell you about the Defensive Spectrum, which is SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B, the more difficult defensive positions being on the left, and how players often move right but rarely left when they change position. They'll explain why such well-known and oft-cited statistics as Batting Average and Runs Batted In are not nearly as important as such obscure stats as Slugging Percentage and On-Base Percentage. They'll tell you that stolen bases are overrated, walks are underrated, double plays are way underrated, sacrifice bunting is ineffective unless the guy at bat just can't hit at all, and that home runs really are just as big as they look. The high mucky-muck of sabermetrics is Bill James, who has been insistently writing on the subject since the Seventies and has finally, within the last few years, been getting some deserved attention. First Billy Beane, Oakland's general manager, began relying on sabermetrics as one of his factors when he made decisions--and Beane has had remarkable success with an Oakland club that has been playing well above what its relative budget would predict. Now Bill James himself has been hired as an adviser by underachieving Boston. The story is here in an article by Rob Neyer, a sportswriter who has worked with James and who uses sabermetrics as the source of his own columns. Looks like Bill gave Rob the scoop.
I like Dahlia Lithwick's posts about the Supreme Court in Slate.
John Derbyshire is often too paleocon for my taste, especially on gays and religion, but this column from National Review Online makes amenable reading.
This article from Frontpage is a little hysterical, but I completely agree with its point. At every demonstration here in Barcelona the Left brings out its six-year-old kids carrying "No War" signs, as if the kids understood the bilge their parents are spouting. You can't stop parents raising their kids however they see fit as long as there's no abuse or endangerment, but it's terribly unattractive to make your children parrot your political ideas. I am just as disgusted by anti-abortion protesters who bring their kids along, of course.
Speaking of demos, remember the P.J. O'Rourke bit about how he asks his friend why, whenever the Left gets its underwear all in a knot over something, thousands of protesters turn out, but whenever the Right is full of righteous indignation, all they get are three old ladies in tennis shoes and a couple of Young Americans for Freedom. His friend answers, "Simple. We have jobs." P.J. also said that you can tell which way the political tide is turning by checking whose side the good-looking girls are on. In the US and UK the good-looking chicks are generally apolitical, moderate or right of center. Non-good-looking chicks are the ones who dye their hair green, get all kinds of shit stuck through their faces, and wear black lipstick. British lefty chicks are particularly horrid. But extremely easy. Just get 'em drunk--they don't need much persuasion--while telling them that England is much more culturally vital or some crap like that than America and they begin behaving in a truly beastly fashion. On the Continent, though, watch out. There are some good-looking conservative chicks, but they're conservative, if you know what I mean, and I'll bet you do. But some good-looking chicks over here get their hair dyed silver and wear blue lipstick and have had a screw drilled all the way through their heads or whatever. And there are lots of real leftist babes, which is something I find preoccupying.
Thanks to the lovely and sensual Sasha Castel for linking to us. Thanks also to OmbudsGod, who is an ombudsman and who ombuds other ombudsmen in his blog, and thanks to InstaPundit for not only linking to us but also UPDATING the URL for THIS HERE BLOG on his BLOGROLL. Please, please, other blogmeisters, jump on the bandwagon! InstaPundit's doing it, so it must be cool! Homestead has informed me that if I don't pay them some money the old website at johnandantonio.com will disappear into the ether of the cybersphere. Since I'm not going to pay them any more money, that site will soon be an ex-site and no longer have a link to our new URL, and then all your readers who try to link to Iberian Notes will wind up in the web equivalent of a black hole and, like, have their computers implode or something awful like that. Since you wouldn't want that to happen, hurry up and update!
Spanish Soccer Update: In Champions League play Tuesday and Wednesday, Barcelona beat Galatasaray of Istanbul 3-1 on goals by Gerard, Geovanni, and Dani. Barça brought out a team of subs and youth team players that really did a pretty good job. The game was meaningless for Barça, already classified for the second round, but Galatsaray needed the win to qualify and so went all-out. They're a good club, too; many of their players are from the Turkish national team that did so well in the World Cup. If they were in the Spanish League, they'd be midtable First Division; the other two teams from Barça's group, Bruges and Lokomotiv Moscow, are clubs with Second Division talent. Madrid tied away in a meaningless game against Genk, 1-1, Valencia stomped Spartak Moscow 3-0 in another meaningless game, and in the game of the week, Depor beat AC Milan in San Siro, 1-2. Deportivo, with both starting central defenders injured, their center-midfielder on crutches, and their goalie undergoing chemotherapy, went into Milan controlling their own destiny; with a win they were classified for the second round. If not, Lens could bag the second spot in the group with a win against luckless Bayern. Depor came through in a brilliant game; they went down 1-0 on a goal by Tomasson but came back on an unstoppable shot by Tristán from outside the area. Then Amavisca delivered a perfect pass to Makaay, so perfect that the Dutchman was able to look down, up, and down again and then drill the ball with his good leg between the goalie and the far post. Depor goes to the second round por la puerta grande, as they say around here. The sixteen teams qualified for the next round are Barça, Real Madrid, Valencia and Deportivo of Spain; AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, and AS Roma of Italy; Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen of Germany; Arsenal, Manchester United, and Newcastle of England; Ajax Amsterdam of Holland; and the way-out-of-their-league Basel of Switzerland and Lokomotiv Moscow. The groupings for Round Two will soon be drawn. Barça will face either Arsenal, Milan, Inter, or Juve; Roma, Borussia, or Bayer; and Basel, Newcastle, or Ajax. Ideally, I think, we want Inter, Bayer, and Basel. The worst possible draw would be Arsenal, Roma, and Ajax, since you can't be grouped with a team from your own country or from your first round group.
I was just thinking about the Alaskan Independence Party and that ridiculous plank in their platform about being against government waste. It's the kind of plank that marks them as being politically amateurish. Real parties look for issues that distinguish them from the competition. EVERYBODY, from Communists all the way to Fascists and back around, is against government waste except for the people working for the government doing the wasting, most of whom should probably be fired anyway, whether you have a democratic republic or an absolute monarchy, on the grounds that they're wasteful. One way to get rid of lots and lots of wasteful bureaucrats would be to drastically reduce the number of states and thereby get rid of a lot of overlapping agencies. I figure that if you reduced the number of states by about four, you'd be able to cut the number of state bureaucrats by at least half; I also like the number 13, as it brings to mind the Thirteen Original States. We could go back to the thirteen-stars-with-thirteen-stripes flag. That'd be cool, with the stars in a circle. (Trivia question: If any non-American can name the Thirteen Originals, leave your answers in the Comments section. Canadians get half-credit.)
So these are the new Thirteen United States. I tried to make groupings that fit together logically, sometimes dividing existing states, especially in order to keep metropolitan areas together. I chose as capitals attractive smaller cities, none of which is capital of an existing state and each of which is centrally located in its new state. I provided two possible names, one geographical, like the French departments, and the other honoring a Founding Father or a former President. I considered transport routes, politics, and the ethnic makeup of the population. There are four states from the West, three from the South, three from the Midwest, and three from the Northeast. Six states tend Democratic and seven tend Republican. The populations range from about 10 million to about 45 million. The old states will completely disappear as entities; that is, we're not creating regional groupings of existing states here, we're creating all-new states. North Pacific (Washington): AK, WA, OR, North CA (down to Bakersfield-San Luis Obispo). Capital: Eugene, OR. Population: 24.9m. Politics: Strong Dem. South Pacific (Reagan): HI, South CA (below Bakersfield), S. NV (Vegas metro), AZ. Capital: Flagstaff, AZ. Population: 25.9m. Politics: Tends Rep. Interior Mountains (Hamilton): MT, ID, WY, North NV (except Vegas metro), UT, CO. Capital: Jackson Hole, WY. Population: 9.8m. Politics: Strong Rep. South Plains (Eisenhower): NM, TX, OK. Capital: Lubbock, TX. Population: 26.4m. Politics: Strong Rep. Central Plains (Truman): NE, KS, IA, MO. Capital: Lawrence, KS. Population 13.9m, including St. Louis metro in IL and Quad Cities metro in IL. Politics: Tends Rep. North Plains (Kennedy): ND, SD, MN, WI, Upper Peninsula MI. Capital: LaCrosse, WI. Population 12.6m. Politics: Strong Dem. Great Lakes (Lincoln): Lower Peninsula MI, OH including Cincinnati metro in KY, IN except Louisville metro, IL except St. Louis and Quad Cities metros. Capital: South Bend, IN. Population 38.4m. Politics: Tends Dem. Ohio-Tennessee (Franklin): KY except Cincinnati metro, TN including Memphis metro in AR and MS, Louisville metro in IN. Population: 9.9m. Politics: Tends Rep. South Mississippi or Gulf Coast (Jackson): AR, LA, MS, AL, FL panhandle, except Memphis metro in AR and MS. Capital: Greenville, MS. Population: 15.9m. Politics: Tends Rep. South Atlantic (Madison): FL except panhandle, GA, SC, NC. Capital: Savannah, GA. Population 35.7m. Politics: Strong Rep. Chesapeake (Jefferson): VA, WV, MD, DE, DC. Capital: Charlottesville, VA. Population: 15.6m. Politics: Strong Dem. Hudson-Delaware (Roosevelt): NY, PA, NJ, Fairfield County, CT. Capital: Ithaca, NY. Population: 45.7m. Politics: Strong Dem. New England (Adams): ME, NH, VT, MA, RI, CT except Fairfield Co. Capital: Bennington, VT. Population: 11.9m. Politics: Socialist. The political repercussions of this would be several. The states would be divided into House districts as they are now, on the basis of population. An almost round number of 501 seats seems about right. Each state would get six Senators serving six-year terms like now, with two per state up every two years for election. That would give us a Senate with 78 members. There would be a less strong rural bias than there is now, with California and Wyoming having the same number of senators; power would still be relatively decentralized and not all in the hands of the most populous areas, though. We could either throw out the Electoral College system all together and decide the President on the basis of popular vote, perhaps with the top two candidates going to a runoff, or we could set up an Electoral College just like now, with each state having the same number of electoral votes as it does number of Senators plus Representatives. I rather like a British-style system in which the top vote-getter of the Presidential election in each Congressional district wins one electoral vote. That'll keep down the third parties. As for the states, each would have a popularly elected governor and legislature to do as they see fit. Since each state would have at least ten million people, a great deal of money could be saved through economies of scale; each state would also be large enough to handle many current federal government capacities. The powers of the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and the like could be returned to the states. The Feds would keep running the military and international affairs, along with other things that involve more than one state, and there are a lot of other things we'd want to leave under federal control like, say, I dunno, minimum acceptable environmental standards. Of course, the Supreme Court, just as now, could declare state laws unconstitutional in case somebody started getting a little too radical, so there'd be no need to worry about something like a redneck party in South Mississippi getting hold of power and segregating the schools again. We're not off an a radical states-rights kick, just arguing for a bit more decentralization and for saving a lot of money and complexities. Just think of how many bureaucrats we could fire and bureaus we could close! Will this plan be adopted? Naah. Too sensible. Besides, it would require the current states to vote themselves out of existence, which ain't gonna happen. And, we guess, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The United States ain't broke. What do you think? You probably think I've been wasting my time, and you're probably right, but in case you think anything else, let us know. Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Salvador Puig Antich has been held as a saint and martyr by the Catalanist and the leftist movements within Spain ever since his execution in 1974. Puig Antich was a young, handsome Catalan boy from a good family who joined a tiny anarchist terrorist group in the last years of the Franco dictatorship. The group decided it would be a good idea to get some guns and rob some banks. Puig Antich, armed, got in a gunfight with a police officer and was badly wounded; the cop was killed. The Franco regime, extremely hostile to anarchist cop-killers, put Puig Antich up against a court-martial and sentenced him to death. After fruitless appeals, Puig Antich was garrotted. Garrotting was a particularly unpleasant form of execution in which the prisoner was seated with his back to a wooden post and an iron band placed around his neck. The executioner then violently twisted a handle behind the post, as if it were a wine press, tightening the iron band and killing the prisoner by a combination of cutting off the blood to the brain, strangulation, and a broken neck.
