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.
Saturday, June 07, 2003
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.
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.
Thursday, June 05, 2003
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.
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
Eponymous Dowdification
"Me . . . has no intelligence."--Maureen Dowd, New York Times, June 4
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
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.
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
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?
Could somebody who actually knows something about anthropology comment?
Sunday, June 01, 2003
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?)
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.)
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.)
Saturday, May 31, 2003
There's really not that much to say about the latest ETA murders. This is only the second ETA attack this year in which they have killed, which to me indicates that they have lost a great deal of strength and that they cannot maintain an operating cell. The murder happened in Sangüesa, a small city in Navarra. The two dead policemen are Bonifacio Martín Hernando and Julián Embid Luna. A third policeman, Ramón Rodríguez, suffered multiple wounds in the thorax, abdomen, and legs. And, I bet, somewhere else that they didn't mention out of delicacy. He is in very serious condition. Passer-by Carlos Gallo was also seriously wounded; he suffered damage to a major artery.
The police officers were based in Pamplona and had traveled to Sangüesa in order to do the necessary bureaucratic work of renewing people's identity cards and passports; they were members of the documentation unit, and regularly visited smaller cities in Navarra in order to carry out the necessary red tape. Their visits to Sangüesa were regular, every two months.
ETA members planted a limpet bomb under their car at some time between their arrival at 9 AM and their departure at 12:25 PM, when they started the motor of the car and the bomb went off. The bomb contained about five kilos of explosives and was more than powerful enough; fragments of the dead policemen's bodies were found on a balcony and on a rooftop in the square where the car had been parked.
Arnaldo Otegi, the boss of the ETA's now-illegal political wing, EH (or HB or AuB or Batasuna), said that this deliberate massacre occurred because "the Government brings armed men to make war in the Basque Country". I think we can bust Otegi's ass for apology for terrorism, which is against the law in these here parts. I vote we do so as soon as possible. However, Otegi probably has about ten trials on similar charges pending anyway. He really is an asshole; I think he's probably the most hated man in Spain. I certainly hate him. If Otegi's scrotum was on fire I wouldn't even piss on it to put it out. I might piss in his face if I ever got the chance.
Of course, Iberian Notes calls for the adoption of the death penalty for terrorist murder. It won't happen, though I'll bet a solid majority of Spaniards would support it. We also call for the public whipping of collaborators with terrorism. You want deterrents? We want deterrents. Deterrents R Us.
The police officers were based in Pamplona and had traveled to Sangüesa in order to do the necessary bureaucratic work of renewing people's identity cards and passports; they were members of the documentation unit, and regularly visited smaller cities in Navarra in order to carry out the necessary red tape. Their visits to Sangüesa were regular, every two months.
ETA members planted a limpet bomb under their car at some time between their arrival at 9 AM and their departure at 12:25 PM, when they started the motor of the car and the bomb went off. The bomb contained about five kilos of explosives and was more than powerful enough; fragments of the dead policemen's bodies were found on a balcony and on a rooftop in the square where the car had been parked.
Arnaldo Otegi, the boss of the ETA's now-illegal political wing, EH (or HB or AuB or Batasuna), said that this deliberate massacre occurred because "the Government brings armed men to make war in the Basque Country". I think we can bust Otegi's ass for apology for terrorism, which is against the law in these here parts. I vote we do so as soon as possible. However, Otegi probably has about ten trials on similar charges pending anyway. He really is an asshole; I think he's probably the most hated man in Spain. I certainly hate him. If Otegi's scrotum was on fire I wouldn't even piss on it to put it out. I might piss in his face if I ever got the chance.
Of course, Iberian Notes calls for the adoption of the death penalty for terrorist murder. It won't happen, though I'll bet a solid majority of Spaniards would support it. We also call for the public whipping of collaborators with terrorism. You want deterrents? We want deterrents. Deterrents R Us.
Friday, May 30, 2003
ETA has killed again. They planted a bomb that killed two National Policemen, seriously wounded a third officer and a passer-by, and also injured three others, in a town in Navarra. Full details tomorrow. The only consolation we have is that the perpetrators are going to get rounded up in a week or two, like all ETA cells have been recently.
Well, it's a lovely day in Barcelona, nice and warm...My geraniums are blooming...The cats are all stretched out on the bed in the front room, undoubtedly dreaming of mice...Or lizards...We don't have mice, and we don't have cockroaches either, or pigeon poo on the balcony. Pigeon poo on the balcony is a problem for catless houses in Barcelona...I actually rather like pigeons; I also rather like city squirrels, which we don't have here. We do have these weird green birds that were imported from Latin America that are called "cotorros"...Most of the trees around here are plane trees (sycamores), and there's a strange Spanish belief that every few years you have to prune them way back. They just did that to the beautiful, shady sycamores down in the plaza, which are now nude trunks with a few green branches sprouting out...In some places they wire plane trees, like grapevines, into growing into particular shapes. I especially have seen that up north, like in Navarra and Burgos...People complain about the sycamores because they say they produce a lot of pollen, which I guess they do; the air in Barcelona isn't too clean and I do find myself sneezing a lot more here than in clean Kansas (or clean Vallfogona). I think it's the dust particles from all the damned lead-gas-burning old beaters still on the road...Wait, I own a lead-gas-burning 1988 Renault 5, which supposedly produces 100 times as much air pollution crap as a new car...On the other hand we only use it to drive out to the pueblo and back, and that's only like a hundred miles each way...Nobody has air-conditioning at home around here, well, at least not too many people, and you do become a little laid-back when the temperature's 80ºF; you conserve motion...Or is that just an excuse for being lazy? People around here really aren't lazy, they work pretty hard...Obtrusive government regulation causes a great deal of inefficiency, swallowing up various quantities of time and effort whose loss to the economy is pretty substantial...On the other hand, you gotta give the Spaniards credit, they're good-hearted people, and it's pretty hard to fall completely through the cracks of the social system around here, some bureaucrat actually doing his job is eventually going to see what needs done and do it...You gotta try really hard to be a bum in Spain...
Spanish Bums (Strummer / Chappell)
Spanish bums in Andalucía
Begging you money for a bus to their hometow-ow-ow-ow-ns
Oh, please give me seven euros
Been drinking tinto and hanging out downtow-ow-ow-ow-n
Vomit stains on the drunk tank walls, the night bus of the Guardia Civil
Spanish bums pee in the doorways, then pass out in the Rambla toni-i-i-ght
Spanish bums, hey you wanna buy some kleenex?
Buy some kleenex for la volunt-a-a-a-d
Spanish bums, hey I'm gonna wipe your windshield
You better pay me 'cause I'll get psychotic ma-a-a-a-d
The Rambla rings with "¡Hijos de puta!"
Oh, that's just Old Pepe, he's fouled himself agai-i-i-i-n
One day he's gonna kill somebody
All we don't know is who or where or whe-e-e-enn
Spanish bums lie on the sidewalk, clutching boxes of Don García wi-i-ine
Spanish bums waylay the tourists, I'm passing out behind the Boquería ton-i-i-ight
Spanish bums shout in the subway, isn't it a pity that
I have to beg so that I don't have to ste-e-e-eal
Gimme some money, I just got out of prison
Go to Can Tunis to make another de-e-e-al
Spanish bums bother the shopkeepers, the taxi drivers won't stop for them
Spanish bums on the freeway, another one just got run over again
There are too damn many bums in this town and the city government tries to do a reasonable job taking care of them. If you're a bum and you want three hots, a cot, and a penicillin shot, and a bath and some clean clothes, they'll take care of you. And if they won't, for some reason, the Church, or some other nonprofit organization, will. Let's face it. Bums are anti-social. The system here is organized to help people out, and if you don't take advantage of what it will do for you--and it will get you psychiatric help, which is what you probably need if you're a bum--then we can't blame the system for your problems. Nobody but a psycho, whose family won't take care of him and who has no friends and has rejected the intervention of the government and the Church, has to be a bum. And is it the psycho's fault he's a psycho? No. Absolutely not. But he is a public menace, and he needs to be institutionalized until he's back on his feet. They're not tough enough around here about institutionalizing people for their own and everybody else's good.
I know the slippery-slope argument, who draws the line, who decides who's a psycho? I dunno, but I hold that if you're wearing clothes you haven't changed for two months and you're sleeping in a Caixa Catalunya bank branch and you're up over four liters of Don García a day, you're a psycho.
I once, at three o'clock in the morning on the Rambla, noted a bum in front of the Generalitat bookstore who was leaning on a pillar of the arcade and pissing all over himself. The guy could barely stand. I alerted a cop and he said, yeah, yeah, that's the usual, look, I gotta go break up a fight in the Plaza Real, (burble burble from the radio) he'll be OK, they'll sweep him off the street when dawn rolls around if he doesn't get run over first. Or, I suppose, if he does.
It must suck to be a cop. I bet at least three-quarters of a cop's job is preventing stupid assholes from getting themselves hurt, and that cop had higher priorities than the bum at that particular moment. I can see his point of view, the immediate danger is the fight.
Spanish Bums (Strummer / Chappell)
Spanish bums in Andalucía
Begging you money for a bus to their hometow-ow-ow-ow-ns
Oh, please give me seven euros
Been drinking tinto and hanging out downtow-ow-ow-ow-n
Vomit stains on the drunk tank walls, the night bus of the Guardia Civil
Spanish bums pee in the doorways, then pass out in the Rambla toni-i-i-ght
Spanish bums, hey you wanna buy some kleenex?
Buy some kleenex for la volunt-a-a-a-d
Spanish bums, hey I'm gonna wipe your windshield
You better pay me 'cause I'll get psychotic ma-a-a-a-d
The Rambla rings with "¡Hijos de puta!"
