Inside Europe: Iberian Notes

Posted 15:27 by John

Here's an interesting (modern) book titled Workers Against Work: Labor in Barcelona and Paris under the Popular Fronts by Michael Seidman. It was published by the University of California Press in 1991. The first seven chapters are about the history of labor in Spain, culminating in the 1936-39 Revolution set off by the army pronunciamento. Now, Mr. Seidman seems to me to be a Marxist, because his model is one of class struggle and he uses words like proletariat and bourgeoisie. He may have Communist leanings, since he doesn't criticize the Communists much, not nearly as much as he does the anarchists and the unions. But his book is full of facts, his footnotes and sources are legit, and he is iconoclastic. One of the main faults of the leftist supporters of the Second Republic is their tendency to insist that everyone of the left was heroic and noble. Mr. Seidman does not make that mistake. In fact, he pretty much proves the opposite, and he emphazises the totalitarian character of the revolutionary Republic. Go check out the whole thing. I borrowed a few quotes that I liked, though.

This first, longest one is a summary of Mr. Seidman's basic theme, that the workers of Barcelona were interested in their own benefit and not in solidarity with others or anything utopically altruistic.

...An approach that seeks to judge only the economic performance of workers’ control will, like the purely political appraisals of the Spanish Revolution, surely miss the significance of this Revolution, which some have called the most profound of the twentieth century. My concern has been to avoid an exclusively political or economic evaluation and instead to explore the social relations in the collectivized factories and workshops. In this regard, the technicians and union militants who took control of the productive forces confronted the same problems that have affected both the Western bourgeoisies and the Communist parties that have rapidly developed the means of production. The new factory managers often ran into the resistance of the workers themselves, who continued to demand more pay, fake illness, sabotage production, reject the control and discipline of the factory system, and ignore calls to participate in managing the workplace.

In response to workers’ resistance, the union militants disregarded their democratic ideology of workers’ control and opted for coercive techniques to increase production. Many collectives gave technicians the power to set production levels; piecework reappeared, and incentives tied pay to production. The new managers established strict control of the sick, severe surveil lance of the rank and file during worktime, and frequent inspections. Firings and dismissals for poor performance and “immorality,” that is, low productivity, occurred. The CNT realized its plan for the “identity card of the producer” that would catalogue workers’ behavior. Socialist realist posters glorified the means of production and the workers themselves so they would produce more. Labor camps for “parasitic” enemies and “saboteurs” were founded on the modern principle of reform through work.

The reactions of the leaders of the working-class organizations to the rank and file’s actions in the collectives and controlled firms were revealing. Federica Montseny, the CNT Minister of Health and Public Assistance in the republican government, posited a theory of human nature to explain the problems in workers’ control. According to this prominent faísta, who was the daughter of a well-known anarchist theoretician, human beings “are as they are. They always need an incentive and an interior and exterior stimulus to work and to produce the maximum production in quality and quantity.”[7] As for the CNT Metallurgical Union, “the collectives…have underlined the bad side of human nature. This has consequently led to a decrease of production when it is most necessary to produce.”[8] At the end of 1938, Felipe Alaiz—a faísta who was elected editor of Solidaridad Obrera in 1931 and was later named director of Tierra y Libertad—defined the “essential problem of Spain” as “the problem of not working.”[9] “In general,” he complained, “there is low productivity, and low productivity means…irremediable ruin in the future.”

The CNT activist asserted that the “strikes were partially responsible for the decline of the work ethic.” Though strikes were necessary on occasions, workers had abused the right to strike. Political, general, sit-down, slowdown, and other kinds of strikes may have been useful in the past, but now they only hurt the new “consumer-producer.” Likewise, holidays on Sundays, weekends, May Day, and numerous other public holidays as well as vacations injured the cause. Sick leave, work accidents, featherbedding, and job security hurt the “proletarian economy” and food production.

Here's Mr. Seidman's take on the Catalan Nationalists of the time.

In Catalonia, at the time of the Asturias revolt (1934), the “Catalan state within the Federal Spanish Republic” was declared by Lluis Companys, the leader of the Catalan nationalists grouped in the Esquerra. This attempt at Catalan independence failed miserably. It clearly demonstrated the limits of Catalan nationalism, whose social base was too weak and narrow to form an independent nation. As we have seen, the Catalan bourgeoisie had long made its peace with Madrid and the traditionalist elements of central and southern Spain; it lacked the strength to overcome their influence and the dynamism to dominate the entire nation economically and politically. Thus, radical Catalan nationalism could not count on the support of a large part of the upper bourgeoisie that depended for protection and favors on Madrid. Lacking the support of the upper class and the CNT, radical Catalan nationalism in the 1930s was the province of what for lack of a better name we call the petty bourgeoisie—technicians, shopkeepers, funcionarios, clerks, artisans, and sharecroppers. Their nationalism was not only political but cultural and involved as well a renaissance of Catalan as a spoken and written language. The economic possibilities of a nationalism that called for a separate Catalan state were severely restricted, because the feeble Catalan industries depended both on protection granted by Madrid and on the impoverished markets in the rest of the peninsula. Catalan nationalism might mean a desirable political and cultural independence from a bureaucratic and centralized Spanish state, but many Catalans of varying social origins realized that, given the condition of regional industries, a separate nation might well lead to their economic destruction.

Some things never change. This is probably still the standard method of content production at La Vanguardia, and goes a long way toward explaining Baltasar Porcel:

For example, early in the Revolution employees and security guards of the Barcelonan newspaper La Vanguardia met at a tavern to drink and gamble during working hours.

One thing I notice about all the parlor pinkos and self-proclaimed revolutionaries and middle-class squatters who hang out in the bars around here is they smoke tons of cigarettes and drink enormous quantities of alcohol, and don't work very much. They wouldn't have lasted long in the good old days:

Spanish militants sometimes equated excessive drinking and laziness with sabotage and even fascism. One CNT poster, which was made in Barcelona for the Departamento de orden público de Aragon, pictured a corpulent man smoking a cigarette and comfortably resting in what appeared to be the countryside. The colors of this piece were unlike those of most other posters; the figure was not red or black but yellow, reflecting the tones of sunny Spain. At the bottom was printed the caption, "The lazy man is a fascist". Another CNT poster, made again for comrades in Aragon, displayed a man who was also smoking a cigarette, a symbol, one may speculate, of indifference and insolence since committed workers and soldiers were not shown smoking. This individual was surrounded by tall wine bottles, and the poster contained the caption, "A drunk is a parasite. Let’s eliminate him." This was particularly tough talk during a period when threats of elimination did not always remain oral, and work camps for enemies and the apathetic were in operation. Both Marxists and anarchosyndicalists were hostile toward non-producers.

This one ought to disprove the myth of the people's unity and collective virtue:

The most spectacular case of theft occurred in the power industry.[60] The gas and electric committee had a secret—and illegal—bank account in Paris that was supposedly destined for the purchase of coal. In 1936 the managing committee, acting perhaps with the complicity or knowledge of the Generalitat, had authorized a delegation to deposit funds in a Parisian bank. In September 1937 the managing committee ordered a new delegation to return to Paris to change the francs into pesetas. Several colleagues accompanied the two members of the original delegation—one in the CNT, the other in the UGT—who had placed the bank account in their own names. When the spouses of the two men joined them in the French capital, suspicions awoke in other members of the delegation. Tempted by such a large sum, over one million francs, the duo had become embezzlers. They disappeared with the women and the money.

Posted 00:48 by John

Welcome to everybody coming over from Little Green Footballs. Look around here and see what you can find, and go visit the blogs we link to. Hope you enjoy it and want to come back.

Here's a nice little story from Slate on college flag football. In Kansas there are some people who take it pretty seriously, and some of the coolest long pass plays I've seen have been at flag games, and that was back in 84-87 and 91-94. Read the story if you like participatory sports and scandal.

Posted 15:55 by John

Here's a little squib from Wednesday's El Periodico on the whooptedo over George Bush's unfortunate support of an anti-gay-marriage Constitutional amendment. Now, imagine what you'd think if this were your main source of information about the United States, as it is for almost 200,000 Catalans. The squib is by one Carlos Enrique Bayo.

Fundamentalism

The neoconservative ideology which now rules the American Administration is directing the first steps of Bush's campaign, which is trying to fire up its phalanxes of fundamentalist voters and make it clear from the beginning that no liberal wishy-washiness will be tolerated. But, above all, what he is trying to do with this plan to corrupt the Constitution with his homophobia is distract the voters from questions at which he has failed: unemployment, health, the deficit...

Note these confusions:

a) Neoconservatives, by original definition, are ex-liberals who switched over to a conservative viewpoint because of their views on defense and foreign affairs. The prime example is Irving Kristol. Neoconservatism has nothing to do with the Christian religion. In fact, many prominent neocons are Jews and "neocon" is often an anti-Semitic code word for "pro-Israeli". Neocons are often socially liberal or at least generally tolerant, which gets them criticized from the fundamentalist wing of the Republicans. I am sure than most real neocons deplore Bush's stance on a possible gay-marriage constitutional amendment, but will hold their noses over it due to their agreement with Bush on national security issues.

b) Bush certainly hasn't failed on unemployment, which is at a tolerable 6%, or on health care, since he's subsidizing prescription drugs for old folks big-time, or on the deficit, which is not in a particularly good state but is by no means out-of-control yet.

c) Nobody thinks that Bush is homophobic. He hasn't made any anti-gay statements nor has he tried to roll back gay rights. He's wrong on this issue, but he's not a hater of gays.

d) The term "phalanx" (falange) is obviously calculated to evoke memories of Franco's dictatorship, since the semi-Fascist political organization that supported Franco was called the Falange. It's a very loaded word, and its use demonstrates the user's ideology.

Posted 16:26 by John

One of the Slightly Famous People I Actually Know is the baseball writer Rob Neyer, whom I knew in college. He writes regularly for ESPN.com and has several books out. With his compadre Dr. Rany Jayazerli, who writes for the Topeka Capital-General and works as a dermatologist, they put out my favorite sports blog, Rob and Rany on the Royals. I'm biased, of course, because I'm a Royals' fan, but for baseball analysis these guys are hard to beat. With spring training and then Opening Day before we know it, they'll be posting much more regularly. (My second favorite, a very close second, is Aaron's Baseball Blog. This guy, Aaron Gleeman, is a college kid up in Minnesota and a huge Twins and T-Wolves fan. He's already picked up a couple of professional writing jobs on various Web sites. Aaron knows what he's talking about and I like the way he writes. Watch out for this guy as a real writer in a few years.)

I seriously think the Royals have a chance this year. If--

--Neither LF Juan Gonzalez nor 1B/DH Mike Sweeney gets hurt. If these guys can play 140 games, they'll hit home runs--say 25 for Sweeney, 35 for Juan Gone--and rack up OPSs of well over 900. With Berroa leading off, Beltran second, Sweeney third, Gonzalez cleanup, and the Stairs/Harvey DH platoon fifth, there are going to be some serious runs driven in at the dop of the order.

--CF Carlos Beltran does what most people think he's going to do and has a career year. He's just entering the prime of his career and this is his last season before free agency. Carlos will likely be wearing pinstripes next season and he wants the big contract.

--Jeremy Affeldt turns out to be the starting pitcher we think he can be, Darrell May and Brian Anderson come through with solid seasons, as they usually do, and two of the other four candidates for the starting rotation don't suck too bad.

--Nobody else--C Benito Santiago, 3B Joe Randa, SS Angel Berroa (2003 Rookie of the Year), RF Aaron Guiel, and the two platoons at second base and 1B/DH--really sucks it up big-time.

--The relievers perform adequately.

All of these things are more than possible. If most of them happen the Royals can win 90-92 games and compete in the AL Central. Nobody else in the division is going to be much good. The Twins are capable of winning 85-95 games and might well win again. Chicago is not going to be much good and Detroit and Cleveland are going to just blow. The Royals are going to rack up the wins against those two teams this year just like last year.

A few other things make me like the Royals. They're deep. If somebody gets hurt, the Royals can sub him with an adequate player who will do the job. They have a couple of fine young players, corner outfielder David DeJesus (who will either sub Juan Gone or compete with Guiel for the RF spot) and starting pitcher Zack Greinke, who will likely start the season in Triple-A and come up in June or so. If either of these two guys plays well this year, that's gravy, more than we were expecting. Also, the relief corps is made up exclusively of professionals. A couple of years ago Jason Grimsley, the personification of "adequate" or "mediocre", was their best reliever. Now he's their worst, their mop-up man. Finally, Tony Pena is a good manager. Nobody claims he's a brilliant strategist; he basically just lets the guys play and gives them plenty of support. The players respect him, and he was an important piece of the change that happened last year, when Pena replaced Tony Muser, the worst manager ever to live. Anybody would have been better than Muser, of course, but Pena has been pretty successful so far.

Posted 15:24 by John

You know, since I've already linked to several of my favorite sites, Sasha's, Winds of Change, and HispaLibertas, I'm going to go whole-hog and mention a few other blogs I like, what with the avalanche (well, small avalanche) of hits coming in.

Frequent commenter Akaky has his own blog, Passing Parade, which I highly recommend. I just wish he'd post more often, but he's been good about getting at least a post or two up every week. You all know him, so check out his blog. He's funny and smart.

You'll want to keep up with the former Cinderella Bloggerfeller, the most erudite of bloggers and somebody else who is funny and smart. This link connects you to his plethora of successor blogs, including the Axis of Porcel HQ, the only blog that regularly brings you the ravings of Baltasar Porcel, undoubtedly the craziest git in the world with his own daily newspaper column, outside of North Korea.

Trevor is, as always, doing yeoman's work over at Kaleboel. Check out his smart, funny posts, many of them about Catalonia. I love Dr. Weevil; there's another guy who's funny and smart. Chicago Boyz is one of my favorite sites; I don't know why I never plug them. They don't need it. These guys really know their econ and law.

As for funny, smart people of the female sex, Jessica Harbour is very interesting. You've kind of got to sit down and read her stuff; her site is not one to hit for thirty seconds, it's one to stay on for a while and hit a few of the links. Angie Schultz is a frequent contributor here, and she speaks plainly and extremely sensibly. I don't know whether those two know one another but they share an interest in things Asian. Cecile Dubois has picked up some press from FrontPage for her politically incorrect stance--in her ninth-grade English class, where her teacher has denounced her conservative political ideas. Cecile is quite probably the most intelligent fourteen-year-old I have ever come across. Check out her site.

Posted 13:05 by John

We're getting massive piles of hits on the Noam Chomsky post from a few days ago. Seems that the lovely, talented, chic, and happily married Sasha Castel linked to it, and then Winds of Change linked to her, and the whole Winds of Change audience descended here through Sasha. Welcome. Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player.

Here's a hypocritical little local story. The elections are coming up in about three weeks, and Esquerra Republicana has been made to look very bad because of its leader's secret meeting with the ETA leadership in Perpignan. In addition, the Socialist Party and the Communists have been made to look very bad because they are Esquerra's partners in the coalition governing Catalonia. So what they've done is call a demonstration against ETA and against the ETA truce declared in Catalonia for this afternoon in the Plaza Sant Jaume. The three leftist parties, Maragall's personal organization (Ciutadans pel Canvi), and the unions, along with Convergence and Union, are sponsoring it. The PP has refused to join in because they consider that all these groups are mounting a phony demo, that they are trying to whitewash their dirty faces and hands by having a demo against ETA that they wouldn't have given the slightest thought to having if not for Pepelu Carod-Rovira's stupidity, venality, or both, which has embarrassed the hell out of everybody associated with him.

There's a story going around saying that Carod-Rovira's real last name is Perez. I neither know nor much care whether it's true; I'd be worried if it was Schickelgruber, though. The point of the rumor is that Carod is trying to cover up his Spanish origins, which is really not too unusual around here. Remei has a female cousin who shares her molt katalanisch surname, Guim, who married a guy whose surname is Rodriguez. Their kids' surname is therefore Rodriguez Guim. The cousin does not like this and wants to change the order of the two surnames so they'll be Guim Rodriguezes.

In the media, Miguel Calzada uses the name "Mikimoto" and Jordi LP's surnames are Lopez Perez. In soccer, all the Barca players who have Catalan surnames use them as their official soccer one-word nicknames--Guardiola, Ferrer, Puyol, Victor Valdes. The ones that don't, though, use their first names, so Gerard is Gerard Lopez, Sergi is Sergi Barjuan, Oscar and Roger are Garcias (they like to be called Garcia Junyents, since they have a molt katalanisch second surname), Dani is Dani Garcia, Xavi is Xavi Hernandez, and so on. The two Catalan NBA basketball players are referred to here as Gasol (the guy who plays for Memphis, Pau Gasol) and Raul (the guy who plays for Utah, Raul Lopez).

Campaign promises: Rajoy wants to cut taxes on small businesses and Zap is promising a 26% increase in pensions over the next four years.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, life expectancy 53.3 years, the lowest in the Western hemisphere, the rebels have rejected a peace plan backed by the US, Canada, France, the OAS, and Caricom, which sounds pretty damn multilateral to me. I vote we let the French send in peacekeeping troops and let them run the show. That'll make them feel better about themselves and keep us as far out of this mess as we can. As for whether the rebels or the government approve of said force, the hell with them because the first thing the peacekeeping troops need to do is round up several hundred, at least, of the bad guys on each side. This needs to be a real invasion, no pussy-ass stuff like we did back in '94. Then some nation-building needs to be done and the United States, as rich as it is, really needs to pony up, assuming the French and Caricom troops are going to occupy the place for several years. I wouldn't give a dime of foreign aid to either Aristide or the rebels, but if say the Red Cross--or the French Army--were established there and some real work on health and education and the economy got done, we should be generous.