Let us stipulate several things. 1) We do not sympathize with the Franco dictatorship. 2) We consider garrotting to be an unacceptably cruel form of execution. 3) Puig Antich didn't get anything resembling a fair trial. 4) Had we been the judge, we would have granted mercy and imposed a life sentence figuring Puig Antich would be released in 20 or 30 years, since he was guilty of doing what he did and had to be punished, but he was also obviously a reclaimable project, a basically decent person who could be reformed and who was likely to seriously repent what he had done within a year or two. Puig Antich was no psychopath, he was a normal person like you or me who made the bad mistake of believing, of allowing himself to be persuaded, that ideology justifies violence. Even George Orwell once believed that. And Orwell was a lot smarter than Puig Antich showed any signs of having been. 5) He was, however, guilty as hell of murdering a police officer, a regular cop, not a Gestapo man; he also knew damn well when he picked up a gun that anarchists like him were garrotted if they killed cops and got caught. He made his own choice, fully aware of the risks it involved. 6) He received the support of the international Left in his appeals because of the ideological nature of his crime; many Spanish leftists would argue that Puig Antich was justified in shooting the cop, since he was an idealistic anarchist, after all, not a nasty Fascist. And he received the sympathy of the average Catalan man-on-the-street since he was one of them, a nice boy with TWO Catalan surnames who went to school by evening and worked in an office by day who had just happened to kill a man. 6) What happened to Puig Antich was his own fault, but it's hard not to blame, at bottom, the Santiago Carrillos and Pasionarias and Eduardo Haro Tecglens and Manuel Vázquez Montalbáns and Lluís Llachs and the whole bunch of Seventies progres whose Utopia, whose false Utopia, glorifying all forms of Leftist revolution, seduced impressionable and idealistic kids like him and led them into terrorist gangs that justified and practiced violence when it was used against the right people. Salvador Puig Antich and his tiny cell were, essentially, the equivalent of the SLA in the United States or the Baader-Meinhofs, the Red Army Faction, in West Germany. They had no popular support and no idea about how to be proper terrorists. They were rank amateurs playing revolutionaries, fired up by the Spanish left's incendiary rhetoric which they tragically took seriously. And they got people killed, including one of themselves. Anyway, there has been a big stink over the last few days because the Camilo José Cela Museum had, on display, the garotte that was used to kill Puig Antich. The eccentric Nobel Prize-winner, who actually wrote a couple of books worth reading but whose general level of talent was sadly below that expected of a Nobel Lit winner, put the garrotte in the room dedicated to his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte. The novel's protagonist is, like Puig Antich, garrotted. When this hit the fan, there were protests everywhere, including several rather sad letters to the editor by Puig Antich's poor sisters, the real victims--along with the policeman and his family--in this story with no heroes. We think the protests were perfectly justified. Displaying a garrotte used to kill people is in pretty poor taste except in a museum seriously devoted to the history of crime and punishment, and can only add to the misery of Puig Antich's family. And Cela apparently obtained it illegally, anyway; he asked someone he knew in the Socialist government for it back in 1995 and it was just sort of given to him. Gotta love Spain.
Check out Cinderella Bloggerfeller for a whole raft of good posts. He's set up the Axis of Porcel HQ, where you can wade your way through huge quantities of Baltasar's muddy prose in English, more or less. The Google Automatic Translator somehow manages to make Porcel, in broken run-through-the-machine English, more comprehensible than the original Spanish.
From today's Vanguardia:
Two hundred intellectuals and artists sign for ideological pluralism Some two hundred personalities from the Catalan cultural world, among them the journalist Maruja Torres, the authors Rosa Regás and Ramón Folch, and the actor Joel Joan, have signed the manifesto on liberty backed by the Foundation for Peace and the NGO Justice and Peace, issued on October 3 in Barcelona, against "ideological uniformity". A total of 32 personalities, among them the author Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, the singer Lluís Llach, and the architect Oriol Bohigas, read on Oct. 3 the manifesto "For a world in which all worlds fit, no to the reduction of liberty", which is intended to be the "starting point" for those who reject war and defend political pluralism. The document calls on the citizenry to "the defense and the amplification of liberty, human rights, justice, dialogue, and peace", criticizes decisions made by the Government like the Political Parties Law (illegalizing Batasuna, the pro-ETA party), the "decretazo" (modification of the Education Law that would, like, make school way too hard), and the Foreigners Law (which lets the government kick out at least some illegal aliens), and in addition denounces the United States's doctrine of preventive defense. The document was also signed by the lawyers Francesc Casares and Gil Matamala and the philosophers Josep María Terracabras and Francisco Fernández Buey, and the urban planner Jordi Borja, who defended the necessity of accusatory manifestos like this one, since "the world is threatened" by the president of the United States's "new Fascism and aggressive imperialism". No comment, except to say that these people are all notorious Communists and a fine sample of our local population of blabbering ignorant loudmouths. Note that none of the people who are mentioned as signers have real jobs. (If Bohigas is a real architect I'm Mark Steyn.) And what they mean by ideological pluralism is they want us to let Marxism back into the house of intellectual respectability. Oh, well, most of these people are over 55 and drink and smoke a lot, so they'll probably die pretty soon. Except Joel Joan, who is sort of our Alec Baldwin but dumber. Maybe more like our Woody Harrelson. Lluís Llach, in particular, is rumored to have a major strike against him on the living-a-long-time front. Oh, yeah, this appeared as a news article in the politics section, not on the editorial page; it isn't even boxed and labeled something like "News Analysis".
Says Enric Juliana in these excerpts from this article in La Vanguardia (his text is in italics, our comments in regular type)
The presumption that a Europe open to Turkey and other Islamic countries (Morocco) is an idea that is at heart progressive, and that a non-expansionist EU that is sincere about the role of Christianity in its genesis is a right-wing reactionary attitude, is an excessively Manichean position. It just doesn't fit. Wait a minute. I think this guy is saying that if you want to join the EU, you have to be a Christian country. Then what does he want to do about Muslim Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia when their turn comes up? Is he going to say to the people of Sarajevo, Tirana, and Pristina or to the survivors of Srbrenica that they're just not good enough to get in? And what would the officially secular, non-Christian French state, with its 10% Muslim population, have to say about the idea of a Christian EU? And where do the Jews fit in here? And, when you get right down to it, keeping the Turks out just because they're not Christians is politely called racism, at least where I come from. The proof is named Bush. The United States is the largest source of pressure for Turkey to be admitted to the Union. The imperial optics are diaphanous on this issue. Not only do they want to nail down a key piece of the puzzle that is the Western defensive system, the safest access route to the energy resources of the Caucasus, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. but they want to water down the strength of Brussels. The bigger Europe is, the better for Washington. The more it looks like Mercosur or NAFTA, the farther we are from the old ideal of the nation of nations, from the new political body that has never quite been born and which we will perhaps never see. Good God, where do we start? First, check out his logic. Admitting Turkey to the EU can't be "progressive" because Bush is for it, and anything that reactionary Bush is for must automatically be bad. Second, note the bad geography. Oil from Mesopotamia and Arabia will continue to be shipped by tanker because that's the most convenient method. True, stability in Turkey and the Caucasus is necessary for the explotation of Caspian Sea oil and its transport by pipeline, but there's not much oil in the Caucasus. The oil's in the Caspian, down around Baku, and this is not a new find; it's always been known that the Caspian basin is rich in oil. Hitler was trying to grab it in late 1942 in his drive toward the Caucasus; the Wehrmacht's target was Baku. Third, the Americans, let me repeat again, occasionally have foreign policy objectives that have nothing to do with oil, and methinks this is one of them. America simply figures that after 50 years of alliance, the Europeans really owe it to Turkey to set reasonable conditions (e.g., say, the legalization of education in Kurdish) and a deadline that the Turks would have to meet to get in. If the European Union is going to expand to Romania and Bulgaria, and they've set a tentative date for admission of those countries for 2007, then they should also expand to Turkey, much more deserving than either of these two. It's that simple. Washington is lobbying on behalf of its good friend Turkey, which ought to be a good friend of Europe, too; at least that's what Turkey would like. And this guy Juliana is again suffering from typical Spanish conspiracy-theory-itis regarding America and everything else. Since the Spaniards don't trust anybody, much less themselves, they are always prone to believe that a sinister ulterior motivation, in this case the destabilization of the European Union, is hiding behind the most innocent-seeming American initiative.
Spanish Soccer Update: This is already a regular blog feature. Last weekend Barcelona squeaked out another cheap win, 1-0, over Villarreal, not an especially good team--their only real star is Martín Palermo, who once missed three penalty kicks in one game. Riquelme scored the only goal, a penalty kick awarded for no particularly good reason. Luis Enrique is out, injured, and will probably miss next weekend's Big Four match in La Coruña against Deportivo. (The Big Four are Barcelona, Real Madrid, Valencia, and Deportivo de la Coruña, the four Spanish teams that have qualified for the Champions' League during the last three or four years and have won the last several league championships. Any one of them can win the League this year and all of them have a shot at the Champions' League title as well. The two teams closest to the Big Four in talent are Betis and Atlético de Madrid. While Real Sociedad, Mallorca, Celta, and Málaga are currently high in the standings, they'll drop down eventually.) I would favor using Luis Enrique, when he finally comes back, in a limited role. He's a fine player, a real gutsy guy, like Pete Rose, Cal Ripken, or George Brett in baseball, a guy with merely good natural skills who is nonetheless a top star because of his intelligence, hustle, and effort. He is tied with Patrick Kluivert for the team lead in goals scored this League with five. He once played a few minutes at the end of a World Cup match against Italy with a broken nose. His nickname is "Lucho", which directly translated is "I fight". He's 32, though, and he's starting to be nagged by injuries. I would either start him and pull him out after 30-60 minutes, replacing him with an offensive or defensive midfielder depending on whether you needed to score or defend, or start Riquelme in his position and bring on Luis Enrique in the second half if you needed him. Whatever, he can't play the full 6 to 8 games that Barça plays a month. He wants to, but the coach, unfriendly Dutchman Louis Van Gaal, shouldn't let him. He has to realize that he is now a relief pitcher or a sixth man but that relief pitchers and sixth men are important players, too. Also in Barça news, young goalie Victor Valdés got mad and threw a temper tantrum when Van Gaal sent him back to the youth team, which is like being sent down to the minors. He refused to report for practice and everybody got extremely mad at him for being a rookie punk. He has been thoroughly chastised and is repentant. Madrid lucked out and beat Rayo Vallecano 2-3. Valencia tied Betis 1-1. Real Sociedad tied Deportivo 1-1. The game of the week was the two Atletis, Atlético Madrid and Athletic Bilbao, who tied 3-3 with a double hat trick; Urzaiz scored three for At. Bilbao and Jose Mari, formerly of AC Milan, scored three for At. Madrid. The League standings after nine games, almost one-fourth of the season, are Real Sociedad 21 points, Valencia and Mallorca 18, Celta with 17, R. Madrid with 16, Málaga and Barcelona with 15, Betis and Deportivo 14. Español, Osasuna, and Recreativo are clearly the three worst teams so far; each has lost six games and has given up twice as many goals as it has scored. I would bet money now they're the three to go down to Second this year. Villarreal has had poor results but has more talent than these three; they've only lost four games and their goals scored-goals allowed difference is only -2, not -11 as in the case of Recreativo. Villarreal has also had a much tougher schedule; they've played Madrid, Barça, Real Sociedad, and Deportivo, all of which are good teams, and they beat Depor, tied Madrid, and lost 1-0 to Barça and Real Sociedad. That's really pretty good. Recreativo is getting beaten by bad teams; the only Big Four team they've played is Valencia, which stomped them 3-0. They also got stomped 3-0 by Celta, admittedly a good team. Wait till Recreativo plays some of the other good teams; we'll see a few 5-0 or 6-1 games.
I mentioned this several months ago, but thought I'd recap it. Soccer clubs in Spain often represent a political or nationalistic current. FC Barcelona, for example, is the representative of Catalan nationalism. It's always been a symbol of the left, especially during the Franco period. Real Madrid is its opposite, the representative of Spanish centralism. It was the team favored by the Franco regime during those dark days, or so at least say the Barça supporters. Real Madrid is often called unfairly a "Fascist team", and it's true that they have a big group of skinhead supporters called the Ultra Sur. They're also considered the right-wing team in Madrid, as opposed to Atlético de Madrid, which is the anti-establishment team. Barcelona's right-wing team, also unfairly called "Fascist", has always been RCD Español. Español has about one-fifth the number of fans as Barça and is usually thought of as anti-Catalanist and pro-Spain. They have a bunch of Fascist skinhead supporters called the Brigadas Blanquiazules. Ironically, though, the last deaths in hooligan violence in Spain were the murder by an At. Madrid hooligan of a Real Sociedad fan about four years ago and the murder by a gang of Barça hooligans of an Español fan about ten years ago. Both of these were unprovoked attacks on innocent, non-violent fans, and both were committed by hooligans loyal to "left-wing" clubs against fans of "right-wing" clubs. Both Valencia and Mallorca are also considered conservative, anti-Catalanist teams. In Valencia there's a second-division team, Levante, which wears the same colors as Barça and is the left-wing opposition to mighty Valencia CF. In the Basque Country Athletic Bilbao is the rad team and Real Sociedad is the conservative team. In Sevilla, historically, Sevilla CF was the conservative bourgeois team and Real Betis was the left-wing working-class team. Those roles have switched over the last few years, and now Betis is conservative and Sevilla has attracted the most hardcore left-wing supporters in Spain. Whether or not this is a coincidence, Sevilla is known as the team with the most violent, dirtiest players. At. Madrid has always had that reputation, too, as has At. Bilbao. I wonder if the fact that all these clubs are considered to be left-wing has to do with the stigma of being clubs that play dirty. In Asturias Sporting Gijón is the working-class team while Real Oviedo is the bourgeois team. In Galicia Celta de Vigo is the left-wing, Galician-nationalist team, and Deportivo de la Coruña is the conservatrive, pro Spain team. Teams that wear white--Real Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Oviedo--have historically always been considered conservative, though Sevilla has now gone over to the left.
Bad news, guys. The Vangua's headline is "Digital editions of Spanish newspapers to cease to be free." El Mundo, the Madrid right-wing rag, is now charging €50 per year for those who wish to consult it online. El País, the Madrid Socialist rag, will follow suit before the end of November. And notice that the fine folks from the Vangua didn't say anything about their own plans, but that headline looks to me like it means Spanish papers in general.
Transport news: La Vanguardia has updated its information on Spain's high-speed train network. Currently there is a high-speed line running from Madrid to Seville and a semi-high-speed line from the French frontier through Barcelona and Valencia to Alicante. Some portions of this line are normal speed and the rest of it allows trains to go 220 kph; the trains on the true high-speed Madrid-Sevilla line can do 350 kph. Under construction are the Madrid-Barcelona-French frontier line, which will be a truly high-speed job; an extension on the Mediterranean line from Alicante and Valencia to Albacete, which will eventually be connected to Madrid through Cuenca; a spur off the Madrid-Seville line from Córdoba to Málaga; and the Madrid-Valladolid-Burgos line, which will eventually run through Bilbao and San Sebastián to the French frontier at Irún.