Oh, that's just Old Pepe, he's fouled himself agai-i-i-i-n
One day he's gonna kill somebody
All we don't know is who or where or whe-e-e-enn
Spanish bums lie on the sidewalk, clutching boxes of Don García wi-i-ine
Spanish bums waylay the tourists, I'm passing out behind the Boquería ton-i-i-ight
Spanish bums shout in the subway, isn't it a pity that
I have to beg so that I don't have to ste-e-e-eal
Gimme some money, I just got out of prison
Go to Can Tunis to make another de-e-e-al
Spanish bums bother the shopkeepers, the taxi drivers won't stop for them
Spanish bums on the freeway, another one just got run over again
There are too damn many bums in this town and the city government tries to do a reasonable job taking care of them. If you're a bum and you want three hots, a cot, and a penicillin shot, and a bath and some clean clothes, they'll take care of you. And if they won't, for some reason, the Church, or some other nonprofit organization, will. Let's face it. Bums are anti-social. The system here is organized to help people out, and if you don't take advantage of what it will do for you--and it will get you psychiatric help, which is what you probably need if you're a bum--then we can't blame the system for your problems. Nobody but a psycho, whose family won't take care of him and who has no friends and has rejected the intervention of the government and the Church, has to be a bum. And is it the psycho's fault he's a psycho? No. Absolutely not. But he is a public menace, and he needs to be institutionalized until he's back on his feet. They're not tough enough around here about institutionalizing people for their own and everybody else's good.
I know the slippery-slope argument, who draws the line, who decides who's a psycho? I dunno, but I hold that if you're wearing clothes you haven't changed for two months and you're sleeping in a Caixa Catalunya bank branch and you're up over four liters of Don García a day, you're a psycho.
I once, at three o'clock in the morning on the Rambla, noted a bum in front of the Generalitat bookstore who was leaning on a pillar of the arcade and pissing all over himself. The guy could barely stand. I alerted a cop and he said, yeah, yeah, that's the usual, look, I gotta go break up a fight in the Plaza Real, (burble burble from the radio) he'll be OK, they'll sweep him off the street when dawn rolls around if he doesn't get run over first. Or, I suppose, if he does.
It must suck to be a cop. I bet at least three-quarters of a cop's job is preventing stupid assholes from getting themselves hurt, and that cop had higher priorities than the bum at that particular moment. I can see his point of view, the immediate danger is the fight.
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Everyone's been linking to this excellent Adam Michnik piece, and if you haven't already read it, here it is.
The following is from James Taranto's "Best of the Web" from the Wall Street Journal online, which all y'all ought to read every day because it's worth it. You know, I always thought Geldof was full of shit, but I guess he's proven he isn't, and I need to apologize for underestimating the man.
Bob Geldof, the musician behind the well-intentioned if somewhat treacly Live Aid efforts of the '80s ("Do They Know It's Christmas?"), has high praise for President Bush, London's Guardian reports:
"You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical--in a positive sense--in its approach to Africa since Kennedy," Geldof told the Guardian.
The neo-conservatives and religious rightwingers who surrounded President George Bush were proving unexpectedly receptive to appeals for help, he said. "You can get the weirdest politicians on your side."
Former president Bill Clinton had not helped Africa much, despite his high-profile visits and apparent empathy with the downtrodden, the organiser of Live Aid, claimed. "Clinton was a good guy, but he did f--- all."
Geldof also has disdain for the European Union, whose efforts in Africa he calls "pathetic and appalling."
Bob Geldof, the musician behind the well-intentioned if somewhat treacly Live Aid efforts of the '80s ("Do They Know It's Christmas?"), has high praise for President Bush, London's Guardian reports:
"You'll think I'm off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical--in a positive sense--in its approach to Africa since Kennedy," Geldof told the Guardian.
The neo-conservatives and religious rightwingers who surrounded President George Bush were proving unexpectedly receptive to appeals for help, he said. "You can get the weirdest politicians on your side."
Former president Bill Clinton had not helped Africa much, despite his high-profile visits and apparent empathy with the downtrodden, the organiser of Live Aid, claimed. "Clinton was a good guy, but he did f--- all."
Geldof also has disdain for the European Union, whose efforts in Africa he calls "pathetic and appalling."
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
On John Lennon:
The Beatles were cool but they're overrated. They certainly did manage to put Elvis and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and all the other R&B and C&W guys together into a new and coherent sound, which all popular music since has been influenced by. But a lot of people, especially the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, were well ahead of the Beatles as regarding a lot of innovations often credited to the Beatles. They were great and they were hugely important, but a lot of Beatle fans' attitude: that there was nothing between 1963 and 1969 that could possibly compare with those years of the Beatles, is shortsighted and navel-gazing.
I really think that John Lennon's most personal album was "Rock and Roll", the one he did in about '74 of covers of old rock and roll tunes. It's actually a pretty crappy album; why would you want to hear John Lennon singing, badly, Little Richard rather than Little Richard himself? Lennon was very mediocre as a musician. He did have soul, though, he had spirit, he sang his balls off, no one can deny him that, at least if he wasn't fucked up, which he seems to have been most of the time.
The "Rock and Roll" album really tells you where Lennon was coming from, the kind of blues-country-swing-gospel that made him want to become a musician. The man had terrific taste, we've got to say that for him. His albums like "Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine" always sounded completely full of crap to me, full of phony flavor-of-the-month stupidities like "bagism" and that primal scream crap and that BS pseudo-hindu-buddhism and those songs he did along with Yoko, all automatically crap by definition
But "Rock and Roll" is spirited. Lennon chooses songs to cover that actually kick some ass. No better than ten thousand garage bands could do in an old rock-and-roll cover set in a biker bar, but at the very least spirited. That's the John Lennon I like, not the "Two Virgins" crapmonger--the ballsy kid who brought a new, rough sound to rock and roll, carefully modulated by his friend, the golden-eared and highly professional Paul McCartney, back in the nineteen-sixties.
The Beatles were cool but they're overrated. They certainly did manage to put Elvis and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly and all the other R&B and C&W guys together into a new and coherent sound, which all popular music since has been influenced by. But a lot of people, especially the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, were well ahead of the Beatles as regarding a lot of innovations often credited to the Beatles. They were great and they were hugely important, but a lot of Beatle fans' attitude: that there was nothing between 1963 and 1969 that could possibly compare with those years of the Beatles, is shortsighted and navel-gazing.
I really think that John Lennon's most personal album was "Rock and Roll", the one he did in about '74 of covers of old rock and roll tunes. It's actually a pretty crappy album; why would you want to hear John Lennon singing, badly, Little Richard rather than Little Richard himself? Lennon was very mediocre as a musician. He did have soul, though, he had spirit, he sang his balls off, no one can deny him that, at least if he wasn't fucked up, which he seems to have been most of the time.
The "Rock and Roll" album really tells you where Lennon was coming from, the kind of blues-country-swing-gospel that made him want to become a musician. The man had terrific taste, we've got to say that for him. His albums like "Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine" always sounded completely full of crap to me, full of phony flavor-of-the-month stupidities like "bagism" and that primal scream crap and that BS pseudo-hindu-buddhism and those songs he did along with Yoko, all automatically crap by definition
But "Rock and Roll" is spirited. Lennon chooses songs to cover that actually kick some ass. No better than ten thousand garage bands could do in an old rock-and-roll cover set in a biker bar, but at the very least spirited. That's the John Lennon I like, not the "Two Virgins" crapmonger--the ballsy kid who brought a new, rough sound to rock and roll, carefully modulated by his friend, the golden-eared and highly professional Paul McCartney, back in the nineteen-sixties.
After today, we're going to declare a unilateral moratorium on stories about the elections. But today ain't over yet, so we're gonna translate TWO articles on the results of said elections. They're both from La Vanguardia, which is incredibly sensible today, just like the good old Vanguardia before September 11.
"Tantrum" by Francesc-Marc Álvaro
I have a friend in Madrid who just doesn't get it, how the PP was able to hold on so well in the last elections "if there were so many people out in the street, indignant about the Iraq war, the chapapote (oil spill), the decree (on education), and Aznar's own style". My friend is an artist and he believes that the creators and intellectuals should mobilize themselves (clothed or not) at all times. My friend believes that the people should participate more actively in making decisions, Porto Alegre style. My friend doesn't understand it at all, since he was expecting a major collapse of the PP, and now, he's stammering, but he can't find any arguments: "The people are manipulated, the Government media cover up the truth, banging pots during so many nights wasn't worth anything..." My friend, who went to vote wearing all the possible stickers on his sweater, believes that, in the city of Madrid, one of the greatest evils was (Ecogaysocialist José María) Mendiluce's candidacy "because it hurt the left badly", and he refuses to admit that (Madrid PP mayoral candidate) Ruíz Gallardón attracted a lot of non-conservative voters.
My friend comforts himself with the results in the Madrid region but he does not hide the severity of his overall diagnosis: "The Spanish people is not mature yet, there are strong leftovers of Francoism, authoritarianism is popular, bossism exists in certain places..."
I tell him that perhaps what he calls "the Spanish people" feels, at least partly, comfortably represented by Aznar and the PP and that it is too easy to attribute everything to endemic backwardness and the legacy of the dictatorship. I remind him that (Socialist ex-prime-minister) Felipe González renewed his majority after winning the referendum on entry into NATO (1986), a fact that, certainly, caused my friend enormous headaches. I add that, in the case that it has lasted and endured, sociological Francoism has inhabited, equally, the years of Felipeism just as much as the years of Aznarism.
My friend cannot accept that many Spaniards vote for the PP--only two hundred thousand fewer than for the Socialists--and they believe that their choice is just as free and serious and defensible as that of those who choose leftist parties. My friend is convinced that they need to be, more or less, reeducated, saved, brought to the only truth. The right (whether or not it dresses up as the center) is always, according to my friend, an error, and therefore it cannot win. My friend had high hopes for the collapse of the PP, and disappointment has turned over his world. He feels that the people has failed him, instead of trying to understand what it is that Aznar offers to many citizens. Today he observes what the calls "the people" and he is filled with an aristocratic dismissal, which, no question, is not exactly progressive. He's terrified of analysis. He prefers a huge tantrum.
Mr. Álvaro, who is not an idiotarian, has his (almost certainly imaginary) friend twigged. That's the totalitarianism of the Left: no matter how many times we tell them we aren't going to do what they want us to do, they're going to be hassling us about the same old crap, because they know better than we do and there's no way we're going to convince them that they're wrong.
Here comes Quim Monzó, one of our two cleverest Barcelonese writers along with Eduardo Mendoza, a man who would be considered a first-rate writer--OK, maybe high second-rate--if he were American or British, but is stuck in the swamp of Spanish / Catalan writers that are so mediocre that they're not worthy of translation to English: see, for example, María de la Pau Janer. Because the reeking muck of Hispanic literature is so foul at the moment, intelligent people like Monzó get swallowed up and find it hard to sort themselves out from the mire of their contemporaries.