Meanwhile, we're meeting in Peking with the Chinese, Russians, Japanese, and both Koreas about what to do with North Korea. We really don't know whether the North Koreans have nukes, but we've got to assume that they do until proven otherwise. What we've got to do is exactly what we, and China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, are doing: make sure they don't use those nukes until their government collapses, which it will one of these years. We can't risk invading them; there are tens of thousands of American troops hostage along the DMZ, as well as the huge city of Seoul, right under the guns of the North Korean artillery.

The PP president of Murcia, Ramon Luis Valcarcel, let a good one loose the other night. Now, you need to know two things: 1) the PP central government is going to build an aqueduct to carry water for irrigation south from the Ebro river to the areas of Alicante, Murcia, and Almeria. The Socialists oppose this because they're the opposition. Catalonia and Aragon oppose it because they want the money to be spent irrigating Catalonia and Aragon rather than that land down south. 2) It is very widely rumored that Catalan prime minister Pasqual Maragall is a major drunken alcoholic. There's a discussion on this very subject going on at HispaLibertas (in Spanish).

Anyway, Valcarcel said, "I would understand the Catalan Socialist's objections to the Ebro aqueduct if we were talking about wine, because he drinks quite a few hectoliters a day and that makes him say certain things." I actually think that's kind of funny. Objections have been raised, though.

I will bet you money that this is a planted story in La Vanguardia. It seems that the new chief Cabinet minister, Josep Bargallo (he's Carod-Rovira's substitute), is completely unknown. I'd certainly never heard of him before. So the Vangua runs consecutive stories, yesterday and today, AND gives a front-page teaser above the head to yesterday's story, AND prints a letter to the editor in the place of honor, in a box, at the center of the Letters page yesterday, about the fact that--get this--Josep Bargallo does not wear a tie. The President of the Catalan Tiemakers' Association or whatever complained that Mr. Bargallo's tielessness is going to hurt the tie business, so he should provide a good example by wearing one. Now, could this just possibly be a maneuver by certain obscure interested parties whose interest is increasing Mr. Bargallo's popularity and/or notoriety for political reasons? Naah. I've been living here too long. I see conspiracies everywhere.

Posted 11:39 by John

This ought to get a couple of arguments started. If you read Anglo-American historians writing about Spain, up until about the 1920s or 30s Hapsburg and Bourbon Spain was sharply criticized, even condemned, for its backwardness, cruelty, greed, and intolerance. Spaniards hit back, not unreasonably saying that it's pretty hard for Spain to get a fair hearing from a bunch of English Protestants. Spanish historians called the Inquisition / conquistador / mass expulsions of Jews and Muslims / Dutch War part of Spanish history the "Black Legend", pointing out that the Spanish of the time weren't too much worse than anybody else and that Spanish culture of the time made enormously valuable contributions to Western culture as a whole.

The pendulum began to swing the other way and more recently most Anglo-American historians of Spain have been very careful to debunk or minimize tales of Spanish brutality back then in the old days. But has the pendulum reached the end of its trajectory and started to go back in the direction of the Black Legend? Here's a section from a 1998 book by David S. Landes.

The tale of Spanish misdeeds and crimes in the conquest of the Americas is so appalling that it has been a source of retrospective embarrassment and mortification. What kind of people were these, who could perpetrate so much cruelty and treachery? The answer, as outlined above, lay in social selection and history. On the one hand, the kind of adventures that lay ahead in the New World attracted the most daring, hungry, knavish members of Spanish society, many of them blackguards who thought little of their own lives and even less of those of others. On the other, the Spanish historical experience, the protracted war against enemies without and within (the persecution of religious difference), could not but promote ends over means and extinguish sentiments of decency and humanity. To which Tzvetan Todorov would add the factor of distance: the Spanish were operating far from home and exercising their power and wrath on strangers, on an Other defined as subhuman and hence outside or beneath the rules that governed comportment even against an enemy. So they competed in imagining and doing evil, which thus fairly exploded in collective frenzies. Todorov adds, "The 'barbarity' of the Spanish has nothing atavistic or animal about it; it is perfectly human and announces the arrival of modern times."

Unhappy the day that brought together this monumental amorality and the opportunity of conquest, that placed much weaker peoples in the merciless hands of greedy, angry, unpredictably cruel men.

In the effort to mitigate, if not excuse, this record of evil, apologists, many of them descendants of these conquistadors, have followed two lines of argument. One is to discredit the charges by labeling them as myth or exaggeration. Hence recourse to the term leyenda negra (black legend): black, thus by implication excessive (is anything ever completely black?); and legend rather than history. The aim is to dismiss rather than disprove, because disproof is impossible. (The same tactic and the same terminology have been used to discredit the argument that Spanish intolerance and religious fanaticism at home, culminating in the obsession with racial purity [limpieza de sangre], and the pursuit of heresy even into the solitude of dreams, crippled the nation's capacity for inquiry and learning. Here, too, it is easier to dismiss bad news than to rebut.)

The second approach is to point out the misdeeds of other colonizers, in particular the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Norteamericanos, whose strategy of conquest was different and whose victims were fewer, but whose capacity for cruelty and hypocrisy was supposedly similar. As though the misdeeds of others excused one's own crimes. This line of argument is not unrelated to subsequent issues of power and the politics of imperialism. For many Latin American historians and ideologues, it has been vital to emphasize the wickedness of the gringos who came to dominate the Americas. Better, then, to lay the misfortunes of the Amerindian populations at their door, if only by implication.

From The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

OK, folks, let fly. Have at it. Keep it clean. I'll point out that I have found these two strategies of argument that Landes mentions, the flat statement ("Catalan nationalism is defensive", "Wars are fought for economic reasons", "Ferdinand and Isabella were basically good people") for which no evidence is supplied, and the "So what, you're worse" argument, what they call tu quoque, to be dismayingly common around here. Now, I'm sure I use both those fallacious styles of argument all the time, and you guys can undoubtedly go through the archives and find examples of me doing exactly what I'm criticizing in others. But that doesn't excuse other people from doing it.

I'm going to add one more generalization. I find the level of creativity in Spain to be very high, and it's one reason I like the place. Barcelona is full of authors and musicians and artists and actors and architects and designers. The place is packed with them. You could claim that Spain, with Picasso, Miro, Dali, Bunuel, Garcia Lorca, Gaudi and Domenech-i-Montaner, the Machados, Pio Baroja and Unamuno, Casals and Caballe and Domingo, has been the most creative European country in the twentieth century. I find the level of scholarship and research generally very low, though. People who are considered reputable historians and social scientists around here just would not pass muster in the United States or Britain. Sure, some would, but a lot wouldn't. (Exhibit A: Chemical Lali Sole, tenured university prof of sociology and occasional Vanguardia contributor.) I could make a huge generalization here and say that Spaniards tend to be excellent in fields that require the spark of individual inspiration and lousy in fields that require discipline and calm judgment. But I won't.

Posted 00:04 by John

Andrew Sullivan is freaking out. He's completely lost it. Seems George Bush has decided to support a proposed Constitutional amendment reserving marriage to heterosexual couples. I oppose this amendment because I oppose amending the Constitution unless absolutely necessary, and this is not an issue that demands that sort of action.

Sullivan has demonstrated that he is a single-issue author. When we get right down to it, his single issue is gay rights. Well, I think there are a lot more issues that are currently a lot more important, since it seems to me that gays in the United States already have just about as many rights as they have had anywhere, anytime, in world history, and exactly as many rights as everybody else has. The biggest one of those issues is the war on terror. If Sullivan is going to abandon all his years of support of Bush over this little contretemps, that support must never have been very deep in the first place.

It's also interesting that Sullivan's single issue is one that personally affects him. His attitude is not altruistic; it is self-interested. Basically, he's interested in me, me, me, and the hell with everybody and everything else. The war on terror? Iraq? Building democracy? Afghanistan? Israel? Nope, he's turned against Bush because Bush doesn't agree with him over same-sex marriage. As if Andrew can't openly live with his boyfriend and do whatever the hell he pleases. He can go out and be just as gay as he wants. Nobody's going to stop him. But he's not satisfied; he demands the right to a legal formality that has until now been reserved for heterosexuals. And he wants it now. It's very important to him.

Now, I personally don't much care whether gay people can get married or not. Actually, they can. In Kansas City they can go down to the Metropolitan Community Church on the Plaza and get themselves as married as they want. The marriage has no legal standing, but who cares? Isn't the point of getting married to make a solemn commitment to one another?

Nope. Not if you're Andrew Sullivan.

It looks to me like President Bush was pushed to make the declarations he did by the spectacle going on in San Francisco. I have no idea about the legal questions involved according to California law, but apparently the city hall was marrying any same-sex couple that showed up and requested it. Now, maybe that's the way things should be. I really don't care one way or another. But elected officials should NOT go around breaking the laws of their state. If they think those laws are morally wrong, a fair enough position, then they should resign and campaign to change those laws politically. But simply turning up your nose and saying, "This is San Francisco, we'll do whatever we want and the hell with state laws" is not appropriate.

Posted 14:51 by John

At least two or three of you may be interested in this book called Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. (It's another of those Gutenberg texts with the whole book; you've got to scroll down through the crap to get to the text. It's not very long, 150 pages or so.)

Cobb was an American author active maybe 1900-1920 or so; all I recall reading by him are a couple of short stories that show up in anthologies of the time. He managed to make it over in the spring or early summer of 1914 for two months (he went to England, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy) and wrote this semi-ripoff of Innocents Abroad. Cobb does mention Twain in his text; apparently a scam that tourist guides of the time used was to announce themselves as having been Twain's guide. In fact, it seems like half the book is devoted to the author complaining about how the Europeans were cheating him.

The book's worth reading for the other half, though. It shows how a fairly cultured and well-bread American saw Europe in the months right before the Great War. Note Cobb's chapter about how laughable European soldiers seemed in their dress uniforms. Very soon all those soldiers were to become dead. As always, the book probably tells you more about Irvin S. Cobb and the fairly cultured and well-bred American society of his times than it does about Europe. One thing that stands out is Cobb's nonchalant racism. Another is how rich America was then compared with Europe. Cobb does a lot of complaining about European backwardness without striking on the answer why: because they were poor. This is probably why Cobb felt so victimized by the constant badgering for tips; to poor people any American traveling in Europe is rich.

Something else that stands out is the innocence of the book. Cobb is still in the pre-Great War thought mode--politics and economics and the like are something far away, so the Place de la Concorde in Paris is the site of the greatest tragedy in history for him, and he spends a chapter imagining the feelings of the dead at Pompeii. Something a whole hell of a lot bigger was coming very soon and Cobb completely misses it. Not a word about international tensions or imperial conflicts or arms races.

Finally, note all the generalizations and cliches made about Americans and Brits and Germans and French and so on. Much the same stereotypes existed then as now. In fact, in Cobb's book, you'll be more surprised to find a stereotype you've never heard of before than to find a stereotype that is already well-known to you.

Posted 09:47 by John

Twenty people have been killed in northern Morocco when a 6.0 strength earthquake struck early this morning. More news will almost certainly be coming. The earthquake was felt in Melilla but not in any other part of Spain. My guess is that buildings in Melilla are constructed according to at least a minimal building code that means they don't fall down in 6.0 earthquakes. I wonder how true this is in Morocco. Remember that recent earthquake in eastern Iran that destroyed a whole city that was mostly built of adobe and that killed thousands of people? Natural disasters that have little effect in places with modern safety standards can be huge killers in places that don't have them. Here's CNN International's story.

UPDATE: Here's FoxNews saying that there are at least 300 dead and that the quake was felt across southern Spain. No damage is reported from Spain. The area hit is dirt-poor and earns its living supplying Europe with hashish. The difference between the poverty on one side of the Straits of Gibraltar and the wealth on the other is greater than that on one side of the Rio Grande and the other.

GDP per head according to purchasing-power parity (USA=100)

United States 100
Mexico 25.3
Spain 55.9
Morocco 10.4

The average American is four times as rich as the average Mexican; the average Spaniard is more than five times richer than the average Moroccan. And if you thought Mexico was poor, wait till you see Morocco.

(Source: The Economist Pocket World in Figures 2002)

Posted 14:20 by John

Here's a funny new anti-American meme going around here. Jeez, it seems like the only thing people ever talk about is the United States. Anyway, the Academy Awards are a big deal here, they show them live on TV and all that crap. I couldn't care less, myself.

So it seems that due to the fallout of Janet Jackson's breast, they're going to put the Oscars on five-second delay rather than showing them absolutely live. (This is common media practice. All radio and TV call-in programs are on five-second delay, for example, so when the crazy Nazi yells "Fuck the faggot Jew niggers!", which happens more often than you'd like to think, they cut it off so it doesn't get broadcast. Nobody ever complains at Larry or Bill or Charlie or Rush that this is censorship. Check out the level of unmonitored chat rooms on the Net. That's what you'd get on talk radio without the delay.)

We don't want no breasts or nobody saying nothing like "Fuck" at the Oscars. This is national TV and the Hopelessly Squares have to be kept happy. If you want breasts and people saying "Fuck", watch the MTV Awards or the Playboy Playmate of the Year Awards or the Let's See Who Can Yell "Fuck" The Loudest Awards. Or just go down to your vid shop and rent a few pornos.

Anyway, what they're saying round here is that this five-second delay is censorship, see, because there are all these Hollywood actors against the war, and they'd criticize Bush, and so the government is making sure that no one says anything against Bush, so they're going to censor the Academy Awards for political reasons.

Yeah, right. Jeez, you'd think Bush didn't have better things to worry about than whether Sean Penn gets coked up and goes on a Chomsky-quoting binge live from L.A. You'd also think that it was that easy for the government to openly violate the First Amendment.

Note well: The Motion Picture Academy is a private organization and they can censor anybody they want to for whatever reason. The TV network is also a private organization and can also censor anybody it wants to for whatever reason. (They were the ones who decided on the five-second delay for the Oscars, not the government.) It's also been longstanding policy that the Federal Communications Commission can regulate TV and radio broadcasts for such things as obscenity.

But the US government cannot censor political speech. If they try, they won't be able to get away with it. The press and the courts and the people with their votes would stop them. Proof of this are all the lawsuits filed whenever anything that even smells like the government's violating the First Amendment comes up.

Posted 13:22 by John

Hmmm. I've always liked Quim Monzo, but it looks like they have him dead to rights as just another plagiarist working for La Vanguardia, which might as well change its title to "All the Stuff We Could Find on the Net That Other People Wrote". Marius Serra, Rafael Ramos, Roger Jimenez, now Quim Monzo...oh, well, at least we know all Baltasar Porcel's pieces are original, inimitable, and unimitated. (Thanks to our loyal reader Pep.)

Posted 11:50 by John

Well, let's see. The Democrat primary race is down to John Kerry and John Edwards; everyone else has either dropped out or is Dennis Kucinich. If I had to choose between the two, I'd pick Edwards to be the next President, though of course I'd prefer Bush to either of the two. Kerry's a Northeastern left-liberal who's never done anything of importance politically and who can't keep his positions straight. How much you wanna bet the ticket will be Kerry-Edwards, though? I don't think Edwards has a chance at winning the Dem nomination for President, though it's still theoretically possible if he should suddenly sweep a bunch of primaries. Kerry beat him in Virginia and Tennessee, states next to and rather similar to Edwards' home state of North Carolina; Edwards was playing with home-field advantage and lost.

The Spanish press is playing up the possibility that Cheney will be dumped as VP for somebody else, and that that somebody else will be the designated official candidate for 2008. I doubt it, myself, unless Cheney is to be shifted to a major Cabinet or security post (like, say, State, when Colin Powell goes? Or CIA?) Meanwhile, the good news for the Republicans is that Ralph Nader is going to run again. He cost Gore the election in 2000 when he hived off three million votes that would have gone to Gore and put him over the top in several states that he lost to Bush. I figure that only a third or so of the people who voted for Ralph next time will make the same mistake this time, but 50,000 votes may well make the difference in Michigan or Ohio, two of the key states up for grabs.

(Request to readers: Can anyone give me a URL for reasonably current state-by-state polling results, you know, "Alabama: Bush 54%, Kerry 43%"? Or whatever.)

Over here in these parts, ETA has stated that they did not make any kind of deal with Carod-Rovira regarding the ETA truce in Catalonia. Carod-Rovira denies that too. So I figure there are only two possibilities here.

A) Carod is a lying sack of merda and so are the etarras. They did make a deal for a truce in Catalonia. Evidence: The truce did happen. Carod had called for such a thing in the past. And did he really think he was going to convince ETA to lay down its arms all by his little self? So why did he go to the meeting in the first place?

B) Carod is an idiot. He really did think he could convince them all by his little self. ETA screwed, blued, and tattooed him. ETA used the meeting with Carod to confer some political legitimacy upon themselves; they were the ones who leaked the story in the first place. ETA is continuing to take advantage of the opportunity to gain all the headlines they can in order to recuperate some of the political influence they have been losing as they have been growing weaker. (The government estimates there may be as few as 200 active etarras left.)

Or, of course, there is possibility C), that Carod is both a lying sack of merda AND an idiot. I tend to go for this one, myself. This whole Carod-Rovira mess is going to cost the Socialists tons of votes in Spain outside Catalonia and the Basque Country. Most of those people are probably going to abstain rather than vote PP, so right now I like Rajoy with close to an absolute majority partially due to a low turnout of the Socialist base, who don't much like Zap's bumbling and weakness. His ridiculous election slogan--"ZP", which is supposed to stand for "Zapatero Presidente"--isn't going to win him any support, either, except from the Spanish Guild of Newspaper Cartoonists and Cheap TV Humorists.

