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Posted 17:55 by John

I've been doing an awful lot of reading about cultural history lately, and one conclusion I've come to is that there's nothing new in attitudes, in both senses of the word (that of a viewpoint or perspective and that of coppin' a tude). Bohemians have been around forever--you know, people who are too cool for mainstream society. Now they go to the Burning Man festival or the Rainbow Gathering or an anti-war demo and write bad poetry (and talk about sex a lot), but in Paris a hundred years ago they drank absinthe and painted funny pictures and pretended to be anarchists in the cafes and wrote bad poetry (and talked about sex a lot). And Byron and Shelley and Keats were getting up to the same shit with Leigh Hunt and the boys two hundred years ago, bad poetry and sex included. (OK, OK, I really do like Shelley and Keats. Not that they weren't idiots, but they could at least write.) And in Rome two thousand years ago they did the same old crap, except they wore blue denim togas or whatever. Bohemians have existed ever since society became wealthy enough to support them (Bohemians never create anything except in the world of the arts, and a lot of that, from Baudelaire to Kerouac to Gertrude Stein, is crapola. Still, sometimes it's not.)

Anyway, one thing we tend to forget about is that "enlightened liberal opinion" has always existed, at least when society has become wealthy and advanced enough to afford it. Athens and Rome had their dissenters and their progressives, just like we have today. "Enlightened liberals", ever since the Renaissance at least, have held the moral high ground; they're the ones who want to use society's resources to help its less fortunate and who want to loosen the restrictions society puts upon individuals.

All these enlightenedly liberal folks who show up at vigils the night before some Ted Bundy shakes hands with Satan are nothing new, and their arguments now are the same as their arguments then. Mark Twain used to have fun denouncing weepy-eyed bleeding hearts who were too tender-hearted to hang murderers, and Swift did the same thing back in his day. Our moral people who are against giving Mumia the injection are using just the same arguments that Clarence Darrow used and Twain and Swift denounced. Yet somehow they think their moral commitment is something original in society.

Keep this in mind while reading the following Fisking of Clarence Darrow. Clarence Darrow practiced law during the early part of the 20th century, and he was America's most famous lawyer. He "defended the underdog and the little man", as those who heroize him say. He perhaps became most famous at the Scopes "Monkey Trial", a test case in which he defended a teacher who taught the theory of evolution in the state of Tennessee, where such teaching was prohibited by law at the time (1926). Trivia: He lost the case. Scopes was convicted and fined fifty bucks or whatever.

Darrow's second-most-famous case was the Leopold and Loeb murder trial in 1924. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, 19 and 18 years old, kidnapped and murdered a 14-year-old boy, Bobby Franks, in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. They later claimed to have been influenced by Nietzche's philosophy and to believe that they were intellectual "supermen", above the morality of ordinary people.

Now, what they had done, with total premeditation, is kidnap a child, beat him in the head with a chisel, and choke him to death, before dumping his body in a culvert. Loeb did the killing but Leopold was his accomplice throughout.

They bungled the crime and were caught within days; both confessed. They were from wealthy Chicago families, who hired Clarence Darrow to defend their sons. Originally the two young men had pleaded not guilty, hoping to beat the gallows on an insanity plea. Darrow changed their strategy, pleading them guilty and throwing them on the mercy of the court. This meant that Leopold and Loeb's lives would not be in the hands of a jury but rather in those of a judge. Darrow was gambling that he could convince the judge to sentence them to life imprisonment rather than to hang.

Now, before we get into Fisking the following excerpts from Darrow's twelve-hour argument, let's remember something. It was not unusual in those pre-World War II days, that lost America when men wore hats and women knew their place, for the state to execute people. Within the US, between 1930 and 1967 (the beginning of the nine-year moratorium on the death penalty), some 4000 people were executed after conviction for capital crimes.

1906: Chester Gillette, age 22, murdered his pregnant girlfriend in New York. Electrocuted.
1912: Harry Horowitz, Louis Rosenberg, Jacob Seidenschmer, Frank Cirofici, all under 21, murdered gangster in mob killing, New York. Electrocuted.
1913: Oresto Shillitoni, under 21, murdered two policemen and a rival mobster in New York. Electrocuted.
1920: Jack Field, 19, murdered girl in Sussex, England. Hanged.
1922: Frederick Bywaters, 22, murdered lover's husband in London. Hanged.
1928: Gerald Toal, 18, murdered woman in Dublin, Ireland. Hanged.
1937: Alexander Meyer, 20, ran over, raped, threw down well, and then blew up with dynamite 15-year-old girl, Philadelphia. Electrocuted.
1938: Robert Moolhouse, 21, murdered former landlady in Durham, England. Hanged.
1939: Robert Nixon, 19, murdered two women in Chicago, five women in Los Angeles, with a brick. Dubbed "Brick Moron" by press. Black. Electrocuted.

The point here is to show that it was not considered unusual to execute murderers who were young men of legal age in America or Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. It is true that two British hangings of 18-year-olds, Derek Bentley in 1953 and Francis Forsyth in 1960, were significant events in the eventual banning of capital punishment there. Also, 19-year-old spree killer Charles Starkweather was electrocuted in Nebraska as late as 1959.

My question is: if we electrocuted Charlie Starkweather in 1959, why the hell didn't we hang Leopold and Loeb in 1924? If anybody had it coming, they did: a couple of snot-ass punks who did a premeditated thrill killing. They were of legal age. They knew what they were doing and they knew it was both wrong and illegal. Answer: Because Clarence Darrow put a sob story over on the judge and he bought it. Darrow's words are in italics.

(The excerpts from Darrow's speech are taken from Famous Trials, an excellent site run by a UMKC law professor.)

Our anxiety over this case has not been due to the facts that are connected with this most unfortunate affair, but to the almost unheard of publicity it has received; to the fact that newspapers all over this country have been giving it space such as they have almost never before given to any case. The fact is that day after day the people of Chicago have been regaled with stories of all sorts about it, until almost every person has formed an opinion.

And when the public is interested and demands a punishment, no matter what the offense, great or small, it thinks of only one punishment, and that is death.

Come on. Newspapers are supposed to publish news of crimes and trials so that the public knows whether the law is being enforced or not--and whether some innocent person is being railroaded. And it's ridiculous to say the public demands the punishment of death whenever it becomes interested in a case. What might be true is that the public demands the punishment of death for the premeditated murder of a child.

Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows?
I do not care what Dr. Krohn may say; he is liable to say anything except to tell the truth, and he is not liable to do that. No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right.
How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads....
Why did they kill little Bobby Franks?
Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.

Here we go. Darrow says they are insane, that they "aren't right" because "they were made that way". So what they did isn't really their fault, see. He says there's no motive. But there is one: the thrill of committing the perfect crime. That's why Leopold and Loeb said they did it. And I don't blame the community for shouting for the blood of a couple of child-killers. If the law says murderers hang, and you want to avoid being hanged, don't commit murder. That's pretty simple.

I repeat, you may search the annals of crime, and you can find no parallel. It is utterly at variance with every motive and every act and every part of conduct that influences normal people in the commission of crime. There is not a sane thing in all of this from the beginning to the end. There was not a normal act in any of it, from its inception in a diseased brain, until to-day, when they sit here awaiting their doom.

No, planning a thrill-killing and then actually committing it is not too normal. Good. And the State of Illinois prescribed the death penalty for people who do something that abnormal, at least partially to help keep it abnormal. Leopold and Loeb were sane, and if they weren't, Darrow should have pleaded them not guilty by reason of insanity. But he knew a jury would never buy it.

I have in my library a story of a judge and jury and lawyer's trying and convicting an old sow for lying down on her ten pigs and killing them. What does it mean? Animals were tried. Do you mean to tell me that Dickie Loeb had any more to do with his making than any other product of heredity that is born upon the earth?... Your Honor, I am almost ashamed to talk about it. I can hardly imagine that we are in the 20th century. And yet there are men who seriously say that for what Nature has done, for what life has done, for what training has done, you should hang these boys.

There goes Darrow again, arguing that Leopold and Loeb didn't control their own actions and so should be let off--but we didn't let Charlie Starkweather or the Brick Moron off, though what those men did was considerably crazier than what Leopold and Loeb did. Darrow is saying that individuals are not responsible for their actions. Also note that he calls the criminals "boys" and refers to the man who hit Bobby Franks in the head with a chisel and then strangled him by his dimunitive nickname, "Dickie". Also, the errors of the past (considering animals to be as responsible as people) have nothing to do with the present, in which two punks beat and strangled a schoolboy.

And I ask your Honor, in addition to all that I have said, to save two honorable families from a disgrace that never ends, and that could be of no avail to help any human being that lives.

Nobody considered the disgrace of the Brick Moron's family.

If there is such a thing as justice it could only be administered by one who knew the inmost thoughts of the man to whom they were meting it out. Aye, who knew the father and mother and the grandparents and the infinite number of people back of him. Who knew the origin of every cell that went into the body, who could understand the structure, and how it acted. Who could tell how the emotions that sway the human being affected that particular frail piece of clay. It means more than that. It means that you must appraise every influence that moves them, the civilization where they live, and all society which enters into the making of the child or the man! If your Honor can do it--if you can do it you are wise and with wisdom goes mercy.

Total relativism. Of course perfect justice is impossible; humans are imperfect. But if you define justice as the protection of the innocent individual from crime, then Leopold and Loeb committed a horrible injustice and deserved whatever punishment the law meted out.

As a rule, lawyers are not scientists. They have learned the doctrine of hate and fear, and they think that there is only one way to make men good, and that is to put them in such terror that they do not dare to be bad. They act unmindful of history and science, and all the experience of the past. Still, we are making some progress. Courts give attention to some things that they did not give attention to before.

Straw man: why can't lawyers be compassionate? Darrow's a lawyer. Lincoln was a lawyer. Judge Harlan was a lawyer. Thurgood Marshall was a lawyer. And no one believes that we must make men good by using terror (though ironically Darrow's confusing argument, based on relativism, determinism, and proto-behaviorism, seems to show that such a strategy would work, at least if you define good as the absence of evil actions--which is the relativist's and the utilitarian's argument). Also note Darrow's plea for progress and his invocation of history and science, both of which he proceeds to twist.

Once in England they hanged children seven years of age; not necessarily hanged them, because hanging was never meant for punishment; it was meant for an exhibition. If somebody committed crime, he would be hanged by the head or the heels, it didn't matter much which, at the four cross roads, so that everybody could look at him until his bones were bare, and so that people would be good because they had seen the gruesome result of crime and hate.

Hanging seven-year-olds in England was never common. It might have happened once. And they hanged people by the neck until dead, not by the heels, and then they would place their bodies in gibbets and expose them publicly. As a warning, admittedly. But Darrow is confusing hanging with gibbeting. And showing people the gruesome results of crime is actually a pretty good way to stop crimes from being committed, at least from a behaviorist point of view. One problem we have is that first-time criminals often don't know what happens when you kill somebody, because on TV you only have to whack or stab the guy once and there's no screaming or blood. So they think it's no big deal.

We have raised the age of hanging. We have raised it by the humanity of courts, by the understanding of courts, by the progress in science which at last is reaching the law; and in ninety men hanged in Illinois from its beginning, not one single person under twenty-three was ever hanged upon a plea of guilty-not one. If your Honor should do this, you would violate every precedent that has been set in Illinois for almost a century....

Progress, again, says Darrow, and progress is a good thing. But what's so magic about age 23 or a guilty plea or Illinois precedent? That kind of precedent is not the sort that is binding by law, like a judge's decision is. Lots of people were executed below that age in lots of civilized places no matter what they pled; and Illinois had no qualms about executing the Brick Moron fifteen years later.

If your Honor in violation of all that and in the face of all the past should stand here in Chicago alone to hang a boy on a plea of guilty, then we are turning our faces backward toward the barbarism which once possessed the world. If your Honor can hang a boy eighteen, some other judge can hang him at seventeen, or sixteen, or fourteen.

Darrow is calling the death penalty barbaric and anti-progressive, so it must be bad; then he goes on to the slippery-slope argument. No, actually, a judge can't hang anybody under the age set by law.

You may stand them up on the trap-door of the scaffold, and choke them to death, but that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded whether justified or not, than any act that these boys have committed or can commit. Cold-blooded! Let the State, who is so anxious to take these boys' lives, set an example in consideration, kindheartedness and tenderness before they call my clients cold-blooded.

Nope, hanging two murderers is not as cold-blooded as what Leopold and Loeb did to Bobby Franks. The difference is that the State does not want to execute people. The State would be thrilled if they didn't have to execute anybody because nobody committed premeditated murder. Leopold and Loeb, on the other hand, didn't bother going through the complicated process of a fair trial and a judge's decision before killing the boy they wanted to kill out of sheer egotism.

I could say something about the death penalty that, for some mysterious reason, the state wants in this case. Why do they want it? To vindicate the law? Oh, no. The law can be vindicated without killing anyone else.

Sure it could. Illinois law at the time allowed a sentence of life imprisonment for first-degree murder, which is what Leopold and Loeb got. But if you're going to hang adult men for murder, it seems to me you have to be consistent and hang 'em all unless there is some mitigating circumstance. Either that or you hang nobody and abolish capital punishment altogether, which would be fair enough if it were the law. But that wasn't the law in 1924, and I don't see why the Brick Moron hangs when the rich Chicago punks don't--except that the Brick Moron's family didn't have enough money to hire Clarence Darrow.

Every story he (Loeb) read was a story of crime. We have a statute in this state, passed only last year, if I recall it, which forbids minors reading stories of crime. Why? There is only one reason. Because the legislature in its wisdom felt that it would produce criminal tendencies in the boys who read them. The legislature of this state has given its opinion, and forbidden boys to read these books. He read them day after day. He never stopped. While he was passing through college at Ann Arbor he was still reading them. When he was a senior he read them, and almost nothing else. Now, these facts are beyond dispute. He early developed the tendency to mix with crime, to be a detective; as a little boy shadowing people on the street; as a little child going out with his phantasy of being the head of a band of criminals and directing them on the street. How did this grow and develop in him? Let us see. It seems to me as natural as the day following the night. Every detective story is a story of a sleuth getting the best of it; trailing some unfortunate individual through devious ways until his victim is finally landed in jail or stands on the gallows. They all show how smart the detective is, and where the criminal himself falls down. This boy early in his life conceived the idea that there could be a perfect crime, one that nobody could ever detect; that there could be one where the detective did not land his game; a perfect crime.

OK, Darrow was arguing heredity before, and now he's arguing environment. Loeb killed Bobby Franks because his mind had been twisted by crime novels. Yeah, right. That probably is where he got the idea of the perfect crime from, but that's no excuse for actually committing a murder.

The whole life of childhood is a dream and an illusion, and whether they take one shape or another shape depends not upon the dreamy boy but on what surrounds him. As well might I have dreamed of burglars and wished to be one as to dream of policemen and wished to be one. Perhaps I was lucky, too, that I had no money. We have grown to think that the misfortune is in not having it . The great misfortune in this terrible case is the money. That has destroyed their lives. That has fostered these illusions. That has promoted this mad act. And, if your honor shall doom them to die, it will be because they are the sons of the rich.

It's a sob-sister mistake to think of Leopold and Loeb as children when six years ago thousands of eighteen-year-olds were getting shot in France. And that "sons of the rich" stuff; c'mon, Darrow, are you arguing heredity or environment here? And aren't the great majority of rich kids perfectly law-abiding?

When [Dr. Krohn, prosecution psychiatrist] testified my mind carried me back to the time when I was a kid, which was some years ago, and we used to eat watermelons. I have seen little boys take a rind of watermelon and cover their whole faces with water, eat it, devour it, and have the time of their lives, up to their ears in watermelon. And when I heard Dr. Krohn testify in this case, to take the blood of these two boys, I could see his mouth water with the joy it gave him, and he showed all the delight and pleasure of myself and my young companions when we ate watermelon....

Darrow's good, isn't he? Romanticizes youth--which Bobby Franks won't be around to enjoy. Demonizes the opposition; actually, the four top psychiatrists in Chicago testified that Leopold and Loeb were sane, including Krohn. But this is sophistry. It has nothing to do with a chisel and a gag and a culvert, which are the facts of this case.

No one knows what will be the fate of the child he gets or the child she bears; the fate of the child is the last thing they consider. This weary old world goes on, begetting, with birth and with living and with death; and all of it is blind from the beginning to the end. I do not know what it was that made these boys do this mad act, but I do know there is a reason for it. I know they did not beget themselves. I know that any one of an infinite number of causes reaching back to the beginning might be working out in these boys' minds, whom you are asked to hang in malice and in hatred and injustice, because someone in the past has sinned against them.

Gee, Officer Krupke, it's society's fault! I cut out a long Darrow paean to motherhood here. He's in favor of it. And he's arguing environment rather than heredity again, but have no fears, he'll be back at the heredity argument again.

That's about enough of this; this post has been extremely long. There's still a lot more of Darrow's testimony to go through, but I think we've seen most of his arguments. The point I was trying to make with all this is that Darrow's attitudes are exactly the same as those of the Illustrated and Enlightened Among Us today, and his ideas go back a good deal farther than him. Darrow was simply the man of his time that best expressed those ideas, but he was no more original than those who unknowingly parrot those same ideas today.

