Saturday, November 09, 2002
Baltasar Porcel doesn't know when to shut up. Here he goes again, from Friday, November 8's La Vanguardia. Remember, this guy is considered one of Catalonia's leading intellectuals. The following article, titled "Futurism and reaction", is quite obviously the work of a drooling imbecile. Porcel is not even as smart as Noam Chomsky. We're going to leave it up to you, dear readers, to discover the blatant lies, obvious logical fallacies, complete non sequiturs, and just plain moronic crap in Porcel's text, in italics below. Post your faves up on the Comments section.
I attended a screening of "Minority Report", a typical American movie, skilfully made, from the agile rhythm and suggestive camerawork to effects like the spectacular mechanical spiders. The director is a virtuoso of the industry, Spielberg. Although the movie turns out to be disgustingly morbid. A professor used to say that the Americans confuse tragedy with brutality, poetry with sentimentality. As if their official idealism were hiding a sensory dirtiness. Which the film also reveals: we're dealing with science fiction, crime prevention in the middle of the 21st century, which is also portrayed in the manner of the futurism that is so abundant in the English-speaking novel and cinematography and which is based on terror, dehumanization, catastrophism, oppression.
Why do these people who claim to be the paladins of freedom and human welfare fear tomorrow so much? Because the historical process shows that such prophecies have turned out to be false, whether they be the War of the Worlds, "Blade Runner" or the Orwellian Big Brother that haunts us so. When humanity is progressing in all aspects, although it be among scares and imperfections: we are more cultured, healthier, and freer than half a century or half a millenium ago.
Such a futurism does not really foresee tomorrow, but rather is based on the past as destiny, as if humanity were only old and malignant. It is prophecy: you will only be admitted to the Truth of the Lord it you annul yourself and become the servant of a new master. Repugnant. But true. Like Bush, who preaches freedom versus terrorism, which we must obey forgetting the slightest criticism and viewing as the only enemy the second producer of petroleum, Iraq, when those who have economically supported the Bushes are the oilmen of Texas, the state of the Union with most environmental pollution, and who additionally fear finding themselves without oil now that it looks like the reserves will run out in 20 years, and which will additionally be replaced by another completely different source of energy, like hydrogen. The demon Saddam would be acceptable, then, if he were an ally like Saudi Arabia is or like Pinochet was. Bush's and fatalistic futurism's reactionary nature: we're losing ground. Like Bin Laden's ideology: the human being must be mummified in a piece of metaphysical ignorance from a thousand years ago or be killed. Like Holy Mother Russia: after decades of trying to finish off Chechenia, if Chechenia attacks in order to defend itself, then it's terrorism, and justice is found in Putin's gases and bombs.
Why do these people who claim to be the paladins of freedom and human welfare fear tomorrow so much? Because the historical process shows that such prophecies have turned out to be false, whether they be the War of the Worlds, "Blade Runner" or the Orwellian Big Brother that haunts us so. When humanity is progressing in all aspects, although it be among scares and imperfections: we are more cultured, healthier, and freer than half a century or half a millenium ago.
Such a futurism does not really foresee tomorrow, but rather is based on the past as destiny, as if humanity were only old and malignant. It is prophecy: you will only be admitted to the Truth of the Lord it you annul yourself and become the servant of a new master. Repugnant. But true. Like Bush, who preaches freedom versus terrorism, which we must obey forgetting the slightest criticism and viewing as the only enemy the second producer of petroleum, Iraq, when those who have economically supported the Bushes are the oilmen of Texas, the state of the Union with most environmental pollution, and who additionally fear finding themselves without oil now that it looks like the reserves will run out in 20 years, and which will additionally be replaced by another completely different source of energy, like hydrogen. The demon Saddam would be acceptable, then, if he were an ally like Saudi Arabia is or like Pinochet was. Bush's and fatalistic futurism's reactionary nature: we're losing ground. Like Bin Laden's ideology: the human being must be mummified in a piece of metaphysical ignorance from a thousand years ago or be killed. Like Holy Mother Russia: after decades of trying to finish off Chechenia, if Chechenia attacks in order to defend itself, then it's terrorism, and justice is found in Putin's gases and bombs.
Thursday, November 07, 2002
I sent this to CNNSI's Paul Zimmermann's mailbag, since he'd brought up possible modifications for the extra-point rule in American football. He'll probably think I'm a nut. Maybe he'd be right. Let's see if he answers.
Two rules change ideas:
1) Two points for a run, one for a kick. You can either line up at the 25 and either kick for one or fake kick and then run or pass for two, or line up at the 5 and run or pass for two. Kicking for one would be illegal if you lined up at the 5. The ball would remain in play, no matter what, until whistled dead, so a blocked kick, fumble, or interception could be returned for a TD. These changes would make extra points something reasonably difficult to get and even slightly risky, not just something automatic like a kick from the 9-yard line. A 42-yarder would be a bit of a challenge but usually doable by most kickers. But if your kicker is hobbling and it's ten below in Green Bay with the winds swirling and blowing snow around, then what do you do? You might just fake that kick. And choosing to go for two from the five means that they'll have to run wide, pass, or use play-action or some other deceptive play, not just slam it into the line--unless the defense gets too worried about all the wideouts you flood the end zone with. You then give the ball to your big back to take right up the middle for two--unless the defense doesn't bite... Stopping the extra point/s might actually shift momentum in favor of the team about to receive the kickoff. Whatever, I think adopting this solution would make the extra point/s much more interesting for the fans without corrupting the essence of the game. I would indeed argue that since the essence of the game is running plays and defending against them in clutch situations, this rule change would dramatically improve the game by creating many more clutch situations.
2) Borrow this one from soccer. Give a yellow card to any player guilty of a personal foul or unsportsmanlike conduct foul, in addition to the 15-yard penalty. If a player accumulates two yellow cards in a game, he gets a red card and is ejected for the rest of that game and the team's next one too. A direct red card can be given by the ref in case of a truly flagrant foul. The player is then directly ejected and also misses the next game. If a player accumulates five yellow cards over the course of the season, he is also ejected from the match and suspended for the next game. This would nip things like the Derrick Thomas Monday night meltdown in the bud, and provide some real punishment to those players who frequently break the rules. If you're suspended for a game, you don't get paid for it; the paycheck worth 1/16 of your net yearly NFL salary goes to some league charity. And would you sign a guy who you knew would miss two games and parts of two others if you were a GM? What if you had another guy who was almost as good in the same position, but never gets called for flagrant fouls? Who would you trade? This would cut down massively on violent play.
Sorry for being so long-winded; I tried to respond to all possible objections and add a few details. So what do you think?
Best,
John Chappell
Two rules change ideas:
1) Two points for a run, one for a kick. You can either line up at the 25 and either kick for one or fake kick and then run or pass for two, or line up at the 5 and run or pass for two. Kicking for one would be illegal if you lined up at the 5. The ball would remain in play, no matter what, until whistled dead, so a blocked kick, fumble, or interception could be returned for a TD. These changes would make extra points something reasonably difficult to get and even slightly risky, not just something automatic like a kick from the 9-yard line. A 42-yarder would be a bit of a challenge but usually doable by most kickers. But if your kicker is hobbling and it's ten below in Green Bay with the winds swirling and blowing snow around, then what do you do? You might just fake that kick. And choosing to go for two from the five means that they'll have to run wide, pass, or use play-action or some other deceptive play, not just slam it into the line--unless the defense gets too worried about all the wideouts you flood the end zone with. You then give the ball to your big back to take right up the middle for two--unless the defense doesn't bite... Stopping the extra point/s might actually shift momentum in favor of the team about to receive the kickoff. Whatever, I think adopting this solution would make the extra point/s much more interesting for the fans without corrupting the essence of the game. I would indeed argue that since the essence of the game is running plays and defending against them in clutch situations, this rule change would dramatically improve the game by creating many more clutch situations.
2) Borrow this one from soccer. Give a yellow card to any player guilty of a personal foul or unsportsmanlike conduct foul, in addition to the 15-yard penalty. If a player accumulates two yellow cards in a game, he gets a red card and is ejected for the rest of that game and the team's next one too. A direct red card can be given by the ref in case of a truly flagrant foul. The player is then directly ejected and also misses the next game. If a player accumulates five yellow cards over the course of the season, he is also ejected from the match and suspended for the next game. This would nip things like the Derrick Thomas Monday night meltdown in the bud, and provide some real punishment to those players who frequently break the rules. If you're suspended for a game, you don't get paid for it; the paycheck worth 1/16 of your net yearly NFL salary goes to some league charity. And would you sign a guy who you knew would miss two games and parts of two others if you were a GM? What if you had another guy who was almost as good in the same position, but never gets called for flagrant fouls? Who would you trade? This would cut down massively on violent play.
Sorry for being so long-winded; I tried to respond to all possible objections and add a few details. So what do you think?
Best,
John Chappell
This article, to which I found the link on Andrew Sullivan.com, is an excellent recap of why the Democrats lost the midterm elections. It's so sensible, logical, and reasonable that I can't believe it's from the Nation, a notoriously left-wing rag with some pretentions at being the voice of the Oakland-and-Berkeley wing of the Democratic Party.
The following is a well-deserved Fisking of this article from today's La Vanguardia. (We can't find the article in today's online edition. It's in the Thursday, Nov. 7's issue of the print version.) It's by Baltasar Porcel, a big man in Catalan lit, which tells you something about the pathetic state of Catalan lit. Mr. Porcel is a native of Mallorca but lives in Barcelona, where he is much made over by the Catalanist government in power because he is a Mallorcan who believes in Catalonia Irridenta. He is the president of some government thing called something like the Mediterranean Institute, a body paid for with my tax money that does God knows what; he is a classic case of an artist who has been bought and paid for by the government, co-opted, if you will. He is also a very boring novelist who writes books that people praise and don't read. Furthermore, he writes a daily column in La Vangua. It is sometimes quite dull and sometimes frothing at the mouth; you never know what you're going to get. The following is quite frothy. Porcel's piece is in italics. Ours is in standard type.
