Kitten Update: She can eat a whole 80-gram can of tuna within a couple of minutes. Now that we've cleaned her up and that her own efforts are taking effect, her white bits of fur are now actually white. She and Oscar have been spending their free time chasing one another and the Superball up and down the hallway. Bart is the only one of the established cats who is still furious. Keep those suggestions for names coming. Folks, this is a high-quality kitten we're talking here, not like this here loser. Hurry up before someone else adopts her; you don't want to miss out on having your own warm furry ball of fluff.

There's bad news today regarding two of Spain's biggest social problems, illegal immigration and domestic violence. Nine immigrants drowned when their raft sank off the Canary Isle of Fuerteventura, the island closest to the Moroccan coast. So far in 2003 ten rafts are known to have sunk, with 67 confirmed dead or missing and presumed dead. These statistics include 15 drowned off Fuerteventura in January and 12 drowned from a raft found between Tenerife and Grand Canary in February. Yet the Spanish media go wild when a truck full of illegal Mexicans get found dead somewhere in West Texas. The problem in both countries seems to be the same to me; more people want to come to Spain and the US than, at least some believe, either country can handle. As long as that attitude persists, there will be illegal immigration and some illegal immigrants will die, since illegal immigration is by definition dangerous and full of low criminals likely to take your money and dump you in the sea under the pretext of guiding you to the promised land. By the way, Iberian Notes strongly supports the execution of "coyotes" who abandon their "clients" to die. That's first-degree premeditated murder with the aggravating factors of extortion and breach of promise. Hang them. They're scum.

More than forty people have died in Spain this year as victims of domestic violence. Yesterday, in the crummy part of the Sant Andreu working-class area of Barcelona, a man beat his common-law wife to death with a hammer. The two were fiftyish alcoholics. They had met seven months ago and she invited him to live with her, since he had nowhere to go. The two argued and fought all the time, according to the neighbors, and threats of violence were heard several times by different witnesses. The cops spent a lot of time breaking up fights at their place. Once she locked him out and he took off all his clothes and pounded on her door until three in the morning (there's the pacifism and tranquility of nudism for you). She finally got a restraining order. Not much later he jumped her from behind when she opened the street door to her apartment building; he was waiting inside and clubbed her to death with a hammer. She had been out walking her dogs. The reporters point out that the dogs, found in a state of shock by the woman's body, immobile and trembling, were the only so-called irrational animals in this story. This, of course, is another case of premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances, including violating a restraining order and breaking and entering to get into her building. There's no insanity defense since he knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Hang him. He's scum.

In the wake of the great nude "No to the war" assembly in the holy name of Art, Baltasar Porcel reminds us, in today's Vanguardia, that he danced nude on stage in the last, uh, act at the opening night of "Hair" in Paris in 1969. I do not want to see the photos, thank you.

Here's the latest twist in the soap opera which is Spanish politics. In the Madrid regional Parliament, the PP got 55 seats, the Socialists got 47, and the Communists got 9, giving a Popular Front coalition a 56-55 majority over the conservative PP. That was the deal that was made, and the Socialists and Communists agreed to ally and put the Socialist candidate in as President of the regional government, the biggest prize they won in the May 25 elections.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go straight to hell. Two of the Socialist deputies, Eduardo Tamayo and Teresa Sáez, bolted the party yesterday and refused to appear and vote for the prospective Socialist Chairman of the Parliament (i.e. Speaker). This put in the PP woman, Concepción Dancausa, instead of the SocioCommie guy, Francisco Cabaco, as the wielder of the gavel. The two rebel deputies have been summarily kicked out of the Socialist Party and now the question is what they're going to do. If they abstain or do not appear when the vote on who's going to be the President of the region comes up, the PP candidate, Esperanza Aguirre, not exactly a member of the PP brain trust, will win 55-54. There goes the Socialists' big victory from March 25, the control of the Madrid region with its more than 5 million residents.

Tamayo says that the two rebel deputies refused to appear because they do not believe that the Socialists should pact with the Communists in a coalition; they say that such an alliance "is a betrayal of social democracy". Tamayo says he informed the party leadership about his and Sáez's votes on Saturday, so they knew what was coming several days in advance. Continues Tamayo, "A deal (with the communists) does enormous damage to the interests of the Socialist Party, because if what we try to do is to obtain power at any price without respecting the voters, the voters will end up punishing you, and Rodríguez Zapatero (Zap) has a date with the ballot boxes in a few months. We will not permit this kind of agreement, which takes the Socialist Party toward the extreme left. Someone has to represent the moderate Socialists in the Madrid regional parliament."

The Socialist Party spin is that, as everyone knows, there are various factions within the party. The two big factions are the "guerristas", named for their leader Alfonso Guerra, who are the fairly hard-left Party apparatchiks who control the regional party groupings, especially those to the south of Madrid where Socialist power is based, and the "renewers", who are rather Gary Hart-like--they have "new ideas" but nobody's sure what those new ideas are; they do generally believe that it would be a good idea to remove the guerristas from their positions of power within the Party.

The two rebel ex-Socialists, Tamayo and Sáez, are members of a small faction called the "balbases", formed in the early nineties under power broker José Luis Balbás. Historically they've switched between the two major factions in the party; in 1995 they supported Joaquin Leguina against the guerristas; in 1999 they supported the guerristas against Leguina. In 2000 their support was crucial in getting Zap named Party leader. Meanwhile, both Balbás and Tamayo have been accused of corruption and dishonesty regarding a few real-estate deals.

Anyway, both guerristas and renewers were in favor of getting together with Gas and the Commies and hoofing the PP out of the Madrid regional parliament. But the balbases threw a monkey wrench into the works, because they're resentful at not getting enough bones thrown to their faction. So say the Socialists. The PP is howling with laughter again, since it looks like they're going to keep the big electoral prize that the Popular Front coalition would have taken away from them. Also, the Socialist party looks like a bunch of disorganized and incompetent doofuses, as usual, and helps to convince responsible Spanish voters to vote for anybody except them. The PP is going to win the next general election. This fiasco is going to put them over.

The Upper Gràcia Kitten Rescue Squad has struck again. On Saturday Remei heard a kitten meowing piteously up on Calle Sant Salvador, but it was up in the motor of a parked car and I couldn't get it out. I came back every day to bring food and water, and it was in the motor of a different car every day. Finally last night I managed to coax it out with some tuna and grabbed it. She's a female, about two months old, and, like all kittens, is mega-cute. She's obviously used to people, so somebody must have dumped her, which is why she had no idea of how to shift for herself and was hiding out somewhere totally inaccessible. She's calico, white and brown and gray tabby all mixed in patches.