Posted 18:15 by John

Bad news from Iraq. A convoy carrying eight Spanish intelligence agents was attacked just a couple of hours ago. All eight were killed. This makes a total of 10 Spaniards killed in Iraq, to which we need to add the several dozen troops killed in the crash of a Ukrainian transport plane while being carried home.

I just know that the opposition is going to try to make some political hay with this; they wouldn't be Socialists if they didn't. I don't think it's going to change anything, though; sides have been taken on the Iraq issue, and it would take a major change (e.g. hundreds of Spanish deaths or an Al Qaeda strike on Spain itself) to make those sides change.

In contrast to something deadly serious like this, when all Spaniards need to pull together and show a united front and yet the opposition and the press are going to pitch holy hell, there was a big stink yesterday at the Davis Cup in Australia. Seems that some idiot gave the band the wrong national anthem to be played for Spain. It was the anthem used during the Spanish Republic, not the official one used ever since the nineteenth century (except during the Republic). The press was outraged.

Now, who cares? It's just a song, and it's so boring that no one remembers it. It doesn't even have any words. It's just a symbol. So the Aussies apologized and played the right song the next day.

Methinks the press blew it by taking the anthem thing a little too seriously, and methinks that they are going to blow it again in the wake of this tragic terrorist attack.

Posted 19:44 by John

Here's how I spent Thanksgiving: Checking up on the news, blogging, mild translating, alleged working on what I'm writing. No celebration. First, I hate holidays. I know it's a party-pooping attitude, but I refuse to make a big deal out of pretending I'm happy if I'm not. That's hard for some of us to do. So don't invite me to any holiday celebrations. We'll all be better off. And if your happiness depends on my presence, isn't there something a little wrong with you? We can see one another any time you want. We don't need some damn holiday to do that.

I've also been to Thanksgiving parties over here. They go one of two ways: a) everybody gets really loaded, or b) no one really knows anyone else because you're all the "new guys" and somebody's invited you because you might not have anyone to spend the holidays with. As for choice A, if you want to get really loaded we can probably find more congenial places to do it than somebody's living room, and as for choice B, I feel like the kid with cerebral palsy who gets invited to the Christmas party with the other "special" children. These parties are always hosted by rather motherly American women, who are very nice people, of course.

As for Bush and his Thanksgiving visit to the troops, well done. First, the C-in-C needs to at least approach the troops occasionally. Second, they were able to keep it a secret. Nobody leaked. Third, hey, it is a great photo op. Terrific propaganda coup.

Another couple of things I wanted to point out: first, we haven't heard too many casualities coming out of Iraq for the last few days, and there haven't been any widely publicized--or maybe any at all--killings of Iraqis either. Let's hope this is a trend. Second, for all everybody is saying about how horrible and evil the Americans are, people vote with their feet. Where are all the refugees fleeing Iraq, like you get with any other war? Remember the Kurdish camps inside Turkey last time in '91? The boat people or the balseros? Those who fled the Khmer Rouge or from Ethiopia or Somalia? Or Bosnia or Kosovo or Croatia? Ruanda or Burundi or Congo? Or like what they had to deal with after World War II, with millions of "dispersed persons" all over the place who were eventually settled in somewhere? Those who fled East Berlin, forcing the Communists to put up the Wall?

Repeat: Iraq. Occupied by the Coalition. Refugees: Zero. Somebody is doing something right.

Posted 16:19 by John

You know, there are a lot of different ways people can get things wrong. They can just plain misunderstand or misinterpret the facts, and they might do this for various reasons: deep-seated prejudices, stupidity, ignorance, fear, poor reasoning skills. (The last one, I'm afraid, is very common. Then again, so are the rest.) The facts might be presented to people badly; this could be an accidental error, or it could be prejudice, stupidity, etc. on the part of the informer. A person might be flat-out crazy, which of course leads to misjudgment. A person may think he's learned something from experience that he really hasn't, for whatever reason (he was drunk, he met a weirdo and took him for normal, he jumped to his own conclusions, he fitted the incident into his mind to fit his prejudices). Or a person might just be stone evil, wanting to hurt others out of malice.

Well, as usual, Balto Porcel, Catalonia's official Nobel Prize candidate and author of much pretentious wank, is slandering the United States, Israel, and the Jews in La Vanguardia.

Where does Porcel fit into the above list of causes of being wrong? I've thought about it for about twenty seconds and have come to the conclusion that he is a sad and confused man.

Here's today's staining of the sheets:

...Israel has become angry about that European Union survey that was so unfavorable. So, it has accused the Old Continent of being anti-Semitic again. And Europe has been this, and much more, since the Nazi holocaust could not be understood without a past of terrible genocides--I can't understand it even in this way--in which we see the Spanish Inquisition, Calvin burning Miquel Servet, Russia massacting Chechenia for two centuries, France and the Church eliminating the Cathars, Stalin wiping out social classes and peoples, the Serbs eating their neighbors alive, the gypsies devastated by all the rest, Carrasco i Formiguera shot for being Catalanist.

Without counting other nations: the attacking and attacked Incas, the Japanese against the Chinese, the Muslim slave raids in their centuries of conquest, Belgium massacring and looting the Congo, and the United States to the Indians. Israel has suffered as much as many other peoples. Although it is one of the few who, with more than extraordinary tenacity and intelligence, has managed to subsist and even thrive. Its great example is that of its resistance and resurrections.

However, all this has little to do with the growing European rejection of Israel, because we're not dealing with going back to Torquemada, the "progroms" (sic), and Hitler, but rather that Israel has placed itself in this frame and Europe, perhaps cured of its reiterated genocidal crazes, will not permit them to Israel either. Israel kills, steals, dictates, the Palestinians "only" kill: Europe, in this case, is with the underdog. While Israel is with the United States, which has done as it did with terrorism: worsen the situation, turn it into a planetary epidemic. Washington, and not Europe, causes anti-Semitism.

I see only two reactions that an honorable person can have when faced with this crap: 1) we can organize a petition to get Porcel fired as morally unworthy of his daily column opposite the lead editorials or 2) we can award Baltasar Porcel the First Annual Julius Streicher Award for Just Telling It like It Is. La Vanguardia can play the part of Der Sturmer.

Posted 15:27 by John

That wild and wacky Baltasar Porcel is back with two gorgeously imbecilic and anti-Semitic paragraphs today in La Vanguardia! We'd gone without for so long!

Because the coincidence of the second attack (in Istanbul) with the visit of Bush to London is not casual: Bush, helped by Blair--and this exacerbated Aznar--, has been unable to find a political, economic, cultural, and even police answer, adequate to the hecatomb suffered in the Twin Towers.

Then, his troops are seen, there where they have planted their feet, as something worse than terrorism: exterminating war. And is Israel his disciple or his master? Again, the great genocidal bacillus. Bush has not isolated the terrorism of the Twins, but rather has spread it and has even turned it into the only weapon possible against his giant oppressive machine.

Got that? The United States is there to exterminate and commit genocide on the Iraqi people, at the instigation or with the cooperation of Israel, and terrorism is the only way we (and presumably Israel) can be stopped. Therefore, terrorism is not only justified, but is actually righteous.

Hey, I believe in freedom of speech as much as the next man, but no responsible newspaper would publish such Fascist shit. This insane, psychotic, and frankly evil diatribe is more appropriate for Indymedia than for a major metropolitan newspaper. I call upon La Vanguardia to fire Baltasar Porcel.

Local news update: Valencia was awarded the 2007 America's Cup. This is a big deal economically, since it will attract 600,000 tourists of the desirable, expensive kind. See, Spain's most important industry is tourism, and while cultural tourism (you know, museums, monuments, cathedrals, local restaurants) is popular here, the real money is in the sun-sex-sangria market, those €99 eight days in Benidorm deals. We make a lot of money off that market, but it does create problems. Your margin per tourist is minuscule, and the people you attract are frequently undesirables. At best they'll be puking on your sidewalks.

So Spain is trying to change its appeal and go for the high-dollar market. A big part of this is cultural tourism--I don't know if you've seen those ads the Tourist Board runs in Time and the Economist and magazines like that, but they show pretty photos of the sun setting over the Alhambra and the like, with the slogan "Spain: Everything under the sun". They also want to attract golfers; they've decided that golf tourists are a big rich market, so there are fancy golf courses all along the coasts now. This America's Cup thing is obviously a way to dig into the sailing market; those people are rich and spend money.

More sailors, golfers, and cathedral-gawkers, please! Fewer Glasgow Celtic supporters, topless beach sluts, and Dusseldorfers on the dole!

Actually, the worst crowd I remember here were Inter Milan supporters who came here in 1988 to play Espanyol at the old Sarria stadium in a UEFA Cup game. They were expecting an easy win, but Espanyol was good that year, with players like Valverde, Miquel Soler, N'Kono, Lauridsen, and Pichi Alonso, and they gave Inter a good butt-whupping. (Note: All these players were maybe best known for being smart. That was a damn good Espanyol team, the kind I like, intelligent, tough, and fast. No big stars but a lot of very competent, first-class pros. They were much more likeable than the late-'80s, pre-Cruyff FC Barcelona.) A lot of Inter supporters had come in from Milan, since it's only about a six-hour drive from here, faster than that if you're Italian, and boy, were they pissed. They trashed all the bars and wrecked everything they could find within several blocks of the stadium, and, mind you, Sarria is a wealthy and fashionable area, not some dump out on the edge of town. Millions of dollars of damage was done.

It's time for the traditional Christmas lighting of the streets of Barcelona. Traditionally most streets are bedecked with rather garish colored lights, often arranged in the shapes of Christmasy stuff like stars or angels or whatever. This year they're going for a much more designer look; concretely, they've gotten some local designers to design much more tasteful lighting. The Ramblas is very pretty, I must say, with golden balls illuminated from inside. I haven't seen the other streets with the designer lighting yet. Mayor Clos was supposed to turn it on in a ceremony at the Plaza Sant Jaume, but it didn't work. He looked like a doofus as he went around downtown trying to turn the lights on with a remote control, and it didn't work anywhere. He had to go home looking silly. They supposedly will have all the lights going tonight.

The Vanguardia is very concerned with the effect of the death of "Copito de Nieve" upon the local children. We're supposed to take this as an opportunity to teach kids about death or something. They're debating about what kind of monument to build to him (best suggestion: a realistic statue within the zoo) and whether to name a street after him (now that might be a little exaggerated). As I suggested before, though, we have a Plaza Karl Marx here in town, and if would be quite appropriate to rename it after a creature that actually did some good for the people of Barcelona rather than continue calling it by the name of a crackpot economist whose failed theories have all been disproved.

Well, as we've been saying, the Frogs and the Toads have just unilaterally officially blown off their responsibility to limit their budget deficits to 3% of their GDPs. Everybody else in the EU has to obey this rule, it seems, but our pithable partners, who did more than anyone else to make sure we all stay in lockstep with them setting the pace, can just decide the rule doesn't apply to them. This is not a popular move here in Spain, where people are already remembering that Spain had to leap through some pretty stiff economic hoops, at the instigation of the Bundesbank, in order to get into the euro, including a hefty devaluation in 1993. Aznar and Rato are pissed off as all hell. France and Germany are incredibly unpopular right now in the rest of the EU, if the Vangua and the TV news are reliable sources. Remember that, far from being unilateral, the Anglo-American attack on Iraq was opposed by only three EU nations, the Frogs, the Toads, and the Tadpoles (that is, Belgium). It is Germany and France who are out of touch with world opinion, not the US.

Posted 15:06 by John

One of the main problems that nationalisms have is how they answer the question: Who is "one of us"? I remember I used to work with a perspicacious American woman who used to whisper in my ear about some of our co-workers: "That guy talks American but he thinks European. He's not really one of us."

And, you know, she was right. Let me explain. We worked at a place where the whole teaching staff was American, but some of them were kinda sorta American--a woman who was born in the US to Catalan parents, a man who was the son of Italians, born in the US, but with more than 30 years overseas, a woman, the daughter of an Italian and an American, who didn't even speak standard English, the son of a Paraguayan and a Quebecois who had been born in the US, and several children of American-Spanish marriages who had lived here most of their lives. These folks were all perfectly lovely people, of course, but they did not think like Americans. And there are a good few of them living around Europe; I'd imagine that about half the Americans in Barcelona are this kind of American, the overseas kind.

They're almost in a sort of national limbo--they've got American roots of some kind, but American culture is not part of their lives. They don't know the folk songs or the traditional stories. Wouldn't recognize a square dance--or the hustle or the two-step--if it bit them on the ass. Don't know what the sky looks like on the Southern Plains when there's a norther coming down. Never been to family reunions with a bunch of rednecks. Didn't play high school football or ride bikes down to the reservoir or watch reruns of Gilligan's Island. Don't even know what Gilligan's Island is. Never watched the Canada geese flying south at high altitude. Have never eaten jello with marshmallows in it for dessert--hey, I never said being an American was all good. These folks just don't make the cut.

There are a few basics they've heard about. They know you have turkey at Thanksgiving, but they don't know that the Cowboys and the Lions play that day on TV. And they don't know that probably most American families don't drink wine at Thanksgiving. They've been to Halloween parties but they never went trick-or-treating and they certainly never sneaked out and committed pointless vandalism. They don't know you eat black-eyed peas at New Year's for good luck. They've never seen anyone chew tobacco, and they've never sat through Sunday school on a summer morning when there were better things to do, and they have never heard of fireflies or crawdads. Or fraternities and senior proms and country clubs. Maybe they haven't missed much.

But if my friend referred to these demi-Americans as "not really one of us", and I was able to understand exactly what she meant, that means they exist. Here we are, a couple of Yanks, handing out certificates of being a real American. Sounds pretty arrogant, doesn't it? All right, but if you've never eaten a Ding Dong or a Ho Ho how can you possibly qualify? (And if you had, why would you want to?)

So imagine the problem that Catalans have when they try to decide who's Catalan and who isn't. Now, the Statute of Autonomy says that everybody who lives and works in Catalonia is Catalan. That's fine for legal purposes, but come on. I live and work in Catalonia and no one would ever mistake me for a Catalan, even though I speak the language. They'd never mistake a hand-clapping fino-drinking consonant-mangling Andalusian for a Catalan, either.

I think the story is that Catalonia is divided, more or less, into three groups: the Old Catalans, the New Catalans, and the Non-Catalans. The Non-Catalans (let's say they're 20%) are of Spanish descent and do not speak Catalan or consider themselves Catalans. They live overwhelmingly in the Barcelona industrial suburbs and in the city itself. They answer the question by opting out.

The Old Catalans (let's say they're 30%) have a basic criterion for membership: your native language must be Catalan, and you can't have a "xava" (Castilian) accent. Your first name must be Catalan, and it's really better if you have at least one Catalan surname. Better, two. A grandfather from Switzerland or Sardinia or Salamanca is OK, they suppose. Just one. You also have to know all the stuff about Catalan culture that I mentioned about American culture.

That leaves the New Catalans, who I'd figure as about half the population. They are often of mixed Spanish-Catalan ancestry, or might be of Spanish origin but who have been here a couple of generations. They are most common in Barcelona and in smaller cities like Terrassa or Vilafranca or Manresa. These are the people who are the source of the debate. To simplify things, the New Catalans think of themselves as Catalans. The problem is that most Old Catalans don't. That pisses the New Catalans off no end. Then the Old Catalans call them "charnegos". They hate that. So they strike back against the O.C.s by labeling them as unworthy of the exalted title of Catalan that they claim as exclusively theirs.

The way you pick a New Catalan is, first, by his surnames, since he'll have at least one that ends in -ez. (His first name, of course, will be Catalan.) Second, you listen to his accent, and if it sounds like "xava" than he's N.C. Third, he doesn't know anything about Old Catalan culture except the basics, the equivalents of turkey on Thanksgiving, and he often thinks that by signing onto the basics he's expiated for his lack of real Old Catalan consciousness. He hasn't, at least in the eyes of the O.C.s.

Anyway, keep that in mind while you read this article by Llatzer Moix from Sunday's La Vanguardia. You'll need to know that "malparit", literally "ill-born", is a pretty strong insult in these parts, and that Mr. Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira is the leader of the Catalanista Republican Left party (ERC). Carod is looking for a euphemism for this common Catalan curse, which would translate to Spanish as "malnacido".

Carod-Rovira rebaptized the interior enemy of Catalunya last Sunday with the name of "malnascut". In the middle of his electoral euphoria, with 23 deputies at his back, the leader of the Republican Left demonstrated his gifts for integration and--I'm quoting from memory--proclaimed: there are some people born outside Catalunya who behave like irreproachable Catalans, but there are "malnascuts" who, despite having seen light here don't love Catalunya. Or rather: In a Catalunya designed by ERC adaptable charnegos will have a place, but nothing will be done for the "malnascuts".

For decades, the charnegos were a group that was as necessary as it was stigmatized. Now the chosen target are the "malnascuts". It's a change. Charnegos, yes; "malnascuts", no. That's a lovely slogan for a hypothetical campaign of normalization (i.e. elimination of Castilian), which I offer, for free, to the ERC directors. Now, what is, exactly, a "malnascut"? Carod identified them as those who "having been born here, do not love Catalunya." That leads us to other questions: how do we determine whether an individual loves or does not love Catalunya? Who determines this? Does it depend on his conduct? If that is so, who judges whether that is sufficiently Catalan? In other words, to be a persecutable "malnascut", do we have to go farther out than Vidal-Quadras? Or is it enough to disagree with the Catalan government's cultural policies? Is it necessary to hate Riba, Espriu, or Marti i Pol? Or is it enough to publish in Spanish? While we're at it, does Carod consider that pluralism is a crime of lese-patriotisme? Does he believe there is intelligent life outside ERC's program?