Monzó is often ironic. This piece is called "Is Barcelona losing importance?"
The elections have demonstrated that the protests and the kitchenware concerts of the last couple of months haven't completely fallen into forgottenness. Even the day before the elections, while Televisión Española was showing the Eurovision Festival, there was a timid revival of the pot-banging. And, despite it all, the punishment of Aznar for his attitude toward the Iraq War wasn't as great as that predicted. How can it be that in Barcelona the PP should gain a Council seat while across the whole world the antiglobalizers are every day more and more organized? The latest news is from last week: an online-dating website.
Boiled down, it's a webpage like any other of the millions through which you can pick up, whether permanently or temporarily. Its address is www.actforlove.org and its promoters describe it as an online-dating webpage for "aware people", for people who were shouting, a few weeks ago, "No war!" and "No blood for oil!". Those people now have a million personal advertisements to choose from, among whom it shouldn't be difficult to find someone who makes your heart go flitter-flutter. A million people are a lot of people, that is, if you don't find anyone appetizing, it means that you are castratingly selective. They splash their website with sentences like "Activists of the world, unite! (literally)" and there is an agenda of demonstrations, solidarious fiestas, concerts for peace, and lawsuits against tobacco companies. So, therefore, since the planet is so global, one may end up falling in love with a rasta from Seattle or a homeopath from Genoa.
So I signed up in order to check it out. They asked me exactly what I was looking for. In order not to miss any chances, I tried to be as eclectic as possible. I said I was looking for a person, but I didn't specify any of the things they gave me to choose from: sex, age, race, religion, hair color, zodiac sign...How can we put up barriers against love because of something insignificant like that ascendent in Libra? I also showed myself to be open-minded regarding alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (Note: I, your blogger, have personally seen Mr. Monzó indulge in tobacco and alcohol in fairly herculean quantities), so my spectrum is very wide. The only thing I specified is that, no matter who this progressive and multicultural person is, he or she must live in Barcelona; I'm not going to spend a fortune on phone calls to Porto Alegre.
Well, do you know how many Barcelonese have signed up? Only one: a 33-year-old woman. And, when I read her information, I discovered she was born in California. Of the million people that the personal-relationships website offers, only one is from Barcelona. Only one in a million! This is not due to language difficulties with English, after all the summer courses we've spent in Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States.
Is this the Barcelona that Bush I pointed out as an example not to follow? Within the little anti-system world, today being from Barcelona gives one cachet, something much more important than, on the day of the blind date, staining your Doc Martens black to imitate chapapote (the oil spill), hiding your posters of Beth (the winner of 'Spanish Idol' who represented Spain at the Eurovision festival) under 'Nunca maís' flags, or refusing Coca-Cola in favor of drinking Mecca-Cola. If you're from Barcelona, here's the website where you'll be beating them away with a stick! Just remind them of the Tragic Week, the Cabot Utopians of the 1850s, the demonstrations on Diagonal Avenue, the sustainable campout at the Plaza Macià...
But there's only one Barcelonese woman, and, adding insult to injury, she's imported from California. I'm not at all surprised that (conservative PP candidate) Alberto Fernández Díaz won another Council seat in the elections.
"Tantrum" by Francesc-Marc Álvaro
I have a friend in Madrid who just doesn't get it, how the PP was able to hold on so well in the last elections "if there were so many people out in the street, indignant about the Iraq war, the chapapote (oil spill), the decree (on education), and Aznar's own style". My friend is an artist and he believes that the creators and intellectuals should mobilize themselves (clothed or not) at all times. My friend believes that the people should participate more actively in making decisions, Porto Alegre style. My friend doesn't understand it at all, since he was expecting a major collapse of the PP, and now, he's stammering, but he can't find any arguments: "The people are manipulated, the Government media cover up the truth, banging pots during so many nights wasn't worth anything..." My friend, who went to vote wearing all the possible stickers on his sweater, believes that, in the city of Madrid, one of the greatest evils was (Ecogaysocialist José María) Mendiluce's candidacy "because it hurt the left badly", and he refuses to admit that (Madrid PP mayoral candidate) Ruíz Gallardón attracted a lot of non-conservative voters.
My friend comforts himself with the results in the Madrid region but he does not hide the severity of his overall diagnosis: "The Spanish people is not mature yet, there are strong leftovers of Francoism, authoritarianism is popular, bossism exists in certain places..."
I tell him that perhaps what he calls "the Spanish people" feels, at least partly, comfortably represented by Aznar and the PP and that it is too easy to attribute everything to endemic backwardness and the legacy of the dictatorship. I remind him that (Socialist ex-prime-minister) Felipe González renewed his majority after winning the referendum on entry into NATO (1986), a fact that, certainly, caused my friend enormous headaches. I add that, in the case that it has lasted and endured, sociological Francoism has inhabited, equally, the years of Felipeism just as much as the years of Aznarism.
My friend cannot accept that many Spaniards vote for the PP--only two hundred thousand fewer than for the Socialists--and they believe that their choice is just as free and serious and defensible as that of those who choose leftist parties. My friend is convinced that they need to be, more or less, reeducated, saved, brought to the only truth. The right (whether or not it dresses up as the center) is always, according to my friend, an error, and therefore it cannot win. My friend had high hopes for the collapse of the PP, and disappointment has turned over his world. He feels that the people has failed him, instead of trying to understand what it is that Aznar offers to many citizens. Today he observes what the calls "the people" and he is filled with an aristocratic dismissal, which, no question, is not exactly progressive. He's terrified of analysis. He prefers a huge tantrum.
Mr. Álvaro, who is not an idiotarian, has his (almost certainly imaginary) friend twigged. That's the totalitarianism of the Left: no matter how many times we tell them we aren't going to do what they want us to do, they're going to be hassling us about the same old crap, because they know better than we do and there's no way we're going to convince them that they're wrong.
Here comes Quim Monzó, one of our two cleverest Barcelonese writers along with Eduardo Mendoza, a man who would be considered a first-rate writer--OK, maybe high second-rate--if he were American or British, but is stuck in the swamp of Spanish / Catalan writers that are so mediocre that they're not worthy of translation to English: see, for example, María de la Pau Janer. Because the reeking muck of Hispanic literature is so foul at the moment, intelligent people like Monzó get swallowed up and find it hard to sort themselves out from the mire of their contemporaries.
Monzó is often ironic. This piece is called "Is Barcelona losing importance?"
The elections have demonstrated that the protests and the kitchenware concerts of the last couple of months haven't completely fallen into forgottenness. Even the day before the elections, while Televisión Española was showing the Eurovision Festival, there was a timid revival of the pot-banging. And, despite it all, the punishment of Aznar for his attitude toward the Iraq War wasn't as great as that predicted. How can it be that in Barcelona the PP should gain a Council seat while across the whole world the antiglobalizers are every day more and more organized? The latest news is from last week: an online-dating website.
Boiled down, it's a webpage like any other of the millions through which you can pick up, whether permanently or temporarily. Its address is www.actforlove.org and its promoters describe it as an online-dating webpage for "aware people", for people who were shouting, a few weeks ago, "No war!" and "No blood for oil!". Those people now have a million personal advertisements to choose from, among whom it shouldn't be difficult to find someone who makes your heart go flitter-flutter. A million people are a lot of people, that is, if you don't find anyone appetizing, it means that you are castratingly selective. They splash their website with sentences like "Activists of the world, unite! (literally)" and there is an agenda of demonstrations, solidarious fiestas, concerts for peace, and lawsuits against tobacco companies. So, therefore, since the planet is so global, one may end up falling in love with a rasta from Seattle or a homeopath from Genoa.
So I signed up in order to check it out. They asked me exactly what I was looking for. In order not to miss any chances, I tried to be as eclectic as possible. I said I was looking for a person, but I didn't specify any of the things they gave me to choose from: sex, age, race, religion, hair color, zodiac sign...How can we put up barriers against love because of something insignificant like that ascendent in Libra? I also showed myself to be open-minded regarding alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (Note: I, your blogger, have personally seen Mr. Monzó indulge in tobacco and alcohol in fairly herculean quantities), so my spectrum is very wide. The only thing I specified is that, no matter who this progressive and multicultural person is, he or she must live in Barcelona; I'm not going to spend a fortune on phone calls to Porto Alegre.
Well, do you know how many Barcelonese have signed up? Only one: a 33-year-old woman. And, when I read her information, I discovered she was born in California. Of the million people that the personal-relationships website offers, only one is from Barcelona. Only one in a million! This is not due to language difficulties with English, after all the summer courses we've spent in Ireland, Great Britain, and the United States.
Is this the Barcelona that Bush I pointed out as an example not to follow? Within the little anti-system world, today being from Barcelona gives one cachet, something much more important than, on the day of the blind date, staining your Doc Martens black to imitate chapapote (the oil spill), hiding your posters of Beth (the winner of 'Spanish Idol' who represented Spain at the Eurovision festival) under 'Nunca maís' flags, or refusing Coca-Cola in favor of drinking Mecca-Cola. If you're from Barcelona, here's the website where you'll be beating them away with a stick! Just remind them of the Tragic Week, the Cabot Utopians of the 1850s, the demonstrations on Diagonal Avenue, the sustainable campout at the Plaza Macià...
But there's only one Barcelonese woman, and, adding insult to injury, she's imported from California. I'm not at all surprised that (conservative PP candidate) Alberto Fernández Díaz won another Council seat in the elections.
It's time for the State of the Blog address. Readership is down. My personal guess, from what I figure from the blog stats, is that we haven't lost any hardcore readership--we've got 42 inbound links now and rate as "Floppy Birds" on N.Z. Bear's blogosphere rankings. What's way down are our visitors brought in from Google searches, from other blogs' blogrolls, and especially from InstaPundit. Yeah, the first thing I checked was whether he'd delinked us. He hasn't. This leads me to think that there's a postwar blog slump and that we're heading for a blog depression.
There are an awful lot of blogs now. I discovered them in about November 2001 and started my own in February 2002. They weren't cool and hip yet. Mainly we were a bunch of dorks writing about politics and a bunch of misfits writing about our daily frustrations. Yeah, I know, you're not a real blogger if you started up after September 11. But now that we've all made the New York Times, a lot of people have joined the group of bloggers, which is all to the good. In November 2001 you could almost keep up with most of the good blogs. Now there's no way you could do so, there are so many. This is great, because there's all sorts of wonderful stuff to read; remember, I'm more of a blogreader than a blogger, I spend about the same amount of time doing one thing as the other.