She's very friendly and playful; right now she's playing with a Superball on the floor of this room. She's also gotten into my wastebasket and knocked a book off my desk within the last fifteen minutes. She got over being frightened in about fifteen minutes after I got her home. This afternoon we're going to the vet. I'm already working my circle of contacts to see if there's a kitten-adopter among them. Oscar is the established cat who's reacted the best; he's just sitting and watching her, fascinated. This is the first kitten he's seen except for himself. He's already dared to sneak up on her and sniff her butt. The Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, have seen it all before and are neutral. They'll get used to her in a couple of days. Lisa has her little kitty nose seriously out of joint, though, and Bart is hiding behind the chair out on the balcony and he won't come out.

This kitten is prime adoption material, and anyone in need of a cat should contact me at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com. This is a kitten who will sleep curled up under your chin and play with your shoelaces when she's awake, so don't hesitate.

We're also going to hold a "Name That Kitten" contest. Remei wants to name her Daisy, but I don't much like that. So send in your suggestions for kitten names.

From James Taranto:

All the Nudes That's Fit to Print

Reporting from Barcelona, the New York Times' Sarah Lyall describes her participation in an "art project" that involved 7,000 people doffing their clothes and crouching in a fetal position:

" "The moment you take your clothes off is the worst moment, but then you feel integrated," said Ángeles Rubio, 33, a shoe designer, who said it was not so bad for her as she was a nudist and vegetarian.

Not this reporter. Aside from being worried about losing my clothes altogether and being forced to wander the back streets of Barcelona with nothing on, I discovered that a notebook does not work as a makeshift skirt. It was embarrassing while naked to happen upon people I had already interviewed while dressed. One of Mr. Tunick's earlier projects, involving nude older women in Australia, began to seem like a better bet in terms of participatory journalism."

It's good to know that with the Howell Raines era behind it, the Times is returning to its tradition of serious newsgathering.

Yep. No dog doo. It really happened--check the Vanguardia or the Periódico if you want to see the pictures. For a full gallery of photos, click on "La tapiz humana de Spencer Tunick" over to the right of your screen when you go to the El Periódico link. The horror, the horror. The whole thing made the front page of the Vangua below the fold. Here's the scoop.

One Spencer Tunick, a New York "artist", called upon the people of Barcelona to come out and get photographed nude en masse. 15,000 people signed up and 7000 actually came out--at four in the morning--to get naked and get photographed on Avenida María Cristina near Montjuic. They're saying it's the "greatest collective artistic nudity" in history, breaking the record of some 4000 naked leftovers from the Sixties set by Tunick himself in Melbourne. Anyway, at 6:20 AM, Tunick decided the light was correct and posed the crowd two different ways, lying on their backs and curled up in a fetal position. He was finished by 7:45.

Says our intrepid reporter, Justo Barranco, "The most generalized feeling was that it was strange that the situation didn't seem strange," "We, all together, feel surprisingly like brothers and sisters," "Blai, a young teacher who came with his boyfriend, said, 'I thought it would be like a dream in which you wake up and you're naked and everyone else is too'," "People began doing "the wave" and shouting 'No to the war'," and "(Tunick) reminded us of the paradox that in Barcelona his work is celebrated as an "artistic happening" while in his country, the United States, and in his city, New York, it would have been considered a crime."

Oh, geez, here it is again, that part of the American Black Legend that says we are puritanical philistines. Nobody would have said boo if Mr. Alleged Artist put on his show in Central Park as long as he had a municipal permit, which they would have given him in the holy name of Art. It's New York. They've seen everything. This would be no big deal there, certainly not front-page news in the local newspapers.

If he'd tried to put this crap on in Central Park, though, the Great Unwashed would have stood around in enormous crouds hooting and hollering and generally making fun of the stupid assholes who get up at four in the morning and get naked in the chill dawn in order to promote the notoriety of (and make money for) a fraud calling himself an artist. Our New York volunteers would not have enjoyed themselves nearly as much as the collection of pseuds, wannabes, and phonies who make up our city's element of the Illustrated and the Enlightened and who showed up at Montjuic.

Here's a piece on the revival in popularity of swing and jazz standards; this is not quite new news, since Tony Bennett, for example, has been hip again for several years, and "lounge" music was a trend a couple of years back. Lounge was a joke, though, but both the retro and the innovative trends in music today have a common source.

I really think the trend in question, applicable to both retro and new music, is toward "authenticity", however we want to define that. Now, commercial pop music can be "authentic" as all hell--look at the Motown singers, for example, or the Beatles, but a lot of the stuff that used to be hyped up by the media is not catching on with the American public in general.

What's popular now among a lot of younger people is funk-dance beat stuff, hip-hop plus soul and rap or whatever you want to call it, the stuff the kids like to listen to and can experiment with making themselves. It's got authenticity because it's the music that these kids would be making if they weren't trying to be big stars. Something that's very hip among the twenties-thirties crowd is so-called world music, especially fusions of Algerian or Dominican or West African or whatever dance music and standard Western pop-rock. This stuff gets its authenticity because it's what the people in other countries really listen to. Country music, especially the "authentic" bluegrass and Bakersfield strains, is increasing its popularity a great deal since it's seen as the real voice of the American people. Rock and roll is still healthy, and it's certainly always been hip to be into blues.

What's dropping off in popularity, I think, are the wilder excrecences of Eighties pop, from Madonna to Jacko. Remember that crap like Culture Club and A-Ha and the Thompson Twins and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Adam Ant? A Flock of Seagulls? How about those one-hit wonders like "99 Red Balloons" and "Der Kommissar"? (Van Halen, who had a sense of humor, got the "Der Kommissar" guys to open for them once in Kansas City.) Have they euthanized Cyndi Lauper yet? God, that stuff stank, just as bad as the last gasp of Rock Music, your last and most incredibly boring albums by the Who and Floyd and Zep mixed with your wimp-metal bands like Journey and Foreigner and REO mixed with those hair-metal bands like Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister and Poison. God, the Eighties were an awful time. I'm supposed to be nostalgic for it, and I suppose I am, but not for the music that was on the radio at the time in the deep Midwest. It was phony, riddled with Salingeresque arch-phoniness.

Anyway, the Eighties stars who did that wacky shit are seen today as a bunch of phonies, and even the ones who didn't do wacky shit sucked. Huey Lewis and the News. Bon Jovi. Duran Duran. Hall and Oates. Billy Idol. Bryan Adams. Ouch. Phonies all and commercially dead now, if they were ever alive. Remember that Bryan Adams song called "Summer of '69" about how cool it was in 1969? Bryan Adams was like eight when the righteous shit was going on at Woodstock or whatever. Phony, phony, phony. Maybe we can deport Bryan Adams back to Canada if our relations with our northern neighbor get any worse. They can have all the old Second City TV people and their friends back, too.

Next trend to get the axe for being phony: the boy bands and the teenage sluts of the late '90s. In three years no one will remember any of them. Some of them, like Christina Aguilera, are already as forgotten as Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.