To some people these may seem unnecessary worries. To others, no. I assume that among the latter there are some people who are going to be called upon for legislative functions. Or judicial. This leads us to other questions. For example: What fate awaits the "malnascuts"? Should they wear some badge on their clothing? What punishments will a genuinally Catalan legal code reserve for them? Will they be allowed to follow reeducational programs? What solution is there for the non-cooperative?

Those are a lot of questions in the air. Too many. So let's go back to the beginning: what is exactly a "malnascut"? I go to the sources, to Pompeu Fabra's General Dictionary of the Catalan Language. I look uselessly. "Malnascut" isn't in there. "Malnat", yes: "Insulting term applied to a bad person". Has Carod fallen into a horrible barbarism? ("Malnacido": undesirable, despreciable", according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy.) Heaven forbid...

Posted 15:02 by John

For the real information on Georgia, check out Cinderella Bloggerfeller, the most erudite of bloggers. He's got all kinds of great stuff up and a link to a blogger who's actually on the scene in Tblisi, so go check it out. And the boys over at HispaLibertas, Golan and Poison and Franco Aleman, are on a bilingual roll, so go check them out, too; they're running by far the best blog in the Hispanosphere. Just a little more English stuff, guys, and you'll be able to build up a huge audience. And check out this piece from Kaleboel in which Trevor lays waste to the journalistic reputation of the ineffable Rafael Ramos yet again.

Posted 13:34 by John

One of the most common flagrant economic errors made about poor countries in Spain is that they are "rich in natural resources". The problem here is that natural resources don't matter much of a damn if you can't do something with them that adds value. The implication of the statement, though, is that these poor countries with lots of natural resources ought to be rich. Why aren't they? There's some sort of capitalist conspiracy holding them back and exploiting them, of course. See, that's the problem with, say, Bolivia, according to Vanguardia-thought.

La Vanguardia, in writing about the situation in Georgia, includes these pearls:

The growth of corruption and the rapid impoverishment of a country rich in natural resources are at the roots of the Georgian crisis...(Georgia) was the garden of the Soviet Union, and its wines and fruits supplied the whole Soviet Union, which gave it a higher per capita income than the rest of the (Soviet) republics.

Corruption, OK, no beef with the Vangua there. But "rich in natural resources"? Georgia, on the Black Sea, was the only part of the old USSR with a Mediterranean climate suitable for cultivating vines and fruit trees. That's it, that's all the resources they have. Now, a well-managed country ought to do fairly well selling wines and fruits (hey, wine's a value-added manufacture), and you'd think with their attractive seacoast they could have a tourist business. Think Chile or even Spain.

The difference, though, is that both Chile and Spain have sizable industrial and service sectors. And Georgia is not and never has been well-managed. Its "prosperity" under the USSR was the result of having the whole empire as its captive market. Now it's just another run-down ex-Communist dump on the Med--well, on the Black Sea--in the same league as Albania.

Anyway, the Vangua is emphasizing that the Yanks are behind the opposition to Shevardnadze and that a proposed oil pipeline between the Caspian Sea and the Black would run through Georgia. See, nothing happens without the consent of the All-Powerful, and the All-Powerful will do anything to get more oil. (That's why we were in Afghanistan and Iraq, you know. I even remember seeing some real nutcases around here claim that the Somalia intervention was because of oil.) And then they accuse America of being simplistic. Seems to me that America-bashers are guilty of being reductionists.

Here's more Vanguardia-thought from Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro.

Iraq, on the road to civil war

Almost everything that is happening in Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion had been predicted. We were warned that occupation would foment anarchy, the struggle to resist, and, finally, war among the Iraqis...(The attacks on the Iraqi police stations) corroborate the confrontation of the guerrillas with persons, institutions, and business accused of "collaborationism" with the occupiers.

1) Tommy was predicting mass American carpet-bombings of Iraq that would massacre the population, not any kind of anti-terrorist war. 2) I very much dislike Tommy's use of terms with positive connotations like "guerrillas" and "resistance" to refer to murderous fanatical thugs.

...The American armed occupation, like all the invasions in history, is exacerbating nationalist feeling, but it is also creating destructive divisions among the population. In Algeria, during the FLN's struggle for independence, those who sided with the Paris government were insultingly called "harkis" and they had to abandon their homeland after the liberation...

1) Where Tommy writes "American", read "coalition". 2) I can think of thousands of invasions and conquests in human history that did not exacerbate nationalist feeling because the conquered people were all too busy being dead or slaves to worry about things like nationalism--or because, like between 1940 and D-Day, the conquered people were, well, French. (Of course, the myth of the Resistance in Nazi-governed Europe is largely just that, a myth.) 3) As for Algeria, the FLN were murderous fanatical thugs. Tikrit Tommy is absolutely right about the strategy being used, though. The FLN murdered the "harkis" mercilessly and the Iraqi terrorists are going to try to do the same to moderate Iraqis. That's the first thing you do in a struggle for national liberation, see, you kill all your fellow oppressed people who disagree with you. (See this previous post on Algeria.) 4) It is NOT the Americans who are creating divisions among the Iraqis, it is the pro-Saddam terrorists who are committing the murders. 5) I find it fascinating that Tommy does not condemn, ever, pro-Saddam terrorist attacks on Iraqis or coalition forces, on any grounds, including humanitarian ones of being against innocent people getting killed. Yet if the Americans drop a bomb on a terrorist hideout and some kid gets a splinter in his arm, it's the Nuremberg Trials all over again but this time with the evil Americans in the dock.

...Maybe it would be exaggerated to compare the provisional council established by the US to the Vichy government during the German occupation of France.

Maybe it would. How about these differences:

Transition to democracy underway: Iraq Yes, Vichy No.
Civil liberties, human rights established: Iraq Yes, Vichy No.
Mass sums of money spent on improving daily life: Iraq Yes, Vichy No.
Occupying power sucks out national wealth: Iraq No, Vichy Yes.
Tens of thousands of Jews deported to death camps: Iraq No, Vichy Yes.
Hundreds of thousands of citizens deported as slave labor: Iraq No, Vichy Yes.
Harsh, murderous measures taken against peaceful dissenters: Iraq No, Vichy Yes.
Government overthrown by occupiers evil, corrupt dictatorship: Iraq Yes, Vichy No.
La Vanguardia sympathetic to totalitarian dictators: 1940-44 Yes, 2002-2003 Yes.

Snowflake (Copito de Nieve or Floquet de Neu), the world's only albino gorilla, has died at age 40 of skin cancer in the Barcelona Zoo. That's a shame, of course. We knew it was coming, he'd been very ill for a while, and they took him off display late last week.

The most popular name in Catalonia for newborn males in 2003 is Mohammed, according to TV3. I have no problem with this; I'm pro-immigration, both to America and to Spain. However, I predict a tragic rise in racism in these parts over the next five or ten years, as more (and poorer) immigrants arrive and the locals fail to deal with them in a positive or at least pragmatic manner. See, the locals aren't used to dealing with immigrants at all.

Local TV frequently does news pieces on immigrants, and they're almost always positive (good), and almost always both patronizing and inaccurate (bad). A (well-educated, good-looking) immigrant is shown leading a successful life, perfectly integrated into Catalonia, and the message that this is what happens is thus diffused. In fact, this sort of success is fairly rare among immigrants in Catalonia, most of whom live in comparative poverty--though better than back home in Morocco, so they're just going to keep coming.

We're going to be just like France, not just like America, unfortunately. Old European nationalisms, like the French and the Catalan and the German, are not good at dealing with other folks on an intimate level. They don't mind you visiting, but they want to make sure you go back home without contaminating their blood and land. The only way to overcome this rejection is to become "more Catalan than the Catalans".

I have an article on this phenomenon by Llatzer Moix, which I'll translate either later today or tomorrow.

Posted 21:26 by John

Greetings to those visitors steered here by National Review. For all sorts of Catalan election information, just scroll down to November 17 and the preceding days. Thanks for coming by and we hope you'll stay and set a spell.

Posted 17:42 by John

Check out this bit from ESPN Page 2 on conspiracy theories in sports. It's kind of funny.

Posted 15:01 by John

Here's a Gregg Easterbrook piece (Easterbrook is a moderate Democrat) on Bush's prescription-drug plan, one of his major domestic-policy initiatives. (You folks in Europe may not have heard that Bush actually does things related to domestic issues, and that he does not spend all his time thinking up devilish plots to humiliate the Third World.) What Easterbrook points out is that this plan will help you a great deal if you are old and poor or sick. It will not help you much, even if you are old, if you are not poor or sick. That is, Americans are going to pay higher taxes in order to help out poor, sick retired people, and the wealthy don't benefit. Yeah, just old George Bush failing to be compassionate to the needy and helping out his friends in the oil business as usual.

This is Victor Davis Hanson on the situation in Iraq from Front Page:

Glazov: Welcome gentlemen to Frontpage Symposium. Let's begin with a general question: Can we say still say with confidence that it was the right thing for the U.S. to go into Iraq? How do you read the current situation?

Hanson: Examine three points (1) no more scuds into Kuwait, Israel, invasions of Iraq and Iran; no more worry about petro-dollar-fed weapons programs; no more $20 billion/300,000 sortie no-fly zones; no more genocide of Kurds/Shiites; no more destruction of the Marsh Arabs; no more violations of the 1991 armistice agreements; no more troops in Saudi Arabia; et al.; (2) so far at a cost of less than 400 lives, America has destroyed the Taliban and Hussein regimes (the worst in the Middle East), offered a chance of freedom for 50 million people; suffered no more 9-11s; and changed the landscape of the region in a way that is quite unlike the old Cold War (just pump oil/keep out communists) Realpolitik that led to the appeasement or promotion of tyrants. (3) despite the current hysteria, systematic progress toward a civil society continues in Iraq, as power, schools, politics, trade, and infrastructure are getting better each month. If we really are in a terrible war against Islamofascists and their assorted autocratic abettors, then having such predisposed murderers collect in Iraq where they can be engaged and destroyed in the larger strategic picture of a global war is dangerous of course, but still not necessarily bad.

We've all seen what Al Qaeda just did in Istanbul, with the added fillip that the targets were the British Consulate and a British bank. Among many others, the British Consul was killed. Uh, people of the West, listen to me for just a second here. You're not being paranoid if you've got evidence. They're after us. Don't blame America and Britain for breaking the peace. The loose rogue state / terrorist gang alliance has been at war with us since the Sixties, in case you don't remember the Munich Olympics or Black September or the Lebanon hostages or the Teheran embassy or the Beirut barracks or the Libyan embassy or the raid on Entebbe or the African embassies or the Osiraq nuke plant or the Bekaa Valley or Lockerbie. Or 9-11. And, Brits and Spaniards, don't forget that both the IRA and ETA, who have made a long practice of killing people in your countries, are connected to the Middle Eastern rogue states and terrorists too.

Here's Rafael Ramos, on page 4 from today's La Vanguardia.

...In the streets of London, meanwhile, more than a hundred thousand demonstrators made a completely different interpretation of the invasion of Iraq, denouncing the selfish and neocolonialist policies of the U.S. and Great Britain, and presenting the "war against terror" as a pretext to cut back civil liberties, terrify the people, and advance the economic interests of the Anglo-Saxon allies...

...Bush and Blair have made in London a call to arms with a manifesto that is at bottom simplistic, in black and white. The Republican President wants a sort of American War of Independence, this time against terrorism and at a universal scale, convinced that the outcome is predistined by moral imperative. And the Labour leader seems to be perfectly happy to be his shield-bearer...

For the demonstrators who tore down the statue of Bush in Trafalgar Square reality is very different. Bush and Blair's discourse reflects the anxiety of an ex-empire--Great Britain--that cannot find its place in the world, and a superpower--the United States--that consumes more than it produces, that has a debt of $500 billion financed by China and Japan, and whose military power has been in decline since the Second World War, despite Pyrrhic victories like Iraq and Afghanistan, which confirm its difficulties in fighting a guerrilla war. It's a question of opinions.

Don't you just despise this guy? He's an old European nationalist to the core, hates the United States like poison, likes to put down Britain, and sees everything in terms of compàrative national prestige. Also, he knows nothing about economics; he's fallen into the mercantilist trap of assuming that production should equal consumption, and he doesn't see that a national debt of $500 billion isn't much when compared to the annual American GDP of $9 trillion, unlike certain European countries in hock for more than 100% of their annual GDPs, and that the US national debt is mostly financed domestically.

Oh, by the way, the London Metropolitan Police estimated about 30,000 demonstrators, most of whom were high school kids or squatters. 59,970,000 Britons stayed home. Political demonstrations are generally meaningless. It's when the people pull an uprising that it's scary, and everyone in Britain is far too safe and comfortable to risk anything more than a truncheon on the head by a cop. (Go Cops! Beat 'em, smack 'em, drag 'em to the truck!) Anyway, the government is responsible to all the voters, not to that fraction of demonstrators, many below voting age, that makes the most noise in the streets. And the voters elected Tony Blair. And even the Guardian admits that the people are behind Blair.

Here's Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro, whose piece is on page six and is labeled "Analysis" in twelve-point type, but at least is labeled as such.

You don't have to be a sublime doctor or a graduate expert in the complicated Middle East to know and to repeat over and over that the worst is still to come for these "object peoples".

"Object peoples"? Huh? What we're doing is treating people, not peoples (of whom there are dozens in Iraq), as individuals whose lives are worth a damn, rather than objects. Tommy, do you think Al Qaeda give a shit about people? Or Saddam or the Taliban or Hizbollah or Hamas? If they did, they wouldn't go around killing individual human beings in the name of some combination of crazed ideology and corrupt greed.

The American administration and its allies are determined to make war against what they call international terrorism, without clearing up what its origins are, nor wanting to accept that, for example, the Palestinians and the Iraqis--like the Afghans and Lebanese before them--are combating the fact of an armed occupation. Evidently, we must also know that the causes of those occupations were, the result of previous wars.

Tommy, the whole thing about international frontiers of any kind is they've all been changed repeatedly by war. It's the post-World War I West that has tried, utopically, but has at least tried, to set up a world in which there are no more frontier conflicts in order to prevent future border wars. Anyway, lovely Old European "root causes" wank, Tommy. How can you possibly assure us that the "peoples" of Middle Eastern countries are fighting a unified "struggle against the occupation"? Especially Lebanon, now a protectorate of Syria, but whose people have left off struggling (because if you blow up the Syrians' barracks they just massacre everybody in town. That sort of extreme violence works, unfortunately, and Lebanon is now pacified.) People vote with their feet. More than a million refugees have returned to Afghanistan. And most of the Iraqi people support the US, though they would like us to leave rather sooner than later, which is fair enough.

That's enough fisking Tommy. If I keep this up I'm going to puke--and, oh, no, it's Baghdad Bob Fisk on page seven!

Bagdad Bob's article is really of a pathetic vileness, of gutter-crawling cowardice, of bowing down before those who are scary and violent, of imagining that the bully won't beat you up if you kiss his bum, as Orwell once accused sex-crazed weaselly pro-Nazi pacifist Alex Comfort of doing to Hitler.

...The Australians paid the price of John Howard's alliance with Bush in Bali. The Italians paid the price of Silvio Berlusconi's alliance with Bush in Nasariyah. Now it's our turn. Al Qaeda expressed itself with clarity and precision. The Saudis would pay. The Australians would pay. The Italians would pay. The British would pay. And they have all paid. Canada is still on Al Qaeda's list. Until it is, I suppose, our turn again. Remember, by the way, that already in 1997 Ben Laden said and repeated to me that Great Britain would only escape Islamic rage if it pulled out of the Gulf...

...Think about what they always say about Bin Laden's speeches. When they are broadcast, journalists always say the same thing: Is it really him? Is he alive? This is our only discourse. However, the Arab response is very different. They know it is him. And they listen to what he says. We should do the same thing.

Can it get worse? It can! Here's "Chemical Lali" Sole on the main op-ed page!

The civil population..finds the war at home and with no escape, who hate the missiles but receive their impact, that does not participate in the dividing of the booty, but has to watch while foreign hands loot their country.

All of this, in everyday life, means living in chaos and with abuse, the lack of water and electricity, the lack of medicines, the stundent frightened on their way to school and inside it, with women giving birth suffering more for the future of their children than their own pain, with the old more vulnerable than ever, with the forces of occupation searching the houses and frightening children and adults...

...In Iraq all consideration of the humanitarian labor (of the Red Cross and the UN) has disappeared and both have suffered attacks. In the future, now that every ethical principle has been violated, the brutality will have no brakes. This is the fruit of a churning river, in the form of an invasion, whose benefit is economic lucre.

...Reporters without Borders denounce that the journalists who work in that country are harassed by the American forces. Even worse, freedom of expression, an indiscutible democratic principle, is violated not only in the conquered country but also in the conqueror. That's what happens when Bush prohibits the media of communication from showing the mutilated, the caskets, the pain of the relatives, the burials of their troops in Iraq and in Afghanistan...