In a similar vein, just in case you were interested, the ten most expensive streets on which to rent a commercial space in Spain are Preciados and Serrano in Madrid and Portal de l'Ángel and Paseo de Gràcia in Barcelona, all well over 1000 euros / sq. meter / year; and Rambla de Catalunya and Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona, the Gran Vía in Bilbao, Colón in Valencia, Tetuán in Sevilla, and Jaume III in Palma de Mallorca, at 600-800 euros / square meter / year. The most expensive commercial space in the world is now at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan, at 7600 euros / sq. meter / year.
Tomorrow night Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi, the basketball arena built for the Olympic Games, will host the MTV Europe Music Awards. You may not care, but they're making a big deal out of it. The 13,000 tickets have been sold out for weeks. Christina Aguilera, Bon Jovi, Coldplay, Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, Foo Fighters, Moby, Pink, Robbie Williams, Whitney Houston, and Wyclef Jean will perform. Most of these really are top-name acts, in case you're one of those people like me who likes Van Morrison, the Stones, James Brown, the Blasters, and Dwight Yoakam and doesn't really keep up with what's on MTV. Bon Jovi played a free acoustic show last night up in the park on Montjuic before some 10-20,000 people, among whom I, of course, was not. The guy from La Vanguardia's back page who does the featured interview every day did Bon Jovi yesterday and baited him unmercifully about plastic surgery and hair implants. Bon Jovi kicked the guy out when he asked if he had ever met Pamela Anderson. This whole thing just shows that while a few self-proclaimed intellectuals bash American popular culture in the media, the Spanish people are very interested in Anglo-American pop culture and the Spanish media is more than happy to bow down to its big stars, despite their constant protestations. There's no way they'd bait, say, Eminem in the way they did to Bon Jovi, very much a second-rate star these days. Anyway, rather than kicking rude reporters out, Eminem would just kick their asses. I wish some real obnoxious redneck asshole like Hank Williams Jr. would come over here and put on a show that included the consumption of an entire fifth of Jim Beam and falling off the stage a couple of times. George Jones could be the special guest star, and he could drink two fifths of Jim Beam. Or Merle Haggard, who, we hope, would kick off his show with "The Fightin' Side of Me" and play it again as the encore. Or imagine what David Allan Coe, who really has been in prison, would do with an uppity Spanish reporter. I should become a concert promoter and hire all four of these guys to do a country music European tour. They'd love it; it would be just so typically American.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Spanish Slang Terms: This will become a regular section, in which we fill you in on some fun expressions to add to your Peninsular Spanish vocabulary.
pijo: 1) a snobby rich kid. Wears only expensive brand-name clothing. Drives a Volkswagen Golf. Probably studied business but is not a yuppie; yuppies work hard and strive. This guy doesn't. He works for his dad's company or one of his dad's friends' companies. Speaks, stereotypically, with an exaggerated low-high-low intonation in his sentences and slightly drawled vowels. Probably comes from Sarrià-Sant Gervasi in Barcelona or Salamanca in Madrid. Is often named something retarded like "Borja" or "Alejo". 2) one who tries but fails to emulate a real pijo. He is sometimes called a "pijo-hortera". In this case he is named something retarded like "Jonathan", pronounced "Yon-ah-tan", that his parents thought sounded classy, rather in the way some American parents name their kids inappropriate things like "Tiffany", which is a BRAND NAME, for God's sake, or "Brandy", which is an ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE. I think I'll name my kid "K mart" or "Boilermaker". But definitely not Jonathan, Alejo, or Borja. hortera: tacky in a cheesy sort of way. Often implies that you are trying to put on airs above your station or that you are doing something or behaving in a way exaggeratedly stereotypical of farmers in town in their Sunday best. Can, however, merely mean "in bad taste". cursi: nerdy in sort of a teacher's pet sort of way. The kind of clothes that a teacher's pet would wear, for example, is cursi. un empollón: a nerd. Again, usually refers to the sort of person who tries to please authority submissively. dónde Jesucristo perdió las alpargatas (where Jesus lost his sandals): the middle of nowhere, Nowheresville. A wide place in the road. A jerkwater town. Also el quinto pino (the fifth pine tree). el quinto coño (the fifth cunt) (vulgar): Assboink, Idaho, or Bumfuck, Egypt. el veranillo de San Martín: Indian summer.
You are not going to believe this, but I swear it's true. This has been a weirdly porno-filled week for me. Honestly. My weeks are usually porno-empty. I once linked to a couple of funny and / or interesting sites, Tijuana Bibles, a collection of primitive '20s-40s comics circulated extensively "underground", and Retro Raunch, a collection of teens through about '50s French postcards and the like, but these two sites definitely have redeeming social importance--it's history, for Chrissakes! (Here's an article from Salon, actually the introduction to a book, by controversial cartoonist Art Speigelmann about Tijuana Bibles.) But those are the only remotely nasty sites I've ever linked to. Except for the UnaBlogger. Then, a few days ago, I find the extremely cool website True Porn Clerk Stories, which is a complete and total gas, the blog of a thirtyish woman who works in a Chicago videoclub that apparently specializes in adult videos. (How's that for a euphemism?) Then my wife gets the VCR working; we inherited the damn thing from an American woman named Jane, who went back to California a couple of years ago, and we finally found out what the correct cable we had to buy in order to make it work was. So she goes and rents a porno movie, without my knowledge, "just to see what they're like." Not that I was complaining. She decided it was pretty gross, though, when the male lead began to employ a certain non-traditional orifice belonging to the female lead. Then, today, I get this phone call from my London Irish pal Murph. He says that our American pal Mitch, who works for an Internet company here in Barcelona, has a job for us. He has a contact in London who wants us to translate some pornographic websites from English to Spanish. Of course, I said, "Sure. How much do we get paid?" So that's what we'll be occupied doing for the next few days. It'll probably be more fun than that enormous horribly dull thing we did on car painting. I think I'll get my business cards changed. Right now they describe me as "English teacher. Translator." I want them to say "English teacher. Translator. Pornographer."
Monday, November 11, 2002
While we were watching the Antena 3 news a few minutes ago, there was a human-interest story from Nowheresville, Galicia, the fifth pine tree. Some poor woman's donkey had wandered out in the road ten years ago and had gotten itself run over. The damage to the car and the fine cost more than the woman could pay, so she'll have to sell her little stone house to meet the bills, according to speedy Spanish justice. Now, of course, that the whole thing's been publicized, some magnanimous philanthropist will pay off the three hundred euros and everything will be fine. What struck me curiously, though, was that the woman was speaking Galician, a relative of Portuguese, spoken in the part of Spain that sticks out over the top of Portugal, to a reporter who was interviewing her in Spanish. I asked Remei to explain. She said something like this, paraphrased:
Everyone in Spain can understand Spanish, at least the standard dialect, which they've heard on the radio and TV all their lives. Besides, almost everyone went to school, at least for a few years, and if you're older than about 35 you were taught mostly or completely in Spanish, no matter what part of Spain you're from. In Catalonia, everyone can speak Spanish. Some may speak it so badly that they're embarrassed to do it, but if forced to, they could manage. People in small villages don't usually speak very good Spanish. In bigger towns and smaller cities in Catalonia, they use Catalan among themselves but are perfectly competent in Spanish, though they probably have an accent. Barcelona is completely bilingual, perhaps even majority Spanish-speaking. In the Basque Country and Navarra everybody who speaks Basque can speak Spanish perfectly too. In Valencia and Mallorca they speak Valencian and Mallorcan, both versions of Catalan, among themselves and perfect Spanish with outsiders. Some Valencians and Mallorcans go so far as to say that their "languages" are not related to Catalan, which is just plain ridiculous. And they claim that they don't understand Catalan, so that when dealing with people from Catalonia they will say, 'Speak Spanish, I don't understand Catalan," which is even more ridiculous. They have every right to speak whatever language they want, of course, but everyone in this damn country has some sort of silly attitude about languages and nationalism. Anyway, in Galicia, there are lower-class people in small mountain villages who are mostly elderly and illiterate and really don't know how to speak Spanish. Understand the TV and radio, yes, but they've never had to open their mouths to speak Spanish in their lives. I suppose that when these people die out, which will be within ten or fifteen years, there will be no more monolingual Galician speakers, as there are already no monolingual speakers of Catalan or Basque. UPDATE: Antonio says it's important to add that Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics, Navarra, and the Basque Country have always (at least in the last few hundred years) been rich, fertile provinces agriculturally, that all these people except the Navarrese have historically had large commercial and fishing fleets and big ports, that these were the first provinces to become industrialized, and that they were the first areas to develop important financial institutions. They've always been rich, densely populated areas, and they've always been zones that received a steady in-migration that only spoke Spanish from poorer areas of Spain. The in-migration has diluted the use of the local languages in all those places. Galicia, however, has always been poor, and it's always been an overpopulated source of out-migration. Anybody from outside Galicia who in-migrated there went to one of the ports like Vigo or La Coruña, still heavily Spanish-speaking today. But rural Galicia received absolutely no in-migration from other parts of Spain because there was absolutely no reason to move there, kind of like Oklahoma in the '30s. Since Galicia was so poor, (it's gotten a lot better; it's barely distinguishable from the rest of Europe, except in very tiny isolated places) many older people never went to school, where Spanish was taught, and the only exposure they've ever had to Spanish is TV and radio. They have probably met only a few non-Gallego speakers in their lives, and they've been just fine speaking only Gallego to one another in their little villages. Antonio says that the reason that people in Argentina call all Spaniards "gallegos" in an insulting manner is because most Spanish immigrants to Argentina were Galician, and they were a bunch of oafish rednecks in sophisticated, rich pre-Perón Buenos Aires. Now the tables have been turned and the Argentinians are the poor cousins from overseas while the Spanish are the rich, sophisticated folks; it was reported in the Spanish press that there has been friction that has become problematic between Spanish and Argentinian employees who work for one of the large Spanish companies (BBVA, BSCH, Repsol-YPF, and several others) in Argentina. The Argentinians claim that the Spaniards are overbearing, rude, arrogant snobs who act superior. This is probably a little unfair. They can't be that bad, though I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few prize pijo specimens who give all Spaniards a bad rap.
We did as we always do, watched the news starting at 2:30 on TV3, Catalan government TV, because they've got good international and local coverage. By about 2:55 they've pretty much run out of news, though, and they still have to run twenty more more minutes, so you see a lot of stories about this old guy who is like ninety-three and has three teeth and can barely walk, much less talk a dialect of either Catalan or Spanish that anyone can understand, who lives up in some town in the Pyrenees, where Jesus lost his sandals, that you can only get to by mule and is still making pots on a potter's wheel just like they did twelve hundred years ago or whatever that he's selling for two hundred euros each, so steeped in the essence of Catalanism is he. When the potters come on, we check our watch and get ready to switch over to Antena 3, whose news starts at 3PM, giving us about five minutes of basketweavers, medieval-dance revivalists, and their ilk before the rather happy-talky A3 folks give us their 45 minutes of Spanish-language private-channel Madrid-based point of view. That way we sort of get both sides of the story. Anyway, counting the 30 minutes we saw on TV3 and the 45 we saw on A3, that's an hour and a quarter of hardcore news viewing we've put in today. Not once, on either channel, was it mentioned that today is the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Just in case you were wondering.
Check out this photo from Samizdata.net of a poster advertising fool Michael Moore's stage show in London. Some sardonic anonymous Briton has made a major improvement on it.
Sunday, November 10, 2002
This book review from the Weekly Standard gives you a pretty good idea of who really writes Margaret Truman's books. I didn't know much of this stuff about ghostwriters, though of course I knew they exist, and that the guy's name who appears after the "with" on any book by a celebrity author is the guy who does the real writing.
In the year 1987, a woman named Rosario, a poor inhabitant of Santa Coloma, a Barcelona working class suburb (sort of the local equivalent of Raytown, Missouri), saw the Virgin Mary appear near a locust tree in an empty area of the neighboring suburb of Badalona. Since then, local believers, of whom there seem to be a good few, have erected an altar, built a professional-looking wooden platform around the tree, and generally cleaned up the area. However, the unused land where the sanctuary is belongs to the Badalona city government, and they've ordered the shrine to be removed, supposedly for environmental reasons. They will permit a wooden bench near the tree, where the devout sit to pray, but nothing more.
This is ridiculous. I know the piece of land they're talking about and it's just a big vacant lot, a few dozen acres or so. People dump crap there. If these people are cleaning it up and building a little shrine, it's not hurting anything; in fact, it's good, since someone is picking up the garbage, and if decent people are going there regularly to pray, it keeps the junkies and the prostitutes away, all of which does immense good for the environment. The real reason is almost certainly that Badalona and Santa Coloma have an image problem. They're generally crappy dumps, though there is a nice part of Badalona, and they're seen by the rest of the metro area as being undesirable places to live. The last thing they need is a bunch of Andalusian redneck women with no teeth and black shawls ululating deliriously at the tree where the Virgin Mary appeared.