One surprise--for me--from All Souls Day (Nov. 1, when the dead are traditionally honored in Catholic countries) was that the American party (juerga) called Halloween is imposing itself strongly upon us. Above all, among the children, often in the schools. Another example that Anglo-Saxon culture has begotten horrendous vastages, from the repulsive Dracula to that frenzied Freddy Krueger, including the repugnant Frankenstein, the idiotic Mummy, and whatever. The cinema is committing atrocities here. It appears that for the Anglo-Saxons death consists, boiled down to it, in a maniacal succession of horrors between grotesque and sadistic, totally opposed to the dignified behavior and "cult of the dead" of the Greco-Latin or Chinese cultures, those which have survived longest on this planet. (Liberal translation of near-indescipherable last sentence. Antonio questions: typo in original? missing words?)
Good God, where do we start? First, Porcel must be a complete imbecile if he hadn't noticed that Halloween has become a popular celebration, especially among kids, in the last ten years in Spain. (Interestingly enough, Spain gets many of its American trends through France, of all places. Four of them are Halloween, country music, blue jeans--in again--and fast food. The French sort of filter and vet American trends, and the ones that catch on there make it to Spain in a year or so.) Second, most Americans are about as "Anglo-Saxon" as Porcel himself. Les anglosaxons is slightly snooty French for anyone who speaks English; they need a term to lump us Brits and Yanks and Aussies all together with. Francophile / Anglophobe Spaniards like to show how sophisticated they are by adopting the term. Third, who is Porcel to dis Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? Or the brilliant filmmakers behind the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies? Would he do the same to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in a similar vein? Or Victor Hugo? Or even Stephen King, of whom I am no huge fan, but who is a thousand times the writer that Porcel is? Or the guys who make those silly Freddy and Jason horror movies? Sure, they're silly, they're supposed to be silly, for Chrissakes, just bits of fluff entertainment. The people who make those movies aren't morons and the teenagers who like those movies aren't morons. It's all just for fun. The only morons around here are the people like Porcel who take seriously a silly but fun bunch of crap like children's dressing up as monsters for Halloween. Trust us. Halloween is meaningless for us Americans. It won't contaminate Catalan culture. Look, Halloween is the American equivalent of Spanish / Catalan Carnival. People get to dress up in costumes and go to parties. That's all it is; like New Year's Eve, it's just an excuse to have a good time. You already have Carnival. Why not two dressing-up holidays?
They say that Halloween comes from the Celts. I don't know. But the Celts had a concept of the immortal soul, their celestial pots full of delicious wild boar, the venerated priest, the druid, who even constitutes an antecedent of the Christian soul. Meanwhile, Halloween is a disrespectful, tacky (hortera) masquerade which instantly plants two disquieting questions: would you like to be thought of like that, on the part of the living, once you've died? Do you contemplate the memories of your parents and grandparents as cheesy (chabacano) and repulsive? That's not the point, those who are always up-to-date rush to say, Halloween is just for fun, though macabre fun. OK, fine. But the real problem stands: the child will not be taken to the cemetery, true to that cult of the dead that creates deep family and territorial, even patriotic, traditions, understood like the land where you grow with your roots, and which gives to the human being a historic heritage and transcendence, a metaphysical mystery. No, the child will be induced to dance around foolishly, strictly within himself, as if the Beyond were reduced to a silly game.
Good God, where do we start? It's clear that Porcel just doesn't get that, while Catholics are the largest religious group in the US, America's Ur-culture is Protestant. That is, we don't generally do Catholic holidays like the Immaculate Conception or Lent or the Assumption of the Virgin or All Saints' Day, or any saint's day at all. Because we don't observe All Saints' Day, does that mean we don't honor our dead? No, we honor our dead so much that we have both Memorial Day, the holiday to honor the dead in general, and Veterans' Day, the holiday to honor war veterans, both living and dead. In addition, anyone is free to honor the dead whenever he or she pleases, and perhaps there is more virtue in doing so on a day which is NOT scheduled for such observances. I also remember a year or so ago that some Spaniards criticized the American homage to the dead of the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it maudlin, exaggerated, and chauvinistically patriotic. Well, which is it? Maudlin and exaggerated, or superficial and disrespectful? Please choose one at the sound of the buzzer. Slander America one way or the other, but please be consistent. And there's no reason why the kid can't both dress up as a monster for the class Halloween party in the morning and then go with his folks to lay flowers at the cemetery in the afternoon, anyway. Notice, though, that Cataloonies like Porcel (along with many other Europeans, especially the butts of this ten-year-old Francophobe Spanish joke: "You know, the Gulf War was so short that the French didn't even have time to change sides.") are prepared to read something sinister into the most innocent manifestation of American culture. Why must Porcel not only criticize, but even ridicule and insult something that he obviously does not understand at all? Where does he get this knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Orwell would have said that the answer is that he's a nationalist and so he sees everything in terms of the comparative prestige of the unit he owes allegiance to. Catalonia's comparative prestige internationally is pretty low, as it is seen in Europe by even those who are aware of its existence as a region of Spain with some local peculiarities. Outside Europe, it's virtually unknown. The Catalanists just can't stand this. If an American celebration is being adopted in Catalonia, but no Catalan celebrations are being adopted anywhere, much less in America, then this is a priori a bad thing in Catalanist eyes.
Changing the subject: we are evidently looking at a commercial operation, the most gratuitous consumerism, as we are also again obeying the command of the dominant culture, the North American, in another of its most banal manifestations. And here's where Halloween fits in: a world of immigrants who have come from everywhere, for whom roots and tombs no longer exist, only material and moral deserts in which the wolf devoured the carrion of the dead under the ululating delirium of the night wind. And I repeat my emphasis on the dimensions of Greco-Latin and Chinese culture: no other possesses their almost 3000 years of fruitful riches.
Well, at least we know where to start: great imagery, there, "ululating delirium". Translating this has been such a pain in the ass that I'm going to smoke a whole bunch of dope to escape the blubbering idiocy this guy Porcel has reduced me to. Maybe I'll even hit the state of ululating delirium, but this hash is pretty weak so I don't think I'll get that stoned. Anyway, first, what consumerism? Costumes are dirt-cheap, just paint the kid's face or put a sheet with eyeholes over his head. Candy is not precisely a hugely expensive item either. Maybe it's all a plot of the pumpkin growers, who did some tidy business during October this year. Note the sneer, by the way, in "another of its most banal manifestaciones". Note the fear of immigration. Note the fear of change. Note Porcel's very arrogant assumption that he somehow has more roots than other people, that he has more roots than 300 million Americans. All I can say about my roots are that three of my grandparents were descended from British Isles and Palatinate German ancestors who arrived in the United States before the Revolution, and that the fourth was of Austrian Empire German descent, specifically from Bukovina, who arrived in the 1880s. They'd emigrated from Württemberg to the Austrian Military Frontier out east sometime in the 1700s and from there to Kansas 150 years later. The fact that my roots are from fairly distant places doesn't mean I don't have any. This is something Mr. Porcel should know, as his roots are in Mallorca, not here in Barcelona where he lives. Also, Mr. Porcel should recognize that we Americans, as members of Western civilization, are just as much the cultural heirs of the Greco-Romans (and the Judeo-Christians, too, which Mr. Porcel failed to mention) as anyone else. Or does he think that our laws, our economic and business practices, our popular and cultural traditions, our way of doing things in general, were not inherited by the northern Europeans who founded the United States from their ancestors? And what about the cultural contributions of the descendents of the Africans who were brought to America against their will but have done so much to make America what it is? Of course, what America is today has been influenced by many other cultures as well besides the WASPs and the blacks (the later arrivals influenced America's outside appearance much more than its foundations, though), most notably the Italians, the Eastern European Jews, the Eastern European Slavs, and the Mexicans, all of whose roots are also in the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition. (Right. I know, Mexico, the Aztecs, and all. But they speak Spanish and are Christians.) The only group of non-European Americans that has strongly influenced general American culture is African-Americans; the black heritage in our shared culture is what differentiates us European Americans from other Westerners. Is that what Mr. Porcel's problem really is? Of course not, but he's so anti-American that he doesn't understand that being anti-American means being anti-African-American too. And I haven't noticed Mr. Porcel leading any demonstrations to increase the number of immigrants to Catalonia from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Oh, by the way, China's existed as a culture for considerably more than 3000 years, and should Mr. Porcel find it congenial, he is most welcome to move there. And did you notice that he didn't mention the fruitful cultural riches of the Jewish heritage, yet again, though Jewish culture is also some 3000 years old and has been as influential as any other on Western civilization except possibly the Greeks?
Good God, where do we start? First, Porcel must be a complete imbecile if he hadn't noticed that Halloween has become a popular celebration, especially among kids, in the last ten years in Spain. (Interestingly enough, Spain gets many of its American trends through France, of all places. Four of them are Halloween, country music, blue jeans--in again--and fast food. The French sort of filter and vet American trends, and the ones that catch on there make it to Spain in a year or so.) Second, most Americans are about as "Anglo-Saxon" as Porcel himself. Les anglosaxons is slightly snooty French for anyone who speaks English; they need a term to lump us Brits and Yanks and Aussies all together with. Francophile / Anglophobe Spaniards like to show how sophisticated they are by adopting the term. Third, who is Porcel to dis Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? Or the brilliant filmmakers behind the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies? Would he do the same to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in a similar vein? Or Victor Hugo? Or even Stephen King, of whom I am no huge fan, but who is a thousand times the writer that Porcel is? Or the guys who make those silly Freddy and Jason horror movies? Sure, they're silly, they're supposed to be silly, for Chrissakes, just bits of fluff entertainment. The people who make those movies aren't morons and the teenagers who like those movies aren't morons. It's all just for fun. The only morons around here are the people like Porcel who take seriously a silly but fun bunch of crap like children's dressing up as monsters for Halloween. Trust us. Halloween is meaningless for us Americans. It won't contaminate Catalan culture. Look, Halloween is the American equivalent of Spanish / Catalan Carnival. People get to dress up in costumes and go to parties. That's all it is; like New Year's Eve, it's just an excuse to have a good time. You already have Carnival. Why not two dressing-up holidays?