Speaking of idiots, Federico Trillo, the Minister of Defense, fucked up majorly. Early Saturday morning, after a dinner with PP party activists, he said, "I wish I'd been Minister eight years ago to invade Perejil Island so we'd have gotten fishing rights from the Moroccans." Perejil is the tiny island off the Moroccan coast, which is Spanish territory, that was occupied by Moroccan troops and then reoccupied by the Spanish in 2002. Fishing rights in Moroccan waters have always been the source of controversy between Spain and Morocco. Now, he was almost certainly drunk off his ass when he said that, which doesn't make him less of an idiot. Anyway, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ana Palacio had to apologize to the Moroccans four times before they were satisfied. Trillo needs to go, but if I were Rajoy I'd want to wait until after the election and hope meanwhile that everybody forgets about this, rather than drawing everybody's attention. On the other hand, a quick resignation for family reasons never hurt anything, either. Minimum fuss, minimum bother, put in somebody like Fast Eddie Zaplana, and kill controversy before it starts.

Here's a funny one. Drunk driving is in the news again; a lot of people are talking about the carnage on the Spanish highways and ways to cut it down. One proposal is a zero-tolerance law, which seems a little strict to me. I'd prefer for them to effectively enforce the current limit of .08 before making the laws stricter. Anyway, the Spanish papers are making a big deal about this very civic practice suggested by a French cabinet minister in which, among a group of people who go out, one doesn't drink and he drives everybody else. Many Spaniards seem to think that we should follow the example of our wise, cultured neighbors to the north and adopt said practice, which is claimed to be one reason behind the decline in highway deaths in France. Huh. That's a good idea, but it seems to me I've heard it somewhere before. Can't think where...

One thing that is making Barcelona a more and more attractive place to live is the arrival of immigrants from around the world. Lots of wealthy Northern Europeans and artsy kids from London have been coming down here for years to enjoy the good life. But immigrants from outside Europe are becoming an important part of the city. Ten years ago there were very few foreigners from anywhere except Morocco. Now, they're coming from all over the place. Here's a list of statistics from La Vanguardia about the numbers of "non-Community immigrants" in 2004 and 1996 (in parentheses). The figures are from the city government.

Most Numerous Non-Community Nationalities in Barcelona, 2004 (1996)

1. Ecuador, 32,496 (202)
2. Morocco, 13,594 (3196)
3. Colombia, 13,307 (703)
4. Peru, 13,163 (2094)
5. Argentina, 11,437 (1871)
6. Pakistan, 10,198 (614)
7. China, 7195 (804)
8. Dominican Republic, 6777 (1066)
9. Philippines, 5871 (1854)

I'm completely in favor; I've seen how the immigration of new groups from South Asia and the Middle East and Latin America has changed America for the better within the last twenty-five years, and the same thing is going to happen here. Welcome, everyone.

Barcelona won away, 0-1, at Valencia on a header by Gerard, and they won without Davids. That's their fifth straight win, and a good one, against a top team in their stadium. Barca didn't try to play pretty soccer; they set up a defensive scheme and ground out a win, which strenghtens their hold on all-important fourth place with a five-point lead over Athletic Bilbao. That's just more good news for Real Madrid, which opened up its lead over second-place Valencia to five points. Madrid slaughtered Espanyol, 2-4. Espanyol had better start playing a lot better real soon or they're going to find themselves in Second Division again at the end of the year.

Posted 20:34 by John

Here's something I thought was interesting. It's called The Dominion in 1983 and it's a 1883 pamphlet by one "Ralph Centennius". Mr. Centennius is visualising Canada 100 years in the future, when it will be the most wonderful place imaginable with the help of a few deus ex machinas. Of course, what you learn from the book is what sort of thoughts preoccupied people in 1883. There's an awful lot of talk about transport; seems we would be using some sort of "rocket cars" to travel around the world in just minutes. Check out the various bits of "scientific" predictions Mr. Centennius makes; people at that time must have been fascinated by the power of electricity, since it turns up so often. Note that he predicts something resembling an atomic bomb, which was to put an end to war when the whole lot of European princes got blown up by these oxyhydrogen bombs in 1932. He also predicts a sort of First World War in Europe, to kill four million soldiers, in the late 1880s. Mr. Centennius is quite vague about how social problems are going to be fixed up; seems that a all-wise self-appointed Society of Benefactors, rather as in Plato's Republic, will take it upon themselves to make everything perfect. People, overcome by the society's loving wisdom, will all behave rationally and kindly.

The brash and arrogant United States, by the way, is riding for a fall and will ultimately rejoin the United Empire; the first section of the book reflects Mr. Centennius's fear of annexation by the US, which will fortunately be avoided when the American / Fenian army and fleet trying to invade British Columbia is sunk by a hurricane two miles out of San Francisco. (But if it had come to war, the Canadians would certainly have won, though outnumbered three to one, due to their nobility and high morale.)

Oh, yeah, English will be the universal language, and Britain will peacefully annex the whole Middle East without a drop of blood being shed.

Check this one out. It's quite short. It's a "Gutenberg" text, so you have to scroll down through a lot of crap before you get to the pamphlet itself.

Posted 17:38 by John

Hey, we're censored! Something called SoundWall, which I guess must be filtering software, won't let you access Iberian Notes. We must be cool! Only the cool kids get censored. I hope it's not because I frequently use the word "coprophagia". I love that word. It's probably all Joan's trilingual potty mouth that's got us on the SoundWall shit list.

Posted 20:47 by John

Here's a piece by Canadian Mark Steyn from the Wall Street Journal about how some Canadians can't take a joke. Seems that Conan O'Brian's silly "Insult Dog" act, the whole point of which is to be obnoxiously insulting, made fun of French Canadians.

Go read the whole piece, but check out this bit:

There's a lesson here, both for the European Union and an increasingly Hispanicized U.S.: Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, but they're one of the first things to get lost in translation--and if you can't share a joke, it's hard to have a shared culture. That's why multilingual societies tend toward the humorless: see Switzerland and Belgium. (For the purposes of the preceding racist generalization, I should point out that I'm half-Belgian.)

Is this true in Catalonia? It's certainly the stereotype other Spaniards have of Catalans: they're cold, unfriendly, humorless, unfunny.

The Catalan answer is that other Spaniards, and especially Andalusians, are phony and frivolous though humorous and fun-loving--gracia, alegria, fiesta, and all that--and superficially friendly. Others may offer easy but shallow friendship, while when the Catalan offers friendship it is sincere and from the heart.

My feeling is that stereotyping people is something we all do; you've got to classify things in your mind. I agree it is a sign of intelligence to be able to draw finer classifications than the standard, but the standard, stereotypical classifications--"Catalans are X, Aragonese do Y, Andalusians think Z"--are extremely convenient ways of organizing people into groups that your mind can define, compare, and contrast. We all do it; the funny thing is that classifications become much more specific the closer you get to home.

Here in Spain, for example, each region has its stereotyped character--Catalans are dour, Madrilenos show-offs, Basques tough, Aragonese witty, Andalusians happy-go-lucky. Within your region, comarcas (counties, subregions) have stereotyped characters, and within a comarca different towns and villages are said to be different--just around here there are extremely strong local rivalries between Terrassa and Sabadell, Olesa and Esparreguera, Igualada and Manresa. Remei says she's from the country, though, and that all country people in Catalonia and Aragon and Old Castile have a lot more in common with one another than any of them do with city folk.

I dunno. I wouldn't call Catalans humorless; Catalan individuals are just as likely to have a sense of humor as anyone else. I don't think there's anything I can put a finger on and label "typically Catalan" humor, though. Black humor and irony are popular here, but they are everywhere else. Many Catalan jokes tend toward the scatological or the sexual, but that's just like everywhere else too. And as for being a bunch of Dalinian absurdists, uh, no. High absurdity is a rare gift everywhere, including here.

I do not much like the current style of humor that TV3 is dishing out, though; a lot of their stuff comes from two different producers, El Terrat and Krampack. Both appeal to the 15-30 crowd, more or less. El Terrat's style is harsher and Krampack's lighter, but both of them are doing young urban humor. Much of it is indistinguishable from what you'd find anywhere else; one thing it has in common is that it's all very politically correct and Neocatalanist.

The local twist is that these guys often parody Catalan society, but never too viciously and often quite gently, while they're often harsh with Spain and especially with Spanish media celebrities. I can just see Toni Soler and Andreu Buenafuente and Joel Joan swilling blended scotch (as they do here) and grousing, "Goddamn Maria Teresa Campos, she's not nearly as good as we are yet twenty million people watch her and only one million watch us." So they take it out of her hide.

Funny Catalans: Eugenio, Quim Monzo, Ramon "Iva" Tosas, Eduardo Mendoza, Jaume Perich, Xavier Cugat, Empar Moliner, Miguel Cartanya. Catalans who would be funny if they didn't take themselves a little too seriously: Albert Boadella, Albert Pla, Manuel Trallero, Lloll Bertran.

Posted 19:33 by John

Well, whaddaya know. We got picked up by National Review, along with EuroPundits, Merde in France, A Fistful of Euros, Eursoc, and I Love America, in the Europress section. (We get mentioned way down at the end of the article.) Thanks a lot. To new readers coming over from NR, welcome, sit down and stay a spell. Put on a Johnny Cash or Buck Owens CD if you really want to get in the right mood. Ray Charles, Junior Brown, Dwight Yoakam, or Sonny Boy Williamson will do just fine. I also like to think of this as a James Brown kind of blog, and it's maybe a little Dylanesquely both reflective and absurd at times. We try for an Ice Cube or Clash-style sharpness. The artist this blog reminds me most of, though, is Wanda Jackson.

This is most distinctly not a Mandrell Sisters, Debby Boone, Tiny Tim, Foghat, Grand Funk Railroad, REO Speedwagon, James Taylor, Celine Dion, or Men Without Hats kind of blog. At least I don't think so.

Posted 00:09 by John

On the word "gringo":

One rather far-fetched story says gringo was derived from the song, "Green Grow the Rushes, O" by Scottish poet Robert Burns, as it was sung by English sailors in Mexican seaports. Many of the explanations and interpretations of this word have used this "Green Grow the Rushes, O" theory or slight deviations of it. I am saying that all of this is bunk and not supported by any real evidence. An article in the University of Arizona historical quarterly "Arizona and the West," by Charles E. Ronan S.J., of the Department of History of Loyola University of Chicago, discredits that origin. It gives many examples of the use of the word gringo, but does not find any positive source from which it is sprung.

To quote from Father Ronan's article:

"The word gringo was mentioned in Spanish literature as early as the eighteenth century. In his famous Diccionario, compiled some time before 1750, Terreros y Pando, a Spanish historian states that gringo was a nickname given to foreigners in Malaga and Madrid who spoke Spanish with an accent, and that in Madrid the term had special reference to the Irish. The pertinent passage in the Diccionario reads:

"Gringo in Malaga, what they call foreigners who (have) a certain kind of accent which prevents their speaking Spanish with ease and spontaneity; in Madrid the case is the same, and for some reason, especially with respect to the Irish."

"Another instance of its early use is in Bustamante's 1841 edition of Francisco Javier Alegre's Historia de la Companis de Jesús en la Nueva España, in which he explains that the Spanish soldiers sent to Mexico in 1767 by Charles III were called gringos by the Mexican people.

"Between the late 1760's and the early 1830's, however, the word apparently was rarely used, for no mention of it during that period has been found.

"Beginning in the 1830s, there are numerous references to the word gringo in the New World travel accounts, in dictionaries, and in Spanish-American literature. For example, two early 19th century travelers, the German Johan Jakob von Tschudi and the Frenchman Arseve Isabelle, both testify to the use of the word. In his travels in Peru during the years 1838-1842, Tschudi recounts how the Peruvian women 'prefer marrying a Gringo to a Paisanito, or (native).' In this 'voyage,' Isabelle complains about the insulting names, such as gringo, that travelers were called in South America. As for dictionaries, two, Diccionario (1846) of Vicente Salva y Perez, list gringo as a nickname given a foreigner who speaks an unintelligible language. Interestingly enough, the word is not incorporated into Diccionario de la Real Academia until the 1869 edition. In Spanish literature, gringo appears in Manuel Breton de los Herreros Elena, a drama presented for the first time in Madrid in 1834. Que es eso? Contais en gringo? (What is this / Are you using gringo language?)

Scholars are not in agreement about the correct use and origin of this word. According to one opinion, gringo is a corrected form of griego as used in the ancient Spanish expression hablar en griego, that is, to speak an unintelligible language or "to speak Greek."

What I think is very evident from all of this is that this word was used long ago before any English-speaking calvary soldiers were riding and singing near the Mexican border as has been suggested by some in previous reports.

Please let us lay this debate to rest and conclude that this word was in dictionaries and daily use in the Spanish language in the 18th and 19th centuries. It will continue to be interpreted by all of us in many different ways.

J.H. Coffman

Scottsdale, AZ

Mr. Coffman conclusively proves the word "gringo" was used in Spain a hundred years before the Mexican War. Here's the American Heritage Dictionary:

gringo

SYLLABICATION: grin·go
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. grin·gos
Offensive Slang Used as a disparaging term for a foreigner in Latin America, especially an American or English person.
ETYMOLOGY: Spanish, foreign, foreign language, gibberish, probably alteration of griego, Greek, from Latin Graecus. See Greek.
WORD HISTORY: In Latin America the word gringo is an offensive term for a foreigner, particularly an American or English person. But the word existed in Spanish before this particular sense came into being. In fact, gringo may be an alteration of the word griego, the Spanish development of Latin Graecus, “Greek.” Griego first meant “Greek, Grecian,” as an adjective and “Greek, Greek language,” as a noun. The saying “It's Greek to me” exists in Spanish, as it does in English, and helps us understand why griego came to mean “unintelligible language” and perhaps, by further extension of this idea, “stranger, that is, one who speaks a foreign language.” The altered form gringo lost touch with Greek but has the senses “unintelligible language,” “foreigner, especially an English person,” and in Latin America, “North American or Britisher.” Its first recorded English use (1849) is in John Woodhouse Audubon's Western Journal: “We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called ‘Gringoes.’”

Here's Urban Legends Reference Pages (snopes.com) on the same subject:

Claim: The word gringo comes from Mexicans' overhearing American soldiers sing the song "Green Grow the Lilacs" during the Mexican-American War.
Status: False.

Origins: This rather improbable saga of the origins of the word "gringo" has it that the term began during the Mexican-American War (1846-48), when Mexicans supposedly overheard American soldiers continually singing either "Green Grow the Lilacs" or "Green grow the rushes, O" (a song based upon a Robert Burns poem). The Spanish-speaking Mexicans began referring derisively to the Americans as "green grows" (rendered phonetically in Spanish as gringos), which soon became a pejorative Spanish-language term for "foreigners" (particularly Americans).

Other versions of this etymological legend attribute the singing to Irish Legion volunteers serving in Simon Bolivar's army during Venezuela's war for independence from Spain in the early 19th century, "cowboys in south Texas," or American troops attempting to track down Pancho Villa in Mexico in 1916-17.

All of these charming explanations have chronology working against them. Although the first recorded use of "gringo" in English dates from 1849 (when John Woodhouse Audubon, the son of the famous nature artist, wrote that "We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called 'Gringoes'"), the word was known in Spanish well before the Mexican-American War. According to Rawson, the Diccionario Castellano of 1787 noted that in Malaga "foreigners who have a certain type of accent which keeps them from speaking Spanish easily and naturally" were referred to as gringos, and the same term was used in Madrid, particularly for the Irish.

The true origin of gringo is most likely that it came from griego, the Spanish word for "Greek." In Spanish, as in English, something difficult or impossible to understand is referred to as being Greek: We say "It's Greek to me," just as in Spanish an incomprehensible person is said to hablar en griego (i.e., "speak in Greek"). The English version of the proverb shows up in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599), when Casca, one of the conspirators against Caesar, proclaims:

Nay, an I tell you that, I'll ne'er look you i' the face again; but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was Greek to me.
The same phrase was also used (at about the same time) by another Elizabethan playwright, Thomas Dekker, but its origins are much older: it comes from the Medieval Latin proverb Graecum est; non potest legi (i.e., "It is Greek; it cannot be read").

It is certainly possible (and even likely) that the Mexican-American War precipitated the introduction of the Spanish word gringo into the English language, but the word itself antedates that conflict by at least sixty years and had nothing to do with singing soldiers, American or otherwise.

That's enough for me.

Posted 23:35 by John

Franco Aleman pointed out to me this here gem from La Vangua. It seems to me that the guy who signed this article, Roger Jimenez, is a plagiarist because his signed piece is simply a repetition--he didn't even bother changing too many words--of a common Internet story, an urban legend. If you look at old Saturday Evening Posts or Reader's Digests, you'll see this one come up every couple of years. In the American 1940s-50s version, the American government is the insufferable bureaucracy that is going to impose these ridiculous spelling changes that make everything much more complicated than it needs to be. In the bit Mr. Jimenez ripped off, it's the European Union. It's the same joke, though, and it's been around for at least sixty years. I imagine that Mr. Jimenez didn't even invent the Spanish version of this urban myth; somebody else probably adapted it from English long ago. Is the Vangua going to bust him? Well, they didn't do it to Marius Serra for exactly the same crime, so I don't know why they'd even consider coming down hard on Jimenez.

Posted 22:56 by John

Here's a story that James Taranto links to about silly regulations in the public schools. Taranto thinks this is ridiculous. Yeah, nobody's ever sued him. Look, I'm going to stand up for the teachers on this one. They are responsible for all these kids in their classes, most of whom they love but a few of whom are a massive pain in the ass and among other things ask to go to the bathroom eighteen times a day. When the parents stop demanding the right to sue teachers for eighteen million dollars if a kid should get hit by a bus while they're on duty, then teachers will be willing to be more permissive with said parents' kids. Until then, the rules are the rules and the only way teachers and administrators can be safe against lawsuits that might well ruin them, and there are an absolute shitload of such lawsuits backed up in the courts, is to draw the line and enforce it. If parents and kids don't like it, that's just too damned bad.

The rule, as always, is that the class goes to the bathroom as a group several times every day. If a kid has to go outside those several toilet trips every day, he gets fifteen free trips a month. That seems more than fair to me. I wouldn't let a kid assigned to me get out of my sight, personally.