Eight words I never thought I'd see myself write: this is a good piece by Christopher Hitchens from FrontPage magazine. I must admit the guy is a good writer though I disagreed with him about 90% of the time in the past, until Sept. 11, 2001, anyway. If you don't check out FrontPage fairly regularly, you ought to, though David Horowitz is more than capable of being shrill. He's always off on a new crusade to bring the truth about something to the nation's college campuses, whether it be on 9-11 and the War on Terrorism, the overwhelming liberal Democrat bias of college professors, Nazi holocaust deniers, Noam Chomsky, or Harry Belafonte. It's often got very good links, to Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, and other writers of interest.
With regards to our translations of the fool Baltasar Porcel's columns compared to Cinderella B.'s, one of the interesting aspects of translation is that different translators translate the same original text differently. Joan Margarit, a fine local poet and a very learned man (he gets to meet with Prime Minister Aznar every time Aznar comes to Barcelona; one of Aznar's hobbies is poetry and he is said to be quite knowledgeable about it. Note that he chooses to visit Margarit and not Porcel. Aznar is wise enough to open doors in all fields, not only politics and business. Rumor has it that he's angling for Romano Prodi's or Javier Solana's job after his second term as Prime Minister runs out in 2004. We would be much less apprehensive about the future of the EU if Aznar were in charge of something important) has come out with a translation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy in Catalan. In his introduction, he provides three different translations of one of Hardy's poems, one from a good few years ago, one done quite recently by another contemporary poet, and his own, and invites the reader to compare them. It's really quite interesting, since he gives his own analysis of the similarities and differences.
Anyway, 2002 has been declared by somebody the Verdaguer Year, and the Catalan cultural authorities seem determined, even square-headed, about making sure that everyone possible is exposed to the collected opus of Mossén Jacinto Verdaguer, usually considered Catalan literature's leading poet. Says Vanguardia cultural reporter Josep Massot, "The Verdaguer Year, far from being a failure, continues unveiling important surprises." Surprise my ass, this was funded by the Generalitat's Department of Culture, as it says clearly but very briefly near the bottom of the story, and as for important, let Bernard / Ossian let you know what he thinks, as I'm sure he will when he finds out that this whole thing was inspired by Harold Bloom, who "rediscovered" Verdaguer after having read him in French translation. One Ronald Puppo, a Californian teacher at the University of Vic, has taken it upon himself to translate Verdaguer to English for the first time ever, with the generous support of my tax money. This particular year, 2002, was designated the Verdaguer Year because it marks the 100th anniversary of the poet's death. Jacinto Verdaguer was a priest and was also quite clearly several croquetas short of a plato combinado. While he wrote his two major works, both rabidly Catalanist (L'Atlàntida in 1878 and Canigó in 1885, extremely dull and overblown epic poems, rather comparable to "Hiawatha" or "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in English), he was patronized by a rich family. By 1885 or so he was clearly going completely insane. As Robert Hughes says in Barcelona, "(Verdaguer) began to show embarrassing signs of zeal. As almoner, he was expected to give alms to the poor on (rich patron the Marquis of) Comillas's behalf; now his handouts af the marquis's money became so large and frequent that long lines of the poor and ragged, flocking in from the slums of the Barrio Chino, were always waiting at the back door of the Palau Mojá. Then Verdaguer developed an obsession with exorcism. Toward 1889 he fell under the influence of a Paulist priest who haunted the Barrio Gótico, Joaquim Pinyol. This charismatic quack became his confessor and spiritual adviser. He convinced the poet that the street people of lower Barcelona were infested with demons, and that it was their combined mission to exorcise them. Before long Verdaguer was spending every moment he could find reciting the orders of exorcism opver writhing epileptics and mumbling crones, with Pinyol showing him the needles and pieces of glass they had vomited up. Then Pinyol was joined by a family of morbid il·luminats called Durna, whose daughter, Deseada, appears to have convinced poor Verdaguer that the Virgin Mary's voice spoke through her." The poor bastard only got worse until he died in 1902. Verdaguer is best known for composing the quatrain "L'Emigrant", "Dolça Catalunya / patria del meu cor / quan de tu s'allunya / d'enyorança es mor." Hughes's translation is "Sweet Catalonia / homeland of my heart / to be far from you / is to die of longing." It was rather common at this time of rapid urbanization to write sentimentally about one's far-away homeland or country house or hometown and the old folks back home and all that; hell, Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, asserts that modern nationalism springs from this Victorian romanticism about the national essence being back home on the farm with good old Ma and Pa. In Catalan they call verse written on this theme great poetry. In America we call it country music. In Germany they called it Nazism, or didn't you notice the parallels between the Catalan excursionists and the early, 1920s Hitler Youth? Don't get angry, we're not calling the Catalan nationalist excursionists evil, they neither desire a dictatorship nor want to kill anyone, but their emphasis on youth and healthy living and idealization of nature and going back to the land and homage-like visits to nationalist-tradition-rich places (in Catalonia almost always sites related to Catalan national Catholicism like Montserrat, Poblet, Sant Miquel del Faí, and Núria) and possession of a naive redistributive Marxist ideology (in Catalonia the nebulous "solidarity" inspired by liberation theology, influential in Spain) participation in nationalist ceremonies and exaltation of everything Catalan sure is reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. We must admit that the Boy Scouts remind us a good bit of the '20s Hitler Youth as well, though to a lesser degree as American nationalism is more implicit than explicit in the American Scouts. So back to poor old Verdaguer and comparative translation, which is what I think I started off talking about. Here is a famous section of the Verdaguer epic Canigó in the original Catalan: Un cedre és lo Pirene de portentosa alçada; com los ocells, los pobles fan niu en sa brancada, d'on cap voltor de races desallotjar pot; quiscuna d'eixes serres, d'a on la vida arranca son vol, d'aqueix superbo colós és una branca, ell és lo cap de brot. This is Ronald Puppo's translation: The Pyrenees are a cedar flung high; Peoplse nest, like birds, among its branches, Whence no race-feeding vulture can remove them; Each and every range where life takes hold Forms a branch of this mighty colossus, This superb trunk of life. And this is Sir Mix-a-Lot's translation: I like big butts and I can not lie You other brothers can't deny That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist And a round thing in your face You get sprung Wanna pull up front Cuz you notice that butt was stuffed Deep in the jeans she's wearing I'm hooked and I can't stop staring Oh, baby I wanna get with ya And take your picture My homeboys tried to warn me But with that butt you got Me so horny Ooh, rub all of that smooth skin You say you wanna get in my Benz Well use me, use me cuz you ain't that average groupy For Class Discussion: How would you compare and contrast these two versions of Verdaguer's Canigó? Saturday, November 09, 2002
Jessica from The Blog of Chloe and Pete, which is well worth a read--go on over and check it out--has been kind enough to link to us. Even better, she's baptized us "The Sexy Scourgers of Spanish Socialism". We love it. Patrick, if you're reading this, can you find some way to work it into the template? Thanks in advance.
Check out Cinderella Bloggerfeller, an excellent website whose focus is Europe. They've been following the Baltasar Porcel saga, too, and have translations that are better than ours. A couple more notes about Porcel: 1) He's really ugly. 2) He's a Mallorcan. The stereotypical Mallorcan first name is Tomeu. Since most Mallorcans identify with Mallorca first and Spain and Madrid second, not Catalonia and Barcelona second, you could say that Mr. Porcel has sold out to the Catalans by taking their money and is thus a traitor to his people. You could even call him an "Uncle Tomeu".
Well, it looks like all concerned got what they wanted out of the UN resolution. France and Russia got to feel important and respected, America and Britain will have their war against Saddam (no one seriously thinks Saddam is going to comply), and China and all the other countries that voted yes mark up one in the Favor Book. In other European news, a bunch of antiglobalization wackos marched this afternoon in Florence. It looks like they got a pretty good demo together; I didn't see any figures but I'd bet at least 10,000. What cheesed me off was that the Spanish TV reporters kept referring to these people as "peace marchers" and "hunger activists" and "solidarity groups". All I can say is that from the brief footage of the demo on both the TV3 and then Antena 3 news, there sure looked like there were a lot of red flags. So far, at least, there hasn't been any violence, but I'm writing at six in the evening, around dusk, and that's the time that the demos get ugly in Barcelona--the local folks, union members, high school kids playing rads, and lefty-foo-foo teachers and bureaucrats have all gone back to their comfortable homes. Then the real rads, a lot of whom have come in from out of town for the occasion and now have nothing else to do, come out just around when it gets dark and start smashing shit up and attacking the cops when they arrive at the scene of the disturbance. A few local high-school kids who really shouldn't be out after dark anyway in downtown Barcelona and especially not when there are angry cops in the vicinity join in and get whacked around too and then their parents sue the cops. In case you were wondering, the three McDonald'ses in Florence have shuttered up and taken down the Golden Arches signs in order not to become mob targets, as have many of the famous Florentine luxury shops, so much fun for window-shopping. Here in Barcelona the traditional targets are first the McDonald's on the Ramblas and then bank branches in general, and if I were running a luxury shop on the day of a demo I'd close it up too. Valéry Giscard "d'Estaing", president of the Convention on the future of the European Union, whatever that is, said that the admission of Turkey to the European Union would be "the end of the EU". Well, at least he's being honest; many other European Thlaylis don't like the idea of admitting Turkey, either. Giscard said that "Turkey's capital is not in Europe and 95% of its population lives outside Europe...Turkey, with its 66 million inhabitants, would become the largest member State." To pick a few nits, Ankara is not in Europe but Turkey's largest city, Istanbul, with its 10 million people in the metro area, 10 times the population of Ankara, is famously in Europe. I would guess that 15-20% of Turks live on the European side of the Straits. Also, Germany, with its 83 million, would remain the largest member State in population, though Turkey would become the largest EU country in area. Giscard added that the next thing that would happen after Turkey's admission would be Morocco's pressure to get in too, as Morocco has also petitioned to be allowed into the EU. Well, good. Tell the king of Morocco, hey, set up a representative democratic government with an independent judiciary and the rule of law backed by an inviolate Constitution, which everyone else has to do to get into the EU, and we'd love to let you in. That would be the best thing that could possibly happen to Morocco, being forced to liberalize and getting payback by being let into the economic club when they've proven they're serious about it. If the Turks successfully continue their evolution toward meeting the above conditions--they're not there yet, but they've been making progress, and the way the new "Islamic Democrat" Turkish government behaves and how the army reacts will let us know how close they are to getting there very soon--they damn well deserve to be let into the economic club as soon as they meet those criteria, since they've stood by the European NATO countries for more than 50 years in the military club, including when the going was tough. M. Giscard, by the way, is extremely well known to be a snooty bastard in general. Apparently everyone who has ever known him hates him except maybe for Chirac. He picked up the noble-sounding "d'Estaing" as part of his endless quest for public homage; his uncle, René Giscard, a social climber, had sought to add luster to his surname by adding the appendage d'Estaing, which was in disuse as its last holder got shaved by the rasoir national in 1794, a very bad year in general anywhere near France. This appendage-adopting is permissible in France, and Uncle René was confirmed as the rightful possessor of the appendage in 1923. Valéry Giscard, as Uncle's nephew, saw fit to add said appendage to his own name. Giscard, get this, claimed that he was descended from Louis XV through an illegitimate connection; one of his female ancestors had been one of Louis's chambermaids. He also tried to get into the Society of the Cincinnati, a very exclusive club that is restricted to the descendants of French officers who fought in the American Revolution, on the grounds that the last d'Estaing (who was an admiral) was his ancestor. Didn't work. (Source: Fragile Glory by Richard Bernstein, an excellent overview of French society, now just a little out of date as it's from 1990.)
Awful joke.
What's on the menu at the next European Union summit? Turkey and Giblets. Sorry. Couldn't resist.
Here's our take on Gibraltar, which hasn't changed because of the recent non-binding and unofficial referendum. The referendum did show that the Gibraltarians (we'll call them the Giblets) overwhelmingly want to keep their current status. Well, public opinion in the UK, notwithstanding British behavior regarding Hong Kong, has a thing about giving loyal subjects away to some other country against the will of said subjects. Remember, for example, the Falklands War. Tony Blair's hands are tied. Relinquishing British sovereignty, or even part of it, over Gibraltar, would be a very serious political negative for Blair, and we all know that Tony Blair is notorious for tailoring his words and deeds to fit public opinion, rather like a somewhat more ethical Bill Clinton. (This is why we have been gratifyingly surprised at Blair's backbone during the entire War on Terrorism so far, since a significant proportion of Brits oppose an attack on Iraq and even opposed the Battle of Afghanistan. Perhaps we shouldn't have been so surprised, since Blair also showed backbone in the Northern Ireland negotiations, the Balkans, and in Sierra Leone. If Tony doesn't think an issue is a life-or-death matter, it seems like he's a leaf turning itself this way and that in order to get the most sunlight possible. But we'll have to give him a lot of credit for being tough and clearheaded and usually right when he has to make a decision that may affect history.)