They say that Halloween comes from the Celts. I don't know. But the Celts had a concept of the immortal soul, their celestial pots full of delicious wild boar, the venerated priest, the druid, who even constitutes an antecedent of the Christian soul. Meanwhile, Halloween is a disrespectful, tacky (hortera) masquerade which instantly plants two disquieting questions: would you like to be thought of like that, on the part of the living, once you've died? Do you contemplate the memories of your parents and grandparents as cheesy (chabacano) and repulsive? That's not the point, those who are always up-to-date rush to say, Halloween is just for fun, though macabre fun. OK, fine. But the real problem stands: the child will not be taken to the cemetery, true to that cult of the dead that creates deep family and territorial, even patriotic, traditions, understood like the land where you grow with your roots, and which gives to the human being a historic heritage and transcendence, a metaphysical mystery. No, the child will be induced to dance around foolishly, strictly within himself, as if the Beyond were reduced to a silly game.
Good God, where do we start? It's clear that Porcel just doesn't get that, while Catholics are the largest religious group in the US, America's Ur-culture is Protestant. That is, we don't generally do Catholic holidays like the Immaculate Conception or Lent or the Assumption of the Virgin or All Saints' Day, or any saint's day at all. Because we don't observe All Saints' Day, does that mean we don't honor our dead? No, we honor our dead so much that we have both Memorial Day, the holiday to honor the dead in general, and Veterans' Day, the holiday to honor war veterans, both living and dead. In addition, anyone is free to honor the dead whenever he or she pleases, and perhaps there is more virtue in doing so on a day which is NOT scheduled for such observances. I also remember a year or so ago that some Spaniards criticized the American homage to the dead of the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it maudlin, exaggerated, and chauvinistically patriotic. Well, which is it? Maudlin and exaggerated, or superficial and disrespectful? Please choose one at the sound of the buzzer. Slander America one way or the other, but please be consistent. And there's no reason why the kid can't both dress up as a monster for the class Halloween party in the morning and then go with his folks to lay flowers at the cemetery in the afternoon, anyway. Notice, though, that Cataloonies like Porcel (along with many other Europeans, especially the butts of this ten-year-old Francophobe Spanish joke: "You know, the Gulf War was so short that the French didn't even have time to change sides.") are prepared to read something sinister into the most innocent manifestation of American culture. Why must Porcel not only criticize, but even ridicule and insult something that he obviously does not understand at all? Where does he get this knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Orwell would have said that the answer is that he's a nationalist and so he sees everything in terms of the comparative prestige of the unit he owes allegiance to. Catalonia's comparative prestige internationally is pretty low, as it is seen in Europe by even those who are aware of its existence as a region of Spain with some local peculiarities. Outside Europe, it's virtually unknown. The Catalanists just can't stand this. If an American celebration is being adopted in Catalonia, but no Catalan celebrations are being adopted anywhere, much less in America, then this is a priori a bad thing in Catalanist eyes.
Changing the subject: we are evidently looking at a commercial operation, the most gratuitous consumerism, as we are also again obeying the command of the dominant culture, the North American, in another of its most banal manifestations. And here's where Halloween fits in: a world of immigrants who have come from everywhere, for whom roots and tombs no longer exist, only material and moral deserts in which the wolf devoured the carrion of the dead under the ululating delirium of the night wind. And I repeat my emphasis on the dimensions of Greco-Latin and Chinese culture: no other possesses their almost 3000 years of fruitful riches.
Well, at least we know where to start: great imagery, there, "ululating delirium". Translating this has been such a pain in the ass that I'm going to smoke a whole bunch of dope to escape the blubbering idiocy this guy Porcel has reduced me to. Maybe I'll even hit the state of ululating delirium, but this hash is pretty weak so I don't think I'll get that stoned. Anyway, first, what consumerism? Costumes are dirt-cheap, just paint the kid's face or put a sheet with eyeholes over his head. Candy is not precisely a hugely expensive item either. Maybe it's all a plot of the pumpkin growers, who did some tidy business during October this year. Note the sneer, by the way, in "another of its most banal manifestaciones". Note the fear of immigration. Note the fear of change. Note Porcel's very arrogant assumption that he somehow has more roots than other people, that he has more roots than 300 million Americans. All I can say about my roots are that three of my grandparents were descended from British Isles and Palatinate German ancestors who arrived in the United States before the Revolution, and that the fourth was of Austrian Empire German descent, specifically from Bukovina, who arrived in the 1880s. They'd emigrated from Württemberg to the Austrian Military Frontier out east sometime in the 1700s and from there to Kansas 150 years later. The fact that my roots are from fairly distant places doesn't mean I don't have any. This is something Mr. Porcel should know, as his roots are in Mallorca, not here in Barcelona where he lives. Also, Mr. Porcel should recognize that we Americans, as members of Western civilization, are just as much the cultural heirs of the Greco-Romans (and the Judeo-Christians, too, which Mr. Porcel failed to mention) as anyone else. Or does he think that our laws, our economic and business practices, our popular and cultural traditions, our way of doing things in general, were not inherited by the northern Europeans who founded the United States from their ancestors? And what about the cultural contributions of the descendents of the Africans who were brought to America against their will but have done so much to make America what it is? Of course, what America is today has been influenced by many other cultures as well besides the WASPs and the blacks (the later arrivals influenced America's outside appearance much more than its foundations, though), most notably the Italians, the Eastern European Jews, the Eastern European Slavs, and the Mexicans, all of whose roots are also in the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition. (Right. I know, Mexico, the Aztecs, and all. But they speak Spanish and are Christians.) The only group of non-European Americans that has strongly influenced general American culture is African-Americans; the black heritage in our shared culture is what differentiates us European Americans from other Westerners. Is that what Mr. Porcel's problem really is? Of course not, but he's so anti-American that he doesn't understand that being anti-American means being anti-African-American too. And I haven't noticed Mr. Porcel leading any demonstrations to increase the number of immigrants to Catalonia from North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Oh, by the way, China's existed as a culture for considerably more than 3000 years, and should Mr. Porcel find it congenial, he is most welcome to move there. And did you notice that he didn't mention the fruitful cultural riches of the Jewish heritage, yet again, though Jewish culture is also some 3000 years old and has been as influential as any other on Western civilization except possibly the Greeks?
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Very conveniently, our old Homestead account just got cut off for nonpayment. We don't even have to go to the trouble of cancelling, though we are going to call up the bank to make sure payments get cut off anyway. Thanks to the gallant Mr. Crozier (the next thing I'm going to try are some photos and maps), our new website was set up just in time and we didn't even know we'd need it. The old Iberian Notes webpage is still up, but we assume they'll close it down pretty soon. Our old E-mail has been closed down, though, so if you want to write please use this address. We can't access e-mail to or from our old address, so write again if you wrote us and we didn't answer.
So, you know, I was over at Fox News getting the specific results of the Senate elections and noticed that the Alaskan Independence Party had fielded a candidate. Holy shit, I said to myself, here lo these many years I've been airily brushing off Catalan-nationalistic-minded students' questions about whether there were any regional or state "nationalist" parties similar to those in the Spanish autonomous regions, saying, no, no, of course we don't have any of that in America. Well, I have been very wrong about this, everybody, and I sincerely apologize. I will still defend the thesis that there are no important "nationalist" political parties in America, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any at all.
So, I go to the AKIP website, which, by the way, I had a lot of trouble downloading. Their site boasted that they were the third largest political party in Alaska, which I don't buy because I figure the Republicans are #1, the Democrats are a very distant #2, and the Libertarians are a strong #3, leaving the AKIP #4 at best. I dunno. Maybe the Democrats are really #4. You can never figure Alaskan politics. Anyway, a quick glance through some of their screeds showed that they're in favor of "Accountability", which we suppose we are too; "End(ing) Waste in Government", which it's pretty hard not to go along with; "Equal Use of Fish and Game", where our Catalanist friends will probably jump off the AKIP bandwagon, since it's pretty clear by now that this is an Alaskan white people's party demanding equal access with the Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts to fishing and hunting stocks (the Catalanists would of course side with the nonwhite natives, not the white invaders); and "Resource Development", which will cause the lefty Catalanists to freak out, since they're often Greenies too, and Resource Development means mines and oil drilling and logging and other ways of developing, or exploiting, Alaska's natural resources. A point in their favor: though they still want to be independent after Sept. 11, they condemn the terrorist attacks and express their sympathy for the victims.
So I think, wonder if Hawaii has one? Shore nuf, they have at least two. One of them, called Hawai'i Independent and Sovereign, uses very Catalanist-style rhetoric when it says that one of its missions is to "protect our rights and way of life under the occupation system." I think that means, "We'll bitch about being oppressed but are thrilled to grab government subsidies and pork for Hawaiian-folklore projects." Not too many Catalanists would go along with one of their other planks, though, the one that wants to bring back the Hawaiian monarchy. They tend to be rather republican in sentiment, though a few of the older, more romantic, very traditional, Catholic Catalanists (like Mr. X, a well-known gentleman who we are not identifying because we're not sure he's officially out of the closet but who is known for his medievalist proclivities; he's both gay and ultra-Catholic, and is best known for his expertise in heraldry. He'd just love a restoration of the old Crown of Aragon monarchy, or even better the Counts of Barcelona. He'd get all busy drawing up new coats of arms and stuff) probably would like an independent Catalan kingdom or county or whatever.