It makes no sense that, confronted with a global economy, global risks, and global victims, we cannot have a global democracy. We are talking about a democracy that has never been tried before, but new times require new systems. Unless we keep allowing a few to continue sowing the world with cadavers and victims.

And then you're surprised when you hear that Europeans are anti-American? This is an all-time record for La Vanguardia, the most America-bashing in one day ever recorded. And people around here just believe this crap and parrot it back to you as if it were an argument. If you go back to their "root causes" argument, Spaniards' ignorance is a function of the low quality of their media of communication.

Posted 13:18 by John

Here's one of the dumbest things Michael Kinsley, who's gone through a Krugman-like decline in quality since Bush's election, has written lately. Seems Mike is accusing the Republicans of "attack geography" because some people have questioned Howard Dean's credibility as a presidential candidate due to his governancy of such a small, insignificant place as Vermont. Mike is trying to float a trial balloon accusing Reps of trashing Dems for where said Dems come from.

Now, Vermont has about 400,000 people, no urban areas, no crime, and a very high average income. Nobody is dissing Vermont as a place, though for some of us Bennington is just a little bit hippy-dippy. What people are saying is that Dean's job as governor of Vermont was simply not that big a deal, not incredibly difficult to do, certainly not requiring genius, and not nearly as hard as that of being the mayor, police chief, fire chief, or school superintendent in Kansas City, population 500,000, lots of urban problems like crime and bad schools, and with an area probably half that of Vermont. Nobody using this argument is saying Vermont is a bad place, just that 11 years' experience governing it is not proof that a candidate has the necessary experience in government to be President.

Here's the money quote:

When they were going after Clinton, they portrayed Arkansas as the last place you would want your president from. Why? Well, it's in the South—out of the American mainstream. It's full of poor people. Everyone's married to his cousin. They eat horrible, fatty lower-class foods. My dear, it's Hicksville, plain and simple.

Mike, you dipshit, that's what people who vote Democrat in New York and LA and college towns across America say, not what Republicans say. Republicans are actually from places like Arkansas. This sort of denigrating the common people is much more common among people of Michael Kinsley's political ideas than among people of, say, George Bush's.

Also, let me point out that in 1992, a Republican Texan ran against a Democrat Arkansan. In 1996 a Republican Kansan ran against a Democrat Arkansan. In 2000 a Republican Texan ran against a Democrat Tennesseean. Exactly how do you figure that folks from Texas and Kansas look down on folks from Arkansas and Tennessee? It's people like Michael Kinsley who look down on folks from all four states.

Posted 14:04 by John

HOW THEY SEE US:

A few years ago Miquel Esteba exchanged his machine shop for the good life. Now, with 71 very full years, he likes to say that he organizes parties by order...Since his retirement he has dedicated himself to a very curious activity, something we might agree to call "the restaurant at home". The novelty consists in initiating American tourists into gastronomic culture and giving them "homemade, homestyle" food...

A Taste of Spain, an unusual travel agency, offers its clients the chance of enjoying a good meal outside the circuits of the most renowned restaurants. Therefore, as well as taking them through the dining rooms of El Bulli or El Celler de Can Roca, they introduce them to Miquel Esteba, a person charismatic because of his activity, who in addition to cooking for them in exclusive instructs them in cooking.

The most recent clients have arrived from Philadelphia, Texas, and New york. Never more than five people. Miquel welcomes them, takes them to visit markets like the one in Palafrugell, helps them choose the freshest fish--"they have no idea, the only thing they've seen in their lives is frozen fish"--and finally takes them to his house, in Tamarit, installs them in his own dining room, shows them how to prepare a meal, gives them a class in hedonism, and serves. But he adds a very Catalan varient: he charges them.

For 150 euros three people can eat (according to the website it looks like it's €150 per person), with a gastronomy class included...At the last meal Esteba prepared for them some appetizers with Iberico ham and L'Escala anchovies, a generous fideua, and crema catalana, washed down with Rioja. While he prepared it, the Americans--little historical perspective--opened their eyes to a show they'd never seen, culinary artisanship, a slow fire, the finest materials, even the words are marinated...

"Sometimes," Miquel Esteba explains, "you realize that these foreigners have never seen a crab or a monkfish in their lives...What happens to these Americans is like those kids who believe that chickens are beings which are born fried and come in plastic."

Used to junk food and American assembly lines, these new clients are also shown the work in a winery, how to toast almonds, or to see how bread is baked. They end up so impressed and disoriented that they take home jars of "all i oli"--for breakfast. (La Vanguardia, November 14, 2003)

...It's no accident that the American tourists who visit Barcelona's Gothic Quarter repeatedly ask: "When does it close?" They are incapable of understanding that in that museumified and thematized zone, completely dedicated to tourism and commerce, which stretches from the Plaza Catalunya to the port and from the Picasso Museum to the Rambla, there are people who live there when the shops and museums close down. Having identified the unitary area, sectioned off and thematized, it seems incomprehensible to them that it doesn't close at night, as in an amusement park or a shopping mall. Since the space of tourism is a space of leisure and consumption, the tourist is surprised that the historic downtown is, also, a place to live. "Are there people who live in a shopping mall?" they ask incredulously. (La Vanguardia, Culture supplement, November 19, 2003)

I don't know anybody that dumb who graduated from high school. I do know some extremely dumb Americans, and I'm related to several of them, but them people was white trash a hunnert fitty years ago and they's still white trash today. They ain't got no gumption, nair much common sense, and they all got kicked out of school long about the time they started growing whiskers and raping the nine-year-olds while they were still in the third grade. We had one ancestor who wound up in the Arkansas State Pen for grand theft mule about six or so generations ago. He escaped somehow and lit out for Texas, and the rest of his family followed him, which is how that branch of them got out there.

But any Yank who has the dough and the specialized interest to go on a gastronomical tour in Catalonia is well aware that chickens don't come from plastic bags. He's probably even watched Julia Child on TV at one time or another, and he may have even gone to a French restaurant back home or something. Possibly, just possibly.

(By the way, guys, you may actually never have seen a monkfish. Trust me, you don't want to, they're horribly gross, really primitive-looking fish, bottom-dwellers, not handsome sleek cod or trout. Fortunately, it generally is served in slices, "steaks", if you will. Also, do not order a whole roast rabbit because they will bring it to your table with the head on and it is incredibly horrible-looking. If you must order the rabbit, and they say it's quite tasty, ask for it sans head.)

So whence comes the image of the ignorant, uncultured American? I don't know, but it must be very important for the Europeans to propagate and reinforce that image among themselves. Two stories on the same theme in five days. Not bad at all.

Posted 19:01 by John

Well, it looks like this might be the end of the road for Michael Jackson. A 12-year-old boy has accused him of, uh, inappropriate touching, and the cops have a warrant and they're searching his place, the "Neverland Ranch". This is apparently happening at this moment.

I can't help feeling sorry for the guy, what with his abusive father and weird family and showbiz upbringing, and then all that fame and money, and having to hang out with Liz and Liza. I'd have freaked out long ago under that kind of pressure. But no matter how screwed-up you are and how much bad luck you've had, that is not a good excuse for diddling little boys. If he really did it he ought to be in jail. And we all know how long he'd survive there.

The other thing I want to know is who are these families who are letting their kids get within a mile of Michael Jackson? Who the hell is giving Michael Jackson access to his own children? Shouldn't this kid's parents be tried for reckless endangerment instead of getting the big payoff they'll probably take in exchange for dropping the charges?

I will add that if there is an American Dream, Michael Jackson is the American Nightmare. American society isn't perfect. It can be glitzy and flashy and superficial and also tough, harsh, and competitive. And Hollywood is the summit of that side of the USA. Most people are strong enough to deal with it in one way or another. Michael Jackson was not. Everybody thought he had the Dream but by about 1986 it was very clear that this person was unable to take care of himself due to the pressure of the Bad Side of Hollywood.

Posted 14:22 by John

Check out this piece by Andy Robinson, reporting from New York on something happening in California in today's La Vanguardia. On page three, the lead international affairs page. Words within quotes are in English in the original.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had his first taste of enemy fire last month in southern California when 3600 houses and businesses were converted into ashes, most of them belonging to his voters. With a cost of more than $2 billion, the fires are another huge number in the red column of the books of a state whose deficit was already almost $10 billion. But it's still not clear where "Terminator" is going to find any black numbers. Already proven to be a successful formula in Hollywood (dangling participle sic), Schwarzenegger has applied the technique of the "crossover"--the horror movie that is a thriller too, or the melodrama that becomes a comedy--to California politics. His first economic measure will be the elimination of the car registration tax--with a cost of $4 billion--consolidating his support along the "freeways". This old script of cutting taxes--with repeated "flash back" (sic) to the administration of Ronald Reagan in the Seventies--will be accompanied, however, with what the Los Angeles Times calls a "moderate and progressive program" on environmental and social issues. "Schwarzenegger will govern from the left, right, and center," said, without irony, an analyst from the Hoover Institute in the New York Times. The "crossover" becomes fact with the decision to name several Democrats to the team of the Republican governor.

Terry Tamminen, a Democrat and an advocate for ecological causes, is the new president of the Agency for Environmental Protection, and James Branham, a logging businessman, is her new assistant. Since two of the greatest challenges for the ex-Mister Universe will have environmental repercussions--the prevention of forest fires and the solution to the electrical crisis two years after the blackouts that shut down Silicon Valley--we'll see if this Solomonic formula gives results. It is not clear, either--given the absence of the money stolen by corruption in the accounts of the State, so often denounced during the electoral campaign--how Schwarzenegger will try to blend the "horror" genre with the "familia entertainment" of policies of supporting education and social cohesion programs, all promised in the campaign.

Given the difficulties of the "crossover" genre, Schwarzenegger--facing a Democrat majority in the state legislature--will try to hold himself above the upcoming battles; according to all the experts. (Sentence fragment sic.) In the end, he knows through experience that the reputation of the "lead actor" can survive even the worst movies.

Now, let's have a little quiz. The reason this stupid article sucks so bad is because of the inanity of its metaphor of the movies and governing a state. Why do you think the author, Andy Robinson, wrote this tripe?

A. He spends all his time partying his ass off with American hippie chicks who are impressed because he's British, so he's constantly half-pissed and three-quarters pilled up, none of which he paid for himself, and so he can't concentrate enough to write anything better

B. He's such a nerd that he spends almost all of his wa(n)king hours masturbating constantly with a huge tube of KY Jelly and a six-pack of pornos, and he only leaves the house long enough every day to pick up a new porno six-pack and some regional paper from Buffalo or Pittsburgh that probably nobody is bothering to check him on, from which he manages to rip off something resembling an article to send back to Barcelona, and that's why he can't write any better. They hate him at the porno shop because he leaves nasty fingerprints all over the boxes

C. He's such a lazy bastard that he just makes all this shit up

D. He's so stupid he actually thinks the extended metaphor was clever

What do you think? Post your answers below in the Comments section.

Posted 18:14 by John

OK, I promise, this one will be the last post on the Catalan elections until there's some real news. This is just a summary of how each side "won" and how they "lost" in these elections.

Convergence and Union (CiU): Won because they got the most seats and therefore are traditionally the first to get a turn at forming a new government. Can form an absolute majority with ERC. Lost because they dropped ten seats since the last elections in 1999 and because they might not get what they want if ERC goes with the leftist coalition.

Catalan Socialist Party (PSC): Won because they got the most individual votes and because they can form a governing coalition with ERC and ICV. Lost because they won't get what they want if ERC goes with Convergence and Union, because they lost head to head against CiU in seats, and because they also dropped ten seats from the last election.

Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC): Won. Almost doubled their number of seats. They get to decide who the next Prime Minister will be. Whoever offers most, CiU or the PSC, will get their support and be able to form a governing coalition. And you can't make a coalition without them.

People's Party (PP): Won because they gained three seats. Lost because they will not be a part of the next coalition no matter what happens.

Initiative for Catalonia-Greens (ICV): Won because they gained four seats and will be part of the governing coalition if ERC decides to throw in with the PSC. Lost because they may be left out, it's not their decision, and because they came in fifth in both popular votes and seats.

How this will affect national politics: The PP is neither hurt nor helped by these results. They did slightly better than they were expected to do. Doesn't change anything important. The Socialists are hurt badly, though, since they lost a fifth of their seats, and may not get to lead the governing coalition. This just makes Zap look even worse: since he's been in charge of the Socialist Party he's lost the March municipals, the March regionals, the re-vote in Madrid, and now the Catalan regionals. We never get tired of predicting Zap's demise. Maybe he's already toast and the Bono-Chavez-Ibarra alliance will spread butter and jam all over him and his sleazy Guerrista pals and gobble them down. If they're lucky they'll get to put Maragall on TOP BROWN, too. They'd like to get rid of him and his annoying pandering to the Catalanista vote which he'll never win and which only serves to piss off voters in the rest of Spain.

Posted 15:05 by John

Bienvenidos a todos los lectores que vienen de Libertad Digital. Espero que os guste este blog; podeis dejar comentarios si os da la gana. Siento que este todo escrito en ingles; Iberian Notes se concebio como un blog que intentaria explicar Barcelona, Cataluna, y Espana a los de fuera. Pero no hay ninguna razon para que los autoctonos no puedan leerlo tambien. (Ah, lo de los acentos escritos y tildes; los dejo porque el sistema Blogger no los acepta y los sustituye con interrogativos.)

Posted 00:22 by John

You know, it isn't racist to say that certain names are typical of certain ethnicities or nationalities. I mean, there aren't too many chronically sober people named Paddy Murphy, or too many fundamentalist snake handlers named Moe Levy, or too many Sigma Chi or ATO pledges named LaTryrone Jackson, or too many flamenco singers named Jordi Puigdefabregas. Or Koldo Isparregizebarrenoizerretagoitia.

As a sociological study, I asked Remei to name some "typically gypsy" surnames. I got Amaya, Heredia, Flores, Montoya, Amador, and Reyes. I then added up the surnames of the 85 people on the Calo Nationalist Party ballot, figuring you're probably a gypsy yourself if you're on the ballot of that party. That's a total of 170 surnames, two per person. Here's the distribution of interesting stuff:

"Standard" Gypsy Surnames:

Flores 15
Amaya 14
Heredia 11
Amador 9
Montoya 3
Reyes 1

Standard Spanish surnames:

Jimenez 18
Fernandez 12
Perez 6
Hernandez 2
Martinez 2
Rodriguez 1
Gonzalez 1
Lopez 0
Garcia 0

Standard Portuguese surnames:
Silva 4
Vargas 3
Santos 2

Standard Catalan surnames:

Soler 1
Torres 1

Common other surnames among gypsies:

Cortes 14
Santiago 13
Manzano 9

Conclusion: All of the surnames that are stereotypically gypsy turn up, though Montoya and Reyes are not really that common. Several standard Spanish surnames, with no intrinsic gypsy connection, turn up in large numbers, but some other very common Spanish surnames don't turn up at all. Catalan surnames barely appear, though Portuguese surnames are not too uncommon. Cortes, Santiago and Manzano are common surnames among gypsies, but for some reason are not considered stereotypically gypsy.

Posted 23:07 by John

99% of the results are in and there's going to be some fun political wheeling and dealing over the next few weeks. The PSC got 31.2% of the vote and won 42 seats (the PSC scores highly in Barcelona and its metro area). CiU got 30.9% but pulled 46 seats because it scores highly in smaller cities and rural areas, and the system is weighted so those areas are overrepresented and the city and metro areas are underrepresented. ERC got 16.4% of the vote and 23 seats, mostly in the provinces and in Barcelona city. The metro area doesn't vote ERC; they all speak Spanish. They don't vote CiU, either, for that matter. The People's Party got 11.9% of the vote and 15 seats, mostly in Barcelona and the metro area, and the Commie-Greens got 7.3% of the vote, almost all in the metro area and, secondarily, in the city, and 9 seats.

Hoo boy. In the old days CiU used to regularly win an absolute majority in these here regional elections. They were the moderate Catalanist party, more in favor of a great deal of autonomy rather than Catalan independence, and they included conservatives, liberals, and social democrats who all had their Catalanism in common. That coalition--"we're all united because we're Catalanists first and other things second"--is splitting apart. ERC didn't use to get any votes, and what's happened is that the more Catalanist CiU voters have gone over to them. (Example: Pere Esteve.) The more conservative and less Catalanist CiU voters have gone to the PP (Example: Josep Pique). This process was already visible in 1999, in the last regional elections, when CiU lost so many seats they were forced to govern from the minority with the backing of the PP. This did not please many CiU voters at all. As nationalists, they despise the central government in Madrid, and a lot of them did not like the deals CiU made with the PP both after the 1996 general elections and after the 1999 Catalan regionals. They punished CiU.

The Socialists had themselves a good minority coalition going, when they would regularly rack up fifty seats in the Catalan parliament, easy--a strong second, enough to mean what your party says at least has to be taken into account unless it's completely insane--and they pile up mayoralties in Barcelona and the metro area. PSC voters are often idealistic lefties but not usually completely nuts. Some of them are really pretty reasonable. They're like Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean. If those guys are running your country and all you have to worry about is internal affairs, you can get away with doing a Sweden. Things won't be too awful. (But you can't do a Sweden, as Democrat voters in the States seem to think you can, if you're a superpower and international affairs and defense are important issues for you.) What really united PSC voters was their opposition to Convergence and Union. There were some Socialists who were pretty Catalanist (Raimon Obiols) and some Socialists who were pretty leftist (Jordi Sole Tura). Those more Catalanist voters have flaked off to the Republican Left and those who are more leftist have moved on up to the Communists. That's kind of like graduating from marijuana to heroin.