Posted 20:30 by John

Here's a discussion from the Comments section that I thought was worth posting in order to dispel this common myth, what I call a "historical urban legend". Italics are a commentator; standard type is me.

Are you sure you live in Catalonia? You will never hear a spanish or a catalan refer to Americans as "gringos". That's mexican stuff.

People around here have seen it in the movies enough that the less polite of them adopt it when they wish to be insulting to an American.

Did you know the history of the word "gringo". It seems like during the American-Mexican war, the locals used to shout the American troops: "Green go!" (like get out of here). Because the american soldiers weared green uniforms. I dont know... it's one of those mexican words that sound ridiculous to us, like "pendejo", "chinga tu madre" and all that... They have their own culture we have ours. I bet you don't feel comfortable using brit slang. Same thing here.

Nope. The word "gringo" is 18th century Peninsular Spanish slang for any foreigner. It probably goes back before then, since slang words tend not to turn up in writing until they becomes fairly common use. This is documented in writings from the time. It's a corruption of "griego", meaning "Greek" and standing for any foreigner, in the sense of "It's Greek to me." The term later became attached in Mexico to Americans specifically.

Just a few problems with that story:

a) American soldiers at the time wore blue uniforms or none at all.
b) You think a bunch of Mexican peasants are going to be yelling defiantly at a bunch of guys with guns?
c) You think a bunch of Mexican peasants knew enough English to shout "Green go!"?
d) You think a bunch of Mexican peasants cared whether a bunch of Spanish-speaking army guys or a bunch of English-speaking army guys exploited them? Remember, Mexico was a caudillo-style dictatorship under the incompetent and corrupt Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The Americans were saints compared to him and his army, which pillaged wherever they were in Mexico as if they had conquered it. And the American army of the mid-1800s were a pretty rough bunch.

(You might read General U.S. Grant's memoirs; it's available on Gutenberg and Internet Books Online and Internet Library and all those book search sources. Grant wrote it in collaboration with Mark Twain at the end of his life; the collaboration of Twain is obviously what makes it a truly great work, beautifully written, deeply felt, breathtakingly honest about everything except his alcoholism. Grant goes into detail about his experiences as an army lieutenant in the Mexican War. I think it's the one indispensible book on the 1845-65 army.)

Posted 14:42 by John

Here's an interview with Alain Hertoghe, the French journalist from the Catholic paper La Croix who was fired for writing a book saying that the mainstream French (and, by implication, Continental) press had so many anti-American prejudices regarding the Iraq war that they failed to report the story correctly. This is well worth a read.

You also ought to check out this article from Insight debunking some common lies told about George Bush and his family. Give it a look. (From Front Page.)

Eursoc got a link from Andrew Sullivan for this piece about the division in the EU between France and Germany, and everybody else. Good post. Check it out.

Here's Dorothy Rabinowitz from the Wall Street Journal tearing into the History Channel for airing a British documentary that says that Lyndon Johnson had John Kennedy and seven other people killed. This, of course, is utterly insane and a complete contradiction of any actual fact regarding the Kennedy assassination.

By the way, anyone wondering what really happened on November 22, 1963, should read Case Closed by Gerald Posner, which conclusively demonstrates that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman who fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Should you be curious about the other famous assassination of the 1960s, read Posner's Killing the Dream, which concludes that James Earl Ray, a Missouri peckerwood cracker hillbilly redneck dirt-poor barely-literate white-trash loser jailbird felon common criminal, shot Martin Luther King. Ray, however, probably had the help of at least one of his brothers and perhaps other people. Posner does not implicate the government or the law in any way; he does speculate that there was a rumor in American prisons during the 1960s that some Southern racist businessman had put a bounty on King's head, and that this just might be a true story; it would explain Ray's access to ready cash and his travels across the United States in the weeks before the assassination--and his travels around the world afterward. Remember, they caught up with him in London.

Posted 23:00 by John

This Esquerra Republicana-ETA thing is really getting out of hand. For those new to the blog, here we go with a quick explanation. After the most recent Catalan regional elections, a Tripartite coalition made up a coalition. The PSC (Catalan Socialists) had won by far the most votes, but they needed the support of ERC (leftist Catalan nationalists) and ICV (Communists) to form a government.

Well, Josep Lluis Carod-Rovira, the leader of ERC, went and had a secret meeting with the leaders of the Basque terrorist gang ETA in which he tried to "negotiate peace". This was sometime in January. Now, the American equivalent would be Dennis Kucinich meeting with Al Qaeda, without government knowledge, out there making a deal on his own, with the payoff that Al Qaeda wouldn't attack Democrats, only Republicans. What many people said about the Carod-Rovira--ETA meeting was that Carod was trying to make a deal in which ETA would cease to operate in Catalonia. Well, what do you know. ETA released a video today.

It consisted of two guys in black capes and white hoods with black berets on top of their heads--I swear, they looked like 1950s French existentialists dressed up as Klansmen--in front of an ETA logo with a Basque and a Catalan independentista flag. One of them made this statement:

ETA, the Basque socialist revolutionary organization of national liberation, hereby informs the Basque Homeland and the Catalan people of the content of its revised policy of armed action in Catalonia as well as the decisions taken.

ETA, within the framework of the process of liberation that it carries out with the goal of achieving recognition of the rights that belong to the Basque Homeland as a nation, decided in the 1980s to carry out armed actions against the economic resources of the Spanish and French states, and the armed forces of the occupation and the Spanish political authorities.

This question has always been subject to repeated analyses of the situation that our organization has made at various times. ETA has made a new analysis and has made a new decision regarding its armed actions in Catalonia.

These are the principal items that ETA has taken into consideration.

Catalonia and the Basque Homeland are two nations with many similarities and points in common, we would like to emphasize two: (Comma splice sic.)

--They are two nations, oppressed by the Spanish and French states, territorially divided according to artificial frontiers imposed by force of arms.

--This situation of oppression has caused the development of close and deep relationships of friendship and brotherhood.

--The change made in the last decades in the political situation in Catalonia and the Basque Homeland. There has been a clarification and an important advance of independentista forces and a widespread awareness of the need for the right of self-determination which belongs to the peoples oppressed by the Spanish state.

--The serious crisis that the oppressor Spanish state is undergoing. At the end of the Franco dictatorship, the Spanish state invented the "State of Autonomous Regions" with the objective of drowning the desires for freedom of the Basque, Catalan...nations. (Suspensive points sic.) Today, 25 years later, the crisis in which the political framework of the Spanish reform is immersed is clearer and deeper than ever. And we can affirm that it has been the struggle of these two peoples for their liberation that has caused this crisis: The Basque Homeland and Catalonia are the hotbeds that are breaking down the antiquated system of the institutional and political framework that has been imposed.

--The honest, active and generous solidarity that the process of liberation of the Basque people has awakened on the part of the Catalan people.

At the same time, the armed struggle carried on by ETA against the Spanish state in Catalonia has caused different and opposing interpretations and reactions among the different sectors of independentista and leftist Catalans.

--The importance of reinforcing the willpower and determination of the people in order to defend the right of self-determination that belongs to the Catalan people and to the Basque Homeland, as against Spanish imposition. The necessity of reinforcement, in the cases of the Catalan and Basque peoples, of the foundations that, in our understanding, should support the relationship between different oppressed peoples.

--Respect and non-interference regarding the methods and ways in which the respective organizations may put in practice in the process of liberation that each people is carrying out.

--Solidarity to other peoples who find themselves in a similar situation of oppression.

Considering all these elements of analysis and with the desire that the ties between our peoples become stronger based on the the principles of respect, non-interference, and solidarity, ETA hereby communicates to the Basque Homeland and to the Catalan people its suspension of its campaign of armed actions in Catalonia beginning January 1, 2004.

A revolutionary salute to all Catalan independentistas.

LONG LIVE THE FREE BASQUE HOMELAND!

LONG LIVE FREE CATALONIA!

Long live Jon Felix! Long live Joan Carles!

In the Basque Homeland, February 2004.

Jon Felix Erezuma and Joan Carles Monteagudo were the terrorists who pushed a carbomb downhill, put it in neutral and just let it roll, into the Guardia Civil barracks in Vic, near Barcelona, on May 30, 1991; they had previously murdered six policemen in Sabadell. Nine people were killed in the blast in Vic, five of them children, and twenty were wounded. Monteagudo and Erezuma must have seen that the courtyard of the barracks was full of the families of the Guardias when they let the car go. The image most people remember of the bombing is a photograph of a fireman carrying away a small girl with one of her legs blown off below the knee. I remember taking the bus home from work that night; it took like three hours because the cops roadblocked the freeway between Cerdanyola, where I worked then, and Barcelona. When it came our turn they went through everybody very carefully. It didn't bother me when I heard more or less what was going on. A couple of days later they tracked Monteagudo and Erezuma to a house in suburban Barcelona; I don't think they got much of a chance to surrender. The Guardia Civil ventilated the place and the two murderers were found dead inside with multiple perforations, Ma Barker-style.

Here is Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's official statement:

On the 26th of January the secretary general of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the chief of cabinet of the Generalitat publicly stated that he had met with members of the leadership of the terrorist gang ETA. That same day said party made a public statement in which it admitted that it had reached an agreement with the terrorist gang.

Today the terrorist gang has announced its contribution to this repulsive strategy promoted by ERC. The terrorist gang will continue killing, but it will not do so in one part of our national territory. We know that the quid pro quo is the political shielding by ERC of the objectives of the terrorist gang and a closing of the eyes regarding terrorism as long as its party interests are not affected.

The Administration of the nation wishes to state, in an unmistakeable way, its rejection of all forms of negotiation which do not consist of the delivery of all weapons to the legitimate authorities and the surrender of the criminals to the courts. Of course, the Administration will continue to pursue the terrorists with the same determination inside and outside of Spain, and I trust that we can do it with the same success as so far, or even with more success.

The only democratic way to put an end to terrorism is its complete defeat by means of police and judicial action and internatinal cooperation. This, and no other, is the appropriate response for a state with the rule of law.

All negotiation with a terrorist gang on the terms we have just seen confirmed is deeply antidemocratic and implies political complicity with the terrorists. We are facing a pact between the terrorist gang and ERC, unless this party expressly rejects the agreement and immediately fires those who negotiated it.

The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party forms a part, at this moment, of a coalition with ERC that governs Catalonia; equally, the Socialist Party forms part of an electoral coalition that is running joint candidacies with the Republican Left in the upcoming general elections. The Socialist Party, as a national party that presents itself as an alternative to govern and as a signer of the pact for freedom and against terrorism, must adopt immediate decisions, faithful to its commitments and to democracy. They can no longer allege lack of knowledge; they can no longer look the other way.

I believe that it is incompatible with the pact for freedom and against terrorism to maintain coalition governments and electoral coalitions with the party of the Republican Left of Catalonia as long as they do not fulfill the conditions which I have outlined.

All we Spaniards have suffered ETA terrorism for many years; we have fought and have been fighting for decades against it; we are not far from defeating it, and in order to do so we have used the legitimacy of our democracy, the strength of our state with the rule of law, and the solidity of our national unity.

The agreement reached between the Republican Left of Catalonia and the terrorist organization ETA, far from bringing us closer to peace and freedom, moves us away from them, because it means no more and no less than an absolutely unacceptable moral surrender and political complicity.

You go, Jose Maria! We're going to miss his Trumanesque plain speaking. I honestly believe that Aznar is the best political leader in Europe as far as honesty, courage, and intelligence goes. He proved he had brass balls when the ETA tried to blow up his car in 1995. The bomb went off and if Aznar's limo hadn't been armored it would have blown him into very small pieces. A passerby was killed. Aznar kept his cool, sort of like Reagan did when that nutcase shot him, and impressed a lot of people.

The general reaction of the editorialists and the columnists of La Vanguardia is that Carod-Rovira is an incompetent, if not worse, and has to resign now and leave the country for several months. One wag, Alfred Rexach, suggested that we should send Carod to Casablanca in order to get rid of him. The joke is that Carod's predecessor as leader of ERC was a guy named Angel Colom. It was decided by the Catalan poliical class, so it is widely rumored, that certain predilections of Mr. Colom's would likely get everybody into very serious trouble if they were made public knowledge. So Mr. Colom was sent as far away as possible, which is the Generalitat's "consulate" in Casablanca, Morocco. Mr. Colom is a former seminary student and schoolteacher, in addition to being a politician.

My wife's Remei's reaction was profane, to say the least. She called Carod a "mamarracho", a "malparit", a "gilipollas", and an "imbecil", among other less printable epithets. She said, resumed, "Look, I'm Catalan not because I want to be but because I just am, so I take it pretty seriously, and I don't like it that this idiot Carod has given that bunch of terrorists a political card to play. This is a disgrace. Carod got a political job and he's supposed to be helping Catalonia advance and trying to make it better, not negotiating with fucking terrorists. All of us Catalans voted for him and he represents all of us, and he's not doing it right. The older I get the more I see that nationalism is stupid because it makes divisions between people and when you take it too far it leads to killing, and I don't want any of that Bosnia shit around here. I speak Catalan and I am Catalan and I do things not because they're Catalan things to do but just because they're the things I do, and I don't give a shit who else does them."

That was a summary, with most of the foul language edited out.

Posted 17:51 by John

The breaking news is that ETA announced a truce only in Catalonia this afternoon; it looks like Carod-Rovira's meeting with the ETA leadership paid off and that there was a quid pro quo. Everybody in Spain is thoroughly pissed off at the Tripartite government in Catalonia, since what it has effectively done is negotiate a separate peace, leaving the rest of Spain looking down the gun barrel. Spanish Socialist leaders are calling for the Catalan Socialists to pull out of the Tripartite coalition.

The problem with that is new elections will probably prove to be necessary. The current PSC-ERC-ICV coalition cannot stand if the PSC pulls out, of course, but the only other feasible coalition would be CiU and ERC, and ERC is precisely the problem. A PSC-CiU government would probably be impossible since they've hated one another's guts for the last 24 years.

Posted 13:06 by John

From Fox News:

Retailers Think Spring
Hocking pastels, sandals in sub-zero temps may be smart business

Uh, shouldn't that be "hawking"? That's an informal word meaning "selling in the street" or just "selling". "Hock" is to pawn; e.g. you might hock the family silver if you need money. Another meaning for "hock", very informal, is that it's what you do with a loogie.

Now, I'll bet money that the person who wrote this head was from the Northeast; many people in the Northeast speak with an accent that doesn't distinguish the "ah" sound in "father" (low back unrounded vowel) from the "aw" sound in "naughty" (one step higher, slightly rounded). The standard example of this accent is that its speakers pronounce "cot", like a bed, and "caught", the past of "catch", the same. And they pronounce "hawk", with the "aw" sound, the same as "hock", with the "ah" sound.

That's where this little piece of confusion came from. Hey, gimme a break, this is virtually all I learned in two years of grad school. I get to show off occasionally.

Posted 11:03 by John

Here in Spain it certainly seems that there is an epidemic of domestic violence going on right now; murders and beatings are on the news and in the papers with some frequency. It is argued by some that these violent acts are caused by an institutional sexism in Western society, by a patriarchal structure that demeans women systematically. I don't buy it.

The most recent tragedy was yesterday, when some piece of scum in Figueres set his wife on fire. She suffered burns over 60% of her body but is expected to survive. According to the Vanguardia, in recent years in Spain there have been seven attempts by men to set their wives on fire. Now, that is plain sick and disgusting, and I have no sympathy for those who physically abuse others; my personal feeling is that prison should be exclusively reserved for criminals who use violence, and that all criminals who use any kind of violence--rape, murder, robbery, assault and battery--ought to be sent there.

My question, though, is whether there is really an increase in cases of domestic abuse of women or whether it's just being reported more now. My personal guess is that woman-battering is actually on the decline, percentage-wise, as society becomes wealthier and "softer"; agreed, extreme cases like yesterday's in Figueres always get in the news, but I wonder if a lot of the milder cases being reported these days wouldn't have just been swept under the rug in the past.

In order to throw gasoline on a smoldering fire, TV3's lead-in to the story on the news was titled "El horror masclista"--"The sexist horror".

Here are some excerpts from "Who Stole Feminism?" by Christina Hoff Sommers.

For a long time (Richard J.) Gelles and (Murray A.) Straus were highly regarded by feminist activists for the pioneer work they had done in this much-neglected area. But they fell out of favor in the late 1970s because their findings were not informed by the "battery is caused by patriarchy" thesis. The fact that they were men was also held against them.

Geller and Straus do find high levels of violence in many American families, but in both of their national surveys they found that women were just as likely to engage in it as men. They also found that siblings were the most violent of all...The vast majority of family disputes involve minor violence rather than severe violence (defined as "actions that have a high probability of leading to injury"). In their 1985 survey...they found that 16% of couples were violent--the "Saturday Night Brawlers" (with the wife just as likely as the husband to slap, grab, shove, or throw things.) In 3 to 4 percent of couples, there was at least one act of severe violence by the husband against the wife...Gelles and Straus are careful to say that women are far more likely to be injured and to need medical care...Murray Straus estimates that approximately 100,000 women a year are victims of severe violence (in the US)--far short of Senator Biden's claim of three or four million...Because of changing demographics and improved public awareness, there was a significant decrease in wife battery between 1975 and 1985...

Gender feminists are committed to the doctrine that the vast majority of batterers or rapists are not fringe characters but men whom society regards as normal--sports fans, former fraternity brothers, pillars of the community. For these "normal" men, women are not so much persons as "objects". In the gender feminist view, once a woman is "objectified" and no longer human, battering her is simply the next logical step. Just how "normal" are men who batter?...

Are the batterers really just your average Joe? If the state of Massachusetts is typical--the large majority of batterers are criminals...according to Andrew Klein, "almost 80 percent of the first 8500 male subjects of restraining orders had prior criminal records in the state. Many...were for offenses like drunk driving and drugs, but almost half had prior histories of violence against male and female victims. In other words, these men were generally violent, assaulting other males as well as female intimates. The average number of prior crimes against persons complaints was 4.5."