Anyway, back to the Giblets. It's true that Gibraltar no longer has any particular strategic value, not with the US naval base at Rota only a hundred kilometers away. It's also true that Gibraltar is a haven for smuggling into Spain, but this is a problem that can be stopped with some decent police work; you don't have to change sovereignty to solve this one. If the Spaniards would agree to let a few Royal Navy speedboats patrol the coasts, smuggling would, I'm sure, be greatly reduced. There really is no particular reason Gibraltar can't keep the status it has. Nothing would much change if sovereignty of this tiny peninsula with some 20,000 inhabitants were transferred from Britain to Spain in the long run, and nothing would much change if it weren't, either. Nothing's broke. There's no reason to try to fix it. There's nothing for anyone to get his undies all worked up over. There's no crisis. So, since we all agree that democracy is a good thing, let's be democratic. Let the Giblets have a binding referendum on what they want to do, become independent, go over to Spain, or stay with Britain. Co-sovereignty is a dumb idea that will never work, so don't even include it as a choice. The Giblets will vote nearly unanimously to stay with Britain, and their wishes should be honored. Comparisons with the Basque Country are silly. Perhaps 30% of the Basques want independence, whereas 99% of the Giblets want to stay with Britain. I actually wouldn't mind amending the Spanish constitution to give the Basques a referendum on independence (under the Spanish constitution Spain is indivisible) provided it was stipulated that it would be 50 years before another such referendum could be held. Or 100. I don't normally like the idea of amending constitutions, figuring that as few changes in the basic law of a country should be made as possible as long as said constitution is generally fair and decent. In the Basque case, though, a clear defeat for the independentistas might do a lot to remove anything left of ETA's legitimacy. Hell, let the Catalans have a referendum, too, under the same conditions. The independentistas would lose and lose badly. Then they might shut up for a while. Comparisons with Ceuta and Melilla, however, are appropriate. Ceuta and Melilla are small Spanish cities on the north coast of Morocco which form an integral part of Spain; they do not have colonial status (neither do the Canary Islands, which are also an integral part of Spain). Morocco claims them, and Spain quite justifiably refuses to hand them over to Morocco. The Ceutans and Melillans, of course, want to remain part of Spain, as do the Canarians. Massive hypocrisy here on the part of the Spaniards, right? We want to keep our enclaves in Morocco, but we want you to give up your enclave on our shores. The tortuous explanation that Spanish diplomats will give you is that Ceuta and Melilla have been Spanish since the Spaniards themselves founded them in the 1500s and the modern country of Morocco did not exist at that time, while Gibraltar became British under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht when Spain was recognizably the same entity as it is now (for example, it's still ruled today by the same royal family, the Bourbons, that acceded to the Spanish throne precisely according to the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht), and Gibraltar was definitely Spanish territory before it was ceded to Britain. The Spaniards therefore, they say, have the right to demand that their land, Gibraltar, be given back to them, while the Moroccans do not have the right to do so because Ceuta and Melilla were never their land. I don't buy it, of course. During the Franco days, the Spaniards used to argue that Britain had to give up Gibraltar because the Brits had violated one of the clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht by allowing Jews to settle in Gibraltar; the treaty had specified that no Jews were to be allowed to get so close to Judeophobe Spain. This claim is, of course, no longer made. Also, the majority of the Giblets are some kind of mix of Maltese, seafaring Italian (e.g. Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians, not, say, Calabrian peasants), Spanish, and British, with probably a good dash of North African. Atlético Rules has a very different take on this subject..
No luck. Paul Zimmerman from CNN-SI didn't answer my NFL rules proposals in his mailbag, although mine weren't nearly as silly as the proposal he liked best (which was, actually, pretty funny), nor as stupid as his own assertion that you just can't expect players not to commit violent infractions like helmet hits when they're trained to do that.
We're going to try again, with this missive to Jack McCallum, their pro basketball guy: People here are big fans of their hometown hero, Memphis's Pau Gasol. How's he doing this year? Looks like he's been scoring and getting some rebounds, and playing a lot of minutes. But his team loses game after game. Is Pau at all to blame for his team's poor record? What do you think of his defensive game? Do you think he needs to put on more muscle? How good do you see him getting in a few years--do you think he'll be a regular player, an above-average player, a minor star? Major star? Or out of the league? Best, John Chappell
Oh, yeah, feel free to e-mail me at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com. Sorry I haven't got a permanent link for it yet.
Here's an interesting colloquium on anti-Americanism from FrontPage magazine. Since we're on the subject, I thought a link here would be appropriate. Paul Hollander, in particular, is someone whose work I am familiar with and whom I greatly respect, and I tend to agree with him more than I do with the other three. Victor Davis Hanson is definitely my second favorite of the bunch. This guy Flynn, we're willing to admit, is a tad bumptious. This discussion might be something interesting for non-Americans--how a group of conservative American intellectuals react to what they consider to be anti-Americanism. One might also compare the quality of discourse in the colloquium and the quality of discourse in Mr. Porcel's columns.
Here's the link to Porcel's Thursday column in the original Spanish.
I found the link to the original Spanish version of Porcel's column today. It's here.
Baltasar Porcel doesn't know when to shut up. Here he goes again, from Friday, November 8's La Vanguardia. Remember, this guy is considered one of Catalonia's leading intellectuals. The following article, titled "Futurism and reaction", is quite obviously the work of a drooling imbecile. Porcel is not even as smart as Noam Chomsky. We're going to leave it up to you, dear readers, to discover the blatant lies, obvious logical fallacies, complete non sequiturs, and just plain moronic crap in Porcel's text, in italics below. Post your faves up on the Comments section.
I attended a screening of "Minority Report", a typical American movie, skilfully made, from the agile rhythm and suggestive camerawork to effects like the spectacular mechanical spiders. The director is a virtuoso of the industry, Spielberg. Although the movie turns out to be disgustingly morbid. A professor used to say that the Americans confuse tragedy with brutality, poetry with sentimentality. As if their official idealism were hiding a sensory dirtiness. Which the film also reveals: we're dealing with science fiction, crime prevention in the middle of the 21st century, which is also portrayed in the manner of the futurism that is so abundant in the English-speaking novel and cinematography and which is based on terror, dehumanization, catastrophism, oppression.
Why do these people who claim to be the paladins of freedom and human welfare fear tomorrow so much? Because the historical process shows that such prophecies have turned out to be false, whether they be the War of the Worlds, "Blade Runner" or the Orwellian Big Brother that haunts us so. When humanity is progressing in all aspects, although it be among scares and imperfections: we are more cultured, healthier, and freer than half a century or half a millenium ago. Such a futurism does not really foresee tomorrow, but rather is based on the past as destiny, as if humanity were only old and malignant. It is prophecy: you will only be admitted to the Truth of the Lord it you annul yourself and become the servant of a new master. Repugnant. But true. Like Bush, who preaches freedom versus terrorism, which we must obey forgetting the slightest criticism and viewing as the only enemy the second producer of petroleum, Iraq, when those who have economically supported the Bushes are the oilmen of Texas, the state of the Union with most environmental pollution, and who additionally fear finding themselves without oil now that it looks like the reserves will run out in 20 years, and which will additionally be replaced by another completely different source of energy, like hydrogen. The demon Saddam would be acceptable, then, if he were an ally like Saudi Arabia is or like Pinochet was. Bush's and fatalistic futurism's reactionary nature: we're losing ground. Like Bin Laden's ideology: the human being must be mummified in a piece of metaphysical ignorance from a thousand years ago or be killed. Like Holy Mother Russia: after decades of trying to finish off Chechenia, if Chechenia attacks in order to defend itself, then it's terrorism, and justice is found in Putin's gases and bombs.
Is Blogger still not working? I had the same post get eaten THREE TIMES today.
Thursday, November 07, 2002
I sent this to CNNSI's Paul Zimmermann's mailbag, since he'd brought up possible modifications for the extra-point rule in American football. He'll probably think I'm a nut. Maybe he'd be right. Let's see if he answers.
Two rules change ideas: 1) Two points for a run, one for a kick. You can either line up at the 25 and either kick for one or fake kick and then run or pass for two, or line up at the 5 and run or pass for two. Kicking for one would be illegal if you lined up at the 5. The ball would remain in play, no matter what, until whistled dead, so a blocked kick, fumble, or interception could be returned for a TD. These changes would make extra points something reasonably difficult to get and even slightly risky, not just something automatic like a kick from the 9-yard line. A 42-yarder would be a bit of a challenge but usually doable by most kickers. But if your kicker is hobbling and it's ten below in Green Bay with the winds swirling and blowing snow around, then what do you do? You might just fake that kick. And choosing to go for two from the five means that they'll have to run wide, pass, or use play-action or some other deceptive play, not just slam it into the line--unless the defense gets too worried about all the wideouts you flood the end zone with. You then give the ball to your big back to take right up the middle for two--unless the defense doesn't bite... Stopping the extra point/s might actually shift momentum in favor of the team about to receive the kickoff. Whatever, I think adopting this solution would make the extra point/s much more interesting for the fans without corrupting the essence of the game. I would indeed argue that since the essence of the game is running plays and defending against them in clutch situations, this rule change would dramatically improve the game by creating many more clutch situations. 2) Borrow this one from soccer. Give a yellow card to any player guilty of a personal foul or unsportsmanlike conduct foul, in addition to the 15-yard penalty. If a player accumulates two yellow cards in a game, he gets a red card and is ejected for the rest of that game and the team's next one too. A direct red card can be given by the ref in case of a truly flagrant foul. The player is then directly ejected and also misses the next game. If a player accumulates five yellow cards over the course of the season, he is also ejected from the match and suspended for the next game. This would nip things like the Derrick Thomas Monday night meltdown in the bud, and provide some real punishment to those players who frequently break the rules. If you're suspended for a game, you don't get paid for it; the paycheck worth 1/16 of your net yearly NFL salary goes to some league charity. And would you sign a guy who you knew would miss two games and parts of two others if you were a GM? What if you had another guy who was almost as good in the same position, but never gets called for flagrant fouls? Who would you trade? This would cut down massively on violent play. Sorry for being so long-winded; I tried to respond to all possible objections and add a few details. So what do you think? Best, John Chappell
This article, to which I found the link on Andrew Sullivan.com, is an excellent recap of why the Democrats lost the midterm elections. It's so sensible, logical, and reasonable that I can't believe it's from the Nation, a notoriously left-wing rag with some pretentions at being the voice of the Oakland-and-Berkeley wing of the Democratic Party.
The following is a well-deserved Fisking of this article from today's La Vanguardia. (We can't find the article in today's online edition. It's in the Thursday, Nov. 7's issue of the print version.) It's by Baltasar Porcel, a big man in Catalan lit, which tells you something about the pathetic state of Catalan lit. Mr. Porcel is a native of Mallorca but lives in Barcelona, where he is much made over by the Catalanist government in power because he is a Mallorcan who believes in Catalonia Irridenta. He is the president of some government thing called something like the Mediterranean Institute, a body paid for with my tax money that does God knows what; he is a classic case of an artist who has been bought and paid for by the government, co-opted, if you will. He is also a very boring novelist who writes books that people praise and don't read. Furthermore, he writes a daily column in La Vangua. It is sometimes quite dull and sometimes frothing at the mouth; you never know what you're going to get. The following is quite frothy. Porcel's piece is in italics. Ours is in standard type.
One surprise--for me--from All Souls Day (Nov. 1, when the dead are traditionally honored in Catholic countries) was that the American party (juerga) called Halloween is imposing itself strongly upon us. Above all, among the children, often in the schools. Another example that Anglo-Saxon culture has begotten horrendous vastages, from the repulsive Dracula to that frenzied Freddy Krueger, including the repugnant Frankenstein, the idiotic Mummy, and whatever. The cinema is committing atrocities here. It appears that for the Anglo-Saxons death consists, boiled down to it, in a maniacal succession of horrors between grotesque and sadistic, totally opposed to the dignified behavior and "cult of the dead" of the Greco-Latin or Chinese cultures, those which have survived longest on this planet. (Liberal translation of near-indescipherable last sentence. Antonio questions: typo in original? missing words?)