Smart people vote for the PP. That number is increasing slowly but steadily. The Socialists' recent clownish behavior has cost them points, and they've lost a few votes to the PP, as has CiU. Unfortunately, the PP will be shut out of the upcoming coalition negotiations.

Right. Let's do some math. You need 68 seats for a majority in the 135-seat Catalan Parliament. What this means is that a conservative pact, CiU and PP, adds up to 61 seats. No way. A Catalanist pact, CiU and ERC, adds up to 69 seats. That would work. Or a leftist pact, PSC and ERC and ICV, adds up to 74 seats. That works too. So it's all up to ERC. Whichever way they decide to flip will depend on who promises them the most, the PSC + ICV not-very-Catalanist leftists or the CiU Catalanist more or less moderates. The auction has begun. The bidding starts at the conselleria of Economics and that of Public Works...Do I hear Environment?...Come on, you can do better than that...

If ERC went so far as to demand the Prime Ministerial position, I wonder if the Socialists and CiU might make a deal? That's supposed to be unthinkable, but I would prefer either Mas or Maragall to Carod-Rovira as Catalan PM. Those two parties are really not that ideologically different on anything but emotional Catalanism. I wonder if Maragall would prefer Mas to Carod? Or if Mas would prefer Maragall to Carod?

Footnote: Turnout was 63%, up four percent from the last regional elections in 1999.

Footnote Two: Other parties running were the Communist Party of the People of Catalonia, the Humanist Party of Catalonia (the front for the cult), the Internationalist Socialist Workers Party, who must be Trots, Internationalist Struggle, who are probably Trots too, the Platform for Catalonia, the racist / xenophobic Catalanista / Franquista melange, Insubmissive Seats, who are probably the squatters, the Another Democracy Is Possible Coalition, who are the "alterglobalization" hippies, the Republican Social Movement, who just might be far-right, the Spaniards Under Separatism Coalition, who just might be really far-right, and the Calo Nationalist Party, the Gypsies. Except for the Calo Nationalists, who are almost certainly all integrated gypsies and even if they're not deserve a fair hearing in the Parliament, I hope the cops are keeping an eye on all these wackos. The great thing is that each of these parties had its list of 85 candidates, so that's 85 people per wacko political party to keep under surveillance. We should be able to uncover the roots of the conspiracy quite easily.

Posted 21:06 by John

With 16.7% of the vote counted--these are official figures--the Socialists have 34.1% and 48 seats, CiU has 29.4% and 43 seats, the Republican Left has 15.0% and 21 seats, the PP has 11.8% and 15 seats, and the Communists have 7.3% and 8 seats.

Possible alliances: A conservative coalition of CiU and the PP would sum 58 seats; 68 are necessary for a majority. A nationalist coalition of CiU and ERC would sum 64. A leftist coalition of the PSC and ERC would sum 69, enough to form a government. If they gave ICV part of the spoils they'd have 77. Looks like Maragall is the next Prime Minister.

UPDATE: This post turned out to be completely wrong. Later results determined that there are two possible coalitions: CiU-ERC or PSC-ERC-ICV. Maragall stands a good chance of not becoming the next PM.

Posted 20:52 by John

They're announcing the results of the surveys taken outside the polling places. These results have to be taken with a grain of salt, since they're based on what people said when leaving, and this tends to undercount PP results--it's still not too politically correct to say you support the PP, so we'll see how this develops. They're talking about voter turnout of 60%, more than in 1999. Real results ought to be coming in about 11 PM or so.

TV3's survey counts the Socialists (PSC) with 3.3% of the vote and 44-46 seats, Convergence and Union (CiU) with 29.4% and 43-45 seats, the Republican Left (ERC) with 17.6% and a very surprising 24-26 seats, the PP with 10.3% and 12-14 sears, and the Communists (ICV) 7.6% and 8-9 seats. Libertad Digital has the results of three different surveys up.

This would mean a serious drop in the vote for the two major parties, a huge gain for the Republican Left, and small gains for the PP and the Commies. We'll see how it comes out.

Posted 16:04 by John

Well, today's a Japanese girl's favorite day, so we went out to vote. We observed two schools being used as polling places; everything was completely normal. The way it works is that people on the voting lists are chosen at random to serve as vote tabulators. It's like jury duty, but just for one day. You get paid like fifty bucks or whatever, and you have to appear, no excuses, or get hit with a heavy fine. I assume they let you off if you have the flu or something. Official political party volunteers, with a party volunteer tag, are allowed to observe and provide assistance to voters, so the various parties keep things covered. There are never the slightest insinuations of vote fraud. Doesn't happen.

Turnout in Spain is pretty good for the most part. Good turnout would be something like 65% for a regional election, like this one. 70% wouldn't be too unusual for a general election. There are four types of election, general, for Spanish prime minister, (=US federal), regional, for Catalan prime minister, (=US state), municipal, for local mayor, (US local administrations), and European Parliament (no US equivalent, of course). Average turnout drops as you go down the list. It's generally better than in the US, though, and one reason is that elections are always held on Sunday here in Spain, a day almost everyone has off from work.

In the US, by contrast, elections are always held on Tuesday, a working day for almost everyone. I'm amazed that we get even 50% turnout for our working-day elections in the US. I would seriously suggest that elections be held on Sunday in the US if we want a more participative democracy, which we may not. If any religious groups complain tell 'em they can vote by absentee ballot. You wouldn't have to amend the Constitution, since all it says on the question is that Congress shall fix the date of presidential elections and that date must be the same in the whole country (Article II, Section 1)--so I don't see why Congress shouldn't designate the first Sunday in November rather than the second Tuesday.

Anyway, whenever an election is coming around, they send out a voter card to everyone eligible to vote in the circumscription of the election. You are automatically registered, and since we do not have real primary elections here, you do not register a party affiliation.

(The way you get affiliated to a party is by soliciting admission: I don't know if they take a vote on you, but you do have to pay dues and if you do something the party doesn't like you can be expelled. You get a party membership card and everything. You get whatever voice the party allows any of its other members over internal affairs, which normally does not include a vote by the members on selection of the candidates.)

What you do is take your voter card and your photo ID down to the neighborhood elementary school. There is a pile of paper ballots for each of the parties--you don't vote for a candidate, you vote for a party, though of course each party has its leader. You pick up your party's ballot (with the names of your party's 85 nominated candidates, one for every seat up for grabs in Barcelona province, as well as the party's name and its symbol), stuff it into the envelope provided, get in line, they check your name against the computer list, and then they allow you to stick your sealed envelope into the Plexiglass ballot box. That's it. (If you want to vote in secret, there are little booths provided. You can pick up several party ballots, take them into the sealed booth, and then discard the ones you don't want to vote for and stick the one you want in the envelope and seal it.) Then, they count the votes that night and the Parliamentary seats are apportioned out, using the d'Hondt system of proportional representation. If, say, the Socialist party is adjudicated 47 seats out of the 85 in Barcelona province, then the top 47 names on the socialist ballot win a Parliamentary seat. Whichever party or coalition of parties that can form an absolute majority of seats forms a Cabinet, whose members they select. Naturally, the Number One candidate in the leading party's list of names gets to be Prime Minister, and several Cabinet posts are given to the leaders of the allied party or parties, if there are any.

You know, an elitist argument can be made that it's a good idea to keep the percentage of voters low, and one way to do that is to make it a pain to vote. That way only those willing to jump through the necessary bureaucratic hoops and register to vote and the like get to vote. The idea is that the Joe Schloops who don't have the damndest idea about politics won't bother to get registered, thereby removing 'less-qualified' voters. This argument is, of course, profoundly antidemocratic. It doesn't contradict representative democracy, though.

Anyway, I'll post again when something like some real results are out later this evening. It's 5 PM here now and supposedly they'll have preliminary results when the polls close and something like a real projection of the new distribution of seats by 11 or so.

Posted 04:03 by John

I assume by now that everybody has heard about the US intelligence report that links Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Looks to me like they have plenty of evidence. Just more proof that Saddam needed to go.

Posted 16:35 by John

The one conspiracy theory I actually buy into is the one that says there is a loose alliance between Islamic terror gangs (Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Fatah, the Saddam Fedayeen, etc.) and rogue states in general and Middle Eastern rogue states in particular. I think there is plenty of evidence that demonstrates collaboration between these various groups. And I think we're currently at war with all of them, though the war may be hot in some places and cold in others. The Saddam Triangle in Iraq is right now the epicenter of the fighting, and we are winning; we're killing and capturing a lot more of them than they are of us, and they're going to run out of people on the ground ready to do dirty deeds sooner or later.

Al-Qaeda has certainly reached out its long arm recently in this bloody Ramadan, what with the bombing in Istanbul, the attack on Italian headquarters in Iraq, and the attack in Riyadh. I'd like to ask antiwar folks this question: don't you think we should be fighting these guys who are going around sowing terror and hate? Or should we bail out now, leave Iraq in the lurch, let Saddam take over again, and then deal with the consequences of a tremendous loss of American credibility? That's what we've got for choices, guys, and you know in your hearts that somebody's got to stomp terrorist gangs and rogue states right now before they do another Istanbul or Riyadh or 9-11. I hate to have to say this because some of our people are going to get killed fighting the enemy. And some more innocent Iraqis are going to get killed in the crossfire. All I can say is I wish that weren't true. But, it's tragic to say, their deaths now will save maybe millions in the future if this actually winds up working, with a democratic and peaceful and stable Iraq as the beacon for the rest of the Middle East.

I'd like to point out that we're winning the war in Iraq. Every school open, every town with electricity, everywhere the irrigation system has been fixed, is a win for our side. And there are many more wins than tragic losses, when coalition soldiers or innocent civilians get killed. The Iraqis have never had a decent government anytime in the history of their country. It's about time the Middle East saw what can be done with a liberal democratic system in place in a Muslim country.

I actually honestly feel that the country that will lead the Middle East towards democracy is Iran. Post-Shah Iran has always been semi-democratic in a weird way; that is, there was only one system, the Islamic Republic, but you could vote for the guy you preferred who was inside the system. Iran is a step above most Middle Eastern countries in such things that indicate citizen welfare as literacy and life expectancy and GDP per capita. Many Iranians are well-educated and there is a good bit of very decent and even admirable democratic popular agitation to get rid of the current government. I would not be surprised if there is a peaceful transition toward democracy in Iran in the next few years. I would also not be surprised if they had nuclear weapons right now, so we won't be attacking them anytime in the near future.

This would be a good opportunity for Spain to get in on the ground floor in a country that is going to be much more prosperous than it is now as soon as they get a decent government. Spain has first-hand experience in managing a transition from a long-established dictatorship to a democracy, and it is fair to say they've done the best job of all the countries that moved toward democracy in the 70s and 80s. The people who were in charge of running the Spanish Transition are still alive, even though one of them has just been discovered to be, if not a crook, far too friendly with certain people who distribute lots of money. If Spain could contact moderate Iranian (or Iraqi) leaders and and say, "look, this is how we did it, your society is different so you can't follow our plan step by step, but you're likely to learn a few things from our example", it might be very helpful. And it might help us develop useful friendly relations, because when Iran is freed it's going to explode economically.

Posted 15:22 by John

Here's a lovely little article by Eusebio Val, the X-man's replacement as Washington correspondent for La Vanguardia. Its headline is The Dead Are Not Profitable: Bush prevents press from covering funerals, arrivals of caskets of fallen soldiers.

The Bush Administration has no qualms about sowing fear--and even panic--among the citizenry. Since 9-11 antiterrorist alerts have been constant. There was a time when it was recommended to the population that they should stock up on duct tape in order to seal doors and windows against a chemical attack, and the flag of fear of a smallpox epidemic was waved. collective anguish can bring good political dividents. The Republicans won the Congressional elections of November 2002 and the surveys supported the war against Saddam.

The President and his team do not like at all the fact that the press shows the suffering of their soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. George W. Bush has not attended, as far as is known, the arrival of the caskets of fallen soldiers nor has he allowed himself to be photographed among their crying relatives. Neither has he been seen encouraging mutilated soldiers. He doesn't like this disagreeable side of war. He prefers his own harangues.

The Pentagon has dusted off an old rule passed during the Clinton administration--but which was never strictly enforced--to prohibit the media of communication from covering the arrival of the caskets from the Iraqi front. The planes with the caskets normally arrive at the air force base at Dover, Delaware. The Administration does not think it wise to make the images of the shipment of cadavers an everyday event for the general public. The Defense Department has just restricted reporters' access to the funerals in the national cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. Some of the dead in Iraq rest there. In this case they have taken advantage of a rule already on the books but with flexible application. The press can only approach the funerals with permission from the families.

This coyness with the casualties in the "Anti-Terrorist War" has displeased many. "We can't understand the true cost of war without seeing the amputated and the dead," says Steve robinson, director of an association of veterans of the Gulf War. Some newspapers and TV stations get around the prohibition by printing photos and profiles of the fallen soldiers. Bush cannot impose the total invisibility of the tragedy.

The bold type is mine. It seems to me that the story is that the US government does not allow pressies to interfere with the folks invited to the funeral of a "fallen soldier" unless those folks give their consent. What the hell is wrong with that? But no, Eusebio has to make it into some kind of censorship scandal. You people in the States, is there any truth in what this joker says?

Note, by the way, the repeated themes of Americans being frightened cowards, of the government fomenting this terror, of shadowy political forces controlling the voters, and of government censorship. They all show up in Eusebio's story.

Posted 14:58 by John

Well, the Catalan elections are building up to their grand finale, since the election is on Sunday. The weirdest thing that's happened recently is that Juan Carlos Rodriguez Ibarra, the loudmouth populist Socialist boss of Extremadura, called upon PP Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar to stay on as PM: "No responsible politician should abandon ship when the country is in difficulties, and the defense of the Constitution is more important than fullfilling that little promise of eight years." (Aznar is stepping down as Prime Minister early next year; Mariano Rajoy is the PP's candidate to succeed him. Aznar promised, when first elected in 1996, that he would only serve two terms as PM and he is keeping his promise.)

That's very weird. Ibarra has just said he would prefer Aznar, the great enemy of the Spanish left, as Prime Minister, to his Party comrade Zap. This is much weirder than Zell Miller coming out in favor of Bush. It means that the Socialists have abandoned hope for any sort of victory in next year's general elections, and it also seems like an incredibly dumb move, praising the PP leader, when his own comrade Pasqual Maragall is a couple of days away from an election the Socialists have to win. All I can figure out is that the Socialist "barons" (party bosses) Bono of Castile-La Mancha, Chavez of Andalusia, and Ibarra of Extremadura want to throw Zap over the side right now so they can get a new candidate in and give him a few months to get used to the job before the 2004 general election.

Aznar has come to speak in Catalonia, supporting his candidate, Josep Pique, four times. Zap appeared in Catalonia for the first time in the campaign yesterday. But Socialist former PM Felipe Gonzalez has appeared several times in Catalonia in support of Maragall. Conclusion: Maragall thinks Zap is box-office poison.

Here's a funny one. Showman-singer Javier Gurruchaga appeared on stage, along with Zap, to support Maragall last night in the big whoopdedoo the Socialists had. Now, Mr. Gurruchaga is most notable for having been tried (and acquitted, it must be said) for having sex with underaged rent boys procured at a Sevilla gay bar / male bordello. Let me make sure we have this correct: I am not saying that Gurruchaga is a bad person because he is gay. No probs there. But while the court said he was not guilty of child sexual abuse, a lot of people are not sure that they agree with the court's verdict. Yet the Socialist Party considers this guy appropriate to appear on stage at their big party rally of the year. Maybe that's a big difference between Spain and America, but if I were a political candidate, I would not have a guy who is the moral equivalent of Barney Frank's old roommate up there on stage in order to attract people to vote for me.

Many other well-known people got caught up in this scandal. I don't remember whether the Duke of Feria was one of them. He got quite notoriously nailed for doing all sorts of perverted stuff back then, though, and went to jail for several years for acts of pederasty and the like. It's not too common for dukes to go to jail, so this was kind of a big deal. Anyway, (sick joke coming) several years ago there was a famous ad campaign for Telefonica, you know, those mushy ads they run to try to persuade you to call your loved ones at Christmas. It depicted a cute little five-year-old boy named Edu calling lots of people on the phone and repeatedly saying, "Hola. Thoy Edu. Feliz Navidad." And Dad and Mom don't get mad because it's so cheap to use Telefonica, you see. Anyway, (sick joke imminent), people went around saying, "Hola, thoy Edu, Feliz Navidad. Hola, thoy Edu, Feliz Navidad. Hola, thoy Edu, Feliz Navidad. Hola, thoy el Duque de Feria, ?esta Edu?"

Quick review of the parties in Sunday's election, in probable order of finish:

Catalan Socialist Party (PSC). Will get largest number of votes. Would prefer to govern in partnership with only ICV, but will almost certainly have to take in ERC as well. The likely winners, but ICV and ERC will extract a high price for their support. Generally a social democratic party, similar to the left wing of the Democrats in the US. Not very Catalanist.