"Time" (magazine)...informed readers that between 22 percent and 35 percent of all visits by females to emergency rooms are for injuries from domestic assaults...The primary source (for this claim) is a 1984 study...conducted in downtown Detroit....of the 492 patients who responded to a questionnaire about domestic violence, they report that 90 percent were from inner-city Detroit and 60 percent were unemployed. We also learn that the 22 percent figure includes both women and men...

In a November 1992 study...a survey of all 397 emergency departments in California hospitals. Nurse managers were asked, "During a typical month, about how many patients have been diagnosed with an injury caused by domestic violence?" The nurses' estimates ranged from two per month for small hospitals to eight per month for the large hospitals.

Ideology aside, there are indications that those who batter are not average. Talk of a generalized misogyny may be perventing us from seeing and facing the particular effect on women and men of the large criminal element in our society...We need to understand why the number of sociopaths in our society, especially violent male sociopaths, is so high.

My guess is that the number of violent male sociopaths in US society is declining, and this is clearly reflected in the crime rate. Sure there are other causes, like better policing, stiffer sentences, higher income and education levels, but I'm going to chalk it up at least partly to what some are calling the "Roe effect". I think that the sort of people likely to give birth to sociopaths are reproducing less and less.

That is, abortion became a constitutional right in the entire US in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Ever since then, it's been easy and cheap to get an abortion in the US, and there are more than a million performed every year. Now, who gets abortions, as a general rule? Not your stable, middle-class couples, but your single mothers. This is why young people in the US are more traditional than they used to be; the folks who lead an unstable (not liberal or leftist, but the kind that makes you a lousy parent) lifestyle, screwing around a lot and drinking and using drugs and partying a lot and not holding down steady jobs and associating with trashy people, don't reproduce any more. The kids who have been born since '73 are much more likely to belong to a stable family unit because nonstable people have been able to get the Future Unwanted Babies of America aborted.

Posted 07:48 by John

Here's an interesting collection of Spanish Civil War propaganda posters. Read the accompanying commentaries, which were pretty clearly written by several different people: some are quite critical of the Republic and especially of the Communists, while others follow the strict party line. Anyway, check it out.

Posted 12:45 by John

This article from the Weekly Standard by Kagan and Kristol, two of the leading so-called "neoconservatives", is highly recommended for those looking for a correct analysis of the Iraq war. It's a rather long article--don't forget to click on "page 2" for the whole thing. Summary: Saddam was a sonofabitch. He had to go.

Posted 08:58 by John

Well, yesterday was the anniversary of the Great Big Anti-Yankee Demo. On Feb. 15, 2003, leftist organizers got between 300,000 and 500,000 people out on the streets of Barcelona for a mass demonstration that was supposedly "against war" but really against the US; you could tell by the signs people were carrying and by the concluding speech, an anti-American diatribe by the little-known actress Carme Conesa. (Pedro Almodovar did the speech in Madrid. Americans might want to remember this when deciding whether or not to give Almodovar any of their money at the box office.) The organizers claimed a million, though they didn't get anywhere near that many. It was still a very large demo, though.

So this year they decided to have another. This time they got between 6000 and 10,000 people in the Plaza Catalunya. A "cacerolada", a pot-banging, was scheduled last night for 10 PM but I didn't hear a thing, and I had my Merle Haggard CD ready to go at top volume as soon as the pot-banging started. TV3 tried to make a big deal out of it, focusing in on the crowd and filling the screen with it. They did pull back once: then you could see that the crowd comfortably fit into the center of the plaza, without even spilling out and blocking traffic.

The other thing TV3 repeated over and over was that George Bush I said something last year in a TV interview along the lines of "We can't let American foreign policy depend on how many people demonstrate in Barcelona." Now, Bush just threw the name of Barcelona out as an example, as you can tell from his tone of voice; he could just as easily have said "Milan" or "Paris" or "Berlin". Still, both TV3 and the Vanguardia mentioned Bush's mention of the city of Barcelona with great pride, as if it demonstrated the international significance of Barcelona. Woo-hoo! An American ex-president mentioned us with a throwaway line in an interview eleven months ago!

By the way, in other Catalan cities, they got a thousand in Tarragona and 300 in Lerida. In Gerona not even the organizers bothered to show up, so there was no demo, just a handful of reporters milling about.

The Vanguardia has a couple of polls out. In this morning's paper they give us their projection of the vote within Catalonia for the March 14 general elections in Spain. The Socialist PSC will pull 37% of the vote and 18 seats in the Congreso de los Diputados; the conservative PP will get 22% and 11-12 seats; nationalist Convergence and Union will get 18% and 9 seats, the independentista ERC will bring in 13% and 6-7 seats, and the Communist ICV will draw 7% and 2 seats.

Several small surprises here. I'd expect the Socialists to lose a couple of seats and not do quite as well as the survey says. The PP, for the first time, will be the second most-voted party in Catalonia, a role that had previously belonged to Convergence and Union.

The big non-surprise, though, is the collapse of Convergence. Now, CiU, the mainstream and fairly responsible Catalan nationalist coalition, has been riding for a fall for years. It is a combination of Union, the conservative Christian Democrat Catalan nationalist party, and of Convergence, a catchall bunch of Catalan nationalists who run the gamut between moderate conservative and social democrat. Now, Union is a real political party with a solid following and a coherent ideology. They'll survive. Convergence, though, was held together only by the force of personality of its longtime leader, Jordi Pujol. Well, Pujol has retired and Convergence is splitting. The more leftist and more independentista Convergence voters have already gone to ERC, the more conservative and less nationalist voters will stay with Union or go to the PP, and the more social democratic voters will flip to the Socialists.

Yesterday the Vangua ran their poll results for all of Spain; they predict the PP will win handily but will not repeat their absolute majority that Aznar won in the 2000 generals. As I always say, the PP always does a couple of points better on election day than they do in the pre-election surveys, due to the fact that it's politically incorrect to say you're pro-PP. Some people won't admit it even to an interviewer. If the PP doesn't take an absolute majority, though, they can count on the Canarian Coalition and what's left of Convergence and Union to put them over with a parliamentary majority.

Pretty much all the Vanguardia's commentators have been slagging the US off about the Janet Jackson so-called scandal for the last two weeks. Who cares? Everybody's forgotten all about it already. It was no big deal, just a media blip. But the Vangua's columnists are taking turns using words like "puritanical" and "hypocritical" and "immature" and "censorship", and they're still doing it, making the Vanguardia officially The Last Newspaper in the World to get off this dumb story.

"Chemical Lali" Sole has a piece calling the Clint Eastwood movie "Mystic River" "immoral". Huh? I thought it was just a movie.

Barcelona beat Atletico de Madrid last night 3-1, a convincing win against a real team, and held on to fourth place in the Spanish league. Edgar Davids is the big difference. With him in midfield, Xavi, Barcelona's "quarterback" or "point guard", isn't always covered by an opposing player, and so he has a chance to make the long passes that he does so well. And Davids is a scrapper, a never-give-up guy, something Barca really needed. I was very wrong about him. Ronaldinho continues to demonstrate that he really is a top-class player. Nobody else on the team is doing all that great, but at least they're playing competently now. Madrid, Valencia, and Deportivo are still running away with the league, though.

Cyclist Marco Pantani, who won the Tour de France several years ago (1997?), was found dead in a hotel room in Italy surrounded by boxes of antidepressives and anxiety-blockers at age 34. He'd been involved in several drug scandals, though he was still competing professionally. They haven't made it clear whether this was a suicide or an accident, or whether it was even an overdose. Pantani suffered from manic depression.

On the back page of La Vangua, there's a very odd interview with Robert Gallo, one of the discoverers of the AIDS virus. About halfway through Dr. Gallo begins spilling his guts to the interviewer, how he dumped his wife for a Twinkie and how she then took him back, how he ignored his children, how he'd been a bad parent, how the dispute over who'd found the AIDS virus first hurt him emotionally as well as financially, how the people he'd expected to stand up for him didn't, and so on. This is clearly a guy who has some psychological problems that he is in the process of working out. Or, in regular English instead of jargon, he's a sad and rather bitter man who feels guilty. Rather like me on a bad day.

The interviewer, Lluis Amiguet, adds this commentary:

Somebody told me that the doctor's surprising confessions are in the same line as the "born-again Christians" that are so trendy in the United States, and added with cynicism, "If he knows how to apologize well on TV, he'll make it to the White House." Gee, that sounds like prejudice and stereotyping to me, not to mention making light of Dr. Gallo's obvious pain.

And if Dr. Gallo were one of those "stiff-upper-lip" emotionally cold WASPS, out of touch with their feelings and emotions, who care only about work and money and burst with pride over their worldly accomplishments, they'd blast him for living up to that side of the typical American stereotype.

By the way, in case you were interested, the expression "keep a stiff upper lip" is of American origin rather than British, according to H. L. Mencken. Yeah, I was surprised at that, too.

Posted 21:06 by John

Well, whaddya know, we've gotten some press. Barcelona Business (for which I cannot find a URL), a well-known local English-language monthly newspaper, gave us a plug, and one to Trevor from Kaleboel, too.

Complaint: Barcelona Business has our URLs wrong.

Inside Europe: Iberian Notes is http://www.iberiannotes.blogspot.com
Kaleboel is http://oreneta.com/baldie/blog

Anyway, though, we made page six of Barcelona Business. The article is by Eve Tomkis, whom I do not know. Here are a few quotes:

The real action, as usual, is happening on the Web, where a couple of erudite bloggers have registered record numbers of hits and copious commentary, sparked off by the innocent (innocent my ass, it was Joan) enough query of whether Spanish should be called Castilian. The row has spilled over into immigrants' language-learning obligations, socialists in Catalonia wishing they could vote PSOE instead of PSC, and would "Montse Babe" ever bed blogger John from Gracia, regardless of whether his sweet nothings were whispered in Catalan or Spanish.

All this candid fare and more can be found at http://iberiannotes.blogspot.com and http://oreneta.com/baldie/blog, hosted respectively by an American right-of-center sports fan and a Welsh polyglot. Visit both, as their public is different, and click on the comments to open a can of cucs...

Relish the rage of Iberian Notes as John tilts against the flailing windmills of lefty sentimentalism. He has his more reflective moments too...Has this got your blood up? Get online and post a note to the hottest blogs in town.

Wow. Thanks for the publicity. I'm going to write Barcelona Business and give them my regards if I can find their e-mail. It doesn't seem to be in the print edition and I can't find the damn thing online. And they really oughta know about the correct URLs.

Posted 19:09 by John

Matt Drudge is reporting that a bimbo eruption is about to hit the John Kerry campaign and that at the very least the Clark and Dean campaigns are somehow in on it.

My feeling is that politicians' infidelities don't affect their ability to govern the country. I don't care whether Kerry was cheating on his wife or not. I imagine that many people feel the same way I do. The argument you can make, though, is that Kerry's alleged infidelities tell us something about his character.

We'll have to find out what the poop is. First of all, Kerry could well be completely innocent. However. If it's a long-term mistress, someone adult and discreet, then it's hard to be too critical. If Kerry is trapped in a loveless marriage and so resorts to another woman, I have no problem. (Though the fact that he married Teresa Heinz fairly recently makes that unlikely.) Or if it was a one-time slip-up, hey, those things happen. If there is a Kennedyesque or Clintonesque string of "incidents", though, then I think it does tell us something negative about his character. And if he lies and gets caught doing it, that's an extremely bad sign.

Maybe, in the future, what Presidential candidates ought to do is confess before their campaign even starts. George W. Bush did that with his drinking problem, and it never became much of an issue. Bringing up yourself what some people might consider a morality problem in your past gets the scene out of the way early and it wins you points for honesty, especially if you can use the "he saw he had a problem so he dealt with it" argument.

There are people who claim that the whole ridiculous circus of an American election campaign is actually a highly useful process. It's a test for the candidates. Candidates are put under massive stress repeatedly. Every last thing about them is questioned and examined and criticized. Their good name is dragged through the mud. They risk committing "the deadly gaffe" every time they speak in public, which they do ten times a day. They're sleeping four hours a night for days on end. He who survives this process becomes President, and at the very least, he's proven he's as psychologically stable enough to do the job as anybody else is.

Posted 16:16 by John

Some readers probably think I'm an extreme American nationalist, though I don't really think I am. I like the distinction George Orwell makes between "patriot" and "nationalist": a patriot is someone who loves his country, while a nationalist is one who wants his chosen power unit (whether a nationality, religion, class, whatever) to gain power and prestige. There's nothing I'd love to see more than an end to American overseas military commitments, for example. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to do that in the near or medium future.

And I am not blind to the fact that evil grows in the United States just as it does anywhere else. Now, there are places like Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union whose systems provided the world with a lot more evil than did the Americans or the Brits during the 20th century. But individual Americans are certainly capable of doing evil, and in different parts of our history our system allowed that evil to emerge.

Lynching is probably the most notorious American evil; lynchings in the US were not at all uncommon until well after the First World War. It was acceptable for mobs to drag alleged malefactors out of jail and kill them, usually horribly, in public, and especially in the South. It's estimated that there were some 4000 lynchings (numbers vary) in the US between 1865 and about 1930, and the great majority of the victims were black.

An important branch of our family--the Chappells, Colleys, Whitneys, Shannons--originates in the town of Paris, Texas, which was a hotbed of lynching; in fact, the burning of Henry Smith on January 31, 1893, at Paris, is possibly the single most notorious mob murder of all. Smith was a retarded black man accused of killing and raping a young girl. He escaped to Hope, Arkansas, Bill Clinton's hometown, just a hundred miles up the road, where a posse caught him. He was taken back to Paris by train, where a crowd of at least 10,000 turned out to see his death. It was well-planned; a scaffold was built so the crowd could see, and special trains were run to Paris from as far away as Dallas and Fort Smith, along with the posse's train, full of spectators from Texarkana and Clarksville. Here is a contemporary account. You probably don't want to see this picture.

Here is a list of black men lynched in Paris:

William Armor, John Ransom, John Walker, September 6, 1892
Unidentified man, September 19, 1892
Henry Smith, January 31, 1893
Jefferson Cole, August 26, 1895
George Carter, February 11, 1901
J. H. McClinton, December 25, 1901
Henry Monson, January 27, 1913
Irving Arthur, Herman Arthur, July 6, 1920

That's eleven men killed by lynch mobs in one small Southern town. In addition, during this period, there were three lynchings in neighboring Red River county and one in neighboring Delta county. Of course, I suppose that some of the people who participated in or witnessed these lynchings were ancestors of mine. Our folks were lower-middle class farmers; they owned their land but had no money or social status. These were precisely the people most likely to join lynch mobs. However, these are not the kind of family stories that your grandma passes on to you.

Anyway, I have no illusions about human nature.

Posted 23:46 by John

Well, this ought to put to rest the charges of "AWOL" and "deserter" that have been flung at George Bush. Turns out he did his time in the Air National Guard for six years as he was supposed to have done. It looks like what he did during the last two years of his National Guard service was to pile up a bunch of service days during a couple of months, in order to fulfill his requirements, and then take a couple of months off.

This always leads to the question "What would you have done?" I guess my attitude is if they draft me, I'll go, but I have no plans to volunteer. If I were drafted, I'd try to get myself into a job where I didn't have much chance of getting shot, which I imagine I could do (useful analytical and language skills, age 37, bad knees--not your ideal front-line soldier.) Well, that's what Bush did. He got a place in the Air National Guard, which is not actually quite as cushy as it sounds because your chances of being killed in flight training were a hell of a lot higher than your chances of being shot down over North Vietnam. Also, your unit could be called up at any time, of course. However, Bush did stay a long away from the fighting.

The thing to remember is that Air National Guard units are / were almost always designed to be home defense units to fight the Russians; i.e. the purpose of the fighter pilots in the Guard is to scramble when we find out the Russkies are on the way. They weren't designed to do, say, combat air support in Vietnam.

Politically, this is both good and bad for Bush. It's good because he's been vindicated, and it's good because it makes Kerry look like the bad guy for going negative. Bush can now slam the hell out of Kerry for the major no-no of questioning Bush's patriotism. It's bad, though, because Kerry (or his campaign) has linked the world "Bush" and "deserter" in people's minds, and no matter how many times the story is debunked some people will still believe it. In fact, probably debunking it only this once is proably the best policy.

Whatever, this will have all been forgotten about come November.

The Vangua came out with its first piece saying, literally, "A new wave of puritanism is sweeping across the United States", because of the Janet Jackson breast thing.

Now, come, come. Lemme see if I can explain this. There are three groups of American pop-culture consumers: the Hopelessly Square, who listen to Kenny G and travel to Branson, Missouri, and wear loud golf clothes; the Middle of the Road, who pretty much swallow whatever kind of pop culture the media is plugging; and the Trendy Hipsters.

The Hopelessly Square were those who were offended by Janet Jackson's boob. Hopelessly Square people avoid R-rated movies and nasty rap and heavy metal music and cable TV except for the Jerry Falwell channel. As for the Middle of the Road, they're the people who actually are fans of Janet Jackson. They have cable and go to R movies and listen to gangsta rap. They weren't shocked by Janet's boob. The Trendy Hipsters are unshockable. Maybe if you did some coprophagia or necrophilia on TV they might be shocked. Like say if Janet and Michael got it on in the middle of the football field. Probably most of them would call it "breakthrough" and "iconoclastic" and "avant-garde", though.

Here's the thing about sports: it's a market that isn't segmented. Movies and music are segmented. You don't market a Tarantino or a Neil LaBute movie to everybody, for example, But the NFL is trying to market its product to every single person in America. So what they don't want to do is anger the Hopelessly Square, because those people make up a quarter or a third of football watchers.