Good God, where do we start? First, Porcel must be a complete imbecile if he hadn't noticed that Halloween has become a popular celebration, especially among kids, in the last ten years in Spain. (Interestingly enough, Spain gets many of its American trends through France, of all places. Four of them are Halloween, country music, blue jeans--in again--and fast food. The French sort of filter and vet American trends, and the ones that catch on there make it to Spain in a year or so.) Second, most Americans are about as "Anglo-Saxon" as Porcel himself. Les anglosaxons is slightly snooty French for anyone who speaks English; they need a term to lump us Brits and Yanks and Aussies all together with. Francophile / Anglophobe Spaniards like to show how sophisticated they are by adopting the term. Third, who is Porcel to dis Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? Or the brilliant filmmakers behind the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies? Would he do the same to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in a similar vein? Or Victor Hugo? Or even Stephen King, of whom I am no huge fan, but who is a thousand times the writer that Porcel is? Or the guys who make those silly Freddy and Jason horror movies? Sure, they're silly, they're supposed to be silly, for Chrissakes, just bits of fluff entertainment. The people who make those movies aren't morons and the teenagers who like those movies aren't morons. It's all just for fun. The only morons around here are the people like Porcel who take seriously a silly but fun bunch of crap like children's dressing up as monsters for Halloween. Trust us. Halloween is meaningless for us Americans. It won't contaminate Catalan culture. Look, Halloween is the American equivalent of Spanish / Catalan Carnival. People get to dress up in costumes and go to parties. That's all it is; like New Year's Eve, it's just an excuse to have a good time. You already have Carnival. Why not two dressing-up holidays? They say that Halloween comes from the Celts. I don't know. But the Celts had a concept of the immortal soul, their celestial pots full of delicious wild boar, the venerated priest, the druid, who even constitutes an antecedent of the Christian soul. Meanwhile, Halloween is a disrespectful, tacky (hortera) masquerade which instantly plants two disquieting questions: would you like to be thought of like that, on the part of the living, once you've died? Do you contemplate the memories of your parents and grandparents as cheesy (chabacano) and repulsive? That's not the point, those who are always up-to-date rush to say, Halloween is just for fun, though macabre fun. OK, fine. But the real problem stands: the child will not be taken to the cemetery, true to that cult of the dead that creates deep family and territorial, even patriotic, traditions, understood like the land where you grow with your roots, and which gives to the human being a historic heritage and transcendence, a metaphysical mystery. No, the child will be induced to dance around foolishly, strictly within himself, as if the Beyond were reduced to a silly game. Good God, where do we start? It's clear that Porcel just doesn't get that, while Catholics are the largest religious group in the US, America's Ur-culture is Protestant. That is, we don't generally do Catholic holidays like the Immaculate Conception or Lent or the Assumption of the Virgin or All Saints' Day, or any saint's day at all. Because we don't observe All Saints' Day, does that mean we don't honor our dead? No, we honor our dead so much that we have both Memorial Day, the holiday to honor the dead in general, and Veterans' Day, the holiday to honor war veterans, both living and dead. In addition, anyone is free to honor the dead whenever he or she pleases, and perhaps there is more virtue in doing so on a day which is NOT scheduled for such observances. I also remember a year or so ago that some Spaniards criticized the American homage to the dead of the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it maudlin, exaggerated, and chauvinistically patriotic. Well, which is it? Maudlin and exaggerated, or superficial and disrespectful? Please choose one at the sound of the buzzer. Slander America one way or the other, but please be consistent. And there's no reason why the kid can't both dress up as a monster for the class Halloween party in the morning and then go with his folks to lay flowers at the cemetery in the afternoon, anyway. Notice, though, that Cataloonies like Porcel (along with many other Europeans, especially the butts of this ten-year-old Francophobe Spanish joke: "You know, the Gulf War was so short that the French didn't even have time to change sides.") are prepared to read something sinister into the most innocent manifestation of American culture. Why must Porcel not only criticize, but even ridicule and insult something that he obviously does not understand at all? Where does he get this knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Orwell would have said that the answer is that he's a nationalist and so he sees everything in terms of the comparative prestige of the unit he owes allegiance to. Catalonia's comparative prestige internationally is pretty low, as it is seen in Europe by even those who are aware of its existence as a region of Spain with some local peculiarities. Outside Europe, it's virtually unknown. The Catalanists just can't stand this. If an American celebration is being adopted in Catalonia, but no Catalan celebrations are being adopted anywhere, much less in America, then this is a priori a bad thing in Catalanist eyes. Changing the subject: we are evidently looking at a commercial operation, the most gratuitous consumerism, as we are also again obeying the command of the dominant culture, the North American, in another of its most banal manifestations. And here's where Halloween fits in: a world of immigrants who have come from everywhere, for whom roots and tombs no longer exist, only material and moral deserts in which the wolf devoured the carrion of the dead under the ululating delirium of the night wind. And I repeat my emphasis on the dimensions of Greco-Latin and Chinese culture: no other possesses their almost 3000 years of fruitful riches. Well, at least we know where to start: great imagery, there, "ululating delirium". Translating this has been such a pain in the ass that I'm going to smoke a whole bunch of dope to escape the blubbering idiocy this guy Porcel has reduced me to. Maybe I'll even hit the state of ululating delirium, but this hash is pretty weak so I don't think I'll get that stoned. Anyway, first, what consumerism? Costumes are dirt-cheap, just paint the kid's face or put a sheet with eyeholes over his head. Candy is not precisely a hugely expensive item either. Maybe it's all a plot of the pumpkin growers, who did some tidy business during October this year. Note the sneer, by the way, in "another of its most banal manifestaciones". Note the fear of immigration. Note the fear of change. Note Porcel's very arrogant assumption that he somehow has more roots than other people, that he has more roots than 300 million Americans. All I can say about my roots are that three of my grandparents were descended from British Isles and Palatinate German ancestors who arrived in the United States before the Revolution, and that the fourth was of Austrian Empire German descent, specifically from Bukovina, who arrived in the 1880s. They'd emigrated from Württemberg to the Austrian Military Frontier out east sometime in the 1700s and from there to Kansas 150 years later. The fact that my roots are from fairly distant places doesn't mean I don't have any. This is something Mr. Porcel should know, as his roots are in Mallorca, not here in Barcelona where he lives. Also, Mr. Porcel should recognize that we Americans, as members of Western civilization, are just as much the cultural heirs of the Greco-Romans (and the Judeo-Christians, too, which Mr. Porcel failed to mention) as anyone else. Or does he think that our laws, our economic and business practices, our popular and cultural traditions, our way of doing things in general, were not inherited by the northern Europeans who founded the United States from their ancestors? And what about the cultural contributions of the descendents of the Africans who were brought to America against their will but have done so much to make America what it is? Of course, what America is today has been influenced by many other cultures as well besides the WASPs and the blacks (the later arrivals influenced America's outside appearance much more than its foundations, though), most notably the Italians, the Eastern European Jews, the Eastern European Slavs, and the Mexicans, all of whose roots are also in the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition. (Right. I know, Mexico, the Aztecs, and all. But they speak Spanish and are Christians.) The only group of non-European Americans that has strongly influenced general American culture is African-Americans; the black heritage in our shared culture is what differentiates us European Americans from other Westerners. Is that what Mr. Porcel's problem really is? Of course not, but he's so anti-American that he doesn't understand that being anti-American means being anti-African-American too. And I haven't noticed Mr. Porcel leading any demonstrations to increase the number of immigrants to Catalonia from North and sub-Saharan Africa. Oh, by the way, China's existed as a culture for considerably more than 3000 years, and should Mr. Porcel find it congenial, he is most welcome to move there. And did you notice that he didn't mention the fruitful cultural riches of the Jewish heritage, yet again, though Jewish culture is also some 3000 years old and has been as influential as any other on Western civilization except possibly the Greeks? Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Very conveniently, our old Homestead account just got cut off for nonpayment. We don't even have to go to the trouble of cancelling, though we are going to call up the bank to make sure payments get cut off anyway. Thanks to the gallant Mr. Crozier (the next thing I'm going to try are some photos and maps), our new website was set up just in time and we didn't even know we'd need it. The old Iberian Notes webpage is still up, but we assume they'll close it down pretty soon. Our old E-mail has been closed down, though, so if you want to write please use this address. We can't access e-mail to or from our old address, so write again if you wrote us and we didn't answer.
So, you know, I was over at Fox News getting the specific results of the Senate elections and noticed that the Alaskan Independence Party had fielded a candidate. Holy shit, I said to myself, here lo these many years I've been airily brushing off Catalan-nationalistic-minded students' questions about whether there were any regional or state "nationalist" parties similar to those in the Spanish autonomous regions, saying, no, no, of course we don't have any of that in America. Well, I have been very wrong about this, everybody, and I sincerely apologize. I will still defend the thesis that there are no important "nationalist" political parties in America, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any at all.
So, I go to the AKIP website, which, by the way, I had a lot of trouble downloading. Their site boasted that they were the third largest political party in Alaska, which I don't buy because I figure the Republicans are #1, the Democrats are a very distant #2, and the Libertarians are a strong #3, leaving the AKIP #4 at best. I dunno. Maybe the Democrats are really #4. You can never figure Alaskan politics. Anyway, a quick glance through some of their screeds showed that they're in favor of "Accountability", which we suppose we are too; "End(ing) Waste in Government", which it's pretty hard not to go along with; "Equal Use of Fish and Game", where our Catalanist friends will probably jump off the AKIP bandwagon, since it's pretty clear by now that this is an Alaskan white people's party demanding equal access with the Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts to fishing and hunting stocks (the Catalanists would of course side with the nonwhite natives, not the white invaders); and "Resource Development", which will cause the lefty Catalanists to freak out, since they're often Greenies too, and Resource Development means mines and oil drilling and logging and other ways of developing, or exploiting, Alaska's natural resources. A point in their favor: though they still want to be independent after Sept. 11, they condemn the terrorist attacks and express their sympathy for the victims. So I think, wonder if Hawaii has one? Shore nuf, they have at least two. One of them, called Hawai'i Independent and Sovereign, uses very Catalanist-style rhetoric when it says that one of its missions is to "protect our rights and way of life under the occupation system." I think that means, "We'll bitch about being oppressed but are thrilled to grab government subsidies and pork for Hawaiian-folklore projects." Not too many Catalanists would go along with one of their other planks, though, the one that wants to bring back the Hawaiian monarchy. They tend to be rather republican in sentiment, though a few of the older, more romantic, very traditional, Catholic Catalanists (like Mr. X, a well-known gentleman who we are not identifying because we're not sure he's officially out of the closet but who is known for his medievalist proclivities; he's both gay and ultra-Catholic, and is best known for his expertise in heraldry. He'd just love a restoration of the old Crown of Aragon monarchy, or even better the Counts of Barcelona. He'd get all busy drawing up new coats of arms and stuff) probably would like an independent Catalan kingdom or county or whatever. So then I go back to the Google page and see this web page dedicated to minor American political parties. It turns out that not only do Alaska and Hawaii have pro-independence parties (along with Puerto Rico, of course) but so do Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont. The Vermont guys call themselves the Green Mountain Boys, of course. We're rather afraid to check out the Alabama independence party website, as we can't help but think that very few black people are members. As for the New Jersey independence party, I say more power to them!
The Spanish take on the results of the United States midterm elections is that President Bush has received the support of the American people to continue the War on Terrorism and to attack Iraq. If the Spanish press had been paying attention to Bush's very high approval rating despite the country's economic slowdown, they'd have realized that the President is very popular and that most Americans support his tough stance on terrorism, national defense, and foreign policy. Instead, they indulged in wishful thinking--being a bunch of lefties, the Spanish press doesn't like Bush, and they exaggerated the importance of a few antiwar demonstrations in Cambridge and Berkeley and of a few antiwar statements by the like of Ramsey Clark and Jessica Lange to the point of actually predicting a "repudiation" of war-mongering Bush at the polls. TV3 ran some interviews with the "man on the street" a couple of days ago--on the streets of that typical Middle American place, Manhattan. All three or four of the people on the street who made it on the show criticized Bush and / or America, so they ran this as proof that the Americans were disenchanted with the President. Nothing, of course, was farther from the truth. One thing Spaniards have trouble realizing is that most Americans vote for the candidate and not the party, and it's very possible that someone, say, in the Kansas Third District, might vote for moderate Democrat gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Sibelius (especially since the Republican candidate was religious right, anathema to many mainstream Kansas Republicans still pissed off at what the far right did to the state school board when they got hold of it a few years ago) and for the incumbent congressman, conservative Democrat Dennis Moore, the former tough-on-crime Johnson County DA and a widely respected person who votes with Bush on foreign and defense policy, while still supporting President Bush and voting for popular longtime Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who ran without Democrat opposition anyway. (Well, that's what I did.) The second thing they forget is that Americans vote based on a lot more issues than just foreign policy, and that the Republican success is due to the fact that more Americans sympathize with their ideas and policies in general than with those of the Democrats. And what they haven't realized yet is that the change in the control of the Senate will have no effect on Bush's foreign policy anyway, since he already had majority support of the Senate on the issue of the War on Terrorism even though he didn't have party control. Anyway, we think that the very significant effects that the election results will have are those of unblocking the appropriations for almost all governmental departments except defense and of overcoming Democrat resistance to Bush's judicial appointees, an unconscionable number of whom have been held up in their confirmations by the Democrat leadership anxious to win some, any, even just tiny, political victories against the Republican juggernaut.
Barcelona is so crowded that the average speed of cars is 16 kph on vertical streets and 23 kph on horizontal crosstown streets. That's kilometers, not miles, per hour. There are 12,000 accidents reported per year in Barcelona and about 60 traffic deaths; 42% of the deaths are motorbike riders, 30% are pedestrians, and 28% are in cars. Of the dead in cars, 90% were not wearing their seatbelts. 52% of people injured in Barcelona traffic accidents are also motorbike riders. We remember that several years ago the Economist ran a story in which they ranked forms of transportation by their safety records, calculated in deaths per traveler per kilometer traveled. By ship was the safest means of transport and planes were right behind. Then came trains and buses. Then cars. Then on foot. Then by bicycle. And by far the most dangerous was by motorcycle; you're something like 200 times more likely to be killed traveling a kilometer by motorbike than by ship or airplane. Of course, in Spain they can fix it so you can even die on a ship; the court case that derived from the 1998 sinking of a pleasure boat on the lake at Banyoles, north of Barcelona near the Pyrenees, has finally come around to trial. Typical Spanish speedy justice. 21 French retirees on a group tour died when the boat, which was overloaded and which had been illegally modified, went down just a few dozen feet from the dock. The tragedy would have been much greater if a high-school class of students from Barcelona on a field trip hadn't happened to be right there. The kids thought quickly and went into the water and started pulling people out, saving many lives as these were old people, most of whom probably couldn't swim, in a panic. We would say that counts as real heroism.