Convergence and Union (CiU). Will come in a close second in votes, and may even tie the PSC for seats (rural area votes count more than metro area ones, as in the US). Will probably lose Prime Ministerial post after Jordi Pujol's 23 years in power. Crucially, will not get enough seats to govern with either ERC or the PP. A CiU-PSC coalition is almost unthinkable and CiU is much too conservative for ICV. Generally socially conservative, very Catalanist, and fairly social democratic economically. Like the left Northeastern Republicans if they were really nutty about traditional Vermont culture.

Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC). Will come in a distant third but will outpace both the PP and ICV. Likely to be the bellwether; that is, the PSC will need them to join in a Barcelona City Council-style three-way alliance. There is an outside possibility that they will gain enough votes to be able to form a coalition with CIU. Kind of an unstable party with no fixed opinions on most social and economic questions. They really stand for only one thing, Catalan independence. Many of their voters feel emotionally akin to the left, but Catalan nationalism trumps leftism in their eyes. No American equivalent to these guys.

People's Party (PP). Will place fourth, picking up a couple of seats over last time. The anti-Catalanist, conservative party. Would be willing to form coalition with CiU but there probably won't be enough votes. Likely to wind up isolated during next legislature.

Initiave for Catalonia-Greens (ICV). They call themselves "ecosocialists". I know a Commie when I see one. These guys are trying to be "communism with a human face". Fortunately, they're going to come in last, though they also ought to pick up a couple of seats. Unfortunately, they're likely to be needed by the PSC to form a three-way coalition with ERC. They will extract a high price for their support.

Posted 13:32 by John

Definitely check out this nasty blast at "Baghdad Bob" Fisk by David Pryce-Jones in the Spectator. Brilliant job. Fisk is toast. Andrew Sullivan wonders whether Fisk is misguided or malign. I firmly believe that he is malign. Fisk is not an honest pacifist or even an honest Arab nationalist. He actively desires ill for Israel and the United States and he is willing to support anyone, no matter how evil, who tries to strike a blow against those countries--or against those Britons who sympathise with those countries, including Tony Blair and everyone who has ever been a Tory. And this isn't anything new. Fisk has a long pre-9-11 record of hating the Yanks whether they're attacking Iraq or not, and of hating the Israelis since he had use of his so-called reason. I could understand someone becoming infuriated about the Iraq campaign and going nuts and freaking out and starting to spread anti-American hate, especially if they're in someplace like Barcelona where there's a lot of anti-Yanqui peer pressure. But Fisk hated us long before hating us was cool.

You'll want to check out this article in Policy Review about anti-Semitism and ethnic nationalisms in Europe. Well-worth a read. Rosenthal says what we've been trying to say all along, but he does it rather better than we do. And here's a long article by Frederick Kagan from the Wall Street Journal on Donald Rumsfeld's businesslike management of the Pentagon, and why efficiency in military affairs is not always a great idea; there's definitely something to be said for redundancy. This article from Slate on Ronald Reagan's newfound popularity and how he wasn't always beloved during his Presidency is a very useful reminder about the '80s; those of y'all who missed them might want to have a look at this. And the rest of you too.

And you will definitely want to read this Atlantic Monthly interview with P.J. O'Rourke about his experiences in Iraq. P.J. will have an article out in the December Atlantic, which will be out in a few days.

Posted 20:46 by John

I've put up a long piece on the racist and xenophobic origins of Basque nationalism over on EuroPundits, so go check it out.

Posted 13:20 by John

More wacky stuff from this week's Culture section in the Vanguardia. This is by one Ignacio Julia, who manages to get off some lefty-old-Europe rhetoric and some name-dropping of famous gringos at the same time.

Note: The European left refers to the free-market or capitalist system using several code words. "Liberal" means free-marketeer and normally social liberal as well. "Neoliberal" is worse; it means conservative and capitalist, and implies a rejection of Marxism. "Pensamiento unico" (the only thinking), more or less means free-market ideas; it implies a suppression of other economic ideas, specifically Marxist ones. "Salvaje" is literally "wild" or "savage", and could maybe best be translated as "unrestrained" or "unbridled". It implies a total laisser-faire system: for example, "capitalismo salvaje". The United States is always a "hyperpower", implying that we're dangerously powerful, and together with other English speakers we are "Anglo-Saxons", even if our parents came from Cambodia or Iran or Poland. So: "The hyperpower's policy, and that of its Anglo-Saxon satellites, is to enforce "the only thinking"; neoliberalism and unrestrained capitalism are imposing themselves and other ideas are to be invalidated."

The Anglo-Saxon rock community has maintained silence while coalition forces carried off the second Gulf War as they had planned. 9-11 had silenced questioning voices and paved the way toward government "only-thinking"; like the rest of the population, musicians limited themselves to mourning for the dead without digging deeper into the reasons of the catastrophe. Let us compare the answer of today's musicians to the invasion of Iraq to that of their predecessors in the '60s...

...The attack had not only anguished the nation, it isolated it even more from world reality, incapacitating even its artists from reacting. Where were the critical voices? Not even in popular music.

"It's difficult when you're in an environment dominated by political propaganda," the radical folkie Michelle Shocked told me several months ago. "That distorts your artistic instincts. I had to come to Europe to hear other opinions for the first time and to have a certain perspective."

...Jackson Browne admitted during his stay in Barcelona to promote a new record, "Now we're debating whether it is even possible to criticize the actions of our government..."

"What hurts me most is that the democratic doctrine has been one of our most exported products," confesses Michelle Shocked. "I could lie and say that the Americans have understood the impact of 9-11, but unfortunately, because of the Bush Administration's economic policies, which is so embedded in his general policies, you don't hear other opinions in the media, controlled by the big corporations."

Another attitude, less impacting, is that of the rock poet Patti Smith, who is finishing a new album that will deal with these questions certainly from a more humanistic than political perspective. "You can't stop terrorism, it's impossible; we're dealing with human beings who have decided to give up their lives and there will be an interminable parade of them," she said to me on the telephone a year ago. "Those who think we can get rid of terrorism like that is wrong." That doesn't seem to be the conviction of the world leaders who operated on Iraq for cancer and left it gutted. Those who now hold up their guitars in their fists to stop this unsustainable progression toward barbarism will arrive late, but their voices will be welcome in a country that needs them like never before in its history.

Brilliance. Sheer brilliance.

In case you don't believe these quotes are legit, it's La Vanguardia, November 12, 2003, Culture supplement, page 25.

Posted 11:43 by John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted 23:05 by John

Congratulations to our friends at HispaLibertas and to Franco Aleman for getting Instapundited! Here's the link to an excellent piece on the LA Times's coverage of Spain. Go read it now. If you can read Spanish I highly recommend that you make HispaLibertas an everyday stop--and even if you don't, make it an everyday stop because Franco will be posting there, I assume at least sometimes, in English.

Posted 14:09 by John

Just a little comment about Steve Earle--Mickey Kaus linked to a little piece about him. I like Steve Earle, I think he's a hell of a good country / rock musician. Several of his songs, like "Guitar Town" and "Copperhead Road", are classics, and all his songs are good. He's also known for playing hot live shows.

Now, Steve is also known as a lefty loudmouth. He is, but he's more responsible than some, and I've never heard him bitch too much about the way the media treat him, unlike the Dixie Chicks.

The thing about Steve is 1) he's not a mass-market star and he's not all over mainstream country radio 2) he's been around for a long time and everybody knows he's kind of a weirdo and he used to be a junkie and he's been in jail and all that 3) he's never pretended to be anything he's not 4) he was a lefty back before being a lefty was cool 5) even before he came out and said so everyone already knew he was against the war. So he didn't surprise anybody and he didn't get "Dixie Chicked". Mainstream country radio never played him anyway, and alt-country radio didn't quit playing his stuff after he spoke up on the war.

The problem with the Dixie Chicks was that they were selling an all-American wholesome image and making the big--no, huge--bucks off it. (Steve Earle probably still lives in a trailer park. I don't think he's ever made any money and whatever he's made he's spent on Evan Williams and crank.) Nobody knew or cared what they thought about politics. They were pretty girls and good musicians who played nice country songs. Then, suddenly, they go off the deep end and criticize the President--and the state of Texas--in pretty harsh terms in a foreign country, then, when people get angry, they whine that all the folks who bought their records and subsidize their opulent lifestyle are ignorant warmongering evil scum, then they get naked on a magazine cover, and then they tell all their fans to fuck off and that they're not a country band anymore.

Therefore, mainstream country radio and fans told them to fuck off in return. The people didn't know what kind of human beings the Dixie Chicks were and they were pretty surprised when they found out. Everybody has always known what kind of human being Steve Earle is and so he didn't surprise anyone in the least.

That is why I am supporting Steve Earle and boycotting the Dixie Chicks. If you haven't heard Steve's music, you might check it out.

Posted 19:04 by John

InstaPundit links to Nick Denton who links to this collection of Spanish female hot newsreader babes caught with ecstatic porno queen expressions on their faces. There are a couple of, uh, head shots of future Queen of Spain Letizia Ortiz. Denton's direct link is to Antena 3's Susana Griso, who is a genuinely hot babe and whose brother I had in class once. No, I can't get you a date. Warning: I make no promises about whether you might get on some penis-extension spam list by clicking here.

Posted 16:55 by John

Well, they gave Susan Sarandon some kind of award in Sevilla and she insisted on shooting off her mouth as soon as she saw a camera and a microphone within range. Said Susie, according to El Periodico, the Barcelona daily:

It terrifies me to think that today's patriotism means following the government's line without questioning it. It's a dangerous form of democracy that is becoming Fascism...I think I was the first woman to speak out and they've been talking about me as if I had committed treason. As if I were putting our troops in danger. It's very unpleasant.

...There is the idea that only bad actors get involved in politics. but in a free country, everybody has the right to get into politics...As a citizen and an actress I do not lose the right to criticize them, above all if Arnold is occupying a public position...I've spoken with Spanish actors and it was very moving for me that in the Goya Awards ceremony (Spain's mini-Oscars) they were able to raise their vioces against the war. (In my country) there is no freedom of expression. In the United States you cannot say things out loud. And this is a terrifying situation for democracy, because whatever the government says, we artists are free to express ourselves.

Right, Susie. I think artists like, say, I dunno, Willem de Kooning (is he still alive?) or Roy Liechtenstein, or Frank Gehry, or Jeff Koons, or David Hockney--my favorite living painter--, or my man Stan Herd, the Kansas crop-art guy, genuinely creative people, ought to speak out even if they don't make any sense, because they see the world from a real original artist's viewpoint and that's something the rest of us ought to pay attention to. Life isn't just economic statistics. These folks have demonstrated that they are worth hearing out because of their creativity and originality and hard work and intelligence. I wouldn't go out and elect one of them President, but they are real creative artists and deserve our respect even if we do later decide they are full of crap politically.

But Susie, you, an artist? Fugeddaboudit.

Sports Update: The Chiefs blew out Cleveland and are now 9-0. If they keep playing like that they'll go down as the greatest team in NFL history. FC Barcelona has won three straight games against two schloops (Mallorca and Murcia) and one decent team (Betis) and are currently in fourth place behind Deportivo, Real Madrid, and Valencia. Things don't look too bad; they're learning how to play as a team. Coach Frank Rijkaard has a set starting lineup: Valdes; Gabri, Puyol, Cocu, Van Bronckhorst; Xavi and Gerard (or Motta); Quaresma, Ronaldinho, Luis Garcia; Saviola. Marquez has seen some action in midfield and has done very well, scoring a goal last night. Kluivert went in for Ronaldinho, who got himself mildly injured, early in last night's game, and also scored a goal after an incredibly infantile error by the Betis goalie. Maybe he'll break out of his slump.

Some guy from England wrote in late last football season and told me I'd blown all my cred for suggesting a defense with Gabri and Cocu (and Gerard, who hasn't been tied down there yet). Yeah, blown my credibility my ass, right now Gabri and Cocu are both starting defenders and Gerard plays either at defender or as a defensive midfielder.

Catalan NBA Watch: It's pretty incredible that a small place like Catalonia, with six million people, has produced not one but two NBA players. They are Pau Gasol of Memphis, in his third season, whom any casual fan like me recognizes and who might well be on his way to an All-Star season this year. He's a seven-foot power forward who can rebound, shoot, and play D, and he's Memphis's best player. The other guy is Raul Lopez of Utah and this is his first NBA season. He got drafted two seasons ago but was out all last year with injuries. He's getting about twenty minutes a game at point guard and is making the most of them, with ten fourth-quarter points in his last game, precisely against Memphis. It was the first time two Spanish, let alone Catalan, players have competed against one another in an official NBA game. Spain's only other NBA player was Fernando Martin, who was with Portland a couple of years in the early 80s.

Congratulations to both Gasol and Lopez, and to FC Barcelona's basketball program, which produced both of them.

Posted 18:20 by John

New Partido Popular leader Mariano Rajoy was interviewed in today's Vanguardia about the upcoming elections for the Catalan Parliament. Here are a few of the things he said. This is pretty good. It is not typical governmental guff. Mr. Rajoy, in the interview, demonstrates himself to be a well-informed and thoughtful leader who shoots straight. I often complain about Spanish politics, but I admire the Spaniards as a whole for producing such a competent, responsible, and professional political party as the PP, and then electing it.

Look at the piece we did on Zap way back when in May he gave an interview to the Vangua. We translated some of his utterances then. Compare the intellectual and moral level of the two men, Zapatero and Rajoy. The difference is shocking.

Says Rajoy, ...What we want, as I said before, is to be able to work with the "rules of the game" in place now; with the Constitution and Statute of Autonomy, which have been useful and which have allowed a great advance in the self-government of Catalonia, and also in the well-being of the citizens. We hope to achieve, in the upcoming years, real convergence (equivalence in GDP per capita with the rest of the EU) and full employment, and let nothing distract us from that situation. It's a problem of priorities. Our priority is not reforming the Constitution and the Statute, and I don't think that's the priority for the majority of Catalans, but rather working so that Catalonia will become better and better off. Let's not forget that Catalonia has seen large growth over the last few years. It's the second autonomous region in Spain as far as the active (percentage of) population, outranked only by the Balearics, and its employment rates are very reasonable. We plan to continue in this line and to continue working in favor of governability in Catalonia, as we did during these eight years of getting the (regional) budgets passed. We are satisfied by this, as we are satisfied by the cooperation that Convergence and Union gave to the Administration of Spain.

...I believe that the agreement there has been during the last eight years has been positive; sincerely, it's been positive. That is, to give you a figure that is enormously significant, the budget of the Generalitat since the PP has been in the Administration has increased more than a billion (US=trillion) of the old pesetas, more than six thousand million (US=billion) euros, which is not pocket change. That has meant an enormous increase in the capacity of self-government.

From another point of view, I think that the economic growth that has occurred is enormously relevant in Catalonia. And, look, I think it's been that way from the perspective of investment, because the average investment (in Catalonia) during the years of Socialist Administrations was 8% of the total spent by the Ministry of Development (Fomento); in our first legislative term, when we had an agreement with CiU, it was 11%, and in more recent years it's been 16%, arriving at 17% of the 2004 budget. Therefore, cooperation has been positive, and what I think is not positive is distracting ourselves from what is really important to us, which is continuing to work toward growth and employment.

In the year 1978 the whole of Spanish society decided to look forward and forget a history that had certainly been complex, to put it like that. And there was a political agreement, a social agreement, there was an agreement that permitted that in Spain the PSOE or the PP could govern with a majority, allied sometimes with the (regional) nationalists, sometimes not; that is, it permitted governing with everyone and establishing a territorial agreement (division of governmental power between the central government and the regions) that was very difficult to reach. And the territorial agreement was established fundamentally because of the special situation that responds to history, and not to something just made up, of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Galicia. And there we all said, "We're going to move from a centralist State to a State decentralized politically, legislatively, and administratively." Today, the autonomous regions in Spain have a level of public spending very superior to those of the decentralized European models, concretely Germany and Austria. They have authority over the fundamental large public services, and with the PP Administration we passed the new model of regional financing that has produced the greatest autonomy of income that there has ever been, because before there was authority to spend but not to generate income.

The Generalitat can make decisions about taxes that are important to the people, like income tax, inheritance tax, gift tax, judiciary acts, VAT, et cetera. And this is a very relevant fact. From there on, that was the big decision we made when we (the Spaniards) passed the Constitution and the Statute.

Note several things about Mr. Rajoy. His thoughts are organized. He knows his facts cold. He has his priorities straight. He avoids using demagogic rhetoric. He is a dealmaker, not a divider. He is a moderate, not an extremist. Compare Mr. Rajoy's statements with Zap's again, and two things just leap out at you: 1) Mr. Rajoy is professional and competent and will do a fine job as Prime Minister, which we all know he's going to be. 2) Zap is a dope. How the hell did he ever get to be leader of anything, much less the major opposition political party in a major European democracy?

By the way, if you want some political guff in Catalan, here's the link to the PP's program for next weekend's elections. It's just baloney, mumbo-jumbo, bushwah, gobbledygook, horsehockey, whatever, but it is MODERATE above all else.