The Super Bowl doesn't need showbiz personalities to attract fans; it's already got lots of fans in all three groups of Americans. What it needs to do is program its halftime entertainment in the good old square way--that is, bring out the marching bands, cheerleaders, and Punt, Pass, and Kick kids. Or have an old-timers flag football game. That's what we had traditionally at football games. The Squares would love it. The MORs will swallow whatever you give them, and the Trendies will make a virtue out of the "authenticity" of the new old halftime activities. Trendies are nostalgic for what's "real" and "old-time traditional".

Posted 13:40 by John

This is the fourth part of our series on the atomic bomb.

IV. Military Situation, July 31, 1945

Thirteen American divisions were scheduled to land on the island of Kyushu in November 1945, an operation twice as large as D-Day. Sixteen American divisions would invade Honshu in March 1946. One million American casualties were expected. The Japanese were prepared to resist to the last woman and child, planning for civilians to attack the Americans with sharpened bamboo sticks in suicidal human wave attacks. There are no estimates for the number of Japanese who would have died in an invasion, but they would have been at least several million, since the American planners believed that it would take until November 1946 to mop up the last Japanese resistance. (They were basing their projections on what they'd learned at Okinawa and Iwo Jima and Saipan and Guadalcanal and Manila and Tarawa and Tinian.) Meanwhile, the British were going to invade the Malay Peninsula with six divisions, 200,000 men, an operation as large as D-Day, and retake Singapore, on September 9, 1945. They expected fighting to last until March 1946. That fighting alone would have cost 50,000 British soldiers' and perhaps five times as many Japanese lives.

Said former U.S. Army Captain Harry Truman, who had commanded an artillery battery on the Western Front in 1918 and who had actually been in a war, on the front lines, and seen hundreds or thousands of people die, "Having found the bomb, we have used it. We have used it to shorten the agony of young Americans."

(Source: Thank God for the Atom Bomb, Paul Fussell)

Posted 22:12 by John

News from around these here parts: La Vanguardia is actually providing fairly decent coverage of the American elections. Their man, Eusebio Val, seems to be pretty much transmitting the conventional political wisdom regarding the Democratic primaries, without too much bias. Congratulations to the Vangua for not turning this into another anti-American festivity.

Otherwise, there's nothing much new. The election campaign continues with both sides slagging off the other and Zap promising the moon--now he's going to build 60,000 apartments per year and rent them to young people at a rate no higher than 35% of their salaries. Yeah, right. One thing about Spain is that politicians don't bother explaining where the money is going to come from when they promise us what they think we want. I mean, if, say, Kerry made that proposal tomorrow in the US campaign, the very first thing both his opponents and the press would ask him is "So are you gonna raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else in order to get this money to spend on this program?"

Looks like the conspiracy theory du mois in the Vangua is the American plot against the Catholic Church manifested in the novel "The Da Vinci Code". Enric Juliana brought it up, some other guy wrote a piece I didn't translate which condemned the book but doubted there was actually a conspiracy, and now Josep Miro i Ardevol, a Catalan nationalist and pretty extreme Catholic, has this to say:

Things are what they are. When an operation is well-organized, we should admit it. And "The Da Vinci Code" is exactly that: an operation against the Church from a high-level source, at least as good as the anti-Jewish poison of the "Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion". In that case the real author, it was learned, was the Czarist police. In this one, from the beginning, it's notorious public knowledge that it is Daw (sic) Brown. But what we haven't learned yet is the collective that is supporting it, the same that amplified to the point of paraoxysm the cases of pederast homosexuality of some American priests. It's the American political collective, which the excellent journalist Enric Juliana has described in these very pages. It will not be their last operation while the Catholic Church, truly universal and gifted with a strong center, as is the Papacy, continues as an alternative to the hegemonic model of globalization.

a) We will give credit where credit is due. Mr. Miro i Ardevol shows no signs of anti-Semitism and denounces the Protocols of Zion as a forgery by the Okhrana, which is what they were.

b) Mr. Miro i Ardevol is alleging an American conspiracy against the Church. That is nuts. Period. One-third of Americans are Catholics. Does Mr. Miro think that one-third of the responsible people in the US government are not Catholic? Of course they are. How is a plot like that going to be managed? This is flat-out paranoia.

c) Mr. Daw (sic) Brown's book is a NOVEL. It does not pretend to be the truth. It is a mystery-thriller, apparently trying to appeal to the same crowd that likes those boring Umberto Eco books and that insanely confusing Robert Ludlum crap. The basic theme of a mystery is that things are not what they seem and the detective must discover how. Very often, the thing that is not what it seems is a respectable organization, very frequently the US government (Seven Days in May, Six Days of the Condor, The Manchurian Candidate, JFK, etc. etc.) In this case, the rogue organization is the Catholic Church. I cannot think of another popular novel in which the Church is the infiltrated organization. Let me repeat: for Christ's sake, this is a work of fiction! And it's coming out of the same "anti-Catholic" American media industry that is also producing Mel Gibson's ultra-Catholic version of Jesus's martyrdom!

d) It is reprehensible for Mr. Miro to minimize the damage caused by the pederast (NOT homosexual, the two things are completely different; the great majority of gays, like the great majority of straights, are not pederasts) priests in the United States. The problem is not so much that there were a few pederasts in the priesthood; every large organization attracts some bad apples. But if the Church had been responsible, it would have moved its pedos to positions in which they had no access at all to children. And it would have turned in those who were perving off with kids, or at least gotten them some professional help. But the Church was not responsible and it tried to cover up the scandal while not transferring the pervopedos to Greenland to convert the walruses. This is why the archbishop of Boston had to resign. That is a goddamn disgrace. The Church is terribly embarrassed in the United States and deservedly so, and it's going to take a few years of penance to recover its former moral status.

e) It would be an extremely bad idea for the Church to ally itself with Old Europe and the Thirdworldistas against the "hegemonic model of globalization", which I think refers to American / British-style semi-capitalist democracy. (Of course no modern state is anywhere near laisser-faire capitalism.)

Sports: FC Barcelona is on a roll; they beat Osasuna away 1-2. Not that Osasuna is a particularly good team, but they're pretty tough at home. Saviola scored and Ronaldinho manufactured a goal all by himself which he put away with a chilena (bicycle-kick). I must admit that Edgar Davids is playing very well and that the team has been winning since they acquired him. Now, he's earning a million and a half euros from Barca for less than half a season, but that's pretty cheap figuring that Kluivert is costing you four million a half-season and he ain't doing shit. Not to mention the uselessness of the very expensive Marc Overmars. I'd recommend that Barca do what it can to bring Davids back next year if he keeps playing like this. He's 31, and Juventus decided he was over the hill, but it looks like they, and I, might have been wrong.

In the Spanish league, it's Real Madrid with 52 points, Valencia with 50, and Deportivo with 46, who are way out in front of everybody else and will certainly win three of Spain's four spots for the Champions League next year. Madrid, an enormously talented team that has until now played close to expectations, seems to be getting better and better, but Valencia is keeping pace just two points behind, and if either of them falters Deportivo has a chance to get into the race, too. I really like Valencia. They're a terrific team, and they play together like one. They don't have the big superstars that Madrid has, but all their players are good and they all play their asses off. As for the fourth spot for the Champions League, right now it belongs to no one else but FC Barcelona with 37 points, followed by Athletic Bilbao and Atletico Madrid with 36 each. Ronaldo is leading the league with 19 goals in 23 games, way ahead of Mista of Valencia with 13. Fernando Torres of Atletico has 12; rumor has it Barcelona is going to buy him for next season.

In other leagues: In Italy, Milan, Roma, and Juventus are way out ahead of everybody else. In England, it's Arsenal, Man U, and Chelsea bunched together at the top. Werder Bremen is out front in Germany but not by too much, with Bayern, Stuttgart, and Leverkusen behind them, and in Holland it's down to Ajax and PSV. Rumor has it that Barcelona wants to buy Van de Vaart from Ajax. Madrid is denying rumors that they're trying to buy Totti from Roma for next season.

Just a comment: I think that the United States was very lucky to have Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower as Presidents between 1932 and 1960, the critical years of the 20th century. Every other nation had some kind of problem with their leadership at some time during that period. In Britain Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were jokers (Churchill wasn't, but of course he was half-American); in France so were Daladier and Blum and Laval, though not De Gaulle; in Italy so was Mussolini. Hitler and Stalin and Chiang and Mao and the Japanese militarists were no jokers, but they were also all extremely bad people. In the States, you may disagree with Roosevelt's 1933-38 New Deal proto-socialist economic policies, which I about halfway do object to, but except for that we had somebody dependable running the country at all times. And the New Deal certainly did not wreck the country; it just probably wasn't the best economic policy for the times.

Posted 14:17 by John

This post is a continuation of our series on the atomic bomb.

III. Leading Up to the Bomb

The Americans had captured Iwo Jima and Okinawa, with heavy casualties. They had destroyed most of the Japanese navy and almost all Japanese shipping. (The Japanese were very poor at both submarine and antisubmarine warfare. American subs sank Japanese ships virtually as they pleased.) American battleships were pounding coastal zones on Honshu and hundreds of B-29s had been hitting Japanese cities every day since February. A total of 260,000 people were killed in the March-August 1945 camapign of terror bombings against Japanese cities.

But the Japanese would not surrender.

The destruction continued relentlessly, at virtually no loss to the American bomber crews but at appalling cost to Japan; by July 60 percent of the ground area of the country's sixty largest cities and towns had been burnt out. As MacArthur and other military hardheads had argued, however, the devastation did not seem to deflect the Japanese government to continuing the war. In early April (1945), after failing to draw China into a separate peace, Koiso had been replaced as Prime Minister by a moderate figurehead, the seventy-eight-year-old Admiral Kantaro Suzuki; Tojo, though a deposed Prime Minister, nevertheless retained a veto over cabinet decisions through his standing in the army, and he and other militarists were determined to fight it out to the end. This determination exacted sacrifices which even Hitler had not demanded of the Germans in the closing months of the war. The food ration was reduced below the 1500 calories necessary to support life, and more than a million people were set to grubbing up pine roots from which a form of aviation fuel could be distilled. On the economic front, reported a cabinet committee instructed by Suzuki to examine the situation, the steel and chemical industries were on the point of collapse, only a million tons of shipping remained afloat, insufficient to sustain movement between the home islands, and the railroad system would shortly cease to function. Still no one dared speak of peace. Tentative openings made in May through the Japanese legation in Switzerland by the American representative, Allen Dulles, were met with silence: over 400 people were arrested in Japan during 1945 on the mere suspicion of favoring negotiations.

In midsummer the American government began both to lose patience at Japan's intransigence and to yield to the temptation to end the war in a unique, spectacular, and incontestably decisive way. They were aware through Magic intercepts that the Suzuki government, like Koiso's before it, was pursuing backdoor negotiations with the Russians, whom it hoped would act as mediators; they were also aware that a principal sticking-point in Japan's attitude to ending the war was the "unconditional surrender" pronouncement of 1943, which all loyal Japanese recognized as a threat to the imperial system. However, since the Russians mediated in no way at all, and since the Potsdam conference following the surrender of Germany indicated that uncinditional surrender need not extend to the emperor's deposition, America's willingness to wait attenuated during the summer. On 26 July the Potsdam Proclamation was broadcast to Japan, threatening "the utter destruction of the Japanese homeland" unless the imperial government offered its unconditional surrender. Since 16 July President Truman had known that "utter destruction" lay within the United States's power, for on that day the first atomic weapon had been successfully detonated at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert. On 21 July, while the Potsdam meeting was in progress, he and Churchill agreed in principle that it should be used. On 25 July he informed Stalin that America had "a new weapon of unusually destructive force". Next day the order was issued to General Karl Spaatz, the commander of the Strategic Air Forces, to "deliver its first special bomb as soon as weather will permit visual bombing after about 3 August 1945 on one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki". The attempt to bring the Second World War to an end by the use of a revolutionary super-weapon had been decided.

Source: The Second World War, John Keegan.

Posted 02:13 by John

The subject of Noam Chomsky and his credibility has been brought up. Here is the best piece I know of on the subject, a complete intellectual demolition of Chomsky by Australian historian Keith Windschuttle in the New Criterion. Just in case you don't believe Chomsky is completely irresponsible, check out this passage by Windschuttle:

Despite his anti-Bolshevism, Chomsky remained a supporter of socialist revolution. He urged that “a true social revolution” would transform the masses so they could take power into their own hands and run institutions themselves. His favorite real-life political model was the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War.

That ought to be all you need to know about Chomsky right there.

Here's a long tirade, mostly about Chomsky's anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi connections in France, by one Werner Cohn, who certainly does dislike Chomsky. Cohn attacks Chomsky from an old-time left-wing and pro-Israeli position.

Here is a 1998 article by Brad DeLong on Chomsky's falsification of alleged facts from alleged sources, and at the bottom it contains a series of links to other pieces denouncing Chomsky's mendaciousness. This is a 2002 article by DeLong on the same subject with new and different information.

This is a David Horowitz all-out assault on Chomsky, written right after 9-11. Horowitz is an American right-wing political activist, a converted Marxist, for those of you who haven't heard of him.

Wanna see Chomsky hang himself with his own words? Here's what Noam broadcast over Radio Hanoi back in the glory days.

And finally, don't miss this crackpot piece claiming that Chomsky is working for the US military and that he's one of the Illuminati. David Icke will be picking up on this pretty soon and will denounce Chomsky as a tool of the reptilian aliens from outer space who control everything. Then where are our leftists going to base their arguments, after Icke's devastating expose on the Chomsky = reptilian connection?

UPDATE: The following specific accusations against Chomsky are made in the Windschuttle and Horowitz articles.

Noam Chomsky:

said the US deserved 9-11 because of the "extreme terrorism" of US foreign policy

praised Mao's China--during the Cultural Revolution

openly supported Vietcong terrorism and called for the same in the Philippines

supported the Khmer Rouge; denied the mass killings in Cambodia; accused his critics on this issue of lying; falsely claimed the Economist as his source

lied about the 1998 attack on the Bin Laden pharmaceutical factory in Sudan; claimed that it resulted in tens of thousands of deaths; lied, saying that Human Rights Watch was one of his sources

believes the media is a mass conspiracy putting out "systematic propaganda"

claimed that the Bosnian Muslims were America's "Balkan clients" while opposing all US efforts to deal with Slobodan Milosevic

still denies that Robert Faurisson, anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, is a Nazi

Horowitz's article lays out these pearls of Chomskyan belief:

According to Chomsky, in the first battle of the postwar struggle with the Soviet Empire, "the United States was picking up where the Nazis had left off."

According to Chomsky, during the Cold War, American operations behind the Iron Curtain included "a ‘secret army’ under US-Nazi auspices that sought to provide agents and military supplies to armies that had been established by Hitler and which were still operating inside the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe through the early 1950s."

According to Chomsky, in Latin America during the Cold War, U.S. support for legitimate governments against Communist subversion led to US complicity under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in "the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads."

According to Chomsky, there is "a close correlation worldwide between torture and U.S. aid."

According to Chomsky, America "invaded" Vietnam to slaughter its people, and even after America left in 1975, under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, "the major policy goal of the US has been to maximize repression and suffering in the countries that were devastated by our violence. The degree of the cruelty is quite astonishing."

According to Chomsky, "the pretext for Washington’s terrorist wars [i.e., in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, etc.] was self-defense, the standard official justification for just about any monstrous act, even the Nazi Holocaust."

In sum, according to Chomsky, "legally speaking, there’s a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They’ve all been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes."

Noam Chomsky is not a serious intellectual of any sort. His record of supporting totalitarians, of distorting and lying about the facts, of making up sources, of using extremist rhetoric, and of outright paranoia completely discredit him. Nothing he says is to be believed; he's lied and distorted and just made stuff up too often in the past. In addition, he is a morally reprehensible human being.

Posted 22:35 by John

Since the subject has come up, I am going to do a series of posts on the American decision to use the atomic bomb. This is one of the most criticized actions in history, and the basic criticism is hard to object to: Blasting a hundred thousand people to death is a very bad thing. But those who make this obvious point sometimes do not know the answer to this question: Compared to what?

I. The Committee Makes Its Recommendation

The highly secret "Interim Committee on S-1" met for the first time on May 9, 1945. The chairman was Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The other eight members were Stimson's special assistant, George Harrison; Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, President Truman's personal representative; Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph Bard; Assistant Secretary of State William Clayton; James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard; Karl T. Compton, president of MIT; and Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institute. On May 31 they were joined by physicists Enrico Fermi, Arthur H. Compton, Ernest O. Lawrence, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, and General George Marshall.

After extensive debate, that day the committee unanimously decided that "the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible". Byrnes reported the results directly to Truman, who "with reluctance had to agree, that he could think of no alternative," according to Byrnes. The bomb was going to be used. When and where were still to be decided.

Remember, at this time the battle of Okinawa was in full swing. It was probably the most brutal battle American soldiers have ever fought in. The Japanese dug into caves and pillboxes and fought to the death despite overwhelming American material superiority. The Americans lost 12,000 killed and 36,000 wounded. (Fighter pilot George Bush was shot down but bailed out into the water and survived.) Thirty American ships were sunk. The Japanese lost at least 110,000 dead soldiers, and as many as 150,000 Okinawan civilians were killed in the fighting. Nobody wanted to see another Okinawa.

Source: Truman, David McCullough.

II. Bombing Civilians

...Attitudes about the bombing of civilian targets had changed drastically in Washington, as in the nation, the longer the war went on. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1937, it had been viewed as an atrocity of the most appalling kind. When the war in Europe erupted in 1939, Roosevelt had begged both sides to refrain from the "inhuman barbarism" of bombing civilians. His "arsenal of democracy" speech in December 1940 had had particular power and urgency because German bombers were pounding London. But the tide of war had turned...That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany--two British raids, one American--incendiary bombs set off a firestorm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died.