So then I go back to the Google page and see this web page dedicated to minor American political parties. It turns out that not only do Alaska and Hawaii have pro-independence parties (along with Puerto Rico, of course) but so do Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont. The Vermont guys call themselves the Green Mountain Boys, of course. We're rather afraid to check out the Alabama independence party website, as we can't help but think that very few black people are members. As for the New Jersey independence party, I say more power to them!
So, I go to the AKIP website, which, by the way, I had a lot of trouble downloading. Their site boasted that they were the third largest political party in Alaska, which I don't buy because I figure the Republicans are #1, the Democrats are a very distant #2, and the Libertarians are a strong #3, leaving the AKIP #4 at best. I dunno. Maybe the Democrats are really #4. You can never figure Alaskan politics. Anyway, a quick glance through some of their screeds showed that they're in favor of "Accountability", which we suppose we are too; "End(ing) Waste in Government", which it's pretty hard not to go along with; "Equal Use of Fish and Game", where our Catalanist friends will probably jump off the AKIP bandwagon, since it's pretty clear by now that this is an Alaskan white people's party demanding equal access with the Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts to fishing and hunting stocks (the Catalanists would of course side with the nonwhite natives, not the white invaders); and "Resource Development", which will cause the lefty Catalanists to freak out, since they're often Greenies too, and Resource Development means mines and oil drilling and logging and other ways of developing, or exploiting, Alaska's natural resources. A point in their favor: though they still want to be independent after Sept. 11, they condemn the terrorist attacks and express their sympathy for the victims.
So I think, wonder if Hawaii has one? Shore nuf, they have at least two. One of them, called Hawai'i Independent and Sovereign, uses very Catalanist-style rhetoric when it says that one of its missions is to "protect our rights and way of life under the occupation system." I think that means, "We'll bitch about being oppressed but are thrilled to grab government subsidies and pork for Hawaiian-folklore projects." Not too many Catalanists would go along with one of their other planks, though, the one that wants to bring back the Hawaiian monarchy. They tend to be rather republican in sentiment, though a few of the older, more romantic, very traditional, Catholic Catalanists (like Mr. X, a well-known gentleman who we are not identifying because we're not sure he's officially out of the closet but who is known for his medievalist proclivities; he's both gay and ultra-Catholic, and is best known for his expertise in heraldry. He'd just love a restoration of the old Crown of Aragon monarchy, or even better the Counts of Barcelona. He'd get all busy drawing up new coats of arms and stuff) probably would like an independent Catalan kingdom or county or whatever.
So then I go back to the Google page and see this web page dedicated to minor American political parties. It turns out that not only do Alaska and Hawaii have pro-independence parties (along with Puerto Rico, of course) but so do Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont. The Vermont guys call themselves the Green Mountain Boys, of course. We're rather afraid to check out the Alabama independence party website, as we can't help but think that very few black people are members. As for the New Jersey independence party, I say more power to them!
The Spanish take on the results of the United States midterm elections is that President Bush has received the support of the American people to continue the War on Terrorism and to attack Iraq. If the Spanish press had been paying attention to Bush's very high approval rating despite the country's economic slowdown, they'd have realized that the President is very popular and that most Americans support his tough stance on terrorism, national defense, and foreign policy. Instead, they indulged in wishful thinking--being a bunch of lefties, the Spanish press doesn't like Bush, and they exaggerated the importance of a few antiwar demonstrations in Cambridge and Berkeley and of a few antiwar statements by the like of Ramsey Clark and Jessica Lange to the point of actually predicting a "repudiation" of war-mongering Bush at the polls. TV3 ran some interviews with the "man on the street" a couple of days ago--on the streets of that typical Middle American place, Manhattan. All three or four of the people on the street who made it on the show criticized Bush and / or America, so they ran this as proof that the Americans were disenchanted with the President. Nothing, of course, was farther from the truth. One thing Spaniards have trouble realizing is that most Americans vote for the candidate and not the party, and it's very possible that someone, say, in the Kansas Third District, might vote for moderate Democrat gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Sibelius (especially since the Republican candidate was religious right, anathema to many mainstream Kansas Republicans still pissed off at what the far right did to the state school board when they got hold of it a few years ago) and for the incumbent congressman, conservative Democrat Dennis Moore, the former tough-on-crime Johnson County DA and a widely respected person who votes with Bush on foreign and defense policy, while still supporting President Bush and voting for popular longtime Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who ran without Democrat opposition anyway. (Well, that's what I did.) The second thing they forget is that Americans vote based on a lot more issues than just foreign policy, and that the Republican success is due to the fact that more Americans sympathize with their ideas and policies in general than with those of the Democrats. And what they haven't realized yet is that the change in the control of the Senate will have no effect on Bush's foreign policy anyway, since he already had majority support of the Senate on the issue of the War on Terrorism even though he didn't have party control. Anyway, we think that the very significant effects that the election results will have are those of unblocking the appropriations for almost all governmental departments except defense and of overcoming Democrat resistance to Bush's judicial appointees, an unconscionable number of whom have been held up in their confirmations by the Democrat leadership anxious to win some, any, even just tiny, political victories against the Republican juggernaut.
Barcelona is so crowded that the average speed of cars is 16 kph on vertical streets and 23 kph on horizontal crosstown streets. That's kilometers, not miles, per hour. There are 12,000 accidents reported per year in Barcelona and about 60 traffic deaths; 42% of the deaths are motorbike riders, 30% are pedestrians, and 28% are in cars. Of the dead in cars, 90% were not wearing their seatbelts. 52% of people injured in Barcelona traffic accidents are also motorbike riders. We remember that several years ago the Economist ran a story in which they ranked forms of transportation by their safety records, calculated in deaths per traveler per kilometer traveled. By ship was the safest means of transport and planes were right behind. Then came trains and buses. Then cars. Then on foot. Then by bicycle. And by far the most dangerous was by motorcycle; you're something like 200 times more likely to be killed traveling a kilometer by motorbike than by ship or airplane. Of course, in Spain they can fix it so you can even die on a ship; the court case that derived from the 1998 sinking of a pleasure boat on the lake at Banyoles, north of Barcelona near the Pyrenees, has finally come around to trial. Typical Spanish speedy justice. 21 French retirees on a group tour died when the boat, which was overloaded and which had been illegally modified, went down just a few dozen feet from the dock. The tragedy would have been much greater if a high-school class of students from Barcelona on a field trip hadn't happened to be right there. The kids thought quickly and went into the water and started pulling people out, saving many lives as these were old people, most of whom probably couldn't swim, in a panic. We would say that counts as real heroism.
Here's a comment from Francesc-Marc Álvaro in today's Vanguardia: "We must not forget that if anything remains from the Spanish tradition, it is the tendency toward all forms of the picaresque, whose vigor is based on a fundamental law: if you don't take advantage of your neighbor, you're a fool, because he will certainly do the same to you, and do a much better job of it. The modernization of Spain has placed limits on the picaresque, but has not eliminated it. The disguise of the pícaro has changed and his tools have become more sophisticated, but the basic ethic of the general populace is the same as in the Siglo de Oro." As Francis Fukuyama said, there is a fundamental lack of trust in Spanish society, one that does not exist in the States or Britain or Germany. Sure, we Americans try to be careful when we buy things or deal with other people, but we consider ourselves and one another to be basically trustworthy folk (with the conspicuous exceptions of used-car dealers and spammers). Since the Spaniards do not consider anyone outside family and friends as trustworthy, not even their neighbors, they're always ready to believe the worst of everything; this is why they're so prone to believe in conspiracy theories, as they believe that everyone is out to screw everyone else and so even the most transparent-seeming action may hide a sinister ulterior motive. The Spaniards, therefore, generally consider Americans to be innocent, naive, overtrusting, and simplistic; most Americans who have spent time in Spain think of Spaniards as cynical and corrupt. Each group considers the other to be a bunch of hypocrites. Individual Spaniards and Americans often get on very well together; hell, I'm married to one and another is my sometimes collaborator on this blog. As groups, we are not great admirers of one another's societies, though.
Says groovy Catalan economist Pedro Schwartz in today's La Vanguardia, "In Spain there reigns a great confusion about what free competetion is, how it works, and what can be expected of it, as I have seen in my years as the President of the Institute of Free Market Studies. In many universities "perfect" competition is defined with so many conditions that it becomes a model that has never existed in reality. There is only perfect competition, it is said, when individuals behave perfectly rationally, when there is an infinite number of buyers and sellers in the market, when these transactors are `perfectly informed, and when the factors of production and the intermediate and final products are perfectly divisible." No wonder most Spanish people just don't get the free-enterprise system if this is what they're teaching their economists and business leaders.
Well, there's good news and bad news on the anti-terrorism front here in Spain. First the good news. The French cops arrested two armed ETA members in the town of Agen near Toulouse. (As much as we complain about the French, we have to admit that their law enforcement and security departments are effective in the War against Terrorism.) The cops decided to check these two guys out because they looked suspicious; originally they thought that these guys, who have not been identified yet, were involved in drug trafficking. Turned out they were both armed, packing pistols. The French immediately arrested them and found that they were carrying internal ETA documents; they're being held in Toulouse and the French have sent their fingerprints to Madrid so that they can be identified. Now the bad news. Two bombs in the Vigo area of Galicia went off, killing two people and wounding two more. The police think that this is a local job, since the bombs do not carry the hallmarks of having been either the work of ETA or Spain's other terrorist group, the communist GRAPO. Early suspicions focused immediately upon GRAPO, since Vigo has served as a GRAPO home base and a center for GRAPO activity, but the cops are now convinced they weren't involved; the cops are also discounting the idea of a war between drug-trafficking and smuggling gangs, common in Galicia, because of the nature of the victims, ordinary, decent Joes. The dead couple were nice middle-class people; the husband was a middle manager at Pescanova. The injured are a man who worked in a Citibank branch and his 12-year-old son. These people are not involved in organized crime or terrorism. Could it be a Unabomber-style terrorist? We have no idea but hope the perps get busted soon. Also in France, in the Lyon banlieue, eight people have been arrested, accused of complicity in the Al Qaeda suicide bombing of a Tunisian synagogue last April which killed 18 people. Good.