Posted 13:01 by John

WE SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT SQUATTERS: In other news: NASA confirms moon-green cheese theory, Generalitat designates bullfighting "element of traditional Catalan culture", Saddam endorses Bush for 2004

The squatters down in the plaza copped a break: the cops were going to kick them out last week, but the judge decided they couldn't because he had not received a direct formal request from the owners of the property that he eject said squatters. Looks like they'll be around a while longer. Anyway, they hang around the plaza a lot, and there are several squat dogs that look sleek and well-fed and behave themselves a good bit better than their owners, who keep painting defiant violent slogans on the walls about how they want to blow everything up. I am pro-dog, and these guys are pretty obviously dumped pets that the squatters picked up somewhere and took in. So you have to give them credit for something. There's one of them, a Spanish hunting dog (big, ugly, goofy, good dogs as a rule) with a bandanna around his neck, who insists on sniffing my crotch when he sees me. It's a friendly gesture. I hope.

Catalan regional elections are next weekend; the Vanguardia's poll has Convergence picking up 48 seats, the Socialists 47, the Republican Left 18, the PP 14, and the Communists 8. Convergence loses 8 seats, the Socialists lose five, the Republican Left gains six, the PP gains two, and the Commies (Initiative-Greens) gain five. All the other newspapers have polls, too, and they're all about the same. One of them has the Socialists winning more seats than CiU, but that doesn't really matter. The facts, Jack, are that all the polls show that a PP-CiU coalition AND a CiU-Republican Left coalition would fail to win a majority. The only winning ticket possible, if the actual voting comes out like the surveys say, is what we said a couple of days ago: a Red-Green-Light Brown Popular Front coalition of the PSC, the Republican Left, and Initiative-Greens. Precisely what we have now in the Barcelona City Council.

They had a debate on TV last night. It wasn't very interesting. The only candidate I like is, of course, the PP's Josep Pique. Convergencia's Artur Mas is a lightweight, the PSC's Pasqual Maragall is a blowhard, the Republican Left's Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira is a one-issue candidate, and Initiative-Greens' Joan Saura is dumb. Intellectually. He's a smart politician running on Marxist hot air and exaggerated criticisms of everyone else, and he got most attention in the debate.

Xavier and Murph and I have a debate going on about whether the PP is or is not "monolithically centralist". They say it is. I say the PP is not in favor of greater autonomy for the regions, but it doesn't have a problem with the system of autonomous regions as it stands, and that it would be willing to consider some changes in the system.

Josep Pique, the PP's candidate (and the most qualified candidate: Maragall was Mayor of Barcelona for many years and has proved that he has political credibility. I don't like him, but I admit that a lot of reasonable people do. If you're a Clinton-Gore Democrat, Maragall's your man. Neither Mas, Carod, or Saura has ever held an important position. Pique was a Cabinet minister in Madrid three different times in three different posts, including that of Foreign Minister) said this during the debate:

"The PP defends the Estatut (the Statute of Autonomy, the Catalan regional constitution), and we are the only ones. And here are four political forces that want to destroy it. We won't close ourselves off intellectually to reforms, if it continues to be the Estatut of all Catalans."

There you go. The PP is satisfied with the level of Catalan autonomy as it is. And it is open to certain changes. That, to me, is not monolithically centralist, it's pretty damn reasonable.

The Vangua got itself into a nasty little mess. It seems that activist idiot actor Joel Joan (our Woody Harrelson, sort of) got up on a stage at a Republican Left rally and told about going to an Italian place called La Corza Blanca in Barcelona's Vila Olimpica. Joan says he went into the restaurant and asked for a table for seven in Catalan, and he was treated rudely and basically told to fuck off. Quim Monzo fell for this one and repeated it in a rather hysterical Vanguardia column last week titled "The Harassment of Catalan".

Explosion. The people from La Corza Blanca and their clients raised a huge stink, saying that they weren't an Italian place, first, and that second, they never treated clients badly and always used the language the client preferred, Catalan or Spanish. They got a bunch of signatures from their regulars over dinner that night and wrote in to the Vangua the next day. Monzo and Joan both had to retract.

Now, let's think for a minute. Let's say you run a restaurant and Joel Joan, who has been on TV and in movies a lot and whom you certainly recognize (he's about six foot six and quite distinctive-looking), walks in with six other people and asks for a table in Catalan. What do you do? You think, humm, at seven people and twenty-five euros each that's €175, and if they get into the wine list or order whiskey or brandy that's €300 at least, and you also figure that if you give them good service and treat them right they'll come back and cough up more dough at your place, and you think that if you have Joel Joan as a regular client he'll tell his friends and your place will look fashionable and hip and maybe you can even get an autographed picture or something.

What you do is say "Si, senyor, es clar, aqui mateix. O on vulguin." And then you rub your greedy little restaurant-owning hands all the way to the bank. Have you ever heard of a business owner offending a client in the way Joan says he was offended?

Here's what happened. Joan repeated an urban legend that he's heard more than once. It didn't really happen to him; he repeated something that "happened" to "a friend of a friend" that he thought was a good story. Joan, as a hardcore radical Catalan nationalist, enjoys playing the victim, and this story of alleged discrimination against Catalan-speakers was too good not to use, so he appropriated it. That is, he lied.

WARNING: The Partido Humanista is running in these elections. It is a front group for a cult that calls itself La Comunidad and is controlled by an Argentinian "visionary" named Silo. They recruit at a very grassroots level among idealistic far-leftists, and their modus operandi is well-known since they've been at it since the Sixties. The organization consists of an inner circle around the mysterious Silo which receives contributions sent by cult branches around the world.

Their political party is merely an opportunity for them to take advantage of the free airtime provided by Spanish television to parties during elections; it never gets more than about seventeen votes. Most notorious was what they pulled off in the '91 election, when they adopted the name "Ecologistas Verdes" and skimmed off some 20,000 votes from those who thought they were supporting a legitimate Green Party rather than a front for a cult.

Don't believe me? Google some combination of "silo" and "partido humanista" and "la comunidad" and "cartas a mis amigos" (the title of Silo's magnum opus.) Just look what you'll find.

Lluis Foix, former editor-in-chief of La Vanguardia, goes off the deep end in Thursday's op-ed section:

The plot thread of these hypotheses is that the terrorist organization Al Qaeda could not have had such a sophisticated level of preparedness to carry off such a perfect and successful attack. It is questioned, for example, whether the suicide terrorists were sufficiently trained in aeronautic navigation as to carry off an attack with so much precision and such synchronicity against New york's Twin Towers.

I am never in favor of conspiracy theories and I look at the facts that are in front of my face. However, why didn't the American intelligence services act correctly, knowing as they knew that a terrorist attack of great dimensions was being planned using commercial airplanes?...

Where is Bin Laden? Was that terrible massacre prepared in Afghanistan? If the official version is true, the power of the terrorists could strike the most unexpected objectives. I don't give a lot of credit to the hypotheses going around. But it's difficult to believe that the perversity of the terrorists was so perfect.

Louie, Louie, Louie. Bin Laden said he did it, and we know how it was done. We also know he pulled off sophisticated attacks on our African embassies three years before 9-11. Your logic, Louie, is that of conspiracy theories, despite how many times you try to throw us off the trail by claiming you don't believe in them--because this is a pretty big one. Louie is using that same old anti-American bias, thinking the USA is the All-Powerful and that so nothing can happen without its say-so.

Louie, what happened is that our intelligence services got caught with their pants down and their asscracks sticking out behind. That happens much too frequently for my taste, and the incompetence of that bunch of bunglers is proof that all CIA-based conspiracy theories are false, because there's no way the CIA could actually make something so complex as Al Qaeda's 9-11 plan work. You need a tight, organized, motivated terrorist cell run by professionals to pull that off.

Are you seriously suggesting, Louie, that the United States government is lying about what happened on 9-11? Your use of the words "official version" and your last sentence seem to show that you are. So why would they lie about it? Obviously because the US government was really behind 9-11. Come on, Louie, admit that's what you're saying. And then think for a minute about exactly why the US government would intentionally get 3000 innocent people killed. Obviously because the US government is evil enough to murder innocents for its own nefarious purposes. Just come out and say it, Louie, tell us what you really think.

The shocking thing is that 1) such ignorant and baseless speculation is taken seriously enough by a prominent journalist to get in the paper and 2) Louie tells us that his column is in response to a growing number of rumors in Europe that 9-11 was an American government setup. I've personally heard those rumors spread by ignorant people I know, including some of my in-laws whom I don't have to go visit anymore. My guess is that within a year most Europeans will come to believe in the 9-11 conspiracy theory that Louie lays out while telling us he does not believe in conspiracy theories. If they don't already. Eurostat ought to do a poll on this one, if they can keep their hands out of the till long enough to do their so-called job. I bet half the Europeans think 9-11 was an evil CIA plot.

Oh, yeah, Louie, the power of the terrorists CANstrike the most unexpected objectives. Like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They missed the White House thanks to the efforts of the cowardly, fear-stricken Americans who charged the cockpit and caused the terrorists to crash the plane in the Pennsylvania mountains. That's why we're fighting this war. 9-11 must never be allowed to happen again, whether in New York--or Barcelona. Don't fool yourself that they wouldn't take a shot at Barcelona. They would if they saw a good chance.

Lluis Foix, you are a stupid asshole. You are too stupid to recognize that the United States is not the All-Powerful and that is why you indulge in masturbatory fantasies about an arch-villainous American government pulling the string behind everything that happens in the world. You are also too stupid to realize that international terrorism has you on its list, too, and that wishing it away with antiwar demonstrations and whining for peace will serve for absolutely nothing when you are behind the eight ball, which you may be one day. And you are such an asshole that you accuse those people who are in charge of the US government of being callous murderers with absolutely no proof, just the wildest speculation. That's what we call libel where I come from.

Posted 13:58 by John

I love listening to the early morning show on KHYI in Dallas. First, they play great country music. Second, the DJs are generally personable and sometimes even funny. Third, they take a lot of calls, and about five percent of the time the callers are really bright and witty. Half the time they're just regular Joes. The rest of them range from a little slow to real dumb. Seems that many of them have been up all night drinking, like the guy who just phoned in, said, "I jus' wanned to--BURP--uhh, some Mac Stallings." The DJ instantly put on "Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink". They run this thing they call "Earl Pitts, American" at about 8:20 Central time, which is worth tuning in for. Earl is an Angry White Male.

Christopher Hitchens is off the reservation. He's rolled over, flip-flopped, jumped the fence, changed his coat--joined the Right. Welcome, Chris. You may remember that we predicted this would happen several months ago, but we were still awaiting his recantation of his past sins before we would currently accept him into the congregation. Here it is. He hath repented. Kill the fatted calf, the prodigal has come home. Note the bold type.

An example: In trying to justify the earlier eviction of Saddam from Kuwait, Secretary of State James Baker put forward the case that "jobs" were the main justification. I thought that to be both stupid and ignoble at the time (and was generally antiwar at that date) but did not think that it automatically, or even partially, invalidated the case for restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty by force of arms.

He was a little more than antiwar at that date. In fact, he spent a great deal of his time slandering Bush I in particular and the United States in general at that date. But hidden and convoluted as it may be, that's the mea culpa we needed. Chris is in the club.

I think it's interesting that Hitchens's hero is George Orwell, and I can't avoid thinking that Orwell's thought developed greatly during the years. As late as 1937 he was still parroting the Trot / Left Socialist doctrine about the coming war against the Nazis being a dastardly capitalist plot. Then he went to Spain and learned that it was possible for the Left to be not only wrong but evil. From 1938 Orwell was anti-Soviet. From 1939 he was pro-war. But until at least 1940 he was anti-Semitic:

25 October (1940)

The other night examined the crowds sheltering in Chancery Lane, Oxford Circus, and Baker Street stations. Not all Jews, but I think, a higher proportion of Jews than one would normally see in a crowd this size. What is bad about Jews is that they are not only conspicuous, but go out of their way to make themselves so. A fearful Jewish woman, a regular comic-paper cartoon of a Jewess, fought her way off the train at Oxford Circus, landing blows on anyone who stood in her way...

Surprised to find that D., who is distinctly left in his views, is inclined to share the current feeling against the Jews. He says that the Jews in business circles are turning pro-Hitler, or preparing to do so. this sounds almost incredible, but according to D. they will always admire anyone who kicks them. What I do feel is that any Jew, i.e. European Jew, would prefer Hitler's kind of social system to ours, if it were not that he happens to persecute them. Ditto with almost any Central European, e.g. the refugees. They make use of England as a sanctuary, but they cannot help feeling the profoundest contempt for it. You can see this in their eyes, even when they don't say it outright. (War-time Diary, 1940)

Lovely, George. Xenophobic and antiSemitic all at the same time. But he grew over the years. I am convinced that when he says "you" in the following famous passage from 1945, he is talking about himself:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the makeup of most of us, whehter we like it or not. whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first and all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority toward the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of these feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. (Notes on Nationalism)

The second passage is a great deal wiser and more mature than the first. This is Orwell's recantation of his antiSemitism, twisted as it is: "I admit I despise Jews, but I don't like that fact about myself". I think he's being honest.

I have a feeling that Orwell's movement toward the Right would have continued if he had survived; he might well have moved as far as Muggeridge or Paul Johnson did. Certainly his two best-known books, written after 1943, were savagely anti-Soviet, and he's known to have made a list of literary figures who were untrustworthy because of their Communist affiliation, in his judgment. I think Hitchens is passing through the same intellectual process that Orwell did.

Posted 14:15 by John

Apropos of nothing, but I just thought this article from the Weekly Standard by Joel Engel on Rod Serling and his battles with censorship was very interesting and well-done, so I figured you might enjoy it too.

Posted 11:36 by John

The Spanish government, as you may already know, has pulled out most of its staff at the embassy in Baghdad. Several staffers will be staying on and the Embassy will not close. "State security forces" recommended that the embassy be moved to a larger and more secure building; the new building will be able to house the entire delegation. Before, some embassy staffers lived in private residences in the city, and one was murdered several weeks ago. Prime Minister Aznar announced that the government would take advantage of the situation by calling diplomats back to Madrid for high-level consultations. Most Embassy staff should be back in Baghdad by the end of the month. Said Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, "This is a temporary measure. The representatives who have gone to Amman will return soon."

Robert Fisk pitches a fit in today's Vangua. Seems Edward Said died and some people said some things that were not very nice about him. Mr. Fisk thinks this is repugnant and unhealthy and insulting and execrable and in bad faith. He thinks we're all racist against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular. He is especially miffed that some people have accused Hanan Ashrawi of favoring Palestinian suicide attacks. Mr. Fisk is particularly angry at one Zev Chafetz, so he attempts to discredit him by pointing out that Mr Chafetz was an Israeli government spokesman back in 1982, and he says that all this is the work of "supposed friends of Israel" and "Israeli pressure groups". I say Mr. Fisk is a big poop head.

The Catalan regional election campaign continues apace. Both Jaime Mayor Oreja of the PP and Jose Bono of the PSOE have blasted the Catalan nationalists for their fence-sitting regarding the Ibarretxe plan for a semi-independent Basque Country. Bono called CiU (!) and the Republican Left (well, OK) a bunch of radicals. Here's our official election prediction, and remember we haven't been wrong yet: A Socialist-Republican Left-Communist coalition takes over the Generalitat with Pasqual Maragall (who has botoxed his narrow piglike eyes so he doesn't look like as big a drunk as he did before) as Prime Minister. Convergencia, the moderate nationalist party, is going to take a bath and the PP is going to get the same 15% of the votes it always gets. As Jordi Pujol, Catalan Prime Minister for the last 23 years, goes into retirement, the party he held together all these years is going to begin to crack up. The less Catalanist and more conservative CiU voters will move to the PP, the more Catalanist CiU voters will go to the Republican Left, and the more social democratic CiUsters will go over to the Socialists, holding their noses maybe, but they will. CiU will become a minority party probably under the leadership of its Christian Democratic faction, Democratic Union, and its boss Josep Antoni Duran Lleida. (Note: If you ever want to irritate a Catalan nationalist call this guy "Duran Lerida", using the Spanish version of his second surname. The explosion will last at least five minutes.)

Some of the more idiotic Cataloonies have been making noises implying that the nasty Spaniards planned this royal wedding thing to distract attention away from the Catalan elections. This is known as thinking that the world revolves about one's own navel. Toni Soler is unhappy with the choice of Letizia Ortiz because he thinks she was just a mouthpiece for the evil antiCatalanista TV1 while she was doing the news (up until last Friday. Letizia note: she's way too skinny. She also has a camera-friendly large head compared to the rest of her body.)

Letter to La Vanguardia: ...Many theater, dance, and review shows use, absolutely bare-faced, the Yankee model for inspiration, without this impeding the same people from later scorning everything American after performing it on stage. Or is all this antiAmericanism and scorn for their way of life, their culture, and their customs, just a mask to cover up the envy we have for them?

MIGUEL MASSANET, Begues

Andy Robinson simply cannot shut up about the fires in California. I think he's written as much about the California fires as the whole Vanguardia staff did about this summer's heat wave, in which at the very least several hundred people died in Barcelona and several thousand in all of Spain. Says Andy, wrong again about American history, The suburban model was promoted by Anglo-American real-estate developers and car manufacturers like Ford, who did not understand its incompatibility with the unpredictable and extreme Mediterranean ecosystems. The move to a suburban model--a middle-class dream made in the very same California--has been brutal in recent years and has coincided with the destruction of the rural economy.