...In one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9-10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. With Japan vowing anew to fight to the end, the raids continued. On May 14, five hundred B-29s hit Nagoya, Japan's third largest industrial city, in what the New York Times called the greatest concentration of fire bombs in the history of aerial warfare. On May 23, five square miles of Tokyo were obliterated. As weeks passed, other coastal cities were hit--Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe.

(Source: Truman, McCullough, pages 393-393.)

The Axis powers started the practice of bombing civilians, and Japan was defeated by that very practice. The Axis converted Allied civilians into military targets. It is not appropriate to criticize the Allies for doing the same to the citizens of the Axis nations. John Keegan believes that the "moral corruption" of the Nazis and the Japanese militarists spread to the Allies; that is, the Nazis and the Japanese were willing to sacrifice everything for victory. The Allies couldn't beat them unless they were equally ruthless.

Just a note: During the Iraq War many critics of the Coalition accused Coalition forces of intentionally killing civilians. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. American and British forces did their best to avoid killing civilians whenever possible. If we'd wanted to, we could have completely obliterated Baghdad without using nuclear weapons. Nothing of the sort happened. Now, in World War II, nobody would have given a damn whether an American (or British, not to mention Russian, German, or Japanese) military action was going to kill enemy civilians. I imagine the general reaction would have been something like "The more, the merrier." Fortunately, this is not World War II anymore, and we don't have to live by World War II standards anymore, thanks to the people who won it.

Posted 21:02 by John

Check out this New York Times article on animals and homosexuality. Seems that penguins and dolphins, not to mention the notorious bonobos, among others, form same-sex partnerships. Very interesting. I really love the headline, though: "The Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name".

Posted 15:28 by John

Since we're in the middle of the primary season in the States and heading for a general election in March in Spain, here's one of my favorite political stories. It shows how much big events can depend on little things and how, whenever there's a big screwup of some sort, alcohol is often involved.

It was the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago and a group of powerful party insiders decided that Henry Wallace, the incumbent Vice-President, was a dangerous radical, and had to be removed from the ticket. They managed to get semi-approval for their plan from Franklin Roosevelt, who was clearly dying but who was to be reelected anyway. These party leaders knew that Wallace was not fit to be President, and they decided that Missouri Senator Harry Truman was their man, someone they could trust to take over as President when Roosevelt died.

At the Blackstone (Hotel), (party chairman Bob) Hannegan told Truman he might have to be nominated that night, depending whether they had the votes. They would have to be ready to move fast. Bennett Clark (the other Senator from Missouri) was supposed to nominate Truman, but no one knew where he was. Clark, whose wife had died the year before, was drinking more than usual. Truman went to look for him. Hannegan started for the convention hall.

The Wallace supporters tried to stampede the convention that night. Wallace gave a fine speech and momentum began to build on the convention floor for his renomination as VP. Bob Hannegan and Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly got to the convention chairman and convinced him to adjourn before Wallace's name could be placed in nomination by liberal Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida, who was jumping up and down on a chair while waving a flag in an intent to get the chairman's attention and the floor. Henry Wallace might well have been nominated for Vice President that night, and he would have succeeded Roosevelt as President. He also might have lost us the Cold War before it began.

Harry Truman had witnessed none of this. He had spent the night in search of Bennett Clark, finding him finally in a room where he was not supposed to be, at the Sherman (Hotel), and too drunk to say much more than hello. By then it was past midnight. "So I called Bob Hannegan," Truman remembered, "and said 'I found your boy. He's cockeyed. I don't know whether I can get him ready or not, and I hope to Christ I can't.'"

Truman and Hannegan sobered Clark up, more or less, and they got him to the convention the next day where he nominated Truman for VP.

But his speech for Truman was short and had none of his usual flair.

Ah, those were the days when politics was really fun. (Quotations from Truman by David McCullough.)

Posted 16:40 by John

Here's the news from these here parts. As you only know if you've been following the Spanish media, Jose Maria Aznar spoke at a joint session of Congress in Washington. This is a nice honor, a good photo op, but no big deal since he didn't say anything we hadn't heard several times before. Most of the congressmen blew the event off and their seats were filled by diplomats in order to make it look like a full house. Still, it was a nice tribute to a steadfast ally.

The Vangua is making a big deal about some statements made by CIA director George Tenet; paraphrasing their story, the CIA never said anything about "imminent threats". They did say that Saddam had hostile intentions, intentions of rearming, a record of dishonesty, and the fact that he could do something nasty at any time.

They're also making a big deal about this Pakistani scientist who "sold nuclear secrets and equipment to Libya, Iran, and North Korea" all on his lonesome. Yeah, right. I have no problem believing that Pakistan sold that stuff to those criminals and dictators. I imagine it was done with full knowledge by rogue elements within Pakistan and especially by the Pakistani intelligence service. That's just a guess; I'm no expert.

To me this is just more evidence that the One Great Conspiracy Theory that I believe in is true. That theory says that there are a bunch of rogue states from Libya to North Korea, a bunch of terrorist organizations from ETA to Hamas to those whackjobs in the Philippines, and unpleasant elements within several non-rogue states like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt, that have a loose alliance and are known to have worked together in the past. Gee whiz, a Pakistani nuke scientist "admits" selling nukes to Iran, Libya, and North Korea? What the hell is going on here? It sounds to me like the threat from the Rogue Alliance needs some containing and if possible some rollback. Qaddafi's renunciation of his WMD programs is a good sign, for example.

As for Ariel Sharon and the Israeli pullback from the Gaza settlements: The way to peace is a complete pullout of settlements from the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for everyone's recognition of Israel's existence. The fence stays up and access through will be controlled by Israeli police. After five years of peace we think about taking the fence down. Sharon is the only leader who can pull this off because he is trusted as a hard-liner by the Israelis. No way the Israelis would have gone for a pullout from Gaza with someone they thought of as wishy-washy in charge.

The rumors abound about a possible split between the PSC (Catalan Socialist party) and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). The PSOE is pissed off as all hell that PSC leader Maragall made a coalition with Esquerra Republicana, a pro-independence party, in the first place. See, the PSOE has no truck with Catalan separatism. Nationalism, like flags and sardanas, they can handle. Independence is something else. The Carod-Rovira crap with ETA was the last straw. The PSOE is seriously pissed off at its Catalan partners. It's even more embarrassing that the PSOE and the PP are allied in the Basque Country; that is, the differences between them are a lot smaller than between either of them and the Basque nationalists. And the PSC's slogan for the March 14 elections is "If you want it, we'll beat the PP", trying to appeal strictly negatively to those who dislike Aznar and Rajoy. And that's a lot of people around here.

Some unpleasant news about the Catalan health-care system; I am not personally complaining, mind, I am very pleased with the quality of the National Health here. But there are almost 60,000 people on the waiting list for a "non-essential" operation, including almost 10,000 who have cataracts, 7600 who need a knee replacement and almost 2000 who need a hip replacement, and, get this, 500 awaiting circumcision. Those people must either be Jewish, and there aren't many Jews around here, or have phimosis. Ouch. How can you make the poor guy wait for surgery to correct that? And there are nearly 10,000 with some kind of cyst or boil. Yuck, gross, get rid of that already, people! Give them their operations! We'll pay more if only not to see huge boils sprouting out of people's necks on the streets! 548 people are awaiting wart surgery. Oh, icky poo. I'd make a lousy doctor. "Uh, what's growing on you today? Warts, boils, goiters? Oh, Jesus, it's the Elephant Man."

Some nutcase in Esplugues, a suburb of Barcelona, stabbed his mom in the neck and buried her in quicklime in their apartment back in November 2002. Then he'd cry all night, screaming, "Mama, Mama, why did you leave me?" Finally the other relatives called the cops, after a year or so of this. Pure Ozarks. These folks were not your regular middle-class family; mom was a hooker who'd graduated to madam. The Vangua also says that more than 30,000 Spaniards practice sexual tourism with children in Latin America every year, among the top five nationalities. The others are France, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. Pervos going to Cuba to get laid cheap by good-looking hookers, under 18 if possible, desperate for hard currency. These are the people who support Fidel Castro's tourism industry. Also by the way, La Stampa in Turin says that Barcelona is the Mediterranean capital of homosexual tourism, the "Sodom of the Mare Nostrum". In the first six months of 2003 more than 600,000 gays visited Barcelona, and the area around Calles Diputacion and Concejo Ciento to the left of the Paseo de Gracia is known as "the Gaixample". I wonder whether Barcelona may have a concentration of switch-hitters whom men travel hundreds of miles to meet. Catalans are known for their anal fixations...

Since we're on the topic of sex, the actress Cayetana Guillen Cuervo, who is rather waiflike, blonde, and thirtyish, has announced through her lawyer (Cristina Almeida, of all people) that she's going to sue anyone spreading rumors that she is romantically involved with "a well-known politician". Rumor has it that the politician is no one less than Jose Maria Aznar. Hey, if it's true, good job! I wouldn't kick her out of be...oops, wait, I'm happily married, so I roundly deplore any such action taken by our Prime Minister, if such actions were taken.

Here, by the way, is a good story from Deepest America. It wasn't the Ozarks, but it could have been...

Posted 14:48 by John

There's a debate going on down in the Comments section, and it's spilled over into Trevor's blog Kaleboel.

(Scroll down--you may have to scroll down a long way--to about the fifth post, titled Spanish / Castilian. Trevor, when I enter your blog, I get the "header" and then blank space about 3/4 the way down the scroll, if you see what I mean. Is this just my computer?)

Here's the official Iberian Notes Press Release on the topic.

1. In English the language spoken in Spain and most of Latin America is called "Spanish". "Castilian" refers to the dialect of Spanish spoken in the northern two-thirds of Spain; it's characterized by the "lisping" TH sound for Z and C before E or I. "Peninsular" refers to features common to all dialects of Spanish in Spain--for example, the use of "vosotros". This is English and those are the rules we use. It personally doesn't matter to me whether you or I say "espanol" or "castellano" when speaking Spanish. I think they are interchangeable. When speaking Catalan I say "castella", of course, that being the standard term in Catalan. You can say what you want as long as I can understand what you say.

(Note: Same deal works for "American". In English it means a person from the United States. [Also in French, German, Italian, and Russian.] Some people claim that in Spanish "americano" refers to anyone from the Americas. Fair enough, in Spanish. If the rule is that what we call "American", you call "estadounidense" or "norteamericano", then fine, when we're speaking Spanish that's the terminology we will use. But when we're speaking English I will use the right word in English. You can do whatever you want.)

2. I think that, absent government regulations, the language spoken in a place ought to respond to the market. That is, you will use the language(s) you need to use to get along. In that case, most people will speak both Catalan and Spanish, here in Barcelona. If you work at a supermarket, for example, some of the customers are going to want to use one and some are going to want to use the other, so it's perfectly acceptable for the boss to demand that the worker be basically competent in both languages, at least to greet clients, make change, and say goodbye.

However, there's something that Catalan nationalists refuse to accept, which is that people have the right to live here and not learn Catalan if they don't want to or need to. If I'm the client, you should adapt to my language. And if I'm the boss, you should adapt to my language. And if that language is Spanish rather than Catalan, or vice versa, then you'll just have to put up with it. See what I mean? It's not that hard.

For international purposes, Catalan has little appeal except for those who are interested in Catalonia, its culture, and its language. (Valuable things to be interested in. I am interested in them. That is why I live here.) They will want to learn Catalan. The rest will want to deal in Spanish or in English, whichever language they already know. You can't force foreigners to use Catalan, nor can you force people from the rest of Spain to do so.

Here's an example. Say you are half liquored-up at some party and it's two in the morning, and you are flirting with someone attractive. You both REALLY want to communicate to one another that your genitals are becoming inflamed. What language are you going to use? Let's say I speak English best, then Spanish, then Catalan, then French. You speak Catalan best, then Spanish, then French, and then English. Which language are we going to use? Now be honest.

Posted 14:00 by John

InstaPundit is passing out recipes, so I suppose I should deign to catblog and recipeblog for at least one entry.

Sushi the cat is leaving us today. We stuck up some signs at vets and pet stores around the neighborhood and some woman who lives right here on the Plaza del Norte saw one and wants him. So it's going to be a little more peaceful around here, though we'll miss him. He's a good cat.

Here's how to stock up on decent vegetarian food.

MUSHROOM VEGGIE RICE

Slice up about half a pound of mushrooms. Cut up a leek. Add all the broccoli florets off a broccoli stalk. Saute the lot in olive oil. Add salt, pepper, 1 clove garlic, 1 cup dry rice. Saute another minute or two and then add 2 1/2 cups water and soy sauce to taste. I like a couple of spoonfuls but that's just me. Heat to boiling and then cover, turn down heat, and simmer about 20 minutes or until rice is done.

CREAM OF VEGETABLE SOUP

Take the broccoli stem(s) that you cut the florets off for the rice. Slice it up. Peel and slice up two or three potatoes, a carrot or two, and a leek or two. Feel free to add zucchini, cauliflower, green beans, etc. if you want. Saute the lot of veggies lightly in olive oil, just a minute or two, and then heat them to boiling in a pot with about one liter of water so the veggies are, like, half steamed and half boiled. Give 'em at least ten minutes over low bubbling heat. Add salt, pepper, and a half-liter of milk. Or less, depending on how thick you like your soup. If you like it really really thick, add another potato. Add a shot of brandy or sherry if you want, and then liquefy in the blender or with the "minipimer". Then let it simmer for a few minutes longer over low heat. The longer it simmers, the thicker it will be. Can be served hot or cold, like vichyssoise.

This ought to do you for a couple of days and will provide leftovers for another couple of days.

Posted 11:35 by John

One of my various identities is that of teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL). Now, I have an MA in applied linguistics, which is basically general linguistics with an emphasis on second language acquisition. I was in grad school between '92 and '94, at the height of the touchy-feely years. The whole point of touchy-feeliness is to disprove all obvious traditional ways of doing things that are just too old-fashioned and judgemental and the like.

Well, the standard way we'd always thought of EFL was that the enemy to overcome is interference. The definition of interference is that the student's original language affects his competence in English: e.g. "I broke my shirt" instead of tore because the two words break and tear in English are just one word, romper, in Spanish. Another examlpe would be Spanish-speakers unable to distinguish between the J sound and the Y sound in English, because the two sounds are "different" in English but "the same" in Spanish.

The problem here is that a really good teacher of EFL must know not only the target language but at least something about the students' native language. That is hard to do. There aren't that many people who are really bilingual at an academic level. Teaching often doesn't provide enough money to satisfy these people, whose expectations are often high.

What the foo-foos tried to do was come up with a magic formula to make EFL easy. See, teaching EFL correctly is hard. You have to know the grammar inside-and-out, you have to understand vocabulary nuances, you have to be able to correct writing for content and style, you have to model appropriate English for your students, you have to provide them with large quantities of reading and listening input, and you have to do it over and over because they're not going to get it the first time. Also, you have to know how to manage a class. There's not a magic bullet. You have to write dozens of compositions and have thousands of conversations and do hundreds of dumb grammar exercises (which are nonetheless very useful because they demand that a student follow a standard model and learn to imitate it), and the teacher has to be competent enough to be able to teach all this stuff.

Problem: The educational system in America attracts many people of only modest talents, since it doesn't pay that well compared to the amount of crap you have to put up with.

Solution: Raise teacher pay in order to attract people who might otherwise become lawyers or get MBAs.

Problem: Right now we've got a bunch of incompetents holding down jobs in the public schools. We're gonna pay these losers the same sixty grand a year as these really competent people we're trying to attract?

Solution: Very strict competence exams in which you are required to demonstrate your competence and ability in your teaching field.

Problem: The teachers' unions won't stand for that.

Solution: Fire the lot of them on June 1 and advertise for college graduates to sign up at sixty grand a year. (Of course, we allow fired teachers to compete for the new jobs open, and I imagine we'll hire all the good ones back since we'll be paying them a lot better than before. As for the incompetents who can't pass the test, let 'em look for work in the growing field of 7-11 cashiering.) We oughta be ready to go by the end of August. Set up a new system in which a teacher needs a BA in his field and what we'll be generous and call an MA in education, a one-year course in which you learn mostly practical shit, like say the extent they can hold you responsible if you're on bus duty, you turn one way because little Billy is pushing little Johnny around, and little Keisha walks in front of a bus while your back is turned.

(That should be Education 101; not "Basic Curriculum and Instruction" but "What Can They Sue Me For?")

Failed Solution: Look for teachable formulas that will allow even the biggest idiot to somehow make it through el-ed on sheer effort and nastiness to successfully impart knowledge to students.

In EFL there have been dozens. One is called audiolingualism, in which you fire questions at the students in the target language so that they get to be able to reproduce the answers automatically. This actually has some value at basic levels, especially when you come to a point which just has to be memorized, like irregular verb forms.

Some are a lot weirder. There's one where you break out a box of colored rods of different length. Then you ask all these retarded questions like "Jose, tell Paco to put the black rod on the red one," or "Paco, which is longer, the black rod or your rod...no, no, the blue rod you're holding..." This can apparently be combined with this one from Bulgaria, in which you sit learners down in comfortable chairs, turn the lights down, and the teacher speaks reassuringly in the target language. Apparently you get the students into a stupor and they learn unconsciously or something.

What all the methods have in common is that they can be picked up fairly quickly by not-too-bright people, who are then considered to be fit as teachers when they know no grammar, nothing about writing, and have read nothing. You just teach according to the formula.

(The formula always includes a lot of group work, which I am in favor of for about a third to a half of class time, as long as everyone's speaking in English about a topic I give them, and using the grammar or vocab that we're working on. The problem here is you have to ride herd on group work to make sure they're really working and not just dicking off. I take notes on errors and answer questions and then take five minutes to correct them as a class at the end of each conversation group activity. Lots of folks just sit down at their desks, though, rather than monitoring. The formula also tries to minimize correcting, to the point at which some teachers don't correct their students' errors, in speaking or in writing. In addition, the formula de-emphasizes grammar. I have seen new teachers just out of college who had never heard of what a freakin' verb tense was, for Chrissakes. Supposedly doing grammar exercises doesn't help students learn, and it's a drag anyway, so we can just sort of skip over it. Yeah, right.)