Comment: British music is as non-influential as it has been in the United States since the Beatles. I can't think of a British artist who's broken out in America for a few years now. Oasis bombed. So did the Spice Girls. As did Kylie Minogue, who I think is Australian anyway. Hypothesis: the British pop culture scene is seen as phony in the States.

The big news in Barcelona are the elections for the presidency of FC Barcelona. The Barça has about 100,000 members, who pay a substantial but not enormous sum--I believe it's some $400 a year, less than any other football club in Spain, and there's a several-year waiting list--and in exchange get tickets to the 19 League home games and a vote for the club president. The Barça is "owned" by its members, not by an owner like, say, George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees. 58% of the club's members are in Barcelona city and more than 90% live within Barcelona province, so this is something that affects the average Joe here, who can afford to be a member and get the season tickets. The guy who owns the newsstand in the plaza, for example, is a member. So is my psychiatrist. Now, about 58,000 people here in town are members out of about 1 1/2 million within the city limits. That's a sizable chunk of the population, and it's a very middle-class bunch of people, very much the kind of established, civic-minded people who are the backbone of the city.

To demonstrate the importance of these elections, the Vanguardia has been devoting several pages daily to them and TV3 has also been giving us daily, in-depth reports. The two sports daily papers (each of which has a circulation of over 100,000 and is at least 75% devoted to the Barça) are talking about nothing else.

José Luis Núñez was the club president for more than twenty years between the late '70s and late '90s. Núñez was never a popular president, but he was a good money manager and cleaned up the club's financial situation, putting it in excellent shape to make big signings and to invest in the future. Barcelona had traditionally been a disappointing team, the "Wait till next year" club, like the Red Sox or the Cubs or the old Brooklyn Dodgers. In the early '90s, finally, Núnez signed a few superstars and coach Johan Cruyff put together a fine squad that won four consecutive Spanish Leagues, a Cup Winners' Cup championship, and a European Cup championship. Then, a few years later, a much less popular squad won two Leagues under very unpopular coach Louis Van Gaal. As soon as Van Gaal's squad failed to win any titles, the club members threw a snooty fit because Van Gaal was so hated and they wanted to get rid of him. Núñez was offended at this internal revolt and resigned, and Van Gaal did too.

Joan Gaspart became the team president and rapidly became much more hated than Núñez had ever been. He wasted tons of the money Núñez had carefully saved up on crap signings and left the Barça in a similar situation to the New York Mets right now: a club that should have a lot of money and a bright future, but which has a ton of crappy over-the-hill players with huge contracts that they can't get rid of and that the fans hate (i.e. Frank "Where's the Ball?" DeBoer). The straw that broke the club member's back was when Gaspart rehired Louis Van Gaal, of all people, at the beginning of this last season. That was it. Everybody in town was ready to hate this squad, and the squad has repaid the fans by stinking up the League in what has been by far the worst season in the history of FC Barcelona. Next year will be the very first season in which the Barça will not qualify for European competition since said competitions were introduced in the 1950s. Van Gaal got run out of town on a rail along about January, and Gaspart resigned as president in about March or so.

Now, I am royally pissed off at the Barça. Here are five excellent reasons: 1) they hired Serbian fascist Slobo-loving Radomir Antic to replace Van Gaal as coach 2) they held an anti-American demonstration when the players became the only squad in Europe to wear "No to the war" T-shirts 3) they played a friendly match against Gadafi's son's team in exchange for €300,000 4) the fans threw mobile phones, whiskey bottles, and a pig's head at Luis Figo when Madrid came to play in the Camp Nou, getting the Barça headlines around Europe; the papers in, I think, Newcastle, where Barça was scheduled to play the next week, headlined "Beware! The pig-throwers are coming!" That's just great for the city's image 5) the League closed the Camp Nou for two games as punishment and the Barça sued them in regular court instead of accepting it as a fair consequence of discreditable behavior by its fans. The sentence still hasn't been served.

Well, as if I needed any more reasons to hate the goddamn Barça, anti-Semitism has reared its head in the Barça presidential race. Lluís Bassat is the leading candidate; he's a well-known advertising man who runs the local branch of Ogilvy and Mather. Mr. Bassat normally uses just his father's surname; here in Spain you can go by either just your father's surname (Pablo Ruíz) or by your father's and your mother's (Pablo Ruíz Picasso). Either way is fine.

So Jaume Llauradó, one of the other five candidates, has made an issue of the fact that Mr. Bassat uses only his first surname, which is standard Catalan, like Johnson in English though less common. Mr. Bassat does not habitually use his mother's surname, which is Cohen. You see, Mr. Bassat is Jewish. I didn't know that before, and I don't particularly care whether Mr. Bassat is Muslim or Catholic or Protestant or an atheist or whatever. Like me, most Barcelonese didn't know Bassat was Jewish before Mr. Llauradó clued us in. It's a curious fact that he's Jewish because there are very few Jews in Spain, but it doesn't matter, of course. It's like finding out that a black guy is Jewish. You're surprised because very few blacks are Jewish, and it goes against your expectation, but it doesn't change the way you think about him.

Unless, apparently, your name is Jaume Llauradó. Mr. Llauradó, who, we must assume, is no dummy, seems to believe that the tactic of publicizing Mr. Bassat's Jewishness will cost Mr. Bassat votes. This does not speak wonders for Mr. Llauradó's conception of the members of the Football Club Barcelona, as it shows that he believes that real Barcelonese won't vote for a Jew. If Bassat doesn't win--and he is the big frontrunner right now, he is the best-known and most prominent citizen of the candidates, he's signed up Barça hero (and drug-user) Pep Guardiola as his general manager-in-waiting and Barça legends Eusebio Sacristán and Guillermo Amor as Guardiola's assistants--who knows more about soccer than these three guys, all known as smart players with character?--, and he has the support of Miquel Roca, perhaps the city's leading citizen and its most powerful lawyer--I will assume that it is because he has been outed as a Jew.

The Vanguardia has been giving very little attention to this little contretemps, which would get Mr. Llauradó read out of decent society where I come from, just like Glenn Close in Dangerous Liasons. They are also paying very little attention to the success of the racist and xenophobic political party Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) in the municipal elections. If you want fascism, you'll do a lot better looking at the PxC and its Francoist leader, Josep Anglada, than at elected Prime Minister Aznar or elected President Bush, who have been getting labeled as Fascists by the illustrated and enlightened among us in the pages of the very newspaper that is playing the ostrich regarding these outbursts of xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, which have included several anti-Arab near-pogroms right here in Catalonia, especially in the redneck working-class Terrassa neighborhood of Can Anglada. (Note: there is no connection between the names of Josep Anglada, the racist politician, and the Can Anglada neighborhood.)

Manuel Trallero, the Vangua's gadfly, blows the whistle in his column in today's edition in an article titled "Catalunya racista".