Oh, Lord. Suburbanization has been a constant in American history going way back; check out the book Gotham, a well-known history of New York, which makes it clear that New York had residential suburbs going back at least two hundred years--what do you think Harlem was until about 1910? For other examples, look at the net of leafy towns around Boston, the Philadelphia Main Line, Fairfield County, Westchester, Queens, Grosse Pointe, Shaker Heights, Oak Park and the North Shore, et cetera. Those places all existed long before the automobile. Henry Ford and the evil real estate guys didn't cause the phenomenon. And the idea of the American dream goes back to the pioneers and the immigrants, not merely to the LA metro area.

Michael Moore's opus "Stupid White Men" is Number 1 on the Vangua's best-seller list in both Spanish and Catalan. That might have something to do with this story from yesterday's Vangua:

MAJORITY OF EUROPEANS BELIEVE US, ISRAEL AGGRESSIVE STATES: Spaniards view Bush's America as most dangerous country on planet

The majority of Europeans consider that Israel and the United States as a threat toward world peace, according to a study performed by the statistical office of the European Commission, Eurostat, published yesterday. Israel comes in first, with 59% of those surveyed seeing that country as a danger. George W. Bush's America is not far behind, since 53% of those consulted see it as dangerous to the world, as many as Iran and North Korea, and more than Afghanistan (50%) and Pakistan (48%).

Seems that the figures for those who "see the Jewish state as a threat" are 74% in Holland, 69% in Austria, 64% in the UK (!), and 56% in Spain. Those who see the US as "threatening" are 88% in Greece and 61% in Spain. 68% of Europeans surveyed said the coalition attack on Iraq was unjustified, 58% said the UN should be in charge of Iraqi reconstruction, 65% said the US should pay for said reconstruction, and 54% opposed sending their troops for peacekeeping in Iraq. The study was carried out between =ctober 8 and 16 and consisted of 7515 telephone interviews.

Now, Eurostat is up to its neck in corruption, there's a major scandal going on there, but I don't think the survey is incorrect. I think the results reflect EU opinion pretty well, which leads me to one conclusion: They don't like us.

What should our response be to this ejaculation of America and Israel bashing? I'm tempted to say this: Screw European public opinion and the European public. The results of the survey make it pretty clear that most Europeans want us to go home. I vote we do so. Why should we volunteer to defend the Greeks? Let's pull out of NATo and replace it with a series of bilateral treaties, since there's no reason for us to stick out our necks for these people. Goodbye nuclear umbrella, goodbye American bases, goodbye American intervention in Europe, if that's what they want. Also goodbye most-favored trade status. I'm not calling for isolationism here, I'm calling for a realistic foreign policy based on our interests and exclusively our (and our friends') interests. If Greece doesn't want to be our friend, fine. They don't have to be. But then they shouldn't expect any favors, either.

InstaPundit links to this article by Jonathan Rauch on American "unilateralism". Check it out for a review of debunking arguments shredding the "big bad USA" stereotype. Front Page links to this Daniel Pipes article which basically says that the Europeans are all mouth and whining and bitching but no action. They talk big about the US as a threat but their governments do nothing effective that would indicate they really believe in that alleged threat.

Posted 13:23 by John

Since it's Tuesday, it's time for the weekly TMQ-tribute NFL Power Rankings. There were a good few surprises last week, but our rankings haven't changed that much.

Rank. (Last week) Team; Won-Lost; Ratio points for / against

1. (1) Chiefs; 8-0; 1.89
2. (2) Colts; 7-1; 1.61
3. (3) Dolphins; 5-3; 1.46
4. (4) Bucs; 4-4; 1.43
5. (6) Vikes; 6-2; 1.36
6. (7) Titans; 6-2; 1.34
7. (5) Rams; 5-3; 1.34
8. (12) Niners; 4-5; 1.33
9. (10) Cowboys; 6-2; 1.32
10. (9) Seahawks; 6-2; 1.31
11. (11) Ravens; 5-3; 1.23
12. (8) Broncos; 5-4; 1.23
13. (14) Pats; 7-2; 1.19
14. (13) Packers; 4-4; 1.19
15. (15) Panthers; 6-2; 1.09
16. (17) Giants; 4-4; 0.98
17. (16) Bills; 4-4; 0.97
18. (21) Eagles; 5-3; 0.93
19. (18) Jets; 2-6; 0.93
20. (19) Saints; 4-5; 0.92
21. (22) Bengals; 3-5; 0.88
22. (20) Browns; 3-5; 0.88
23. (23) Jedskins; 3-5; 0.78
24. (24) Raiders; 2-6; 0.75
25. (25) Steelers; 2-6; 0.73
26. (28) Bears; 3-5; 0.71
27. (30) Lions; 2-6; 0.71
28. (26) Jags; 1-7; 0.69
29. (29) Texans; 3-5; 0.64
30. (27) Chargers; 1-7; 0.61
31. (32) Cardinals; 3-5; 0.53
32. (31) Falcons; 1-7; 0.53

Note there is barely any difference between #5 and #10; those teams could be mixed up in any order. The Dolphins and Bucs look to be overrated by the system, though I still like both teams. The Patriots are definitely underrated, though I don't think the Panthers are; I think the Panthers are a middle-of-the-pack team, rated about right. I guarantee the Cowboys are not overrated. I think the Niners are too high, that they're not as good as their ranking. Too inconsistent. The Jedskins, Raiders, and Steelers are all finished for the year. The Eagles are moving up slowly but surely. The Jets are ranked too high; they ought to be down there with the other 2-6 teams. The Ravens are for real. The Broncos will keep sliding.

Last week we "broke even" again, with the Bucs letting us down and the Ravens covering the spread against the Jags. So we're now down forty bucks after two weeks. We've got three picks this week: we like Indy at Jacksonville, giving 6 1/2 points (this is 7-1 Indy ranked Number Two playing 1-7 Jax ranked Number Twenty-Eight), we like the 6-2 Vikings to snap out of it at the expense of the horrible 1-7 #30 Chargers in San Diego, giving six points; and we like Dallas at home to beat the Bills by more than four points. We think Dallas is really a legit playoff team and that the Bills are mediocre at best.

Posted 12:12 by John

Check out this article from Slate which shows that there's not a correlation between making campaign contributions to the Republicans and receiving Iraq or Afghanistan reconstruction contracts. Yes, Bechtel and Halliburton have received big contracts, largely because they are the best-known and most-experienced companies in their field, I assume. They are also very well-known contributors to the Republicans. That's their right. They're allowed to make publicly-announced campaign contributions and there's nothing wrong with their doing so. But a lot of companies that have made only tiny contributions or none at all have also received Iraq / Afghanistan contracts, demonstrating that the quo is not necessary to get the quid.

Here's another article by the same author, Daniel W. Drezner, from the New Republic, which tells us not to panic at the apparent backlash of antiglobalism and antiliberalism in Latin America; it supports a couple of the things we said in yesterday's post about moral equivalence. There's another piece by Andrew Sullivan in TNR, in which he shreds Andy Rooney's idiotic 60 Minutes rant on the Iraq War (and provides stacks of evidence demonstrating that the ilk of Moore and Franken and Rooney are baldly lying when they accuse President Bush of doing just that) that is well worth reading. And if you want some more discrediting of Al Franken's screeds, check out this story by David Frum from Front Page.

Finally, Sullivan links to this old British magazine, Homes and Gardens, from November 1938. Just like Becks and Posh show off their houses in Hello! and OK!, Adolf Hitler shows the fawning reporter his mountain house at Bertechsgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Read the article to learn how delightful it is to spend time with der Fuehrer and his cultivated guests, while Frauen Goebbels and Goering entertain the local children, suave cosmopolitan Ribbentrop chooses the wine at dinner, and Putzi Hanfstaengel, Hitler's court jester, plays post-prandial piano.

Posted 12:58 by John

There are two interesting City Journal pieces that Front Page links to today; the first is Victor Davis Hanson on the Europeans, and the second is a look at the new conservative hip media. Check them out.

You want moral equivalence? Here's some really shocking and extremely stupid moral equivalence from El Periodico last Friday. the author is one Jose Ovejero, billed as a "writer". The title is all you need to know: "Not All Violence Is Terrorism". In case you're a masochist, though, and actually want to read it, check this out.

In recent years a strange and repetitive consensus has been developing in the Western world, according to which all violence not generated by democratic states is intrinsically condemnable. Paraphrasing the Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, in his recent speech before the UN, the nobility of a cause cannot serve as an alibi for the ignominy of the act--terrorist--an affirmation which not only the great majority of politicians support, but also Western commentators and columnists. Let me quote Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the UN: "No goal gives anybody the right to kill innocent civilians..."

Violence seems to be only a legitimate recourse in the hands of democratic states; then the cause does justify the ignominy of the act: Aznar himself, to defend Spanish participation in Iraq, affirmed with noticing any contradiction, that "guaranteeing the security and the freedom of the world...seems like a noble cause to me": the civilian victims, a priori unacceptable, become in this way the painful but necessary price of a noble objective, at least if anybody still thinks that a war can be fought without causing casualties among the civilian population.

We should not think that those who say things like terrorism is everywhere, violence is never justified, or that the Zapatistas and ETA are the same thing, as a Socialist politician said after a visit to Mexico, have become pacifists overnight and repudiate all violence. What is rejected is terrorist violence, which seems to be defined as that directed against the democratic states, their citizens and their companies. Which gives us at least two problems.

The first, the definition of a democratic state. Is it enough to have elections and a theoretical freedom of the press and of expression to talk about democracy? Do countries like Bolivia, Colombia or Mexico live in democracy, which makes any use of violence to achieve social or legislative gains condemnable? We must suppose so, because otherwise we cannot understand that Western countries sell arms and give logistic and intelligence support to the Government of Colombia, or have friendly--and economic--relations with those of Bolivia and Mexico.

Well, yeah, Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia are all countries striving to move toward greater democracy and better social conditions, and the fact that there are a bunch of communist guerrillas running around each of the three countries is not helping a whole hell of a lot. Is this guy saying it should be OK to use violence to weaken those governments? If so, just who elected those people who are killing others in order to "achieve social and legislative gains"? Oh, by the way, the biggest difference between the ETA and the Zapatistas is that the Zapatistas aren't nearly as proficient at killing people.

The fact that in one of those countries 85% of the population lives in poverty (presumably Bolivia, per capita GDP 1999 about $3000, literacy 82%, unemployment 11%--so it's poor but not that awful, not comparable with Africa. Says the World Almanac, "Since 1985, Bolivia has implemented economic changes that have been phenomenally successful. Still at the bottom of the South American economic ladder, its economy has steadily improved over the last fifteen years. Political stability has helped."), that the Government of another is pushing the civilian population to implicate themselves in the war--creating networks of civilian informers and with its plans to recruit peasant-soldiers--and in which the connivences between the army and the paramilitaries are obvious (that means Ovejero doesn't have to prove this, he just says it's "obvious"; also, what's wrong with encouraging the population to do their civic duty?), and another in which numerous crimes are planned and protected by a corrupt system, does not seem to make Western politicians and businessmen uncomfortable, although many more people die the victims of those false democracies than because of terrorist or guerrilla--if that distinction is permitted--actions. (Well, no, the distinction is not permitted. What this guy is saying is that it's OK for people to organize private armies, beholden to no one, in order to overthrow the imperfect governments of Mexico, Colombia, and Bolivia, and presumably the rest of the Latin American countries, in order to "achieve social and legislative gains", whatever those may be. I imagine they are similar to the gains Fidel Castro has made.)

The second problem is posed by the fact that the democratic countries are only democratic within their own territory, but they use reprehensible and even criminal means in the territories of others. They have no problem with allying themselves with dictators that defend their interests (false; the US has never supported a dictator unless he was the lesser of two evils, as during the Cold War, and it's never enjoyed doing so), they sell weapons and military technology to countries that are far from being democratic, even with the knowledge that they might be used against their citizens (the only nondemocratic countries I know America is supporting are precisely in the Middle East where they are still the lesser of two evils; I won't vouch for the French, though, with their network of client states in Africa and their deals with Saddam and Assad and, well, everybody else with money who wanted to destroy Israel), and they bribe corrupt bureaucrats so that they will approve projects that are often damaging--and even fatal--to the population of the country in question, that, for example, is expelled from its lands to give room for exploitation of forests or petroleum or the construction of a dam. (Give me one example of the US government doing this, please. I thought the last place they built a huge dam and made like a million people move was China.) While they pretend to fight terrorism with one hand they feed it with the other. (Here's his real point. Those goddamn Yankees are just reaping what they sowed and deserve whatever happens to them.)

So, deciding that all terrorism--all non-state violence--is the same, that is, persisting in ignoring its causes and its distinctive characteristics, is not only stupidity; it is also a subtle way of leaving aside a crucial question: how the political and economic interests of the First World are responsible, often directly, for the appearance of violence in the Third World. And not accepting that responsibility is a way of perpetuating the violence we are supposedly condemning.

Wow. That sure is some moral equivalence there. We're even WORSE than the terrorists because their violence is OUR fault. I would estimate that the majority of Spaniards who read the papers or watch the news on TV believe this stuff, because this is a common message in the Spanish media. It's not usually stated quite so bluntly, but it's a very common belief. I'd say most Spaniards who don't vote for the PP believe this line and actively parrot it. Fortunately the PP is going to win again in 2004, so we won't have to worry about these demented fools coming to power again until 2008.

Posted 18:34 by John

An American helicopter was shot down over the Saddam Triangle. There are 15 dead soldiers. It seems to me that we should perhaps increase our efforts in pacifying said Triangle, to the effect of blowing the crap out of anybody who's carrying serious armament. The rest of the country seems to be doing pretty well, the 80% of the country that is either Kurd or Shiite, with universal allegiance to the new government and the occupying powers, but the Saddamites haven't given up yet. OK, whatever it costs, we have to level them, because we're fighting the whole damned Terrorist International here. And I vote we spend money rather than lives as far as possible. But let nobody be fooled. This is the War on Terrorism and we're going to have to be ready to fight on several fronts at once, because either we take the war to them like we're doing right now, or they're going to take the war to us like they did on September 11.

Posted 16:30 by John

Well, Prince Felipe, the Principe de Asturias, the heir to the throne, has officially announced he's going to get married. Everybody was expecting this to happen pretty soon, since Felipe is 35 and it's about time he got around to producing his own heir. The future Queen is a very attractive young woman who has had a good bit of plastic surgery and was, until Friday, one of the newsreaders on the 9 PM TV1 newscast. Her name is Letizia Ortiz and she is from a middle-class family in Asturias. She is 31 and has been married (civilly, not religiously) and divorced, so there are no phony standards of virginity operating here.

Prince Felipe has a long history of romances attributed to him; the three most famous former aspirants to the throne were Isabel Sartorius, of the minor Spanish nobility, with whom he actually had a long romance, or at least what was publicized as one; Giselle "Gigi" Howard, an attractive upper-class New Yorker; and Norwegian model Eva Sannum. There are only two possiblilities about our Prince. Either he's a real lady-killer, since his name has been linked with everybody's from Elle McPherson to Tatiana of Liechtenstein. Or he's got Prince Edward / Albert of Monaco problems and all the women are smokescreens. It's one or the other.

The Spanish media are absolutely wild with the news; the Royal Family is actually pretty popular. They're not known for being a bunch of Eurotrash or spendthrifts or perverts or whatever (can you say "Belgium"?); their behavior is exemplary. They are a comparatively poor bunch of nobles--it's not like they're homeless or anything, but their resources are limited. There was a big stink a few years ago about the taxpayers' paying for the King's yacht, and it hasn't been that long since they sold off a couple of palaces back in the Eighties. One of them that they unloaded was the palace in Santander; my impression is they turned it over to the State in lieu of taxes. We are not talking the British royals here, we are talking about fairly shabby nobility. They are pretty popular but I don't think many people have a real affection for the monarchy. I doubt many people would mind if Spain were a republic.

Catalan feeling seems to be, great, lovely for them, big deal. They are not precisely swept up in the excitement.

To demonstrate the good sense of the Spanish Royals, Juan Carlos's and Sofia's first daughter, Elena, who is apparently a little retarded and maybe a little autistic, married minor Spanish noble and fellow borderline person Jaime de Marichalar. They've had two children who seem pretty normal. The ceremony was held in Spain's third city, Seville. The second daughter, Cristina, who is perfectly normal and quite pretty, married Inaki Urdangarin, an Olympic and FC Barcelona team handball player from the Basque bourgeoisie. These two apparently carried on a secret romance for years, and their marriage was celebrated in--Barcelona. They have three kids. Cristina "works" here in Barcelona. The big wedding, that of the heir to the throne, will of course be in Madrid.

The only thing nasty that's rumored about the Royals is that the King supposedly has problems keeping his pants zipped. Supposedly he has gone through half the women in Spain. There is allegedly a videotape of the King in action with aging starlet Barbara Rey which has been covered up, paid off, whatever. He is also supposed to like a drink but not to be a Boris Yeltsin. Maybe not even as bad as Ted Kennedy.

Posted 10:45 by John

The Jedman is back in business. Check out his experiences with mafia dudes in Grandview, Hooter's girls, at Arrowhead, and as public address anouncer at junior high basketball games.

We're going to hold a "Win a Date with the Jedman" contest. Minimum requirements: 18 years or over. Female. (Or maybe very persuasive gay male, I don't know.) Write in down in the Comments section explaining why you want to date a bald guy with a bad back who speaks two languages badly and has taught them both to impressionable children. The winner gets to go out with the Jedman. Second place gets to go out with the Jedman twice.