But there's gonna be a shakeout. Whenever some novelty in communication gets big enough that Bill Clinton joins in and major media outlets have to have one and the New York Times is writing about it and my mom, for Chrissakes, has seen the story, it's a fad that's riding high. Regression to the mean, guys, it's gonna happen and I think my stats are a sign of it happening already. We got whipped up into a frenzy of need for information between September 11 and the Iraq war, and I think a lot of people are sitting back and relaxing and thinking that it's all over, so they're not paying as much attention to the news after that year-and-a-half information overload--I mean, we've all heard of Karbala and Uday and Qasay and Umm Qasr and the Fedayeen and Paradise Square and Mosul and Kirkuk and the Marsh Arabs and the like now, which we had no idea about before the war. People are relaxing and blowing off current events to the same extent that they did before September 11.
This is good. But it might be bad.
That's Iberian Notes' solid, unshaken, cast-in-iron opinion.
On the other hand, everything I just wrote above might be a crock of crap and readership is down because a) we've bored the piss out of everyone with the elections or b) we just plain suck and everyone's figured it out.
I kind of figure that we and Ibidem are the blogs of record in Spain in English, so I had to get that election reporting in in detail just in case somebody really needed to know it. Sorry.
Anyway, if you're a regular reader (I know my parents and sister and brother-in-law are readers, and so are my pals Clark, Murph, Damian, and José Manuel), leave a message in the Comments, whether it's for the first time or the twentieth, just so that I'll know you exist.
There are an awful lot of blogs now. I discovered them in about November 2001 and started my own in February 2002. They weren't cool and hip yet. Mainly we were a bunch of dorks writing about politics and a bunch of misfits writing about our daily frustrations. Yeah, I know, you're not a real blogger if you started up after September 11. But now that we've all made the New York Times, a lot of people have joined the group of bloggers, which is all to the good. In November 2001 you could almost keep up with most of the good blogs. Now there's no way you could do so, there are so many. This is great, because there's all sorts of wonderful stuff to read; remember, I'm more of a blogreader than a blogger, I spend about the same amount of time doing one thing as the other.
But there's gonna be a shakeout. Whenever some novelty in communication gets big enough that Bill Clinton joins in and major media outlets have to have one and the New York Times is writing about it and my mom, for Chrissakes, has seen the story, it's a fad that's riding high. Regression to the mean, guys, it's gonna happen and I think my stats are a sign of it happening already. We got whipped up into a frenzy of need for information between September 11 and the Iraq war, and I think a lot of people are sitting back and relaxing and thinking that it's all over, so they're not paying as much attention to the news after that year-and-a-half information overload--I mean, we've all heard of Karbala and Uday and Qasay and Umm Qasr and the Fedayeen and Paradise Square and Mosul and Kirkuk and the Marsh Arabs and the like now, which we had no idea about before the war. People are relaxing and blowing off current events to the same extent that they did before September 11.
This is good. But it might be bad.
That's Iberian Notes' solid, unshaken, cast-in-iron opinion.
On the other hand, everything I just wrote above might be a crock of crap and readership is down because a) we've bored the piss out of everyone with the elections or b) we just plain suck and everyone's figured it out.
I kind of figure that we and Ibidem are the blogs of record in Spain in English, so I had to get that election reporting in in detail just in case somebody really needed to know it. Sorry.
Anyway, if you're a regular reader (I know my parents and sister and brother-in-law are readers, and so are my pals Clark, Murph, Damian, and José Manuel), leave a message in the Comments, whether it's for the first time or the twentieth, just so that I'll know you exist.
Country music notes: I've been listening to KHYI in Dallas. Turn on your speakers and click on "Listen Now" on the upper left of the screen. They rock. They play about half classic country--Merle, Willie, Johnny, George and Tammy, and the like--and half active Texas musicians and especially their newest stuff. There's a song they play over and over called "The Road Goes On Forever and the Party Never Ends" which was apparently written and first recorded by Robert Earl Keen and covered by Joe Ely, which compares favorably to any Bruce Springsteen story-song. Joe Ely is great. He kicks ass. Friggin' A. Some rock radio station ought to just get slightly hip and start playing Keen, Ely, and Steve Earle--call themselves "Authentic American Rock" or something like that and then play Petty and the Dead and the Stones, who wanted to be American so badly they succeeded, and Creedence and Dylan and the Band and the Allmans and the Byrds and that stuff, plus the Blasters and Jason and the Scorchers and Cracker and whatever. And a little bit of Taj Mahal and Keb Mo blues stuff, not to mention your B.B. King and Willie Dixon and an occasional funky James Brown tune. That'd be a great station.
They've been playing this guy named Tom Russell, whom I've never heard of before, who's got a new record out with three good songs on it, one called "Modern Art", another called "Racehorse Haynes", and one more Western tune about a vigilante called Deacon and two horse thieves, the Sandoval brothers. Great stuff. I highly recommend it. According to the DJs, Russell got on David Letterman a few weeks ago, so he's not exactly an unknown.
The only thing that bugs me about KHYI is they play a lot of Waylon and Jerry Jeff songs about how great Bob Wills was, but they don't play any Bob Wills. Or Hank. They play a lot of covers of Hank, many of which are terrific, but we wanna hear the real thing occasionally.
They've been playing this guy named Tom Russell, whom I've never heard of before, who's got a new record out with three good songs on it, one called "Modern Art", another called "Racehorse Haynes", and one more Western tune about a vigilante called Deacon and two horse thieves, the Sandoval brothers. Great stuff. I highly recommend it. According to the DJs, Russell got on David Letterman a few weeks ago, so he's not exactly an unknown.
The only thing that bugs me about KHYI is they play a lot of Waylon and Jerry Jeff songs about how great Bob Wills was, but they don't play any Bob Wills. Or Hank. They play a lot of covers of Hank, many of which are terrific, but we wanna hear the real thing occasionally.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Occasionally I get accused of not liking Spain or of insulting Catalonia or of dissing Barcelona. Nothing could be further from the truth, though I do reserve the right to be critical. I have insulted Cataloonies and socialists, but that's not insulting the Catalans or the Spanish. That's insulting individuals who have no brains or sense as far as politics goes.
One thing about Spain that I like is, of all things, the National Health (confusingly called "la Seguridad Social" around here). You'd figure a free-market dude like me would be blasting socialized medicine left and right, but it actually works pretty well around here; note the fact that Spain's life expectancy is longer than America's, though American per-capita income is almost double Spain's, and the Spaniards drink and smoke more than the Yanks. They also get more people killed in car wrecks, which balances out our higher homicide rate. Therefore, somebody's got to be doing something right (my guess: extensive preventive care), and my attitude is, if something works, even if you're ideologically opposed to it, don't try to fix it. I don't like residential zoning laws either, ideologically, but I have to admit they work.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, I finally got my wisdom tooth pulled--left side, lower jaw. I'd gone in three times previously, thinking they were going to yank it that day, but they were doing something else. Once I went and waited for like an hour and saw the doctor for about 30 seconds; I opened my mouth and he said, "Yep, that tooth's impacted, it's got to go," which I already knew, thank you very much. So the National Health can be inefficient and slow and you have to wait in lines if what's wrong with you isn't life-threatening or an emergency, but when they do something, they do it very well. The doctors are absolutely top-quality. Several years ago, I cracked a fibula and they fixed it; I also had an operation to unblock my vas deferens in which they cut me open and I was hospitalized for four days; and the National Health provides me with psychiatric care. I am the last guy who's going to complain about it.
So they pulled the tooth; shot me up with lidocaine, waited five minutes for it to take, and then the doctor used this mean-looking implement to straighten the tooth out by prying and instantly yanked it with his forceps. Didn't hurt a bit; it was painful yesterday evening, but I took some pills they gave me and managed to get to sleep. Today I've got a mild, dull ache, but nothing more. The ol' lower jaw is just a little swollen. I think I have a pretty high threshold of pain; I didn't use to, but now mild pains that other people make a big deal about don't bother me much.
So I'm fine; it's the Socialists who are in pain. They did win, in the sense that they increased their representation almost everywhere except Catalonia, but they lost, in the sense that they really thought they were going to massacre Aznar and his PP over the war and all the rest. They didn't, and they are yelping and howling and whining like three-year-olds who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas. Check out this bit titled "Comeback" by Enrique Gil Calvo in yesterday's El País.
Judging by the provisional vote counts, there has not been an electoral turnaround in the May 25 local elections. It's true that the opposition might have won the most votes, but it has not managed to take the most disputed strongholds from the People's Party. We could talk about a tie, but given the expectations of only a month ago, we are really dealing with an Aznar victory. This produces a bitter feeling of historical injustice, since if these first estimates are confirmed (note: they were, in spades), their result could be interpreted as a validation on the part of the Spanish electorate of the most recent--and most negative--governance by Aznar.
Instead of unleashing a massive punishment vote, as an expression of protest against the three black holes of the last year for the Administration--the general strike, the Prestige disaster, and the aggression on Iraq--, on the contrary, this Sunday, there has been a tacit vote of forgiveness, if not support, for Aznar's extreme right-wing economic policies--which clean up the economy at the cost of increasing "exclusion" and social inequality--and security--with the increase of judicial repression as its worst but most demagogic black hole. It's the classical "shut up and eat" vote of the middle classes...
(Paragraph calling Zap and Gas dipshits)
But these explanations, though plausible and pertinent, grow pallid before the unquestionable pull of Aznar's comeback. His exclusive protagonism has stolen the show from both his partners and his rivals, because of the surliness and harshness of his dirty electoral games, without scruples in terrifying the least informed of the electorate through the media that serve the Administration. Aznar's political style has always been that of a madman, but in this last year he has surpassed all previous limits, since the final stretch of the campaign has been characterized by his lack of dignity, stealing the show from his political allies, threatening right and left, and insulting everybody.
WAAH! WAAH! WAAH! After the PP wins the general elections again next year we're going to hear even more crying from these Socialist jokers. Note that Mr. Gil i Pollas calles Aznar a madman and surly and the like and then accuses Aznar of insulting everybody. Also note that he says that the PP won because they frightened the stupid people through manipulation of the media. I call bullshit on that. I say that the Spanish middle class voted for their man and their party knowing full well what they were doing. I also say that Mr. Gil's column, which does not show a great deal of respect for the Spanish people, the Spanish voters, is a much graver insult to the Spaniards, who have just spoken out democratically and said what they wanted, than anything I have ever said.