One of the most extraordinary things that has happened recently is that the so-called Plataforma per Catalunya has managed to win City Council seats in several Catalan municipalities, among them Vic. The fact that a xenophobic and racist organization has obtained such a result has seemed to all of us the most normal and natural thing in the world. No one has been screaming to the heavens or rending his garments. As usual in Catalonia, nothing happens around here.

There is a perverse logic according to which, if there are immigrants, the logical result is racism. Racism in Catalonia is no longer socially looked down upon, it's not politically incorrect anymore. The attempts of the media of communication to hide their heads under their wings have failed.

It isn't just that Mr. Anglada has won his first council members--Mr. Le Pen started off in France in exactly the same way--it is that anything goes against the immigrants. From the president of the Generalitat (Jordi Pujol) who blames them for the possible disappearance of Catalan--blames them, precisely those who just got here-- and who minimizes the violence in Can Anglada over and over, to the (racist) public statements of his honorable wife (Marta Ferrusola), or those of the former leader of the (ultraCatalanist) Republican Left, Mr. Heribert Barrera, who still holds his well-deserved medal awarded by Parliament, or the evacuation of a few immigrants camped out in the Plaza Catalunya, decreed one summer by (Communist) vice-mayor Mrs. Inma Mayol ("Chemical Inma") while the real mayor was out of town, while the workers of the Sintel company, all white, of course, camp out on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid as long as they feel like it.

We've accepted that all this is normal, habitual, everyday, and that it forms part of us, ourselves. That is why Mr. Llauradó has committed the offense of raising suspicions when he denounced that Mr. Bassat did not use his second surname in order to hide his Jewish origin. This is an attack of, pure and simple, anti-Semitism, which anywhere in Europe would have provoked an enormous scandal, but here has been unnoticed.

We still have the consolation that, if the cases of woman-battering are higher in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain, it is not because we Catalans are stupider and more violent (más energúmenos) than the Spaniards, but because our women are braver in calling the police. We Catalans, according to some, are seen as racists because we admit it, while the Spaniards keep their mouths shut. All I can say is good for them.

All right! It looks like Blogger is willing to let me post again. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, though.

The idiots in the Basque Nationalist Party, who control the Basque Parliament, are behaving like a bunch of pricks as usual. The Supreme Court told them that ETA's political arm, Batasuna (or whatever it is this week), has been illegalized. Outlawed. Banned. And that the Administration was perfectly inside the bounds of the Constitution in doing this. This means that the Basque Parliament must kick out all the Batasuna deputies. They are refusing to do so.

The Basque Parliament has no choice but to comply. This is not a proposed Administration policy. This is a Supreme Court decision and all administrations, national, regional, provincial, comarcal, and municipal, MUST comply with it. That's called the Rule of Law, and it's more basic even than democracy in the defense of our rights as individuals. Remember that the Liberals in the 19th century wanted written constitutions, checks on the power of the king and the judges and the Parliament, as the first step in getting rid of the ancien regime. They didn't get around to asking for "one man, one vote" until the latter part of the 19th century.

But the Basque Nationalists are, as of now, refusing to obey the Court's sentence. They want to negotiate about it. Sorry, guys, there's no negotiating a Supreme Court decision, as the state of Arkansas found out when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock and as Mississippi learned when Kennedy marched them into Oxford. You got two choices: obey or go to jail. Which is it gonna be?

Basque Nationalist leader Retch (Juan José Ibarretxe) and Basque Communist leader Javier "the Madman" Madrazo are daring the central government to get tough on their asses, claiming that this whole shebang is a cover-up for the evil PP Spanish Nationalists to destroy Basque freedoms and accusing Aznar of getting ready to apply Article 155 of the Constitution, which states that "exceptional measures" may be taken if a regional government does not obey the principles of the Constitution.

Well, if I were Aznar that's what I'd do. Close 'em down. He can suspend the activity of the Basque Parliament if they do not comply with the Constitution, and he should. This is not a matter for negotiation. This is Spanish society telling Retch and the Madman and that gang of psychopathic killers that we are heartily sick of terrorism and are not going to tolerate it or its apologists and sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and as for the democratic process, it is perfectly democratic and legal to close these bastards down for defying the Supreme Court.

Can we pass a law forcing members of the Basque Nationalist Party to be those who clean up the blood and guts and human hands blasted onto rooftops that ETA leaves lying all around Spain? Yes, Mr. Zugazugatxoia, that's you. Please pick up that severed hand and carry it down, the coroner is waiting, and then use these paper towels to mop up the blood and collect the bone fragments. Now may we have your reaction towards the latest ETA atrocity? You still seeking to remedy the root causes of the discontent of the oppressed Basque people, who are as wealthy and privileged and free as any group of people in the Western world, before worrying about arresting murderers and breaking up their support groups? Don't puke all over that hand, we need it for evidence, and we hear the widow wants to bury it along with the rest of her husband later.

OK, let's try it again.

The French are going into the Congo with orders to fight when necessary in order to keep the peace, such as it is around there, according to the Telegraph. I am completely in favor, but 100 French Special Forces aren't going to do much good. They need thousands of Special Forces and elite troops in order to clean that mess up, and it's not only the Congo, it's also Rwanda and Burundi and Uganda and Angola and Zimbabwe.

Questions: Do the French have UN approval for this little expedition? If they don't have it, why not? Seems that the French have attempted to set the precedent that the US has to check with the UN in case we want to attack somebody. To be consistent, they can't send their guys roaming all over Africa without asking anybody, at the same time they tell us we can't take out a major international criminal without their permission. Also, how do we know the French aren't there just to grab the diamonds and the other mineral riches of the Congo? They said, after all, that we just went into Iraq to grab the oil. Why should anybody believe that the French are any more moral and altruistic than we are? I challenge Robert Fisk to head off to Congo and start turning out exposés on the behavior of French troops in Kivu or wherever they are. But I'm afraid he'll be staying in his luxurious manse in Beirut while regurgitating everything negative anybody, no matter who, tells him about the United States.

I've been having problems with Blogger and have just managed to get it working again--or, more appropriately, it has deigned to permit itself to function again. Sorry the postings have been sparce, but we've been on the sidelines in a cast.

Things We Would Have Blogged On:

1) There was a disastrous train wreck in Albacete province in which 19 were killed and more than forty badly hurt when a Talgo, a top-of-the-line Spanish-built passenger train, crashed head-on into a freight. There have really been too many accidents recently on the trains. I, of course, would privatize the whole damn system if I could, but since I can't, I at least want a shakeup in management, please.

2) The fallout from the airplane accident that killed 62 Spanish soldiers is still falling out. The Left is calling the Aznar government irresponsible for hiring cheapo Ukranian planes to transport our troops. The Right is saying that it was Leftist budget cuts that reduced the Spanish military to what it is today. I think Spain needs a pretty hefty military budget increase, myself, if we would like to be taken more seriously internationally.