Here's a comment from Francesc-Marc Álvaro in today's Vanguardia: "We must not forget that if anything remains from the Spanish tradition, it is the tendency toward all forms of the picaresque, whose vigor is based on a fundamental law: if you don't take advantage of your neighbor, you're a fool, because he will certainly do the same to you, and do a much better job of it. The modernization of Spain has placed limits on the picaresque, but has not eliminated it. The disguise of the pícaro has changed and his tools have become more sophisticated, but the basic ethic of the general populace is the same as in the Siglo de Oro." As Francis Fukuyama said, there is a fundamental lack of trust in Spanish society, one that does not exist in the States or Britain or Germany. Sure, we Americans try to be careful when we buy things or deal with other people, but we consider ourselves and one another to be basically trustworthy folk (with the conspicuous exceptions of used-car dealers and spammers). Since the Spaniards do not consider anyone outside family and friends as trustworthy, not even their neighbors, they're always ready to believe the worst of everything; this is why they're so prone to believe in conspiracy theories, as they believe that everyone is out to screw everyone else and so even the most transparent-seeming action may hide a sinister ulterior motive. The Spaniards, therefore, generally consider Americans to be innocent, naive, overtrusting, and simplistic; most Americans who have spent time in Spain think of Spaniards as cynical and corrupt. Each group considers the other to be a bunch of hypocrites. Individual Spaniards and Americans often get on very well together; hell, I'm married to one and another is my sometimes collaborator on this blog. As groups, we are not great admirers of one another's societies, though.
Says groovy Catalan economist Pedro Schwartz in today's La Vanguardia, "In Spain there reigns a great confusion about what free competetion is, how it works, and what can be expected of it, as I have seen in my years as the President of the Institute of Free Market Studies. In many universities "perfect" competition is defined with so many conditions that it becomes a model that has never existed in reality. There is only perfect competition, it is said, when individuals behave perfectly rationally, when there is an infinite number of buyers and sellers in the market, when these transactors are `perfectly informed, and when the factors of production and the intermediate and final products are perfectly divisible." No wonder most Spanish people just don't get the free-enterprise system if this is what they're teaching their economists and business leaders.
Well, there's good news and bad news on the anti-terrorism front here in Spain. First the good news. The French cops arrested two armed ETA members in the town of Agen near Toulouse. (As much as we complain about the French, we have to admit that their law enforcement and security departments are effective in the War against Terrorism.) The cops decided to check these two guys out because they looked suspicious; originally they thought that these guys, who have not been identified yet, were involved in drug trafficking. Turned out they were both armed, packing pistols. The French immediately arrested them and found that they were carrying internal ETA documents; they're being held in Toulouse and the French have sent their fingerprints to Madrid so that they can be identified. Now the bad news. Two bombs in the Vigo area of Galicia went off, killing two people and wounding two more. The police think that this is a local job, since the bombs do not carry the hallmarks of having been either the work of ETA or Spain's other terrorist group, the communist GRAPO. Early suspicions focused immediately upon GRAPO, since Vigo has served as a GRAPO home base and a center for GRAPO activity, but the cops are now convinced they weren't involved; the cops are also discounting the idea of a war between drug-trafficking and smuggling gangs, common in Galicia, because of the nature of the victims, ordinary, decent Joes. The dead couple were nice middle-class people; the husband was a middle manager at Pescanova. The injured are a man who worked in a Citibank branch and his 12-year-old son. These people are not involved in organized crime or terrorism. Could it be a Unabomber-style terrorist? We have no idea but hope the perps get busted soon. Also in France, in the Lyon banlieue, eight people have been arrested, accused of complicity in the Al Qaeda suicide bombing of a Tunisian synagogue last April which killed 18 people. Good.
Here's one for the Darwin Awards. Last Friday night in the working-class Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a group of seven Ecuadoran immigrants, at an impromptu party, drank a bottle of antifreeze thinking it was moscatel. They had found, while looking through a skip full of abandoned furniture, a bottle with a moscatel label on it that was filled with a greenish-blue liquid. (Real moscatel is golden-brown in color.) In order to celebrate their find of the furniture, they decided to have some drinks, so they put the bottle in the fridge and then drank it down. One of the seven victims said that she'd had only three glasses and that it was very good, nice and sweet. Anyway, on Saturday morning, they began to feel a lot worse than they should have, with vomiting and hallucinations. They went to a hospital where all were treated for possible liver and kidney damage; three have been released and the other four will make it. Because they all survived, we don't feel like ghouls making jokes about it, and we can tell you that the English-speaking community of Barcelona has been admonishing its members constantly, Woodstock-style, "Don't drink the blue moscatel." This is a true Darwin Award winner, as there was an eighth woman who was pregnant and so declined to drink anything; she was obviously the one who put two and two together and figured out it was the "moscatel" that had made them sick. She was the only one of the eight who demonstrated the qualities of fitness necessary to improve the species by passing on her genes. The other seven deserve to go sterile after pulling a dumb stunt like drinking a bottle of stuff they found in a garbage skip. This is not an urban legend. The hospitals involved were Esperit Sant in Santa Coloma and Sant Pau in Barcelona. The director of the Generalitat's department of Public Health, Lluís Salleras, made a public announcement that the poisoning had been accidental and that adulterated moscatel was not being sold anywhere. The author of the newspaper article, in Monday, November 4's La Vanguardia, is Luis Benvenuty.
Spanish political update: Jordi Pujol, prime minister of Catalonia, of the conservative Catalanist party Convergence and Union (CiU), has shaken up his cabinet according to the wishes of party heir apparent Artur Mas. Whoop-te-doo, you think. Yeah, it's just a shuffle of names, but it's the most power that old-time political boss Pujol has ever surrendered to any of his designated heirs, of which he has had several in his 22 years of power, all of whom he first made and then broke. The problem with CiU is that it's really a melange of people with very different political beliefs, from lefty progressives to Christian Democrats, united by their strong Catalanism and by Pujol's leadership. When Pujol goes, and he has promised to retire and let Mas be the party's leader in the next elections within a year from now, will CiU hold together? Or will the more conservative and less Catalanist CiU voters move to the conservative centralist People's Party (PP), with the more lefty and less Catalanist CiU voters moving to the Socialists and the more Catalanist and lefty CiU voters moving to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), leaving CiU with only its Catalanist conservative core? If that happens, then Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist candidate in Catalonia and former mayor of Barcelona, will be the next Catalan prime minister, defeating Mas and the other parties soundly. Probably not too much would change, though; Maragall would be less anxious to expand the role of Catalan as Catalonia's State language than CiU, but he'd spend just as much money foolishly and run up just as much debt as Pujol has. (Pujol's conservatism doesn't keep him from passing out lots of big juicy helpings of pork.) Should Maragall win the 2003 Catalan elections, he'll be beautifully placed to become the first serious Catalan candidate for Prime Minister of Spain after PP Prime Minister José María Aznar's successor (either Rodrigo Rato, Jaime Mayor Oreja, or Mariano Rajoy) stomps Socialist candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the 2004 national parliamentary election. Maragall will have been in power in Catalonia for five years, assuming he gets reelected in 2007, and Prime Minister of Catalonia is a very important job in Spain, similar, say, to Governor of California in the United States. Maragall will have plenty of weight to throw around as a big vote-getter in a big, rich region, and would be the logical Socialist choice in the nationals in 2008 assuming that Zapatero gets beat in 2004, which seems a safe assumption.
Thanks very much to everyone who has made nice comments; we'll pass them on to the redoubtable Patrick Crozier of UK Transport and CrozierVision who has done yeoman work setting this up with very little help from us. "Jesús Gil" of Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora of Buscaraons, our cobloggers from here in the Blogdom of Spain, were kind enough to provide very helpful advice. Xavier has a post from several days up on the stupidity of an American petition going around calling for American divestment from Europe that is well worth a read. It's here. Thanks also to all blogmeisters for updating the links.
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Any native English speaker interested in helping out some linguists should click here and take their Dialect Survey. At the end there are some groovy maps that show the regional distribution of the some 120 items you're asked to report your pronunciation and / or lexicon about. The survey's aimed at American and Canadian dialectology but they'd love to hear from you if you're a non-American native English speaker too.
James Taranto has a bit at the end of Best of the Web about a Madagascar soccer team. We saw this several days ago in La Vanguardia. What happened was that, with the score 0-0, the Stade Olympique team became enraged with the referee. In protest, they proceeded to intentionally kick the ball into their own goal, and continued to do so for the rest of the game. They lost 149-0, an apparent all-time record in an official soccer game in any league. The Madagascar Soccer Federation is very put out. We will point out that Reuters is a British news service and is thus perfectly justified in referring to the sport we Yanks call soccer as football, much as we hate to stick up for Reuters.
This article from National Review Online provides an interesting perspective on why exactly the French, both left- and right-wingers, are screaming bloody murder that the Americans want to take over Iraqi oil: because French companies control at least 23% of it and are afraid that a post-Saddam government would void said contracts. Well, that probably would be a consequence of a war against Iraq, but getting oil drilling or exploring contracts for American companies is not the business of the United States government, strange as that may sound to French (or Spanish) ears. America doesn't care whose company drills or refines or does whatever to the oil as long as it makes it to the world market. Hell, our boycott of Iraq shows that we can live just fine without Iraqi oil. And if what we wanted to do was grab said oil, wouldn't we logically already have done it many years ago?
What the French are doing when they ascribe base motives to the Americans is simply projecting what they would do in such a situation. They would do what they thought was in the interests of France, whether that was moral or right or not. They would go to war for 23% of Iraqi oil, so they think we would, too. The abovementioned article points that France sold some $20 billion worth of jet fighters and the like to Saddam's Iraq, and the French government is a part-owner of the French aerospace industry. This means that Mitterand and Chirac and Jospin and Juppé thought the profit they could make off selling arms to one of the world's nastiest dictators was in the interest of France. They all probably figured that it wasn't too likely that a Frenchman would get within target range of any of these weapons anyway. But, cry the French and their Spanish acolytes like La Vanguardia's José Martí Gómez, the Americans are the ones who armed Iraq! Well, first, if that was true, then why wasn't Iraq using American arms against us in the Gulf War? Second, it's true that America, figuring that what we were really rooting for in the Iraq-Iran War was for both sides to lose, "tilted" toward whichever side we thought was behind. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal? What that was all about was selling arms to the Ayatollah, if we remember correctly mostly Soviet-made formerly Arab equipment captured by the Israelis in one of their many wars, with which to fight Iraq, and sending the money to fund the contras in Nicaragua. We were arming the Iranians as well as the Iraqis, mostly at different times and in smallish quantities. There are a couple of France-based conspiracy theories going on in Continental Europe. One involves a supposed spy satellite operation called Echelon run by the CIA and MI5 or 6 or whichever it is and, like, Australia and Canada and New Zealand are involved. The English-speaking conspirators spy on France and steal French industrial secrets, with which they perfidiously make more money than the Jacques Brel-listening surrender monkeys. We have no idea whether there is any truth at all in this story. We doubt it. Another one is Operation Condor, which was supposedly a plot through which the United States organized the military juntas that ran much of South America in the late 1970s. Again, we doubt it. Another is a supposed smear job on "Latin" ex-Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch by the "Anglo-Saxon" press; the French and Spanish and Italians are convinced that Samaranch is their man and all the corruption talk is just the jealous Anglos trying to get the Latin guy. A very common theory with no basis at all is that the Americans set the prices for such goods as coffee, forcing the Latin American peasantry into poverty by holding down prices. This one quite obviously orignated in Latin America and spread from there into Spain, France, and Italy. Monday, November 04, 2002
Check out the Linguablogs web ring if you're interested in language. Right there are links to ten or so interesting blogs, at least for us linguists, teachers, translators, and the like. We get the idea that these guys are sort of their own little blog ghetto, as we'd never seen any linguistics sites before and suddenly came across not one but a lot. We're not sure if we count as a linguistics blog, but we do seem to find ourselves talking about language a lot.
We are now true Blogger users. A post just got eaten.
You know the holiday season is coming up in Spain when you see, in the neighborhood shops and bars, participations in the Christmas lottery for sale. The Spanish Christmas lottery, known as "El Gordo" (The Big One), is supposedly the biggest single lottery draw in the world, in the sense that it distributes the most money. It's also supposed to be the lottery that returns the highest percentage of the takings in the payoffs. A décimo in the lottery costs 20 euros, and there are 66,000 numbers. The payoff for the Fat One is 200,000 euros per decimo, 10,000 times what you paid for your ticket. There are lots of very appetizing smaller prizes. You're not the only person holding your number; many other people, quite likely thousands, are certainly holding it. Décimos are traditionally bought up by civic groups (the block Christmas lighting commission, the fiesta mayor association, choral groups, football fan clubs, and the like) and then divided up into much smaller participaciones which are resold door-to-door and in shops and bars. A 20% surcharge is added to benefit the group in question. So, for example, the local choral group is selling one-euro participations for one euro twenty. If you buy a ticket you're helping them out and taking a little flyer on the lottery as well. Most people buy several different participations and perhaps a whole décimo or two as well, all of different numbers, so you're riding several different horses, as it were. It is not unusual for people to buy fifty or a hundred bucks' worth of tickets, or more. We usually wind up with twenty-five dollars or so "invested".
December 22 is the day of the prize draw every year, and the numbers themselves are selected by, get this, blind children from a special school in Madrid; that, we suppose, is about as innocent as a hand can get. The whole country spends all morning watching the drawing on TV, and by the time of the afternoon news on TV the Big One has been drawn along with all the other prizes. The newspapers come out with special editions and everyone is checking his participations. The fun part is that the prize money is widely spread around since most people hold very small stakes in the number, just a couple of euros or so, and so the probably thousands of holders collect twenty or thirty or forty thousand euros each--ten thousand times the money they put in. The holders are concentrated in the one town or neighborhood where the number was distributed in the local shop or bar, so if you win, you and everybody you know are rather better off but not life-changingly rich. The TV networks immediately send their reporters to wherever the Big One and the several second, third, fourth and fifth prizes have fallen and film joyous small crowds jumping around and drinking cava. The clichés, repeated every year, are that the Big One ha caído en un barrio popular (it landed in a working-class neighborhood) and that the prize money has been muy repartido (widely shared). And then it's Christmas, so if you won it's a very nice one and if you didn't win, you forget about it in a hurry.