¿Dónde están, no se ven, los amigos de los Bardem? ¡Zapatero, jódete, España es del PP!
One thing about Spain that I like is, of all things, the National Health (confusingly called "la Seguridad Social" around here). You'd figure a free-market dude like me would be blasting socialized medicine left and right, but it actually works pretty well around here; note the fact that Spain's life expectancy is longer than America's, though American per-capita income is almost double Spain's, and the Spaniards drink and smoke more than the Yanks. They also get more people killed in car wrecks, which balances out our higher homicide rate. Therefore, somebody's got to be doing something right (my guess: extensive preventive care), and my attitude is, if something works, even if you're ideologically opposed to it, don't try to fix it. I don't like residential zoning laws either, ideologically, but I have to admit they work.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, I finally got my wisdom tooth pulled--left side, lower jaw. I'd gone in three times previously, thinking they were going to yank it that day, but they were doing something else. Once I went and waited for like an hour and saw the doctor for about 30 seconds; I opened my mouth and he said, "Yep, that tooth's impacted, it's got to go," which I already knew, thank you very much. So the National Health can be inefficient and slow and you have to wait in lines if what's wrong with you isn't life-threatening or an emergency, but when they do something, they do it very well. The doctors are absolutely top-quality. Several years ago, I cracked a fibula and they fixed it; I also had an operation to unblock my vas deferens in which they cut me open and I was hospitalized for four days; and the National Health provides me with psychiatric care. I am the last guy who's going to complain about it.
So they pulled the tooth; shot me up with lidocaine, waited five minutes for it to take, and then the doctor used this mean-looking implement to straighten the tooth out by prying and instantly yanked it with his forceps. Didn't hurt a bit; it was painful yesterday evening, but I took some pills they gave me and managed to get to sleep. Today I've got a mild, dull ache, but nothing more. The ol' lower jaw is just a little swollen. I think I have a pretty high threshold of pain; I didn't use to, but now mild pains that other people make a big deal about don't bother me much.
So I'm fine; it's the Socialists who are in pain. They did win, in the sense that they increased their representation almost everywhere except Catalonia, but they lost, in the sense that they really thought they were going to massacre Aznar and his PP over the war and all the rest. They didn't, and they are yelping and howling and whining like three-year-olds who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas. Check out this bit titled "Comeback" by Enrique Gil Calvo in yesterday's El País.
Judging by the provisional vote counts, there has not been an electoral turnaround in the May 25 local elections. It's true that the opposition might have won the most votes, but it has not managed to take the most disputed strongholds from the People's Party. We could talk about a tie, but given the expectations of only a month ago, we are really dealing with an Aznar victory. This produces a bitter feeling of historical injustice, since if these first estimates are confirmed (note: they were, in spades), their result could be interpreted as a validation on the part of the Spanish electorate of the most recent--and most negative--governance by Aznar.
Instead of unleashing a massive punishment vote, as an expression of protest against the three black holes of the last year for the Administration--the general strike, the Prestige disaster, and the aggression on Iraq--, on the contrary, this Sunday, there has been a tacit vote of forgiveness, if not support, for Aznar's extreme right-wing economic policies--which clean up the economy at the cost of increasing "exclusion" and social inequality--and security--with the increase of judicial repression as its worst but most demagogic black hole. It's the classical "shut up and eat" vote of the middle classes...
(Paragraph calling Zap and Gas dipshits)
But these explanations, though plausible and pertinent, grow pallid before the unquestionable pull of Aznar's comeback. His exclusive protagonism has stolen the show from both his partners and his rivals, because of the surliness and harshness of his dirty electoral games, without scruples in terrifying the least informed of the electorate through the media that serve the Administration. Aznar's political style has always been that of a madman, but in this last year he has surpassed all previous limits, since the final stretch of the campaign has been characterized by his lack of dignity, stealing the show from his political allies, threatening right and left, and insulting everybody.
WAAH! WAAH! WAAH! After the PP wins the general elections again next year we're going to hear even more crying from these Socialist jokers. Note that Mr. Gil i Pollas calles Aznar a madman and surly and the like and then accuses Aznar of insulting everybody. Also note that he says that the PP won because they frightened the stupid people through manipulation of the media. I call bullshit on that. I say that the Spanish middle class voted for their man and their party knowing full well what they were doing. I also say that Mr. Gil's column, which does not show a great deal of respect for the Spanish people, the Spanish voters, is a much graver insult to the Spaniards, who have just spoken out democratically and said what they wanted, than anything I have ever said.
¿Dónde están, no se ven, los amigos de los Bardem? ¡Zapatero, jódete, España es del PP!
Monday, May 26, 2003
Just to remind you, here are the predictions I made May 20.
I will make several predictions, more specific than the last lot, which I figure will be borne out. The three most powerful positions that are actually in play, the Valencia region, the Madrid region, and Madrid city, will be held by the PP. The PP will win at least three of the eight Andalusian capital cities as well as both of those in Extremadura. The Popular Front, with a Communist mayor, wins in Córdoba. The Socialists repeat in their strongholds of Extremadura's and Castile-La Mancha's regional governments--Socialist home base Andalusia, as well as Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque country, are the four "historical communities" that are holding their regional elections on different dates. Three-way tossup in the Canaries, the PP, the Socialists, and the Canarian Coalition. The Socialists take Aragon. The PP takes the Balearics and Navarra. The PP takes San Sebastian and Vitoria with the support of the Socialists; the Socialists take Bilbao with PP support. The Socialists take most of the Galician cities in alliance with the Galician wacko nationalists, and the Socialists take Asturias and its cities, Oviedo and Gijón. The PP takes its home ground, Castile-Leon, Cantabria, and La Rioja. The Socialists repeat in Barcelona and Gerona, and Convergence repeats in Lérida and Tarragona.
Not bad. Missed the Madrid region. Got the Basque cities all wrong--Vitoria to the PP, OK, but the Socialists get San Sebastian and the Basque Nationalists took Bilbao. I called three PP mayoralties out of eight in Socialist homeland Andalusia; the PP actually won four. Other than that, some pretty good predictions there, if I do say so myself.
I will make several predictions, more specific than the last lot, which I figure will be borne out. The three most powerful positions that are actually in play, the Valencia region, the Madrid region, and Madrid city, will be held by the PP. The PP will win at least three of the eight Andalusian capital cities as well as both of those in Extremadura. The Popular Front, with a Communist mayor, wins in Córdoba. The Socialists repeat in their strongholds of Extremadura's and Castile-La Mancha's regional governments--Socialist home base Andalusia, as well as Galicia, Catalonia, and the Basque country, are the four "historical communities" that are holding their regional elections on different dates. Three-way tossup in the Canaries, the PP, the Socialists, and the Canarian Coalition. The Socialists take Aragon. The PP takes the Balearics and Navarra. The PP takes San Sebastian and Vitoria with the support of the Socialists; the Socialists take Bilbao with PP support. The Socialists take most of the Galician cities in alliance with the Galician wacko nationalists, and the Socialists take Asturias and its cities, Oviedo and Gijón. The PP takes its home ground, Castile-Leon, Cantabria, and La Rioja. The Socialists repeat in Barcelona and Gerona, and Convergence repeats in Lérida and Tarragona.
Not bad. Missed the Madrid region. Got the Basque cities all wrong--Vitoria to the PP, OK, but the Socialists get San Sebastian and the Basque Nationalists took Bilbao. I called three PP mayoralties out of eight in Socialist homeland Andalusia; the PP actually won four. Other than that, some pretty good predictions there, if I do say so myself.
Here's a Washington Times story on how absurd federal regulations are screwing up one man's life. The guy is a DC public school teacher and baseball coach, apparently a competent professional, who ran for office on the Green Party ticket though he didn't expect to win. That's an American citizen using his right to free speech and his right to stand for public office, right? That's being public-spirited and participating in the democratic political process, right? Wrong, according to the Feds. They want to fire him. Check it out. I vote we give the guy a medal for teaching in DC, for wanting to stay there, for God's sake, and for not being so freaked out by that fact, that he runs for office instead of spending the rest of the day after school lets out down at the bar.
Here's the Daily Telegraph's take on the results of the elections. The reporter has bought the Socialist spin; in reality the PP suffered small losses, not huge ones, and even registered some gains. Either that or she sent off her story before any of the real results were in; as usual, the surveys taken outside polling places gave the PP two or three percentage points of the vote fewer than the real, counted results. Note that she says that voters wore stickers and buttons to the polls and that's against election rules. Wrong. You can wear anything you like to go vote. What's prohibited is actual electioneering--putting up political signs in the voting places. The Election Board decided that no signs referring to the war, the oil spill, the general strike, etc., could be hung in voting places, which are mostly public schools. Since all of Spain's lefty teachers have been assigning their kids to make "No to the war" posters and the like and hanging them all over the walls of the schools, the Election Board decreed that those signs were against the rules and had to come down. In many places, they didn't.
Here are the most important races and their results, with all the votes in:
Madrid mayor: PP absolute majority
Valencia mayor: PP absolute majority
Sevilla mayor: Socialists most voted, either PSOE or PP must pact with regionalists
Barcelona mayor: Socialists most voted, must form Popular Front
Zaragoza mayor: Socialists most voted, must pact with regionalists
Málaga mayor: PP absolute majority
Las Palmas mayor: PP absolute majority
Murcia mayor: PP absolute majority
Valladolid mayor: PP absolute majority
Bilbao mayor: Basque Nationalists most voted, must pact with Communists
San Sebastián mayor: Socialists most voted, must pact with PP
Vitoria mayor: PP most voted, must pact with Socialists
Regional elections:
Aragon: Socialists most voted, must pact with regionalists
Asturias: Socialists most voted, must pact with Communists
Balearics: PP absolute majority
Canaries: Canarian Coalition most voted, must pact with somebody
Cantabria: PP most voted, must pact with regionalists
Castile-Leon: PP absolute majority
Castile-La Mancha: Socialist absolute majority
Valencia: PP absolute majority
Extremadura: Socialist absolute majority
Madrid: PP most voted, Popular Front pact can unseat PP
Murcia: PP absolute majority
Navarra: PP most voted, must pact with regionalists
La Rioja: PP absolute majority
PP spin: We won because we held our own, because we won the most total votes in the regional elections, because we took eight of the thirteen regions up for election, and because we won in the great majority of provincial capitals.