Here's one for the Darwin Awards. Last Friday night in the working-class Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a group of seven Ecuadoran immigrants, at an impromptu party, drank a bottle of antifreeze thinking it was moscatel. They had found, while looking through a skip full of abandoned furniture, a bottle with a moscatel label on it that was filled with a greenish-blue liquid. (Real moscatel is golden-brown in color.) In order to celebrate their find of the furniture, they decided to have some drinks, so they put the bottle in the fridge and then drank it down. One of the seven victims said that she'd had only three glasses and that it was very good, nice and sweet. Anyway, on Saturday morning, they began to feel a lot worse than they should have, with vomiting and hallucinations. They went to a hospital where all were treated for possible liver and kidney damage; three have been released and the other four will make it. Because they all survived, we don't feel like ghouls making jokes about it, and we can tell you that the English-speaking community of Barcelona has been admonishing its members constantly, Woodstock-style, "Don't drink the blue moscatel." This is a true Darwin Award winner, as there was an eighth woman who was pregnant and so declined to drink anything; she was obviously the one who put two and two together and figured out it was the "moscatel" that had made them sick. She was the only one of the eight who demonstrated the qualities of fitness necessary to improve the species by passing on her genes. The other seven deserve to go sterile after pulling a dumb stunt like drinking a bottle of stuff they found in a garbage skip. This is not an urban legend. The hospitals involved were Esperit Sant in Santa Coloma and Sant Pau in Barcelona. The director of the Generalitat's department of Public Health, Lluís Salleras, made a public announcement that the poisoning had been accidental and that adulterated moscatel was not being sold anywhere. The author of the newspaper article, in Monday, November 4's La Vanguardia, is Luis Benvenuty.
Spanish political update: Jordi Pujol, prime minister of Catalonia, of the conservative Catalanist party Convergence and Union (CiU), has shaken up his cabinet according to the wishes of party heir apparent Artur Mas. Whoop-te-doo, you think. Yeah, it's just a shuffle of names, but it's the most power that old-time political boss Pujol has ever surrendered to any of his designated heirs, of which he has had several in his 22 years of power, all of whom he first made and then broke. The problem with CiU is that it's really a melange of people with very different political beliefs, from lefty progressives to Christian Democrats, united by their strong Catalanism and by Pujol's leadership. When Pujol goes, and he has promised to retire and let Mas be the party's leader in the next elections within a year from now, will CiU hold together? Or will the more conservative and less Catalanist CiU voters move to the conservative centralist People's Party (PP), with the more lefty and less Catalanist CiU voters moving to the Socialists and the more Catalanist and lefty CiU voters moving to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), leaving CiU with only its Catalanist conservative core? If that happens, then Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist candidate in Catalonia and former mayor of Barcelona, will be the next Catalan prime minister, defeating Mas and the other parties soundly. Probably not too much would change, though; Maragall would be less anxious to expand the role of Catalan as Catalonia's State language than CiU, but he'd spend just as much money foolishly and run up just as much debt as Pujol has. (Pujol's conservatism doesn't keep him from passing out lots of big juicy helpings of pork.) Should Maragall win the 2003 Catalan elections, he'll be beautifully placed to become the first serious Catalan candidate for Prime Minister of Spain after PP Prime Minister José María Aznar's successor (either Rodrigo Rato, Jaime Mayor Oreja, or Mariano Rajoy) stomps Socialist candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the 2004 national parliamentary election. Maragall will have been in power in Catalonia for five years, assuming he gets reelected in 2007, and Prime Minister of Catalonia is a very important job in Spain, similar, say, to Governor of California in the United States. Maragall will have plenty of weight to throw around as a big vote-getter in a big, rich region, and would be the logical Socialist choice in the nationals in 2008 assuming that Zapatero gets beat in 2004, which seems a safe assumption.
Thanks very much to everyone who has made nice comments; we'll pass them on to the redoubtable Patrick Crozier of UK Transport and CrozierVision who has done yeoman work setting this up with very little help from us. "Jesús Gil" of Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora of Buscaraons, our cobloggers from here in the Blogdom of Spain, were kind enough to provide very helpful advice. Xavier has a post from several days up on the stupidity of an American petition going around calling for American divestment from Europe that is well worth a read. It's here. Thanks also to all blogmeisters for updating the links.
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Any native English speaker interested in helping out some linguists should click here and take their Dialect Survey. At the end there are some groovy maps that show the regional distribution of the some 120 items you're asked to report your pronunciation and / or lexicon about. The survey's aimed at American and Canadian dialectology but they'd love to hear from you if you're a non-American native English speaker too.
James Taranto has a bit at the end of Best of the Web about a Madagascar soccer team. We saw this several days ago in La Vanguardia. What happened was that, with the score 0-0, the Stade Olympique team became enraged with the referee. In protest, they proceeded to intentionally kick the ball into their own goal, and continued to do so for the rest of the game. They lost 149-0, an apparent all-time record in an official soccer game in any league. The Madagascar Soccer Federation is very put out. We will point out that Reuters is a British news service and is thus perfectly justified in referring to the sport we Yanks call soccer as football, much as we hate to stick up for Reuters.
This article from National Review Online provides an interesting perspective on why exactly the French, both left- and right-wingers, are screaming bloody murder that the Americans want to take over Iraqi oil: because French companies control at least 23% of it and are afraid that a post-Saddam government would void said contracts. Well, that probably would be a consequence of a war against Iraq, but getting oil drilling or exploring contracts for American companies is not the business of the United States government, strange as that may sound to French (or Spanish) ears. America doesn't care whose company drills or refines or does whatever to the oil as long as it makes it to the world market. Hell, our boycott of Iraq shows that we can live just fine without Iraqi oil. And if what we wanted to do was grab said oil, wouldn't we logically already have done it many years ago?
What the French are doing when they ascribe base motives to the Americans is simply projecting what they would do in such a situation. They would do what they thought was in the interests of France, whether that was moral or right or not. They would go to war for 23% of Iraqi oil, so they think we would, too. The abovementioned article points that France sold some $20 billion worth of jet fighters and the like to Saddam's Iraq, and the French government is a part-owner of the French aerospace industry. This means that Mitterand and Chirac and Jospin and Juppé thought the profit they could make off selling arms to one of the world's nastiest dictators was in the interest of France. They all probably figured that it wasn't too likely that a Frenchman would get within target range of any of these weapons anyway.
But, cry the French and their Spanish acolytes like La Vanguardia's José Martí Gómez, the Americans are the ones who armed Iraq! Well, first, if that was true, then why wasn't Iraq using American arms against us in the Gulf War? Second, it's true that America, figuring that what we were really rooting for in the Iraq-Iran War was for both sides to lose, "tilted" toward whichever side we thought was behind. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal? What that was all about was selling arms to the Ayatollah, if we remember correctly mostly Soviet-made formerly Arab equipment captured by the Israelis in one of their many wars, with which to fight Iraq, and sending the money to fund the contras in Nicaragua. We were arming the Iranians as well as the Iraqis, mostly at different times and in smallish quantities.
There are a couple of France-based conspiracy theories going on in Continental Europe. One involves a supposed spy satellite operation called Echelon run by the CIA and MI5 or 6 or whichever it is and, like, Australia and Canada and New Zealand are involved. The English-speaking conspirators spy on France and steal French industrial secrets, with which they perfidiously make more money than the Jacques Brel-listening surrender monkeys. We have no idea whether there is any truth at all in this story. We doubt it. Another one is Operation Condor, which was supposedly a plot through which the United States organized the military juntas that ran much of South America in the late 1970s. Again, we doubt it. Another is a supposed smear job on "Latin" ex-Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch by the "Anglo-Saxon" press; the French and Spanish and Italians are convinced that Samaranch is their man and all the corruption talk is just the jealous Anglos trying to get the Latin guy. A very common theory with no basis at all is that the Americans set the prices for such goods as coffee, forcing the Latin American peasantry into poverty by holding down prices. This one quite obviously orignated in Latin America and spread from there into Spain, France, and Italy.
What the French are doing when they ascribe base motives to the Americans is simply projecting what they would do in such a situation. They would do what they thought was in the interests of France, whether that was moral or right or not. They would go to war for 23% of Iraqi oil, so they think we would, too. The abovementioned article points that France sold some $20 billion worth of jet fighters and the like to Saddam's Iraq, and the French government is a part-owner of the French aerospace industry. This means that Mitterand and Chirac and Jospin and Juppé thought the profit they could make off selling arms to one of the world's nastiest dictators was in the interest of France. They all probably figured that it wasn't too likely that a Frenchman would get within target range of any of these weapons anyway.
But, cry the French and their Spanish acolytes like La Vanguardia's José Martí Gómez, the Americans are the ones who armed Iraq! Well, first, if that was true, then why wasn't Iraq using American arms against us in the Gulf War? Second, it's true that America, figuring that what we were really rooting for in the Iraq-Iran War was for both sides to lose, "tilted" toward whichever side we thought was behind. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal? What that was all about was selling arms to the Ayatollah, if we remember correctly mostly Soviet-made formerly Arab equipment captured by the Israelis in one of their many wars, with which to fight Iraq, and sending the money to fund the contras in Nicaragua. We were arming the Iranians as well as the Iraqis, mostly at different times and in smallish quantities.