Here's the sports update for all you folks that are just dying for it. In last weekend's Spanish first division soccer, FC Barcelona put up a poor show in Santander but got out of there with a 1-1 tie. Real Madrid failed again to win, tying 0-0 against Deportivo under the rain again in Coruña. Valencia won against Español here in Barcelona, 0-1. Valencia has scored the second-most goals so far (17) and has given up the fewest (5). That's barely half a goal allowed per match. Real Sociedad won again, 0-1 in Villareal. We still think they'll come back to earth. The top of the standings: Real Sociedad 20 points, Valencia 17, Mallorca 15, Celta 14, Betis, R. Madrid and Deportivo 13, Barcelona and Málaga 12. In the Mutha Fucka watch, he scored 10 points in Barcelona's 93-82 loss at Caja San Fernando.
English has truly become the world language, in case you somehow missed it. Here in Spain, it's become almost a necessity. My wife, Remei, is an assiduous reader of the Sunday help-wanted ads in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia. She calculates that about 40% of all job ads and 70% of white-collar job ads require English, and that the jobs that require English usually are better-paid than those that don't. Her only outstanding job skill, besides her general competence at office work, is her excellent command of spoken English. Remei says that if she wanted to, she could find a relatively lousy new job instantly and a relatively good new job after some time looking, owing exclusively to her English. This is while, don't forget, the Spanish economy is going through a slowdown--not a recession, but a fall in the rate of growth--that's made work a bit harder to get than it was a couple of years ago.
Many Spaniards seem to agree with Remei that knowing English really is a rung up the ladder in the job market. La Vanguardia says that there are 900,000 students of English in Spain, and this does not include elementary and high school students. There are 3500 English schools which employ 20,000 people in Spain, and the Spanish demand for English employs many more people in Britain and in other English-speaking countries in the form of summer classes, textbooks, videos, and the like. (The US, curiously, doesn't much compete in the international English-teaching racket; American English-as-a-second-language materials tend to be directed at domestic use with often poorly-educated immigrants, very different from the British English-as-a-foreign-language books and software aimed at fairly literate and cultured Continental Europeans.) All totaled, the English-teaching business in Spain grosses €600 million a year, which is a healthy pile of money. So why, you ask, don't the Spaniards just learn English and get it over with? The problem is that learning English is seen in Spain as a New Year's resolution sort of thing, rather like losing weight, getting in shape, or learning the piano. That's because learning English is hard for Spaniards. It's difficult and time-consuming. The American Institute in Barcelona, a non-profit organization which has been in operation for 50 years, figures that it takes an average Spaniard about 500 class hours to reach the English skill level necessary to pass the Cambridge First Certificate exam, a diploma commonly accepted in Europe that certifies that one indeed does know English reasonably well, sufficient for most work purposes. Regular English classes are normally held twice a week for an hour and a half. If you attend class three hours a week for forty weeks a year, you'll take about five years to reach First Certificate level--and this figure does not include the hundreds of out-of class hours reading, watching movies or TV, surfing the Net, or just chatting that a learner needs to do on his own. Now you're saying "Five years?! Five freakin' years?" Yep, that's how long it takes. Learning a language is not just a question of sitting down and studying it and then regurgitating it on the test; it takes active practice time. You have to practice speaking and listening to and reading and writing English until you get good at it, just like the piano or cooking or driving a car or anything else. And it helps you a great deal if you have a competent teacher to assist you in learning, but there's no magic formula. No silver bullet. No way a teacher can unscrew your head and pour English in. But that doesn't mean there aren't people out there trying to sell you the idea that they can. We suppose that the definition of fraud is making promises about what you're selling that aren't true. Over the last fifteen or twenty years in Spain, ever since the Spaniards realized that they'd better learn English, a whole different category of businesses has started up. Traditionally in Barcelona, English classes have been held at the Escuela Nacional de Idiomas, a government-subsidized institution; the British Council, run by the British government; the American Institute, run as a non-profit by an independent board; and neighborhood "language academies", run by individuals, who specialize in personal treatment and attention and run the gamut between very good and plain awful. But since people began to wake up to the fact that they needed English in the mid-80s, the sharp operators jumped on board. First came two competing chains, Wall Street Institute, now controlled by the American company Sylvan, and Opening School, owned by the old-line distance-courses company, CEAC. What these guys did is advertise a "totally new method" of learning English painlessly and with no work or struggle. All you had to do is come into a Wall Street or Opening branch, spend a few hours a week there, plug into a computer or listen to audiocassettes, and you'd teach yourself English. The scheme was a little more complicated than this, but that was more or less it. They put up a big advertising blitz promising people the moon, linguistically, and convinced a lot of people (also using techniques like cold-calling, and always, always, the hard sell) who didn't know much about language and how it is learned but were desperate to learn English. Meanwhile, they sold franchises to people who didn't know anything about language either, but were willing to kick in the cash to buy the Wall Street or Opening system, including the computer and electronic setups. So you had ignorant franchisees running "education centers", which were basically language labs, selling English to ignorant customers who bought the hard-sell. Meanwhile, very little English was getting learned by anybody in these places, but after about 1995 they became almost ubiquitous. Both Wall Street and Opening opened a couple of dozen franchises in the Barcelona metropolitan area; seeing one was as common as seeing a McDonalds. By about 1998 or so it was starting to become clear that these franchised systems were not getting the job done. Letters from disappointed customers became common in the newspapers and very negative gossip began going around the Barcelona English-speaking community, much of which depends on the English-teaching sector for its livelihood. Also, Opening and Wall Street used the typical health-club sales scam, getting the customer to sign up for a year at a time at prices approaching $2000 and paying in advance, while the company knew the whole time that most students would drop out fairly quickly when they got tired of typing stuff at a keyboard and listening to audiocassettes and not even frequently receiving help from an authentic native speaker, much less an authentic English teacher. The two chains advertised a money-back guarantee with so many escape clauses in it that it wasn't worth anything, and a lot of people became very irritated at not getting their money back when they tried to. By about 2000 the bottom was beginning to drop out of the market for Wall Street and Opening; you started to see shuttered-up franchises and fewer TV advertisements, then none at all. At exactly this time, Brighton, a chain of traditional English activities with a very poor reputation for hiring unqualified teachers, sometimes illegally (i.e. by reporting one salary to the government for tax purposes and really paying a different one; this is politely known in Spain as tax fraud) and then not paying them on time or at all, jumped into the market with both feet. Its flamboyant owner, an Argentinian wheeler-dealer whose name is Alfredo Ibáñez Nicolás but who uses the slightly improved Alfred Ibañez de Nicolás, opened up several more outlets to the chain. Rumor has it that Ibáñez leads a very expensive lifestyle that includes the consumption of large quantities of cocaine. Ibáñez started running full-page advertisements in the Vanguardia every day advertising something called the B.T.S., also known as the Brighton Total System. This consisted of having normal (but generally lousy) traditional-style English classes and access for customers to an extremely ratty room with a few computers, a VCR, and a boom box. Brighton did the same thing as Wall Street and Opening but with a lower budget; no TV ads but lots of direct-marketing hard-sell phone calling. About this time all three chains figured something out: that there would be real money if you made it possible for potential customers to finance their English "studies". Students would take out bank loans for the amount of the course and the bank would directly pay the school in full. The bank would then be in charge of collecting the loan, which the student didn't normally know he'd gotten into because the contracts they signed had an awful lot of fine print, big words, and confusing clauses. In 2002 the chains began to crack up. In August, Opening announced that it was closing permanently after a couple of months of irregular operation during which several franchisees closed down and others began opening only for limited hours. Then it all hit the fan when customers began to ask about getting their money back. Uh, they weren't going to get their money back, and not only that, they had to pay off their bank loan whether or not they were getting any English out of it. Opening didn't have any money to give back, or at least they said they didn't, and the banks certainly weren't about to become angels of charity. Brighton went down at the end of October under much more spectacular circumstances; their teachers went on strike after not having been paid since May. Ibáñez, apparently coked up, called a staff meeting in which he vehemently promised that everybody would be paid. He then proceeded to disappear with the main computer's hard disk and files and the company's books, not to mention whatever cash was lying around; the staff at the main office, when telephoned by a Vanguardia reporter to see what was going on, replied, "Ibáñez has run off with the money." Some 5000 customers in the Barcelona area have been affected by the Brighton collapse alone. Most of them are out fairly substantial sums of cash, at least several hundred bucks and usually more. They're suing. The banks want their money back. Best of luck. Wall Street, meanwhile, is still plugging away, though they admit losing almost a third of their students in the past twelve months; they officially announced that they were down to about 50,000 all over Spain, from the 72,000 they claimed last year. Such a messy, undignified end as those of Opening and Brighton seems unlikely for Wall Street, as they're backed by Sylvan, but Wall Street is in trouble too. They had 167 branches in October of last year and they're down to 126 as of now. Meanwhile, the American Institute, now in its fifty-second year, is seeing an enrollment increase. Now, if you'll please excuse me, I have to go teach an English class. Sunday, November 03, 2002
We're moving to Blogger, thereby, as usual, doing the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. Patrick was right--we can't be a real blog unless we have permalinks. We will be exploring what we can do with Blogger over the next few days and perhaps weeks. We would very much appreciate it if someone with experience with Blogger would volunteer to be our guru and show us how to a) add a hit counter b) add a blogroll c) add comments. Thank you. Meanwhile, our old Homestead site will stay open till the end of this month. We have the anarchic archives saved on disk, and since much of that stuff is by now way out of date, we're not going to bother bringing it over here, which would be a lot of work. Instead, what we're going to do is go through our archives and pick out 25-30 or so of our greatest hits, what we consider our best posts and what we consider worthy of being saved publicly for posterity. We'll copy-and-paste them over here over the next couple of weeks, so y'all (and any new readers who might show up) will be treated to a few old classics (which will be clearly labeled as such). Please send all e-mail here.
We sent an e-mail to Stacy Tabb, who was very nice and helpful and responded within a few hours. (Folks, if you have a few hundred bucks and need a website, this is your person.) However, she quoted us a price that was very reasonable by American standards but which we just can't swing on Spanish salaries. We can't afford to use Stacy's Sekimori, nor do we have the technical knowledge to use anything but Blogger all by ourselves. So that's what we're gonna do. Let us give you some kind of idea about what our material lifestyles are over here. Remei and I live in a three-bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and full bathroom; it's about 75 square meters, not counting the balcony. It's in a good neighborhood, middle-class / working-class, kind of boho, centrally located. We have a used car, a 1988 Renault Supercinco (yes, it's an updated Renault Le Car). We could afford a newer used car or a bare-bones new one, but this one works just fine for taking us out to the village, which is about all we use it for anyway since Barcelona has generally decent public transportation and awful traffic and worse parking. We have a refrigerator, a washing machine, a 21-inch TV, a VCR, and this here computer with an ADSL connection--that's why we can't justify spending any more money on the computer than we are, since the ADSL line runs forty bucks a month. We are lucky enough to have access to a large house in the country which belongs to my wife Remei and her mother. That more than makes up for the lack of a home theater or a 25-inch computer monitor. I am an English teacher and translator and Remei is an office worker, so we're just normal, regular folks, earning normal, regular folks' salaries. We won't tell you exactly how much, but you might get some idea from these statistics: United States GDP per capita US$33,900; United Kingdom $21,800; Canada $23,300; Australia $22,200; Ireland $20,300; Singapore $27,800; New Zealand $17,400; Spain $17,300. (Figures 1999 est.; Source, Time Almanac 2002) So here in Spain we're not doing too badly. We're right up there with more famous countries, though we're not super-rich; we're happy with what we've got, if that makes sense. It's not poor but proud; it's more like middle-class and proud, especially since we really do top the States in culture per capita. Not that that makes us either better or worse. Y'all in the States are about twice as rich on average than we are in Spain and you're a good deal richer than the folks in most of the other English-speaking countries. This doesn't make you good people or bad people but you ought to keep it in mind when thinking of non-Americans' purchasing power. (And no, we aren't whining to Stacy for a discount, we hoe our own row, thank you). Of course, we need to remember that prices in Spain tend to be a good bit lower, especially for locally-produced stuff. If you figure that the American GDP is double the Spanish GDP and the dollar and euro are one-to-one, which they have been for the past several months, with swings of a cent or two one way or the other, mostly against the euro, then you can figure out what life costs here if you multiply our prices by two and then think of how much the equivalent would cost you in America. Rent, 3-br apt, good area $400 if you're from here and look around; cheapest possible safe room $250 Liter of gasoline $0.85 Second-hand computer, PII $300 (box only) Good used car, 6-8 yrs old $3000, a lot more is possible, so is less but at your own risk Large Ikea sofa-bed, new $300 Liter fresh milk $0.90 Liter UHT milk $0.65 Daily newspaper $1 Pack Camel cigarettes $2.15 6-pack San Miguel beer $2.40 Coffee in bar $0.90 100% wool Marks&S sweater $40 Book $5-$20, much more is possible 3 80g cans tuna $0.96 4 150g good yogurts $1.41 Bunch 5 bananas $1.30 2 liter Coke $0.86 Remember, that's what it would cost you if you bought it here. To get an idea of our standard of living, double these prices and then think about them within your current salary. Friday, November 01, 2002
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