Socialist spin: We won because we got most total votes in the municipal elections and we took the Madrid region and Zaragoza away from you. Besides, you only got the most votes in the regionals because two big Socialist power centers, Andalusia and Catalonia, didn't vote.
PP spin: We held two of the three big prizes, Madrid mayor and Valencia region, and we took the Balearics region and the Burgos mayoralty away from you guys. Besides, our holding our own in this election is a big win because you guys had a lot of ammo to shoot at us and you missed with most of it. And one of our big power centers, the Galicia region, didn't vote either in the regionals.
Socialist spin: You sons-of-bitches, we thought we were gonna romp all over your asses.
PP spin: Ha, ha, ha, you didn't. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo, stick your head in doo-doo.
US Government spin: There was no anti-war backlash. The anti-war demos didn't mean a damned thing politically. Our friend Aznar is just as strong, probably stronger, than he was before March 25.
Anti-Catalanist spin: the Plataforma per Catalunya, the out-and-out Catalan racist and xenophobic party, won City Council seats in Vic, Manlleu, El Vendrell, and Cervera. As far as I know the Plataforma is the only political party in Spain that could reasonably be called "fascist" that holds official representation, and where did they win it? In four medium-sized and very Catalan cities.
Madrid mayor: PP absolute majority
Valencia mayor: PP absolute majority
Sevilla mayor: Socialists most voted, either PSOE or PP must pact with regionalists
Barcelona mayor: Socialists most voted, must form Popular Front
Zaragoza mayor: Socialists most voted, must pact with regionalists
Málaga mayor: PP absolute majority
Las Palmas mayor: PP absolute majority
Murcia mayor: PP absolute majority
Valladolid mayor: PP absolute majority
Bilbao mayor: Basque Nationalists most voted, must pact with Communists
San Sebastián mayor: Socialists most voted, must pact with PP
Vitoria mayor: PP most voted, must pact with Socialists
Regional elections:
Aragon: Socialists most voted, must pact with regionalists
Asturias: Socialists most voted, must pact with Communists
Balearics: PP absolute majority
Canaries: Canarian Coalition most voted, must pact with somebody
Cantabria: PP most voted, must pact with regionalists
Castile-Leon: PP absolute majority
Castile-La Mancha: Socialist absolute majority
Valencia: PP absolute majority
Extremadura: Socialist absolute majority
Madrid: PP most voted, Popular Front pact can unseat PP
Murcia: PP absolute majority
Navarra: PP most voted, must pact with regionalists
La Rioja: PP absolute majority
PP spin: We won because we held our own, because we won the most total votes in the regional elections, because we took eight of the thirteen regions up for election, and because we won in the great majority of provincial capitals.
Socialist spin: We won because we got most total votes in the municipal elections and we took the Madrid region and Zaragoza away from you. Besides, you only got the most votes in the regionals because two big Socialist power centers, Andalusia and Catalonia, didn't vote.
PP spin: We held two of the three big prizes, Madrid mayor and Valencia region, and we took the Balearics region and the Burgos mayoralty away from you guys. Besides, our holding our own in this election is a big win because you guys had a lot of ammo to shoot at us and you missed with most of it. And one of our big power centers, the Galicia region, didn't vote either in the regionals.
Socialist spin: You sons-of-bitches, we thought we were gonna romp all over your asses.
PP spin: Ha, ha, ha, you didn't. Nanny-nanny-boo-boo, stick your head in doo-doo.
US Government spin: There was no anti-war backlash. The anti-war demos didn't mean a damned thing politically. Our friend Aznar is just as strong, probably stronger, than he was before March 25.
Anti-Catalanist spin: the Plataforma per Catalunya, the out-and-out Catalan racist and xenophobic party, won City Council seats in Vic, Manlleu, El Vendrell, and Cervera. As far as I know the Plataforma is the only political party in Spain that could reasonably be called "fascist" that holds official representation, and where did they win it? In four medium-sized and very Catalan cities.
We'll fill you in on the election results from yesterday and run down our predictions and see how we did pretty soon here.
The important news, though, is that a Ukranian plane carrying mostly Spanish soldiers crashed in Turkey on its way from Afghanistan to Spain. 74 people were killed, including more than sixty Spanish soldiers. These guys had been keeping the peace in Afghanistan and were on their way home. Damned shame. If any leftist groups attempt to use this tragedy politically I will--well, all I can really do is point it out on this here blog and then insult them. But that's what I'll do.
And can we please start decommissioning those damn Russian-made planes? I certainly wouldn't fly in one.
The important news, though, is that a Ukranian plane carrying mostly Spanish soldiers crashed in Turkey on its way from Afghanistan to Spain. 74 people were killed, including more than sixty Spanish soldiers. These guys had been keeping the peace in Afghanistan and were on their way home. Damned shame. If any leftist groups attempt to use this tragedy politically I will--well, all I can really do is point it out on this here blog and then insult them. But that's what I'll do.
And can we please start decommissioning those damn Russian-made planes? I certainly wouldn't fly in one.
Sunday, May 25, 2003
More results from around Spain, these based on actual partial counts of the vote:
Vigo goes to the PP if there is no deal between the Socialists and the Galician nationalists. La Coruña goes to the Socialists. The PP gets an absolute majority in Valladolid, Palma, Badajoz, Burgos, and Málaga. The PP loses Toledo to a Socialist-Communist coalition. The Andalusian regionalists hold power in Sevilla; whichever side can convince them gets the mayoralty.
The radical right-wing Plataforma per Catalunya won a Council seat in the city of El Vendrell.
Vigo goes to the PP if there is no deal between the Socialists and the Galician nationalists. La Coruña goes to the Socialists. The PP gets an absolute majority in Valladolid, Palma, Badajoz, Burgos, and Málaga. The PP loses Toledo to a Socialist-Communist coalition. The Andalusian regionalists hold power in Sevilla; whichever side can convince them gets the mayoralty.
The radical right-wing Plataforma per Catalunya won a Council seat in the city of El Vendrell.
The results have been coming in from around Catalonia and there haven't been any major changes in who's going to be governing our cities. One thing that is almost uniform is that the Socialists and Convergence have generally lost votes, the Socialists up to 25% of their seats in some cities, including Barcelona. The PP has gained some, a couple of percent, and the Communists and the Republican Left have increased their representation by a good bit, more than doubling it in Barcelona. What it looks to me like has happened is this: the protest vote went from the Socialists to the two smaller leftist parties. The PP voters stayed loyal, and some of the right wing of Convergence moved over to the PP.
Here's the repulsive news of the day from the emblematic and super-Catalan city of Vic: the Plataforma per Catalunya, which is a far-right anti-immigration party, run by Josep Anglada, who is known in those parts as the guy who organizes the pro-Franco demonstrations. took 8.77% of the vote and won two seats on the Vic City Council. The guy from TV3 dared to go so far as to say that said party is considered by some to be xenophobic.
Here's the repulsive news of the day from the emblematic and super-Catalan city of Vic: the Plataforma per Catalunya, which is a far-right anti-immigration party, run by Josep Anglada, who is known in those parts as the guy who organizes the pro-Franco demonstrations. took 8.77% of the vote and won two seats on the Vic City Council. The guy from TV3 dared to go so far as to say that said party is considered by some to be xenophobic.
Catalunya TV has just announced some real results, that is, results based on partial vote counts.
Barcelona City Council:
Socialists 35.77%, 16 seats
Convergence 19.49%, 8 seats
PP 15.52%, 7 seats
Republican Left 12.58%, 5 seats
Communists 12.57%, 5 seats
The Socialists got hit hard in Catalonia, with the protest vote going to the smaller leftist parties, the Republican Left and the Commies. The PP actually increased the percentage of its vote. Convergencia lost votes. Looks like in Catalonia, though, the protest vote hurt the Socialists and Convergencia. I suppose that the 15% of Barcelonese who went for the PP are supporters of Aznar and his politics. Nonetheless, Mayor Joan Clos continues at the head of a Popular Front government on the City Council.
Tarragona City Council: A Convergence-PP deal gives the mayoralty to Convergence.
Lérida and Gerona City Councils: Socialist mayors backed by Popular Front coalitions.
Barcelona City Council:
Socialists 35.77%, 16 seats
Convergence 19.49%, 8 seats
PP 15.52%, 7 seats
Republican Left 12.58%, 5 seats
Communists 12.57%, 5 seats
The Socialists got hit hard in Catalonia, with the protest vote going to the smaller leftist parties, the Republican Left and the Commies. The PP actually increased the percentage of its vote. Convergencia lost votes. Looks like in Catalonia, though, the protest vote hurt the Socialists and Convergencia. I suppose that the 15% of Barcelonese who went for the PP are supporters of Aznar and his politics. Nonetheless, Mayor Joan Clos continues at the head of a Popular Front government on the City Council.
Tarragona City Council: A Convergence-PP deal gives the mayoralty to Convergence.
Lérida and Gerona City Councils: Socialist mayors backed by Popular Front coalitions.
The two major parties are beginning to spin. The PP is saying that they're the winners because they were the most voted party in the majority of regions and in the majority of the provincial capitals. The Socialists are saying they're the winners because they got more total votes than the PP did. My spin is, again, Aznar has weathered the storm and the PP didn't lose too much; there was not a general "punishment vote" on account of the war or anything else.
I've gone over to Tele 5 to see what they're saying. Their survey results vary slightly from TVE's. There will be Socialist-regionalist-Communist pacts in Vigo and Sevilla, putting those mayoralties in Socialist hands. Valladolid may go the same way, they're saying now. The Valencia mayoralty goes to the PP. Bilbao is still up in the air.
The general media take--I've been through Catalunya TV as well--is more or less what I was saying, that the Socialists get a marginal win but they didn't hit the PP a killing blow. The Spanish people did not react, as a whole, against the government and in favor of the left, as some were hoping.
The general media take--I've been through Catalunya TV as well--is more or less what I was saying, that the Socialists get a marginal win but they didn't hit the PP a killing blow. The Spanish people did not react, as a whole, against the government and in favor of the left, as some were hoping.