There are a couple of France-based conspiracy theories going on in Continental Europe. One involves a supposed spy satellite operation called Echelon run by the CIA and MI5 or 6 or whichever it is and, like, Australia and Canada and New Zealand are involved. The English-speaking conspirators spy on France and steal French industrial secrets, with which they perfidiously make more money than the Jacques Brel-listening surrender monkeys. We have no idea whether there is any truth at all in this story. We doubt it. Another one is Operation Condor, which was supposedly a plot through which the United States organized the military juntas that ran much of South America in the late 1970s. Again, we doubt it. Another is a supposed smear job on "Latin" ex-Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch by the "Anglo-Saxon" press; the French and Spanish and Italians are convinced that Samaranch is their man and all the corruption talk is just the jealous Anglos trying to get the Latin guy. A very common theory with no basis at all is that the Americans set the prices for such goods as coffee, forcing the Latin American peasantry into poverty by holding down prices. This one quite obviously orignated in Latin America and spread from there into Spain, France, and Italy.
Monday, November 04, 2002
Check out the Linguablogs web ring if you're interested in language. Right there are links to ten or so interesting blogs, at least for us linguists, teachers, translators, and the like. We get the idea that these guys are sort of their own little blog ghetto, as we'd never seen any linguistics sites before and suddenly came across not one but a lot. We're not sure if we count as a linguistics blog, but we do seem to find ourselves talking about language a lot.
You know the holiday season is coming up in Spain when you see, in the neighborhood shops and bars, participations in the Christmas lottery for sale. The Spanish Christmas lottery, known as "El Gordo" (The Big One), is supposedly the biggest single lottery draw in the world, in the sense that it distributes the most money. It's also supposed to be the lottery that returns the highest percentage of the takings in the payoffs. A décimo in the lottery costs 20 euros, and there are 66,000 numbers. The payoff for the Fat One is 200,000 euros per decimo, 10,000 times what you paid for your ticket. There are lots of very appetizing smaller prizes. You're not the only person holding your number; many other people, quite likely thousands, are certainly holding it. Décimos are traditionally bought up by civic groups (the block Christmas lighting commission, the fiesta mayor association, choral groups, football fan clubs, and the like) and then divided up into much smaller participaciones which are resold door-to-door and in shops and bars. A 20% surcharge is added to benefit the group in question. So, for example, the local choral group is selling one-euro participations for one euro twenty. If you buy a ticket you're helping them out and taking a little flyer on the lottery as well. Most people buy several different participations and perhaps a whole décimo or two as well, all of different numbers, so you're riding several different horses, as it were. It is not unusual for people to buy fifty or a hundred bucks' worth of tickets, or more. We usually wind up with twenty-five dollars or so "invested".
December 22 is the day of the prize draw every year, and the numbers themselves are selected by, get this, blind children from a special school in Madrid; that, we suppose, is about as innocent as a hand can get. The whole country spends all morning watching the drawing on TV, and by the time of the afternoon news on TV the Big One has been drawn along with all the other prizes. The newspapers come out with special editions and everyone is checking his participations. The fun part is that the prize money is widely spread around since most people hold very small stakes in the number, just a couple of euros or so, and so the probably thousands of holders collect twenty or thirty or forty thousand euros each--ten thousand times the money they put in. The holders are concentrated in the one town or neighborhood where the number was distributed in the local shop or bar, so if you win, you and everybody you know are rather better off but not life-changingly rich. The TV networks immediately send their reporters to wherever the Big One and the several second, third, fourth and fifth prizes have fallen and film joyous small crowds jumping around and drinking cava. The clichés, repeated every year, are that the Big One ha caído en un barrio popular (it landed in a working-class neighborhood) and that the prize money has been muy repartido (widely shared). And then it's Christmas, so if you won it's a very nice one and if you didn't win, you forget about it in a hurry.
December 22 is the day of the prize draw every year, and the numbers themselves are selected by, get this, blind children from a special school in Madrid; that, we suppose, is about as innocent as a hand can get. The whole country spends all morning watching the drawing on TV, and by the time of the afternoon news on TV the Big One has been drawn along with all the other prizes. The newspapers come out with special editions and everyone is checking his participations. The fun part is that the prize money is widely spread around since most people hold very small stakes in the number, just a couple of euros or so, and so the probably thousands of holders collect twenty or thirty or forty thousand euros each--ten thousand times the money they put in. The holders are concentrated in the one town or neighborhood where the number was distributed in the local shop or bar, so if you win, you and everybody you know are rather better off but not life-changingly rich. The TV networks immediately send their reporters to wherever the Big One and the several second, third, fourth and fifth prizes have fallen and film joyous small crowds jumping around and drinking cava. The clichés, repeated every year, are that the Big One ha caído en un barrio popular (it landed in a working-class neighborhood) and that the prize money has been muy repartido (widely shared). And then it's Christmas, so if you won it's a very nice one and if you didn't win, you forget about it in a hurry.
Here's the sports update for all you folks that are just dying for it. In last weekend's Spanish first division soccer, FC Barcelona put up a poor show in Santander but got out of there with a 1-1 tie. Real Madrid failed again to win, tying 0-0 against Deportivo under the rain again in Coruña. Valencia won against Español here in Barcelona, 0-1. Valencia has scored the second-most goals so far (17) and has given up the fewest (5). That's barely half a goal allowed per match. Real Sociedad won again, 0-1 in Villareal. We still think they'll come back to earth. The top of the standings: Real Sociedad 20 points, Valencia 17, Mallorca 15, Celta 14, Betis, R. Madrid and Deportivo 13, Barcelona and Málaga 12. In the Mutha Fucka watch, he scored 10 points in Barcelona's 93-82 loss at Caja San Fernando.
English has truly become the world language, in case you somehow missed it. Here in Spain, it's become almost a necessity. My wife, Remei, is an assiduous reader of the Sunday help-wanted ads in the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia. She calculates that about 40% of all job ads and 70% of white-collar job ads require English, and that the jobs that require English usually are better-paid than those that don't. Her only outstanding job skill, besides her general competence at office work, is her excellent command of spoken English. Remei says that if she wanted to, she could find a relatively lousy new job instantly and a relatively good new job after some time looking, owing exclusively to her English. This is while, don't forget, the Spanish economy is going through a slowdown--not a recession, but a fall in the rate of growth--that's made work a bit harder to get than it was a couple of years ago.
Many Spaniards seem to agree with Remei that knowing English really is a rung up the ladder in the job market. La Vanguardia says that there are 900,000 students of English in Spain, and this does not include elementary and high school students. There are 3500 English schools which employ 20,000 people in Spain, and the Spanish demand for English employs many more people in Britain and in other English-speaking countries in the form of summer classes, textbooks, videos, and the like. (The US, curiously, doesn't much compete in the international English-teaching racket; American English-as-a-second-language materials tend to be directed at domestic use with often poorly-educated immigrants, very different from the British English-as-a-foreign-language books and software aimed at fairly literate and cultured Continental Europeans.) All totaled, the English-teaching business in Spain grosses €600 million a year, which is a healthy pile of money.
So why, you ask, don't the Spaniards just learn English and get it over with? The problem is that learning English is seen in Spain as a New Year's resolution sort of thing, rather like losing weight, getting in shape, or learning the piano. That's because learning English is hard for Spaniards. It's difficult and time-consuming. The American Institute in Barcelona, a non-profit organization which has been in operation for 50 years, figures that it takes an average Spaniard about 500 class hours to reach the English skill level necessary to pass the Cambridge First Certificate exam, a diploma commonly accepted in Europe that certifies that one indeed does know English reasonably well, sufficient for most work purposes. Regular English classes are normally held twice a week for an hour and a half. If you attend class three hours a week for forty weeks a year, you'll take about five years to reach First Certificate level--and this figure does not include the hundreds of out-of class hours reading, watching movies or TV, surfing the Net, or just chatting that a learner needs to do on his own.
Now you're saying "Five years?! Five freakin' years?" Yep, that's how long it takes. Learning a language is not just a question of sitting down and studying it and then regurgitating it on the test; it takes active practice time. You have to practice speaking and listening to and reading and writing English until you get good at it, just like the piano or cooking or driving a car or anything else. And it helps you a great deal if you have a competent teacher to assist you in learning, but there's no magic formula. No silver bullet. No way a teacher can unscrew your head and pour English in. But that doesn't mean there aren't people out there trying to sell you the idea that they can.
We suppose that the definition of fraud is making promises about what you're selling that aren't true. Over the last fifteen or twenty years in Spain, ever since the Spaniards realized that they'd better learn English, a whole different category of businesses has started up. Traditionally in Barcelona, English classes have been held at the Escuela Nacional de Idiomas, a government-subsidized institution; the British Council, run by the British government; the American Institute, run as a non-profit by an independent board; and neighborhood "language academies", run by individuals, who specialize in personal treatment and attention and run the gamut between very good and plain awful. But since people began to wake up to the fact that they needed English in the mid-80s, the sharp operators jumped on board.
First came two competing chains, Wall Street Institute, now controlled by the American company Sylvan, and Opening School, owned by the old-line distance-courses company, CEAC. What these guys did is advertise a "totally new method" of learning English painlessly and with no work or struggle. All you had to do is come into a Wall Street or Opening branch, spend a few hours a week there, plug into a computer or listen to audiocassettes, and you'd teach yourself English. The scheme was a little more complicated than this, but that was more or less it. They put up a big advertising blitz promising people the moon, linguistically, and convinced a lot of people (also using techniques like cold-calling, and always, always, the hard sell) who didn't know much about language and how it is learned but were desperate to learn English. Meanwhile, they sold franchises to people who didn't know anything about language either, but were willing to kick in the cash to buy the Wall Street or Opening system, including the computer and electronic setups. So you had ignorant franchisees running "education centers", which were basically language labs, selling English to ignorant customers who bought the hard-sell. Meanwhile, very little English was getting learned by anybody in these places, but after about 1995 they became almost ubiquitous. Both Wall Street and Opening opened a couple of dozen franchises in the Barcelona metropolitan area; seeing one was as common as seeing a McDonalds.