3) The Spanish Supreme Court has told the Basque regional government that it has to outlaw Batasuna / EH / AuB / HB or whatever its name is this week. They have to kick Batasuna's representatives out of the Basque Parliament, and so far they're not willing to do so. We'll see what happens.

4) Howell Raines is gone, as you already know. Let's see if the Times becomes any more responsible in its news coveraqe.

5) Sammy Sosa got busted for corking his bat. Frankly, I don't think it's that big a deal. Those little equipment irregularities are almost part of the game. He got caught, he pays the price--a ten-game suspension or whatever--and it's finished, everyone will forget all about it. It's not going to throw a shadow over his career. Now, is Sammy a roid monster? That, to me, is a lot more serious a violation of the written and unwritten rules than corking your bat.

We hope to be back on our regular blogging schedule as of tomorrow.

The Spanish Civil War in Lérida Province, Continued:

In the last segment, we saw that some 1100 people were killed for political reasons by Republican elements in Lérida province between July 1936 and Lérida's fall to the Nationals, the great majority in the months of Red Terror following the attempted National coup and the leftist revolutionary response.

The number of dead was very different--numerically and as a proportion of the population--in the different comarcas; the differences between some towns and others were even greater.

Until the end of the month of September, a common occurence was that, in the towns near the roads which the soldiers used to go to or return from the front (in Aragon), the militiamen would point out to their comrades who the "fascists" in their towns were so that, when they passed through, they could "throw a scare into them". It was also common for bands from one town to go "throw a scare into" the next town, to kill or to burn the church, while allowing others to do the same thing in their own towns. The decisiveness and, even, bravery, of the local committees were necessary to face "the unrestrained" (els incontrolats). These actions ended in September and October. There were towns where there were not only no fatal victims, but where nobody was even imprisoned. (Not anywhere near where my wife comes from there weren't. --JC)

One aspect that stands out, perhaps above others, is that the most numerous group of victims were members of the clergy--secular and regular (i.e. priests, monks, and nuns)--: in the Segrià they were 30% of the total, in the Noguera 52.8%, in the Garrigues 15%, in the Solsonés 25.7%, in the Alt Urgell 16.9%, in Pallars Jussà 52.6%, in Pallars Sobirà 72.7%, in the Segarra 71.1, in the Vall d'Aran 70%, and in Urgell 59.2% If we take into account the small proportion of the clergy within the total population, these percentages show the chilling depth of anticlericalism in those comarcas. (In my mother-in-law's village, Montoliu de Segarra, they shot the priest. He was apparently fingered by two locals who were in the POUM, and a POUM hit squad came down from Cervera. My mother-in-law really detests the POUM even though it was Franco who put her dad in prison. She kind of gets the point of the brutality of the Franco regime--she hates Franco, too, but in a different way--but she doesn't understand the seemingly random killing of the POUM. --JC)

We will center our analysis of the violence that occured in the comarcas of Lérida province, most of which was a rear-guard area of the Aragon front, upon the city of Lérida, where persons from the villages of the Segrià and from other comarcas were taken to be killed, as it was the provincial capital and the seat of the popular tribunals.

Between July 20 and August 18, 1936, the first month of the war, in Lérida there were no courts; that was a cruel month. On July 25 the daily "Combat"--belonging to the POUM--made a public condemnation of violence, demanding the punishment of the guilty: "Always, in every revolution...like crows around a cadaver...appear those who take advantage, elements of the lumpen from the lowest levels. In Lérida they have begun to swarm...Revolution is not robbery...sacking dishonors the revolution...as does using weapons in strictly personal disputes...we order our militants to arrest the criminals and to be inexorable in their punishment." (As for personal disputes, my mother-in-law claims that a family that disliked theirs ratted her dad out, falsely, after the Franco takeover in 1939. --JC)

Later, the daily "UHP"--belonging to the PSUC, the unified Socialists and Communists--made similar condemnations, recommending the reading of the book "Danger in the rear guard" by Joan Peiró. In the future the daily "Acracia" would also condemn the actions of the "incontrolats". The violence, however, continued, despite the fact that its authors were members of those parties that condemned it and ordered the punishment of the guilty.

In that first month of war, between July 20 and August 18, 144 people were murdered at the cemetery, the parade ground, or in the streets. Most were rebels, clergy, and also civilians who were not implicated in the (National) uprising.

On August 18 the Committee of Public Safety in Lérida created a Popular Tribunal, to whose formation neither the Catalan regional government (Generalitat) nor the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias contributed. This tribunal was formed to put an end to the wave of crime. The day after it was formed, and before it began its actions, there was a "saca"--an attack on a prison--of 74 people who were shot at the cemetery. On August 25 a military column led by García Oliver, which was marching to the Aragon front, after spending the day in Lérida--where the majority got drunk, according to some witnesses-- set the cathedral on fire, pulled down the Gothic Virgin Mary on Santa María Hospital, and shot 21 political prisoners on the parade ground. That week, between August 18 and August 25, was the most dramatic. In Lérida 112 people were killed without any judicial authority, and the atmosphere was one of tragic and agonizing public violence.

The Popular Tribunal, created by the Committee of Public Safety, was active between August 22 and October 13, and, perhaps to demonstrate to the "incontrolats" that it would not fall into the passivity of the first days of the revolt regarding trying the crimes of the accused, publicly boasted that in some cases its sentence was predetermined. This made the trials (of political prisoners, not of incontrolats) a simple show, in which the chief judge, Josep "One-Arm" Larroca, due to his sarcasm--which in those circumstances became cruelty--, became the center of attention of a numerous audience avid for a spectacle; among that audience there were also relatives and friends of those on trial, who watched impotently the useless efforts the accused made to defend himself.

The daily "Combat", in its "Popular Tribunal" section, published the names and places of residence of the people on trial, normally between 5 to 7 per day, and the sentence imposed; if the group was more numerous, the trial lasted, proportionally, more days. Not all those who were tried were sentenced to death; before the trial they had been interrogated, as far as is documented, one or more times.

From James Taranto:

Eponymous Dowdification
"Me . . . has no intelligence."--Maureen Dowd, New York Times, June 4

Here's the Mark Steyn piece everyone has already linked to, just in case you haven't read it yet. This is what happens when you turn Mark Steyn loose in Iraq and give him some BBC and NGO types to make fun of. One detail I don't like: he mentions that he was traveling with an illegally acquired firearm. That sounds like a goddamn stupid thing to do if you're a journalist, especially if the Third Infantry pulls you over at a roadblock and searches your ass. "Let's see, you're a Canadian named Steyn driving around Assboink, Iraq, who says he's a journalist but is packing an illegal gun. Welcome to Guantanamo."