Televisión Española is calling the various election races on the basis of surveys taken of people leaving the polls. The polls close in the Canary Islands at 9 PM mainland time and the official preliminary results are scheduled for 10:30. Here's the rundown so far:
Autonomous Regions:
Madrid: PP most voted but could be unseated by Socialist-Communist coalition
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Balearics: PP most voted but could lose out to leftist-regionalist coalition
Navarra: PP most voted, likely to get Socialist support vs. Basque nationalists
Murcia: PP holds absolute majority
Castile-La Mancha: Socialists hold absolute majority
Castile-León: PP holds absolute majority
Cantabria: PP most voted, could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Asturias: Socialists gain absolute majority
La Rioja: PP holds absolute majority
Aragon: Socialists most voted, must make coalition
Extremadura: Socialists hold absolute majority
Canaries: Canarian Coalition most voted, will have to form coalition.
Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Andalusia did not hold regional elections.
These results for Aznar's PP aren't what I'd hoped for but aren't too bad. They didn't get their clocks cleaned, though in most places they have declined by a couple of percentage points. It looks like the big loss, though, is the Madrid regional government, which will almost certainly fall into the hands of a Popular Front government. The big hold is on the Valencia region, once strongly Socialist, no longer so.
Major Cities:
Madrid: PP holds absolute majority
Bilbao: Completely up in the air
San Sebastián: Socialists most voted, can form coalition with PP
Vitoria: PP most voted, can form coalition with Socialists
Barcelona: Socialists most voted, current Popular Front council to continue
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Sevilla: PP most voted but SocioCommunist coalition would win
Malaga: PP holds absolute majority
La Coruña: Socialists hold absolute majority
Vigo: PP most voted but leftist-nationalist coalition could unseat them
Valladolid: PP holds absolute majority
Burgos: PP most voted but could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Toledo: Socialists most voted, Popular Front coalition unseats PP. Big PP loss
Zaragoza: Socialists most voted, leftist-regionalist coalition wins
Pamplona: PP most voted, wins with Socialist support
Palma: PP most voted, must form coalition with regionalists
Badajoz: PP absolute majority
If these figures hold up, and they are very approximate, I think we can call this election a marginal Socialist win. They've increased their percentage of the vote almost everywhere, and the PP's percentage of the vote has declined, at least slightly, almost everywhere. It also looks like they've taken the Madrid regional government with help from their Communist pals on the United Left. That's an impartant win, and their strong showings in San Sebastián and Zaragoza are also good news for them. But the PP did not get creamed. There was no overwhelming rejection of the Aznar government. These results do not leave them in too awful a position going into the elections for the four regions that didn't vote today and for the general elections next spring.
Autonomous Regions:
Madrid: PP most voted but could be unseated by Socialist-Communist coalition
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Balearics: PP most voted but could lose out to leftist-regionalist coalition
Navarra: PP most voted, likely to get Socialist support vs. Basque nationalists
Murcia: PP holds absolute majority
Castile-La Mancha: Socialists hold absolute majority
Castile-León: PP holds absolute majority
Cantabria: PP most voted, could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Asturias: Socialists gain absolute majority
La Rioja: PP holds absolute majority
Aragon: Socialists most voted, must make coalition
Extremadura: Socialists hold absolute majority
Canaries: Canarian Coalition most voted, will have to form coalition.
Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, and Andalusia did not hold regional elections.
These results for Aznar's PP aren't what I'd hoped for but aren't too bad. They didn't get their clocks cleaned, though in most places they have declined by a couple of percentage points. It looks like the big loss, though, is the Madrid regional government, which will almost certainly fall into the hands of a Popular Front government. The big hold is on the Valencia region, once strongly Socialist, no longer so.
Major Cities:
Madrid: PP holds absolute majority
Bilbao: Completely up in the air
San Sebastián: Socialists most voted, can form coalition with PP
Vitoria: PP most voted, can form coalition with Socialists
Barcelona: Socialists most voted, current Popular Front council to continue
Valencia: PP holds absolute majority
Sevilla: PP most voted but SocioCommunist coalition would win
Malaga: PP holds absolute majority
La Coruña: Socialists hold absolute majority
Vigo: PP most voted but leftist-nationalist coalition could unseat them
Valladolid: PP holds absolute majority
Burgos: PP most voted but could be unseated by SocioCommunist coalition
Toledo: Socialists most voted, Popular Front coalition unseats PP. Big PP loss
Zaragoza: Socialists most voted, leftist-regionalist coalition wins
Pamplona: PP most voted, wins with Socialist support
Palma: PP most voted, must form coalition with regionalists
Badajoz: PP absolute majority
If these figures hold up, and they are very approximate, I think we can call this election a marginal Socialist win. They've increased their percentage of the vote almost everywhere, and the PP's percentage of the vote has declined, at least slightly, almost everywhere. It also looks like they've taken the Madrid regional government with help from their Communist pals on the United Left. That's an impartant win, and their strong showings in San Sebastián and Zaragoza are also good news for them. But the PP did not get creamed. There was no overwhelming rejection of the Aznar government. These results do not leave them in too awful a position going into the elections for the four regions that didn't vote today and for the general elections next spring.
For new readers, these municipal and regional elections are important even if you do not live in Spain. The Socialists (PSOE) and Communists (IU) have successfully turned the election into a referendum on the conservative, pro-Anglo-American central government, which has done several unpopular things recently, more or less in order of importance: Spain's stance in the War on Terrorism, the government water plan, the controversy over the Galician oil spill, the decree on education reform, and the problems with the construction of the Madrid-Barcelona TGV line. If the PP, the conservative governing People's Party, wins most of the key races, then we'll be able to say that it hasn't been too badly hurt by all these controversies, and it's still the top dog party. If they lose most of them, then we'll know they're up to their necks in dog doo when Catalan regional elections come around this fall and general elections come around in spring 2004.
Municipal elections, in particular, are considered by Spanish political scientists as trend predictors; if these municipals go to the Socialists, it'll be a strong sign that they're likely to take next year's generals. We saw this trend before the PP takeover in 1996 and before the Socialist takeover in 1982, and we saw it way back in 1931 when very poor results obtained by the monarchist parties caused King Alfonso XIII to leave the country, giving place to the Second Republic.
So if you approve of Spain's international policies, you'd better join me in hoping for a good showing by the PP so that the peacenik Socialists don't take over again.
Municipal elections, in particular, are considered by Spanish political scientists as trend predictors; if these municipals go to the Socialists, it'll be a strong sign that they're likely to take next year's generals. We saw this trend before the PP takeover in 1996 and before the Socialist takeover in 1982, and we saw it way back in 1931 when very poor results obtained by the monarchist parties caused King Alfonso XIII to leave the country, giving place to the Second Republic.
So if you approve of Spain's international policies, you'd better join me in hoping for a good showing by the PP so that the peacenik Socialists don't take over again.
Oh, yeah, they had another pot-banging last night. I was downtown, where the Vangua says that participation was the most noticeable, and I didn't hear too much racket. Today, since anti-war and anti-government signs are supposed to be removed from polling sites (no political messages allowed in polling places), all the lefties have plastered themselves with stickers and buttons proclaiming their leftiness and peacefulness. Of course, wearing whatever you want is your right and you can wear that stuff into the voting room, but some of these folks looked pretty damn silly with stickers all over themselves.
Here's Libertad Digital's rundown on today's key posts up for grabs. I'm not going to bother translating it since I figure if you're one of the three people following our election coverage, you probably already know Spanish, and if you don't, you can figure out the story because of all the numbers.
The only place where abnormalities have been reported is the Basque Country, where things got a bit hairy over the last week or so. The cops count thirty violent actions in the Basque region in the last ten days, more than half of which were assault and battery on sympathizers of other parties handing out their brochures and exercising their right to free expression. Meanwhile, anti-ETA candidates have received an avalanche of death threats; yesterday the pro-ETA "radical youth" (teenage rioters, looters, and vandals) Molotov-cocktailed the house of a policeman in San Sebastián for the thirtieth act of low-grade incompetent crap terrorism the Basques have seen. In the rest of Spain, some pseudo-anarchist shitheads let off a letter-bomb at the Valencia post office and seven people were injured.
Here in Catalonia, which is divided into some fifty "comarcas" (counties), the Socialists are going to take the five counties of the Barcelona metro area: Barcelonés, Baix Llobregat, Vallés Occidental, Vallés Oriental, and Maresme. The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, should win all the other counties, with maybe a fluke Socialist or even Esquerra win or two somewhere. Now, wait, CiU control most of the counties, right? So they should be the strongest party, right? Wrong. More than four million of Catalonia's six million people live in the five counties of the BCN metro area. The Socialists are clearly the biggest party here in Catalonia.
The percentage of voters in municipal elections in Catalonia has been between 55% and 65%; they're saying it looks like voter participation this time is going to be pretty high, at least 60%, which is good news for the Socialists; most people whose interest in politics is marginal tend to go for the Socialists and their paternalistic program and guff about the rights of labor. The higher the turnout, the better they tend to do. This isn't good news for the PP, as they tend to do better with a smaller turnout; PP voters are very loyal, but there just aren't that many in Catalonia, 15% of the vote maximum.
The only place where abnormalities have been reported is the Basque Country, where things got a bit hairy over the last week or so. The cops count thirty violent actions in the Basque region in the last ten days, more than half of which were assault and battery on sympathizers of other parties handing out their brochures and exercising their right to free expression. Meanwhile, anti-ETA candidates have received an avalanche of death threats; yesterday the pro-ETA "radical youth" (teenage rioters, looters, and vandals) Molotov-cocktailed the house of a policeman in San Sebastián for the thirtieth act of low-grade incompetent crap terrorism the Basques have seen. In the rest of Spain, some pseudo-anarchist shitheads let off a letter-bomb at the Valencia post office and seven people were injured.
Here in Catalonia, which is divided into some fifty "comarcas" (counties), the Socialists are going to take the five counties of the Barcelona metro area: Barcelonés, Baix Llobregat, Vallés Occidental, Vallés Oriental, and Maresme. The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, should win all the other counties, with maybe a fluke Socialist or even Esquerra win or two somewhere. Now, wait, CiU control most of the counties, right? So they should be the strongest party, right? Wrong. More than four million of Catalonia's six million people live in the five counties of the BCN metro area. The Socialists are clearly the biggest party here in Catalonia.