I'm sorry. There's no magic formula for teaching or learning anything. The brighter the student, the quicker he'll learn, and the brighter the teacher, the more his students will learn. It's kind of like journalism: the best ones are those who studied something other than journalism at college. And the only way you'll attract the above-average people we need as teachers is giving them above-average pay and considerably better working conditions. I bet we wind up saving a lot of money in the long run. Imagine if even only half the time spent at school were useful! What a miracle that would be!

Posted 17:15 by John

Let's see what you guys think of this logic.

a) The dominant culture in the United States is European. (More specifically, largely British.) The language, religion, legal system, ideolog(ies), cooking and sewing and building and working and farming traditions, are all of European origin. So why should the Europeans dislike the United States? After all, Americans are pretty much Europeans, and so disliking America is disliking yourself, if you're European. The dislike must, therefore, be due to some outside, non-European influence.

b) American Indians had a great deal of direct influence on the way early Euro-Americans lived. Euro-Americans adopted some farming methods and the like from the Indians. Unfortunately, there were too few Indians (when the Pilgrims landed the East Coast Indians had already been literally decimated by smallpox; 90% had died of a smallpox epidemic most likely caught from fishermen, who'd been up and down the Atlantic coast ever since at least 1500 AD) to have much of an effect on the European-Americans beyond basic practical stuff about planting corn and the like. And, anyway, the European-Americans killed some 20,000-40,000 of them in the frontier wars. So we can't really say they've had too much of an effect on making modern American culture what it is now. They haven't made Americans really different from Europeans.

c) Asians have never really come to America in large numbers until after World War II. While they've certainly played an important role in US history, from the Chinese labor gangs on the Central Pacific railway to the shameful deportation of the Japanese in California during World War II, again, there just haven't been enough of 'em until very recently to have made a defining difference between Europe and America. Not that Asians don't add a valuable flavor to American culture and all, they add to its dynamism and to its sheer variety, but they play the same role as they do in most European countries, which have Asians too. So that's not a major difference.

d) Hispanics have certainly played an important role in American history, and I would even argue that the Hispanic influence is important enough to be defining. Part of what makes America what it is--the cowboy tradition, the clothes we wear around the world now, Southwestern architecture, Texi-Cali-Mexi food, horses and cattle and ranching, border bilingualism, country and western music, large-scale grain farming--is due to Mexican Hispanic influence. And Puerto Rican and Cuban Hispanics give a distinct Caribbean flavor to many Eastern cities as well. (They've added to my diet, anyway, and for the better.) But that's all stuff that the Europeans like. At least they say they like it in its original, Latin American form. They love Hispanics when they're in Latin America. It's very hip and all. So the Hispanic influence in United States culture is not what irritates the Europeans about the US.

So it must be down to e) the African Americans. Now, the first blacks were landed in Virginia in 1619, meaning that their forebears were in America since before 99% of white people's forebears were. At the time of the Revolution the South was one-third black, and by 1860 blacks were a majority in several Southern states. Black people have had a great deal of presence in and influence on modern American culture, especially popular culture, and especially in the South. And their presence will only become greater, since you have to figure that before America began to dismantle Jim Crow in 1954 (Truman had already integrated the Army) black culture was officially discriminated against, and yet it still bubbled up like lava, unstoppably. Give it fifty more years of relative lack of racism and watch it flourish. Popular music and dance, folktales and legends, food, religion, dialect, and almost four hundred years of common history in the New World show the continuing major African influence on American culture. It is the basic mixture that truly makes the roots of American culture different from European. After all, Jim, the hero of the Great American Novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is black.

Is this what the Old Europeans are objecting to?

Posted 14:03 by John

One thing a lot of folks outside the United States often don't understand is the way the military system works. Since the draft was abolished in 1973 we have not had a conscripted army; it's been only volunteers. (Note: When men turn 18, they must register for the draft. You can do that at the Post Office. If they should need to reintroduce conscription in case of war, they've got the system ready to do so.)

What this means is that the army (let's just refer to the whole armed forces as the army to simplify things) needs to attract people to join or there won't be an army. So army service in the US is not particularly onerous and it provides a good number of benefits. (Of course, you have to risk getting shot, but probably 90% of soldiers are not in combat units, and even combat soldiers' risks are not all that high, when you figure that there are like one and a half million people in the army and about 500 have been killed so far in Iraq.)

First, it pays better than minimum wage and provides room and board and health care for you and your family. Second, they pay for your university education, I believe at the rate of one year of college for one year of service. Third, if you have any sort of aptitude, you'll get training in something sort of useful, driving a truck or communications or electronics or some other skill. Fourth, "1996-2000, Corporal, US Army" looks a hell of a lot better on your CV than "1996-2000, Burger-flipper, McDonalds".

One other thing the army does for some people is it gives them a sense of achievement. Hey, if you make it through basic training, you've proved something, because not everyone is tough enough or smart enough to do that. If you get promoted, hey, great, you know you deserved it. They don't pass out free promotions. And you get to go back to the old neighborhood wearing the cool-looking uniform. You also get a sense of camaraderie and fellowship, and since many Americans are patriotic, you get to feel (quite justifiably) that you're somebody important and virtuous because you're helping to defend your country and your fellow citizens.

I noticed today that the army is running ads encouraging people to join using the slogan "Earn dignity, honor, respect." That's what they're appealing to, and interestingly, that's exactly what street gangs promise their members. I'll bet that slogan works on a lot of people, since an army is really just a sophisticated street gang. It's got its soldiers, its turf, its hierarchy, its camaraderie, its violence, its symbols and uniforms, its discipline, its feeling of belonging, its probationary period that must be survived, its emphasis on honor and respect and duty and responsibility, the common feeling that you mustn't let your comrades down.

One thing the army is generally known as is the least racist major institution in America. Hell, a black guy made it all the way to the top, and success in the army depends exclusively upon your merit and competence, for obvious reasons. Who cares if your buddies are black or white? Your life depends up on them and you'd better get used to that. Most people do so remarkably fast, I've read.

There's a European stereotype, though, which says that American soldiers are all poor blacks and Hispanics. Now, it's true that army service tends to appeal most to the lower-middle classes, but you see all ranks of society (except the California and East Coast wannabe non-Americans) in the army. I'm not going to look the stats up; if you guys want to check me on this you can, but I have read that blacks are overrepresented in the army as a whole (the US is like 11% black, while the army is more like 18% black) but underrepresented in combat units (which are like 9% black). This, by the way, was also true in Vietnam. The legend that blacks were killed there in disproportionate numbers is simply not true.

Don't ask me why this should be. My guess is it's got something to do with relative educational levels of average blacks and average whites. The white person quite likely went to a better school than the black person and so is more likely to qualify for combat duty. Of course this isn't always true and there are thousands of exceptions.

Posted 19:18 by John

Here's an interesting piece by Mark Strauss that criticizes elements of the antiglobalization movement for their anti-Semitism. (They apparently now want to be called "otherworldists".) Strauss points out the connections between the "red" (Marxist), "green" (environmentalist), and "brown" (ultranationalist) worldviews and how each one sees the Jews.

A summary of that commingled worldview, which we could call "Old Europeanism", might be "The Jewish-American capitalists (who also torture the martyred Palestinians) are oppressing the people, especially in the Third World (from where they suck their ill-gotten wealth), as they destroy our noble homeland, abusing our beautiful natural environment and eroding away our great historic culture with trashy pornographic Hollywood movies. We must defend our people, our culture, and our homeland, and we must help save the world from the clutches of the Jewish-American octopus."

Here's Strauss on red-green-brown rabble-rouser Jose Bove, in which Bove hangs himself with his own words.

The greens and the browns share another common cause: opposition to Israel. Given the antiglobalization movement’s sympathy for Third-World causes, it’s not surprising that French activist Jose Bove took a break from trashing McDonald’s restaurants to show his solidarity with the Palestinian movement by visiting a besieged Yasir Arafat in Ramallah last year.

But, in the case of the new left, the salient question is not: What do antiglobalization activists have against Israel? Rather, it is important to ask: Why only Israel? Why didn’t Bove travel to Russia to demonstrate his solidarity with Muslim Chechen separatists fighting their own war of liberation? Why are campus petitions demanding that universities divest funds from companies with ties to Israel, but not China? Why do the same anti-globalization rallies that denounce Israel’s tactics against the Palestinians remain silent on the thousands of Muslims killed in pogroms in Gujarat, India?

Israel enjoys a unique pariah status among the antiglobalization movement because it is viewed as the world’s sole remaining colonialist state—an exploitative, capitalist enclave created by Western powers in the heart of the developing world. “They’re trying to impose an apartheid system on both the occupied territories and the Arab population in the rest of Israel,” says Bove. “They are also putting in place—with the support of the World Bank—a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East into globalized production circuits, through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labor.”

Opposing the policies of the Israeli government does not make the new left anti-Semitic. But a movement campaigning for global social justice makes a mockery of itself by singling out just the Jewish state for condemnation. And when the conspiratorial mindset of the antiglobalization movement mingles with anti-Israeli rhetoric, the results can get ugly. Bove, for instance, told a reporter that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was responsible for anti-Semitic attacks in France in order to distract attention from its government’s actions in the occupied territories.

Posted 15:36 by John

It's Super Bowl Sunday again--and, pardon me, the season is too damn long when the Super Bowl is played in February. Here's a story from Fox News on "the perfect American holiday".

My guess is that the Super Bowl is actually watched by 30 million people or so, real football fans or at least people who casually follow the sport. The rest of the 150 or so million viewers are just kind of there, hanging out at the party and watching the TV commercials.

Here's why I think the Super Bowl is such a big deal:

a) It's a great excuse for a party. Nobody watches the Super Bowl alone. You get all your friends together. And the party is gonna include beer. Lots of beer.

b) It's an unofficial holiday. Official holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and the fourth of July have their own traditional agenda, and people have family-type celebrations. But on the unofficial ones, like St. Patrick's Day, New Year's Eve, Halloween, and the Super Bowl, people get together with their friends, not their families. And they drink lots of beer, which you really can't do on a family holiday. Unofficial holidays are frequently more fun than official ones. (Note: There are frequently attempts to foment new unofficial holidays. The beer companies have been trying to do it with Cinco de Mayo for years.)

c) It's a unique sports event. In all the other major American sports, the champion is determined by a best-of-seven-game series, which means that to follow, say, the NBA Finals, you've got to watch several different games. Several of the games at least are on workdays, cutting down viewership. The non-fan doesn't get up for the event; he may not even know it's going on. But in the Super Bowl it's all down to one game played on a day off from work. So you can drink lots of beer. (This is even a plot twist in a Tom Clancy novel; the President gets drunk watching the Super Bowl and so he wants to nuke Iran when terrorists destroy the stadium. Jack Ryan has to stop him.)

d) It's a television event. American football is extremely television-friendly. There's a pause between each play in which the announcers can rerun the last one and explain it, so the viewer thinks he really knows what's going on. There are frequent breaks for commercials and for people to get up and pee or go to the fridge. There's usually not much going on away from the ball, so you don't miss any of the action as you do in soccer and baseball. And it's an action-packed, violent game. That sells, as you can see by looking at the success of violent action movies. Beer is also successful.

e) People are interested in TV commercials. (Note: Every English teacher has several conversational gambits ready for when he has five or then minutes to kill. The one that works best is getting students to tell you about their favorite TV ad--but in English, of course. People here in Europe like them too.) It shouldn't be surprising--commercials have terrific production values, are often clever and funny, show people products in an attractive way, and catch your attention and hold it. They're much better made than most of the crap on TV. Well, the Super Bowl has become the traditional launch date for new TV advertising campaigns, and people tune in to see them.

The Spanish equivalent is New Year's Eve, in which everyone watches TV until midnight and then goes out, gets loaded, and barfs all over the sidewalk in front of my house. Each TV channel puts on some big gala spectacular with all the network's stars. Everybody in the whole damn country is watching one of them. And the advertising companies take advantage of it.

This doesn't only happen in America. Freixenet, the cava company, puts out a Christmas ad every year. They hire some big star from America and have a huge production number with bubbling glasses and the like. They advertise for the advertisement--that is, you see full-page ads in newspapers and magazines saying "Tune in for this year's new Freixenet ad at 9 PM Saturday night on TV 1". Also, speaking of beer, Estrella has an annual campaign for which they manufacture a pop hit song every year, along with a big production number. It's shown exclusively on the soccer games, and the song always gets all over the radio for a few months after the campaign is released.

Here's Yank-hating Brit Andy Robinson in La Vanguardia today.

The Super Bowl is much, much more than an American football game in the US, it is the day on which the Americans try to celebrate what unites them although it be a Nike logo, a bag of Lay's potato chips, or a credit card sponsored by the NFL. They make heroic efforts to find signs of identity, even gastronomically, although the result of eating hot dogs slathered with chile con carne, ketchup, and mustard causes ulcers...Corporate brands like Pepsi and Anheuser Busch pay what is asked for the opportunity to hook into the sticky sentimentalism of the Super Bowl.

Note the evocation of three of the standard anti-American memes within one paragraph. The most dangerous is a) Americans are not really a people and do not have a national identity. (That's why they need the Super Bowl to unify them artificially, you see). (FOOTNOTE 1)

This meme is dangerous because it implies that there is such a thing as a people, that a people has an existence in itself which must be preserved, and certain groups qualify, like, say, the Germans, the English, or the Catalans, but that the Americans don't. "Blood and land nationalists" all share this belief about the Americans, and interestingly it's pretty much the same thing they still say about the rootless Jews who possess no authentic culture.

Then of course, there is b) America is the land of commercialism, consumption, and corporate dominance. This meme, I think, is a backlash against what people see in their own societies and they don't like. Well, says the Left, our people would all be good and solidarious with the poor and all, and uninterested in flashy and shallow popular entertainment, if it weren't for those evil capitalists, so let's blame the Americans. If you take this argument a little farther, you start demanding quotas against American popular entertainment, then you start demanding that certain content not be allowed, and then it's not far from there to censorship. And, says the Right, our people would be struggling to realize their authentic national identity and dedicating itself to such national values as hard work and sacrifice for the good of the people and the state, rather than watching TV, which is full of subversive ideas anyway. So let's blame the Americans. If you take this argument a little farther...well, you get censorship. (FOOTNOTE 2)

Then there's c), the most harmless, that Americans eat lousy food. I find it highly ironic that a Brit, of all people, is accusing Americans of eating badly. I mean, this guy Robinson comes from the land of the battered, deep-fried Mars bar, the country of bangers, chips, and mushy peas. (FOOTNOTE 3)

Seriously, my experience is this. Wherever you go, there are decent restaurants with pretty good food. Some places, like France, do it better than others, like Germany, but you can eat perfectly decently in any town in Germany. Also, wherever you go, there are many families who are good at home cooking, and that's always tasty wherever you are.

Now, wherever you go there are also lousy cooks like my grandmother and lousy cheapo food stands. The difference, though, is that in England a lousy cheapo food stand is called a "caff". In Spain it's called a "bar" or a "frankfurt". In America it's called "McDonalds". And at McDonalds they have clean bathrooms and hygienic food preparation, at least. You won't find that in English caffs or Spanish bars.

Also, a couple of points. England is the country where people put ketchup all over everything, and what they don't put ketchup on, they cover with brown sauce. In Spain it's mayonnaise. In the States, the number one condiment is Mexican salsa, and the flavor that keeps intruding where I don't want it is sour cream. Also, real Americans don't put ketchup on hot dogs. They might put chili on, and they might put mustard on, but they wouldn't combine the two. They also might put pickle relish or sauerkraut on. The gross thing they might put on is Velveeta fake cheese. That stuff really is nasty.

FOOTNOTES:

1. "When speaking of the German people, we are dealing with a fixed group of people who are defined by their nature and territory. There is usually a "natural" relationship between between a people and its territory, such that naming the people brings to mind a territorial area. On this particular section of the world with its climate, its beauties, and its nature the people's history took place. Here its inhabitants found the source of their strength. Here its cultural landmarks give evidence of its spirit. Here its myths and fables have their roots in the distant past.

Such a relationship between people and space does not exist in the USA. They have no myths and fables, only facts. They jumped right into the middle of history—the only instance in world history in which the development of a governmental system and a "people" could be observed by historians from the very beginning."

From Europe and America: Failures in Building an American People. Anonymous, Germany, 1942.

2. "One is never sure which of two characteristics is more prominent in the American national character and therefore of the greater significance: naivete or a superiority complex. When for example they say things about our region, our surprise at their ignorance is surpassed only by annoyance at their stupid insolence. The less they know about a matter, the more confidently they speak. They really believe that Europeans are eagerly waiting to hear from them and follow their advice. They took our strategic decision not to discuss their shallow culture before the war as a sign of admiration. Their greatest technical accomplishments are refrigerators and radios. They cannot believe that there are cultural values that are the result of centuries of historical development, which cannot simply be bought. It was no bad joke when, after the war, they bought the ruins of German castles and moved them stone by stone to the U.S.A. They really thought that they had purchased a piece of national history embodied in stone, and were naive enough to think that mocking laughter from Europe was respect for the wealth that enabled them to buy what their own tradition and culture lacked."

From God's Country by Josef Goebbels. Das Reich, August 9, 1942.

3. "American housewives can no longer survive without tin cans. They have become so lazy as a result of these tin cans that they can no longer cook like German housewives. When they came home in the evening after visiting the beauty parlor or working in an office, and before going to a cocktail party, they opened a can or two for their family's evening meal."

From America as a Perversion of European Culture. Anonymous, Germany, 1942.