The Wisdom of Jeff Spicoli: Smarter or Dumber than Sean Penn?

Jeffrey Spicoli stands in the doorway, red eyes
glistening. His long, blond hair is still wet and
streaming down the back of his white peasant shirt.
He grins, oblivious to such trivial matters as
attendance bells. A Student sitting near Stacy
turns to his friends.

STUDENT
That guy has been stoned since the
third grade.

MR. HAND
Yes?

SPICOLI
Yeah. I'm registered for this
class.

MR. HAND
What class?

SPICOLI
This is U.S. History, right? I saw
the globe in the window.

MR. HAND
(appears enthralled)
Really?

Spicoli holds his red ad card up to the crack in
the door.

SPICOLI
Can I come in?

MR. HAND
(swinging door open)
Oh, please. I get so lonely when
that third attendance bell rings
and I don't see all my kids here.

Spicoli laughs. He is the only one.

SPICOLI
Sorry I'm late. This new schedule
is totally confusing.

Mr. Hand takes the red ad card and reads from it
with utter fascination.

MR. HAND
Mr. Spicoli?

SPICOLI
That's the name they gave me.

Mr. Hand slowly tears the card into little pieces
and sprinkles the pieces over his wastebasket.
Spicoli watches in disbelief. His hands are frozen
in the process of removing his backpack.

SPICOLI (CONT'D)
You just ripped my card in two!

MR. HAND
Yes.

SPICOLI
Hey, bud. What's your problem?

Mr. Hand moves to within inches of Spicoli's face.

MR. HAND
No problem at all. I think you know
where the front office is.

It takes a moment for the words to work their way
out of Jeff Spicoli's mouth.

SPICOLI
You... dick.

CONTINUED

Desmond returns to the room with a red-eyed Jeff
Spicoli.

SPICOLI
Hey! Wait a minute! There's no
birthday party for me here!

MR. HAND
Thank you, Desmond.
(to Spicoli)
What's the reason for your truancy?

SPICOLI
I couldn't make it in time.

MR. HAND
(in top form)
You mean, you couldn't? Or you
wouldn't?

SPICOLI
I don't know, mon. The food lines
took forever.

MR. HAND
Food will be eaten on your time!
(pause)
Why are you continuously late for
this class, Mr. Spicoli? Why do you
shamelessly waste my time like
this?

SPICOLI
I don't know.

CONTINUED

INT. THE COLD ROOM

There are six examination tables in the "Cold
Room". Each of them contains a cadaver covered by a
white sheet. Mr. Vargas has gathered the class
around one table in particular. He fingers the edge
of the white sheet as he talks.

MR. VARGAS
As you know, all the bodies in this
room are recently deceased human
bio-structures.

A student raises his hand.

MR. VARGAS
Yes, Randy?

RANDY
Who are these guys?

MR. VARGAS
Most of them were derelicts, Randy.
They sold the right for medical
examination of their bodies for
money. Something like thirty
dollars, I believe. Isn't that
right, Doctor Miller?

DR. MILLER
Twenty-five dollars.

ANGLE ON JEFF SPICOLI

who turns to Stacy.

SPICOLI
Twenty-five bucks is pretty good.

CONTINUED

INT. JEFF SPICOLI'S ROOM - NIGHT

Jeff Spicoli sits in his room, and it is his
castle. Clothes lie in disarray on the floor. A
huge half-waxed surfboard is propped against the
window. We see Spicoli dressed in a too large white
short-sleeved shirt, attempting to tie his father's
fat paisley tie. He stops to take a hit from his
bong, all the while talking on the phone. The music
of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Freebird" plays on the radio.

SPICOLI
I... am... so... wasted, mon. What
is in this shit?
(pause)
Doesn't that stuff cause brain
damage?
(pause)
Bitchin'.

Spicoli listens for a moment. He rubs his eyes,
shakes his head. He is really buzzed.

SPICOLI (CONT'D)
Hey, mon, I am going to Mexico as
soon as school is out. Two more
weeks, bud. Week from Wednesday.
(pause)
I am gonna take both boards, my
duck feet, many cases of beer, and
just jam.
(pause)
No, mon, from school. I'm leaving
as soon as school gets out. I'll be
at Sunset Cliffs by nighttime.
(pause)
Totally.
(pause)
Later.

Spicoli hangs up, and concentrates on tying his
tie. He almost strangles himself. Then suddenly the
door to his room flies open and Spicoli's little
brother Curtis bursts in.

CURTIS
Jeff you have company!

SPICOLI
Go away, Curtis. If you can't
knock, I can't hear you.

Curtis slams the door and leaves. A moment later
there is a knock.

SPICOLI (CONT'D)
That's better. Come in.

The door swings open and Jeff Spicoli sits in
stoned shock at the sight before him. There,
standing in the doorway of his room is Mr. Hand.

SPICOLI (CONT'D)
Mr... Mr. Hand.

MR. HAND
That's right, Jeff. Mind if I come
in?

Spicoli can only nod.

MR. HAND (CONT'D)
(calling downstairs)
Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Spicoli.

Hand walks into Spicoli's room, takes off his suit
jacket and lays it on the chair back. He stops a
moment and catches the stare of Miss January
Penthouse on the wall, then turns to Spicoli.

MR. HAND (CONT'D)
Were you going somewhere tonight,
Jeff?

SPICOLI
Yeah. The Graduation Dance Mr.
Hand. It's the last school event of
the year.

MR. HAND
I'm afraid we've got some things to
discuss here, Jeff.

SPICOLI
Did I do something wrong, Mr. Hand?

Hand removes several copies of Oui Magazine from
another chair and sits down. He sets his briefcase
on Spicoli's dresser, next to a bag of pot, and
opens it up for easy access.

MR. HAND
Do you want to sit there, Jeff?

SPICOLI
I don't know. I guess so.

MR. HAND
Fine. You sit right here on your
bed. I'll use the chair here.
(pause)
As I explained to your parents just
a moment ago, and to you many times
since the very beginning of the
school year -- I don't like to
spend my time waiting for late
students, or detention cases. I'd
rather be preparing the lesson.

Mr. Hand takes a sheet from his briefcase and looks
at it.

MR. HAND (CONT'D)
According to my calculations, Mr.
Spicoli, you wasted a total of
eight hours of my time this year.
And rest assured that is a kind
estimate.

He returns the sheet to his case and looks into
Spicoli's weed-ravaged eyes.

MR. HAND (CONT'D)
Now, Mr. Spicoli, comes a rare
moment for me. Now I have the
unique pleasure of squaring our
account. Tonight, you and I are
going to talk in great detail about
the Davis Agreement, all the
associated treaties, and the
American Revolution in particular.
Now if you can just turn to Chapter
47 of Lord of Truth And Liberty.

SPICOLI
Hey, it's in my locker, Mr. Hand.