By about 1998 or so it was starting to become clear that these franchised systems were not getting the job done. Letters from disappointed customers became common in the newspapers and very negative gossip began going around the Barcelona English-speaking community, much of which depends on the English-teaching sector for its livelihood. Also, Opening and Wall Street used the typical health-club sales scam, getting the customer to sign up for a year at a time at prices approaching $2000 and paying in advance, while the company knew the whole time that most students would drop out fairly quickly when they got tired of typing stuff at a keyboard and listening to audiocassettes and not even frequently receiving help from an authentic native speaker, much less an authentic English teacher. The two chains advertised a money-back guarantee with so many escape clauses in it that it wasn't worth anything, and a lot of people became very irritated at not getting their money back when they tried to.
By about 2000 the bottom was beginning to drop out of the market for Wall Street and Opening; you started to see shuttered-up franchises and fewer TV advertisements, then none at all. At exactly this time, Brighton, a chain of traditional English activities with a very poor reputation for hiring unqualified teachers, sometimes illegally (i.e. by reporting one salary to the government for tax purposes and really paying a different one; this is politely known in Spain as tax fraud) and then not paying them on time or at all, jumped into the market with both feet. Its flamboyant owner, an Argentinian wheeler-dealer whose name is Alfredo Ibáñez Nicolás but who uses the slightly improved Alfred Ibañez de Nicolás, opened up several more outlets to the chain. Rumor has it that Ibáñez leads a very expensive lifestyle that includes the consumption of large quantities of cocaine.
Ibáñez started running full-page advertisements in the Vanguardia every day advertising something called the B.T.S., also known as the Brighton Total System. This consisted of having normal (but generally lousy) traditional-style English classes and access for customers to an extremely ratty room with a few computers, a VCR, and a boom box. Brighton did the same thing as Wall Street and Opening but with a lower budget; no TV ads but lots of direct-marketing hard-sell phone calling. About this time all three chains figured something out: that there would be real money if you made it possible for potential customers to finance their English "studies". Students would take out bank loans for the amount of the course and the bank would directly pay the school in full. The bank would then be in charge of collecting the loan, which the student didn't normally know he'd gotten into because the contracts they signed had an awful lot of fine print, big words, and confusing clauses.
In 2002 the chains began to crack up. In August, Opening announced that it was closing permanently after a couple of months of irregular operation during which several franchisees closed down and others began opening only for limited hours. Then it all hit the fan when customers began to ask about getting their money back. Uh, they weren't going to get their money back, and not only that, they had to pay off their bank loan whether or not they were getting any English out of it. Opening didn't have any money to give back, or at least they said they didn't, and the banks certainly weren't about to become angels of charity. Brighton went down at the end of October under much more spectacular circumstances; their teachers went on strike after not having been paid since May. Ibáñez, apparently coked up, called a staff meeting in which he vehemently promised that everybody would be paid. He then proceeded to disappear with the main computer's hard disk and files and the company's books, not to mention whatever cash was lying around; the staff at the main office, when telephoned by a Vanguardia reporter to see what was going on, replied, "Ibáñez has run off with the money." Some 5000 customers in the Barcelona area have been affected by the Brighton collapse alone. Most of them are out fairly substantial sums of cash, at least several hundred bucks and usually more. They're suing. The banks want their money back. Best of luck.
Wall Street, meanwhile, is still plugging away, though they admit losing almost a third of their students in the past twelve months; they officially announced that they were down to about 50,000 all over Spain, from the 72,000 they claimed last year. Such a messy, undignified end as those of Opening and Brighton seems unlikely for Wall Street, as they're backed by Sylvan, but Wall Street is in trouble too. They had 167 branches in October of last year and they're down to 126 as of now.
Meanwhile, the American Institute, now in its fifty-second year, is seeing an enrollment increase. Now, if you'll please excuse me, I have to go teach an English class.
Many Spaniards seem to agree with Remei that knowing English really is a rung up the ladder in the job market. La Vanguardia says that there are 900,000 students of English in Spain, and this does not include elementary and high school students. There are 3500 English schools which employ 20,000 people in Spain, and the Spanish demand for English employs many more people in Britain and in other English-speaking countries in the form of summer classes, textbooks, videos, and the like. (The US, curiously, doesn't much compete in the international English-teaching racket; American English-as-a-second-language materials tend to be directed at domestic use with often poorly-educated immigrants, very different from the British English-as-a-foreign-language books and software aimed at fairly literate and cultured Continental Europeans.) All totaled, the English-teaching business in Spain grosses €600 million a year, which is a healthy pile of money.
So why, you ask, don't the Spaniards just learn English and get it over with? The problem is that learning English is seen in Spain as a New Year's resolution sort of thing, rather like losing weight, getting in shape, or learning the piano. That's because learning English is hard for Spaniards. It's difficult and time-consuming. The American Institute in Barcelona, a non-profit organization which has been in operation for 50 years, figures that it takes an average Spaniard about 500 class hours to reach the English skill level necessary to pass the Cambridge First Certificate exam, a diploma commonly accepted in Europe that certifies that one indeed does know English reasonably well, sufficient for most work purposes. Regular English classes are normally held twice a week for an hour and a half. If you attend class three hours a week for forty weeks a year, you'll take about five years to reach First Certificate level--and this figure does not include the hundreds of out-of class hours reading, watching movies or TV, surfing the Net, or just chatting that a learner needs to do on his own.
Now you're saying "Five years?! Five freakin' years?" Yep, that's how long it takes. Learning a language is not just a question of sitting down and studying it and then regurgitating it on the test; it takes active practice time. You have to practice speaking and listening to and reading and writing English until you get good at it, just like the piano or cooking or driving a car or anything else. And it helps you a great deal if you have a competent teacher to assist you in learning, but there's no magic formula. No silver bullet. No way a teacher can unscrew your head and pour English in. But that doesn't mean there aren't people out there trying to sell you the idea that they can.
We suppose that the definition of fraud is making promises about what you're selling that aren't true. Over the last fifteen or twenty years in Spain, ever since the Spaniards realized that they'd better learn English, a whole different category of businesses has started up. Traditionally in Barcelona, English classes have been held at the Escuela Nacional de Idiomas, a government-subsidized institution; the British Council, run by the British government; the American Institute, run as a non-profit by an independent board; and neighborhood "language academies", run by individuals, who specialize in personal treatment and attention and run the gamut between very good and plain awful. But since people began to wake up to the fact that they needed English in the mid-80s, the sharp operators jumped on board.
First came two competing chains, Wall Street Institute, now controlled by the American company Sylvan, and Opening School, owned by the old-line distance-courses company, CEAC. What these guys did is advertise a "totally new method" of learning English painlessly and with no work or struggle. All you had to do is come into a Wall Street or Opening branch, spend a few hours a week there, plug into a computer or listen to audiocassettes, and you'd teach yourself English. The scheme was a little more complicated than this, but that was more or less it. They put up a big advertising blitz promising people the moon, linguistically, and convinced a lot of people (also using techniques like cold-calling, and always, always, the hard sell) who didn't know much about language and how it is learned but were desperate to learn English. Meanwhile, they sold franchises to people who didn't know anything about language either, but were willing to kick in the cash to buy the Wall Street or Opening system, including the computer and electronic setups. So you had ignorant franchisees running "education centers", which were basically language labs, selling English to ignorant customers who bought the hard-sell. Meanwhile, very little English was getting learned by anybody in these places, but after about 1995 they became almost ubiquitous. Both Wall Street and Opening opened a couple of dozen franchises in the Barcelona metropolitan area; seeing one was as common as seeing a McDonalds.
By about 1998 or so it was starting to become clear that these franchised systems were not getting the job done. Letters from disappointed customers became common in the newspapers and very negative gossip began going around the Barcelona English-speaking community, much of which depends on the English-teaching sector for its livelihood. Also, Opening and Wall Street used the typical health-club sales scam, getting the customer to sign up for a year at a time at prices approaching $2000 and paying in advance, while the company knew the whole time that most students would drop out fairly quickly when they got tired of typing stuff at a keyboard and listening to audiocassettes and not even frequently receiving help from an authentic native speaker, much less an authentic English teacher. The two chains advertised a money-back guarantee with so many escape clauses in it that it wasn't worth anything, and a lot of people became very irritated at not getting their money back when they tried to.
By about 2000 the bottom was beginning to drop out of the market for Wall Street and Opening; you started to see shuttered-up franchises and fewer TV advertisements, then none at all. At exactly this time, Brighton, a chain of traditional English activities with a very poor reputation for hiring unqualified teachers, sometimes illegally (i.e. by reporting one salary to the government for tax purposes and really paying a different one; this is politely known in Spain as tax fraud) and then not paying them on time or at all, jumped into the market with both feet. Its flamboyant owner, an Argentinian wheeler-dealer whose name is Alfredo Ibáñez Nicolás but who uses the slightly improved Alfred Ibañez de Nicolás, opened up several more outlets to the chain. Rumor has it that Ibáñez leads a very expensive lifestyle that includes the consumption of large quantities of cocaine.