MR. HAND
Well, then, I'm glad I remembered
to bring an extra copy just for
you.

Hand reaches in his case and produces the book. He
hands it to Spicoli.

DISSOLVE
TO:

INT. SPICOLI'S ROOM - HOURS LATER

Wearily, Spicoli is trying to grasp the material.

SPICOLI
... so, like, when Jefferson went
before the people what he was
saying was 'Hey, we left this place
in England because it was bogus,
and if we don't come up with some
cool rules ourself, we'll be bogus,
too!' Right?

ANGLE ON MR. HAND

who nods his head.

MR. HAND
Very close, Jeff.

Hand reaches over and gets his case.

MR. HAND (CONT'D)
I think I've made my point with you
tonight.

SPICOLI
Hey, Mr. Hand, can I ask you a
question?

MR. HAND
What's that?

SPICOLI
Do you have a guy like me every
year? A guy to... I don't know,
make a show of. Teach other kids
lessons and stuff?

MR. HAND
Well, you'll find out next year.

SPICOLI
(smiling)
No way, mon. When I graduate U.S.
history I ain't even coming over to
your side of the building.

MR. HAND
If you graduate.

SPICOLI
(panicked)
You're gonna flunk me?!

Mr. Hand pauses a moment, then breaks into the
nearest approximation of a grin we have seen all
year. It isn't much, but it's noticeable. His lips
crinkle at the ends.

MR. HAND
Don't worry, Spicoli. You'll
probably squeak by.

SPICOLI
All right! Oh, yeah!

Mr. Hand has now gathered all his material, and he
stands to approach Spicoli's door. Jeff jumps up,
extends his hand.

SPICOLI (CONT'D)
Aloha, Mr. Hand!

MR. HAND
Aloha, Spicoli.

Mr. Hand exits the room, and descends the staircase
of the Spicoli household. Spicoli kicks the door
shut, grins, and continues struggling with his tie.

A continuing theme of this blog seems to be the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Our position is that we don't sympathize with either the Republicans or the Francoists. We don't sympathize with any of the killers; we sympathize with the killed, especially the poor bastards who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, and there were a whole bunch of those.

I've got a book called The Postwar Repression in Lérida (Province), which is the area my wife's family comes from and which I have a particular interest in. It's by Mercè Ballarat and was published by the Abbey of Montserrat, a well-known press for Catalan(ist) history; the Abbey is both super-pro-Catalan and pro Catholic. Though it has always been conservative, it has also always been anti-Franco. Ms. Ballarat's personal sympathies seem to lie with the Catalan nationalists, Esquerra and Unió; it's true that they were by far the nicest of the various forces--POUM, CNT, Communists, Socialists--competing for power in Barcelona in the late Thirties. They were also the weakest-willed of those forces and wound up not being to exercise any power at all. Ms. Ballarat is nice enough to introduce her book, which is a cataloguing of the atrocities committed by the Francoists in Lérida province--there were plenty of them--with a chapter on the atrocities committed by the Republicans there. I think it's interesting and am going to run it in segments, translating from Catalan. Here goes.

After the elections of February 1936 that gave victory to the Popular Front coalition, everyday life continued normally. However, in Lérida the conspiratorial process to prepare the revolt against the legally constituted government began. In a small city it was difficult, impossible, to keep those preparatory meetings, which important personalities attended, secret.

The night of July 13, 1936, tension grew in Lérida, the capital of the province of the same name and of the comarca (county) of the Segrià, a repercussion of the violence occurred in Madrid. A fire was set at the press of the rightist daily "El Correo"; the next day arms would be found hidden in the house of the leader of the Falange in Lérida, Francisco Boldú, one of the attendees of the conspiratory meetings. This action caused his imprisonment and that of more than 50 other men, mostly Falangists. That same day a bomb went off at the headquarters of the Republican Youth in Lérida.

The cause of the violence, though, was the revolt against the Republic which, though it was evident that it could begin at any moment, surprised the political and military authorities in Lérida who were loyal to the established government and responsible for maintaining and defending constitutional order.

On July 17 the news of the revolt of the Army of Africa and the next day, July 18, at dawn, armed bands of Falangists, requetés (Carlists), and Youth for Popular Action took over some strategic locations in the city--the old cathedral among others. The Army did not intervene, in part because it did not have the function of maintaining public order and in part out of complicity. The delegate for Public Order, Hermenegild Cle, surprisingly, did not give orders to either the Civil Guard or the Assault Guard to arrest them.

The next day, Sunday July 19, early in the morning, the Rebel army disarmed and arrested the police officers and soldiers loyal to the government and, a few hours later, took over the streets and, when they got to the City Hall Square, they proclaimed a state of war, occupied the City Hall, the Post Office, the telephone building, the telegraph building, the Radio Lérida station, and the Catalan Government police station, where they locked up the disarmed Assault Guardsmen. Meanwhile, the Civil Guard occupied the headquarters of the political parties and the unions, where there was no one at that hour of the morning. On July 19 at noon the Rebels had the city in their hands.

On the afternoon of that same day, union members and leftists gathered around the buildings, while the women distributed handbills on the Calle Mayor--where people strolled as on every Sunday, as if nothing were happening--calling for a general strike on Monday, the 20th. During the evening the news arrived from Barcelona that the Rebels were under control, with the direct intervention of the Civil Guard*, and the radio broadcast General Goded's proclamation of the failure of the revolt in Barcelona and ordering the army back to its barracks. The situation began to change. (*In these early days of the war, it was difficult to know who was on whose side; it seems that in Lérida at first some of the Civil Guard sided with the Rebels, while in Barcelona it sided with the government. The Assault Guard, a government force, always stayed loyal to the Republic; some of the Army rebelled and some of it stayed loyal. --JC)

The soldiers who had taken the streets only in obedience of orders abandoned their posts, and those who had been arrested escaped and joined their comrades and the leftist organizations and parties who were already out on the streets. The rebels attempted to hold on to the buldings they had occupied that morning; during the night of July 19-20 there were confrontations, apparently with no casualties; the provincial prison changed hands two or three times, and the rebels went armed through the streets trying to stop the general strike called by the groups loyal to the Republic. On the morning of the 20th the rebellious political groups (Falange, Carlists) who had occupied the old cathedral since the 18th joined them, and at noon they surrendered together. The most important--both soldiers and leaders of political parties--were moved to the provincial prison, and the rest were imprisoned in the old cathedral.

After General Goded's surrender, the Civil Guard left the streets, but there was a division among its members between those in favor of and those against the revolt. Those loyal to the government locked up the pro-rebels and the indecisive in a convent in the city, and they were kept prisoner and disarmed. At the beginning of 1937 they were still there.

By July 21 the forces of order had collapsed: the "unrestrained" (incontrolats*) substituted for them, going straight to "direct action" and beginning a cruel and painful period. (*Those sympathetic to the Republic often refer to its victims as having been killed by "incontrolats", somehow not representative of the Republic. Apologists for the French Revolution and the Paris Commune often make similar claims. In fact, the incontrolats in Lérida were most likely Anarchists or POUM. George Orwell, I believe out of ignorance rather than mendacity, whitewashes the POUM in Homage to Catalonia. --JC)

90% of the victims of the repression during wartime (that is, killed by the Republic) happened, across all comarcas, between July 20 and the end of December 1936. It took six months to bring the situation under control. The majority of the rest of the 10% of the dead were killed when the Nationals arrived, at the moment of the chaotic retreat, in some places at the end of March and the beginning of April of 1938 and in others at the beginning of 1939.

The number of victims of the repression, in most of the comarcas in Lérida province, was higher than the average for Catalonia...

Number of dead Per 1000 inhabitants

Catalonia 8360 2.9

Solsonés 35 2.9
Garrigues 153 5.0
Noguera 159 3.2
Segarra 128 5.8
Segrià 523 5.8
Urgell 71 1.8
Alt Urgell 89 4.5
Pallars Jussà 57 2.4
Pallars Sobirà 11 0.9
Vall d'Aran 10 1.7

The guy from Accuracy in Academia fires a broadside at Howard Zinn and sinks his Commie ass on FrontPage. A couple of problems with the article: 1) it's poorly written and edited 2) the author accepts as fact a hypothesis which I believe to be highly speculative, the allegation that the American Indians were not the first human occupiers of the Americas but, rather, exterminated the (hypothetical) previous inhabitants upon their arrival some 13,000 years ago.

Could somebody who actually knows something about anthropology comment?

This here article from Slate is worth a read. I've given it a mild fisking.

Basque separatists speak one of the planet's most unusual languages.
By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Friday, May 30, 2003, at 2:15 PM PT

The Basque separatist group ETA is being blamed for (is guilty of) a bombing that killed two policemen in the northern Spanish town of Sangüesa today. Basque nationalists often point to the group's distinct language (about twenty percent of them actually speak it, max twenty-five) as a primary reason for independence. How different is the Basque tongue from Spanish?

Aside from a few similar pronunciation characteristics, like trilled r's, the two are completely unrelated. (A lot of Basque vocabulary comes from Latin, either directly or through Spanish.) In fact, Basque—more formally (more nationalistically correctly--the word was invented by completely loco founder of Basque nationalism, Sabino de Arana, as racist as Hitler, about a hundred years ago) known as Euskara—is one of the planet's most unusual languages. Though linguists have tried to connect Euskara to everything from Pictish to the Dravidian languages, the current consensus is that it is not related to any other. It doesn't seem to (it doesn't, period) belong to the Indo-European language family and likely predates the development of those tongues. One theory, popular among Basque scholars, is that both the language and the ethnic group descend from the Iberian peninsula's earliest settlers, who may have arrived around 35,000 years ago. There is scant archaeological evidence, however, to support this assertion. (Fair enough. Real wacky Basques get into the fact that the percentage of A blood type and / or RH negative people in the Basque population is above average for Europe and this somehow shows the Basques are a different and pure race.)

What is certain is that an ancestral form of Basque, known as Aquitanian, was being spoken when the Romans arrived in Spain, around 200 B.C. Though the Basques came down from the Pyrenees to trade with the conquerors, they were never thoroughly subjugated (false; this is one of the most common myths spread in Spanish schools; it is true that the region was always a wild backwater, not christianized until around 900 or so), which may account for the perseverance of Euskara while the rest of the peninsula was influenced by Latin. In the Middle Ages, Basque was widely spoken in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. Between 1200 and 1332, the three Basque provinces of Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia, and Araba allied themselves with the Castilian crown, but they were granted special privileges, including self-government. (Sort of true. In the thirteenth century Guipúzcoa and Alava voted to join Castile. Vizcaya joined Castile through marriage and inheritance in 1379. Navarra was conquered by Castile-Aragón in 1512. They didn't exactly have self-government except for Navarra, which was ruled by a viceroy and had independent legislative and judicial systems, but the three Basque provinces did have autonomous privileges that other parts of Spain didn't.)

The first wave of oppression followed the Carlist Wars of the 19th century, after the Basques supported the losing cause of the pretender Don Carlos. (Because the Basques were reactionary rural Catholics and so was Carlos. They lost a lot of their autonomy after the defeat of the Carlists, but "oppression" is a pretty loaded word.) Things got much worse under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who came to power after the Spanish Civil War and outlawed the speaking of Euskara. (Franco's dictatorship was unpleasant but not horrible, and speaking Basque at home and in private, and at church or among friends was never outlawed, nor could it be. By the Fifties published works in Basque were appearing again and a network of ikastolas, schools that teach both the Basque language and nationalistic politics, had been founded.) This repression led to the creation of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna—"Basque Homeland and Liberty") in 1959. (The above is a pretty cheap-ass justification for turning loose a terrorist gang to kill as it pleases.) Though the Basque region was granted considerable autonomy after Franco's death, a small faction of separatists, (how about the T-word? Where's the T-word? The ETA are a bunch of Ts) who believe their culture is threatened, continues to fight for complete independence. There have been 839 people killed as a result of ETA attacks since 1968. (About 839 too many.)

There are about 600,000 fluent Euskara speakers in Basque Country today, with the vast majority on the Spanish side, and another 400,000 speak Euskara as a second language—there has been a tremendous Euskara revival in Basque schools over the past two decades. (Still, most students in the Basque country study in Spanish, and most people who aren't born into a Basque-speaking family stay with Spanish. About a quarter of the Basques, maximum, can communicate in Basque.) A sign of the Basques' pride in their tongue is their word for themselves, Euskaldunak—"possessors of the Basque language." (That won't save you from getting murdered by the ETA, though, as José María Korta found out.)

Next question? (Yeah, several, but I'll stick with the one big one I've got: where's the T-word and where's the sympathy for the dead victims of the stupid nationalistic bullheaded pride of a small minority of the people? Where's the statement that "ninety percent of Basques want ETA to stop killing right now" or that "in a referendum a large majority of Basques would vote to stay with Spain"?)

Explainer thanks the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada-Reno. (Why doesn't Explainer call up some more neutral historian, like Stanley G. Payne at the University of Wisconsin at Madison?)

Here's a story about the Hag at the Smithsonian from Fox News. He presented the museum with articles belonging to his family, which was one of those who moved from Oklahoma to California in the Thirties.

By the way, for a debunking of the Dust Bowl myth, check out this article by Keith Windschuttle. Windschuttle has done some other debunking of interest, including a lot of research regarding the Australian Aborigines; he rejects the idea that there was a deliberate white genocide of the natives in Australia and particularly in Tasmania. (Don't argue with me about this; argue with him.)