Ibáñez started running full-page advertisements in the Vanguardia every day advertising something called the B.T.S., also known as the Brighton Total System. This consisted of having normal (but generally lousy) traditional-style English classes and access for customers to an extremely ratty room with a few computers, a VCR, and a boom box. Brighton did the same thing as Wall Street and Opening but with a lower budget; no TV ads but lots of direct-marketing hard-sell phone calling. About this time all three chains figured something out: that there would be real money if you made it possible for potential customers to finance their English "studies". Students would take out bank loans for the amount of the course and the bank would directly pay the school in full. The bank would then be in charge of collecting the loan, which the student didn't normally know he'd gotten into because the contracts they signed had an awful lot of fine print, big words, and confusing clauses.
In 2002 the chains began to crack up. In August, Opening announced that it was closing permanently after a couple of months of irregular operation during which several franchisees closed down and others began opening only for limited hours. Then it all hit the fan when customers began to ask about getting their money back. Uh, they weren't going to get their money back, and not only that, they had to pay off their bank loan whether or not they were getting any English out of it. Opening didn't have any money to give back, or at least they said they didn't, and the banks certainly weren't about to become angels of charity. Brighton went down at the end of October under much more spectacular circumstances; their teachers went on strike after not having been paid since May. Ibáñez, apparently coked up, called a staff meeting in which he vehemently promised that everybody would be paid. He then proceeded to disappear with the main computer's hard disk and files and the company's books, not to mention whatever cash was lying around; the staff at the main office, when telephoned by a Vanguardia reporter to see what was going on, replied, "Ibáñez has run off with the money." Some 5000 customers in the Barcelona area have been affected by the Brighton collapse alone. Most of them are out fairly substantial sums of cash, at least several hundred bucks and usually more. They're suing. The banks want their money back. Best of luck.
Wall Street, meanwhile, is still plugging away, though they admit losing almost a third of their students in the past twelve months; they officially announced that they were down to about 50,000 all over Spain, from the 72,000 they claimed last year. Such a messy, undignified end as those of Opening and Brighton seems unlikely for Wall Street, as they're backed by Sylvan, but Wall Street is in trouble too. They had 167 branches in October of last year and they're down to 126 as of now.
Meanwhile, the American Institute, now in its fifty-second year, is seeing an enrollment increase. Now, if you'll please excuse me, I have to go teach an English class.
Sunday, November 03, 2002
We're moving to Blogger, thereby, as usual, doing the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. Patrick was right--we can't be a real blog unless we have permalinks. We will be exploring what we can do with Blogger over the next few days and perhaps weeks. We would very much appreciate it if someone with experience with Blogger would volunteer to be our guru and show us how to a) add a hit counter b) add a blogroll c) add comments. Thank you. Meanwhile, our old Homestead site will stay open till the end of this month. We have the anarchic archives saved on disk, and since much of that stuff is by now way out of date, we're not going to bother bringing it over here, which would be a lot of work. Instead, what we're going to do is go through our archives and pick out 25-30 or so of our greatest hits, what we consider our best posts and what we consider worthy of being saved publicly for posterity. We'll copy-and-paste them over here over the next couple of weeks, so y'all (and any new readers who might show up) will be treated to a few old classics (which will be clearly labeled as such). Please send all e-mail here.
We sent an e-mail to Stacy Tabb, who was very nice and helpful and responded within a few hours. (Folks, if you have a few hundred bucks and need a website, this is your person.) However, she quoted us a price that was very reasonable by American standards but which we just can't swing on Spanish salaries. We can't afford to use Stacy's Sekimori, nor do we have the technical knowledge to use anything but Blogger all by ourselves. So that's what we're gonna do.
Let us give you some kind of idea about what our material lifestyles are over here. Remei and I live in a three-bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and full bathroom; it's about 75 square meters, not counting the balcony. It's in a good neighborhood, middle-class / working-class, kind of boho, centrally located. We have a used car, a 1988 Renault Supercinco (yes, it's an updated Renault Le Car). We could afford a newer used car or a bare-bones new one, but this one works just fine for taking us out to the village, which is about all we use it for anyway since Barcelona has generally decent public transportation and awful traffic and worse parking. We have a refrigerator, a washing machine, a 21-inch TV, a VCR, and this here computer with an ADSL connection--that's why we can't justify spending any more money on the computer than we are, since the ADSL line runs forty bucks a month. We are lucky enough to have access to a large house in the country which belongs to my wife Remei and her mother. That more than makes up for the lack of a home theater or a 25-inch computer monitor.
I am an English teacher and translator and Remei is an office worker, so we're just normal, regular folks, earning normal, regular folks' salaries. We won't tell you exactly how much, but you might get some idea from these statistics: United States GDP per capita US$33,900; United Kingdom $21,800; Canada $23,300; Australia $22,200; Ireland $20,300; Singapore $27,800; New Zealand $17,400; Spain $17,300. (Figures 1999 est.; Source, Time Almanac 2002) So here in Spain we're not doing too badly. We're right up there with more famous countries, though we're not super-rich; we're happy with what we've got, if that makes sense. It's not poor but proud; it's more like middle-class and proud, especially since we really do top the States in culture per capita. Not that that makes us either better or worse. Y'all in the States are about twice as rich on average than we are in Spain and you're a good deal richer than the folks in most of the other English-speaking countries. This doesn't make you good people or bad people but you ought to keep it in mind when thinking of non-Americans' purchasing power. (And no, we aren't whining to Stacy for a discount, we hoe our own row, thank you).
Of course, we need to remember that prices in Spain tend to be a good bit lower, especially for locally-produced stuff. If you figure that the American GDP is double the Spanish GDP and the dollar and euro are one-to-one, which they have been for the past several months, with swings of a cent or two one way or the other, mostly against the euro, then you can figure out what life costs here if you multiply our prices by two and then think of how much the equivalent would cost you in America.
Rent, 3-br apt, good area $400 if you're from here and look around; cheapest possible safe room $250
Liter of gasoline $0.85
Second-hand computer, PII $300 (box only)
Good used car, 6-8 yrs old $3000, a lot more is possible, so is less but at your own risk
Large Ikea sofa-bed, new $300
Liter fresh milk $0.90
Liter UHT milk $0.65
Daily newspaper $1
Pack Camel cigarettes $2.15
6-pack San Miguel beer $2.40
Coffee in bar $0.90
100% wool Marks&S sweater $40
Book $5-$20, much more is possible
3 80g cans tuna $0.96
4 150g good yogurts $1.41
Bunch 5 bananas $1.30
2 liter Coke $0.86
Remember, that's what it would cost you if you bought it here. To get an idea of our standard of living, double these prices and then think about them within your current salary.
We sent an e-mail to Stacy Tabb, who was very nice and helpful and responded within a few hours. (Folks, if you have a few hundred bucks and need a website, this is your person.) However, she quoted us a price that was very reasonable by American standards but which we just can't swing on Spanish salaries. We can't afford to use Stacy's Sekimori, nor do we have the technical knowledge to use anything but Blogger all by ourselves. So that's what we're gonna do.
Let us give you some kind of idea about what our material lifestyles are over here. Remei and I live in a three-bedroom apartment with a living room, kitchen, and full bathroom; it's about 75 square meters, not counting the balcony. It's in a good neighborhood, middle-class / working-class, kind of boho, centrally located. We have a used car, a 1988 Renault Supercinco (yes, it's an updated Renault Le Car). We could afford a newer used car or a bare-bones new one, but this one works just fine for taking us out to the village, which is about all we use it for anyway since Barcelona has generally decent public transportation and awful traffic and worse parking. We have a refrigerator, a washing machine, a 21-inch TV, a VCR, and this here computer with an ADSL connection--that's why we can't justify spending any more money on the computer than we are, since the ADSL line runs forty bucks a month. We are lucky enough to have access to a large house in the country which belongs to my wife Remei and her mother. That more than makes up for the lack of a home theater or a 25-inch computer monitor.
I am an English teacher and translator and Remei is an office worker, so we're just normal, regular folks, earning normal, regular folks' salaries. We won't tell you exactly how much, but you might get some idea from these statistics: United States GDP per capita US$33,900; United Kingdom $21,800; Canada $23,300; Australia $22,200; Ireland $20,300; Singapore $27,800; New Zealand $17,400; Spain $17,300. (Figures 1999 est.; Source, Time Almanac 2002) So here in Spain we're not doing too badly. We're right up there with more famous countries, though we're not super-rich; we're happy with what we've got, if that makes sense. It's not poor but proud; it's more like middle-class and proud, especially since we really do top the States in culture per capita. Not that that makes us either better or worse. Y'all in the States are about twice as rich on average than we are in Spain and you're a good deal richer than the folks in most of the other English-speaking countries. This doesn't make you good people or bad people but you ought to keep it in mind when thinking of non-Americans' purchasing power. (And no, we aren't whining to Stacy for a discount, we hoe our own row, thank you).
Of course, we need to remember that prices in Spain tend to be a good bit lower, especially for locally-produced stuff. If you figure that the American GDP is double the Spanish GDP and the dollar and euro are one-to-one, which they have been for the past several months, with swings of a cent or two one way or the other, mostly against the euro, then you can figure out what life costs here if you multiply our prices by two and then think of how much the equivalent would cost you in America.
Rent, 3-br apt, good area $400 if you're from here and look around; cheapest possible safe room $250
Liter of gasoline $0.85
Second-hand computer, PII $300 (box only)
Good used car, 6-8 yrs old $3000, a lot more is possible, so is less but at your own risk
Large Ikea sofa-bed, new $300
Liter fresh milk $0.90
Liter UHT milk $0.65
Daily newspaper $1
Pack Camel cigarettes $2.15
6-pack San Miguel beer $2.40
Coffee in bar $0.90
100% wool Marks&S sweater $40
Book $5-$20, much more is possible
3 80g cans tuna $0.96
4 150g good yogurts $1.41
Bunch 5 bananas $1.30
2 liter Coke $0.86
Remember, that's what it would cost you if you bought it here. To get an idea of our standard of living, double these prices and then think about them within your current salary.
Friday, November 01, 2002
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