The percentage of voters in municipal elections in Catalonia has been between 55% and 65%; they're saying it looks like voter participation this time is going to be pretty high, at least 60%, which is good news for the Socialists; most people whose interest in politics is marginal tend to go for the Socialists and their paternalistic program and guff about the rights of labor. The higher the turnout, the better they tend to do. This isn't good news for the PP, as they tend to do better with a smaller turnout; PP voters are very loyal, but there just aren't that many in Catalonia, 15% of the vote maximum.
Today is a Japanese girl's favorite day: Erection Day! I accompanied Remei to go vote early this afternoon and we checked out two polling places, and everything seemed to be going completely normally. There's been a bit of a stink because most of the polling places are schools, and they've all got their "No to the war" and "No to the water plan" bulletin boards and murals up. The Elections Commission has decided that such expressions of opinion are not permitted in voting places because they have political overtones, and nobody is supposed to be influenced in his vote by electioneering at the voting booths. At the first one we checked, on Calle Sant Salvador, all was in order. If there had been any "illegal" signs up, they'd been taken down. At the second one we checked on Calle Providencia, there were two "no to the war" bulletin boards up in the lobby, along with one anti-water-plan art project. Results won't start coming in until the polls close this evening.
Saturday, May 24, 2003
Here's an article from the Daily Telegraph on tomorrow's municipal and regional elections here in Spain. The Telegraph is a little less optimistic about the chances of José María Aznar's People's Party than we are here, but they agree that Aznar and his conservatives are not likely to suffer crippling losses.
Today is the "day of reflection" before tomorrow's elections; campaigning is prohibited. Tomorrow evening we'll be watching TV and filling you in on the results as they come in. The big races we're watching are for the presidencies of the Madrid and Valencia regions, the mayoralty of Madrid, and the mayoralties of Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Vitoria in the Basque country. Again, our predictions are that the PP holds Madrid and Valencia, and that the PP and the Socialists team up in a "democratic alliance" to split the Basque capitals, the PP getting San Sebastián and Vitoria and the Socialists getting Bilbao. There is no question that the Socialist-Popular Front coalition will hold Barcelona's mayoralty. Here in Catalonia, the Socialists will also take Gerona and most of the industrial suburbs around Barcelona, several of which are substantial municipalities (L'Hospitalet, Sabadell, Badalona, Santa Coloma, all of which have at least 150,000 people). The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, will hold the mayoralties of Lérida and Tarragona. The PP is gunning hard in Sevilla but that's a Socialist stronghold and they're not likely to take it.
As long as we're linking to the most prestigious British paper, let's link to the least prestigious. The Sun has a piece on how further integration into the EU will destroy Britain's sovereignty and autonomy. It's written in mostly one-syllable words even you and me can understand. Check it out. (Via FrontPage.)
There's a Fred Barnes article in the Weekly Standard on how we won the war, including some stuff I didn't know. It's rather a puff piece on Tommy Franks, but it's well worth a read. Here's one from last week's Economist on how Saudi Arabia has lost influence in Washington.
Today is the "day of reflection" before tomorrow's elections; campaigning is prohibited. Tomorrow evening we'll be watching TV and filling you in on the results as they come in. The big races we're watching are for the presidencies of the Madrid and Valencia regions, the mayoralty of Madrid, and the mayoralties of Bilbao, San Sebastián, and Vitoria in the Basque country. Again, our predictions are that the PP holds Madrid and Valencia, and that the PP and the Socialists team up in a "democratic alliance" to split the Basque capitals, the PP getting San Sebastián and Vitoria and the Socialists getting Bilbao. There is no question that the Socialist-Popular Front coalition will hold Barcelona's mayoralty. Here in Catalonia, the Socialists will also take Gerona and most of the industrial suburbs around Barcelona, several of which are substantial municipalities (L'Hospitalet, Sabadell, Badalona, Santa Coloma, all of which have at least 150,000 people). The Catalan nationalists, Convergence and Union, will hold the mayoralties of Lérida and Tarragona. The PP is gunning hard in Sevilla but that's a Socialist stronghold and they're not likely to take it.
As long as we're linking to the most prestigious British paper, let's link to the least prestigious. The Sun has a piece on how further integration into the EU will destroy Britain's sovereignty and autonomy. It's written in mostly one-syllable words even you and me can understand. Check it out. (Via FrontPage.)
There's a Fred Barnes article in the Weekly Standard on how we won the war, including some stuff I didn't know. It's rather a puff piece on Tommy Franks, but it's well worth a read. Here's one from last week's Economist on how Saudi Arabia has lost influence in Washington.
Friday, May 23, 2003
Check out this bit of sexually explicit anti-Axis propaganda from the good old days. Don't worry, it's OK, it's for historical research purposes. Also check out this pre-WWII Japanese sex toy catalog. I don't recommend looking at the rest of the website this stuff is from unless you have an extremely strong stomach.
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Derb is kind of funny today in the National Review. I know, he's too paleoconservative for my taste, too, but he is usually funny and often makes pretty good sense when not discussing homosexuality.
There's been a major earthquake in Algeria, with more than 500 dead and thousands injured, and they're not done counting. Here's the BBC story. Just what they needed in Algeria. The civil war wrecked the country in the Fifties and it never really stopped. Algeria has nothing resembling a real economy because, well, you never know, when you open up a textile plant, whether your workers are going to get their throats cut or not. This tends to discourage foreign investment.
Algeria is very close to Spain--just look at the map--and I'm surprised that more attention isn't paid over here to Algerian affairs. You see a good bit of stuff about Morocco, with whom Spain has a rather tempestuous relationship; diplomatic relations have been restored--they'd been cut off for a while. You don't get a lot of news from Algeria except for when a bunch of villagers get murdered; that'll get a couple of paragraphs in the International News Briefs in the Vangua.
Earthquakes, of course, are not rare in the Mediterranean. The famous monastery in Ripoll, here in Catalonia, was wrecked, I believe twice but at least once, by a large earthquake during medieval times. There is occasionally a very mild tremor here in Barcelona; I've known people who claim to have felt it. I never have. Supposedly the tremors from this one were felt in southern Spain and the Balearic Islands.
My friend Shannon Stice was in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake; he was living in a crummy apartment at California and Hyde. He slept through the whole thing. The first he heard about it is when our pal, his roommate Erik, called him from LA; Erik had been driving up from LA to SF that day, heard the news on the radio, and very sensibly turned around and returned to LA. As soon as he got home, he called up his roommate, of course; that was the pre-cellphone era. His phone call woke Stice up.
Algeria is very close to Spain--just look at the map--and I'm surprised that more attention isn't paid over here to Algerian affairs. You see a good bit of stuff about Morocco, with whom Spain has a rather tempestuous relationship; diplomatic relations have been restored--they'd been cut off for a while. You don't get a lot of news from Algeria except for when a bunch of villagers get murdered; that'll get a couple of paragraphs in the International News Briefs in the Vangua.
Earthquakes, of course, are not rare in the Mediterranean. The famous monastery in Ripoll, here in Catalonia, was wrecked, I believe twice but at least once, by a large earthquake during medieval times. There is occasionally a very mild tremor here in Barcelona; I've known people who claim to have felt it. I never have. Supposedly the tremors from this one were felt in southern Spain and the Balearic Islands.
My friend Shannon Stice was in the 1989 San Francisco earthquake; he was living in a crummy apartment at California and Hyde. He slept through the whole thing. The first he heard about it is when our pal, his roommate Erik, called him from LA; Erik had been driving up from LA to SF that day, heard the news on the radio, and very sensibly turned around and returned to LA. As soon as he got home, he called up his roommate, of course; that was the pre-cellphone era. His phone call woke Stice up.
I posted this on the Comments section over at EuroPundits. I thought it was kind of clever and didn't want it to die in the Comments where nobody would read it, so here it is.
Here's a bad analogy. There are five of us in the same ninth grade class who are getting pushed around by Billy the bully. He keeps extorting our lunch money and the like. So we get together and two of us, Johnny Bull and Sammy Yank, propose that we all get together, jump Billy, take him down, and whale on him for a while. Then he'll leave us all alone. Johnny and Sammy calculate that Billy isn't nearly as tough as he lets on, anyway, and they volunteer to lead the charge while the other guys back them up. Now, there are risks; Billy might pop one of us good while we're taking him down. Johnny and Sammy figure this risk is worth it, but little Jacques, little Gerhard, and little Guy are so scared of being the one dude who gets popped by Billy that they chicken out of helping Johnny and Sammy jump Billy, finding various excuses for doing so.
Well, Johnny and Sammy do jump Billy and they win; Billy doesn't even get the chance to pop either of them just because they're so fired up and pissed off and ready to kick Billy's ass good. Gerhard, Jacques, and Guy have now gained the benefits of Johnny and Sammy's ass-kicking on Billy: ie, Billy isn't going to be pushing anyone around anymore, not even them--but they haven't taken the risk of Billy's smacking them one. They therefore feel ashamed; that is, somebody else did something courageous which they chickened out of doing themselves. They don't like to feel ashamed; therefore, they will say that Sammy and Johnny aren't really so tough, that they cheated when they jumped Billy, that they beat up Billy too badly after they got him down, that they just did it because they want to take over Billy's extortion racket, and even that Billy wasn't such a bad guy after all and that Sammy and Johnny were the real bad guys because, after all, they were the ones who started the violence when they jumped Billy.
That's what they call self-justification, a way of relieving the cognitive dissonance caused by Gerhard's, Guy's and Jacques's desire to maintain their good opinions of themselves and their certain knowledge, which they are unwilling to admit consciously, that they didn't have the guts to face Billy.
Here's a bad analogy. There are five of us in the same ninth grade class who are getting pushed around by Billy the bully. He keeps extorting our lunch money and the like. So we get together and two of us, Johnny Bull and Sammy Yank, propose that we all get together, jump Billy, take him down, and whale on him for a while. Then he'll leave us all alone. Johnny and Sammy calculate that Billy isn't nearly as tough as he lets on, anyway, and they volunteer to lead the charge while the other guys back them up. Now, there are risks; Billy might pop one of us good while we're taking him down. Johnny and Sammy figure this risk is worth it, but little Jacques, little Gerhard, and little Guy are so scared of being the one dude who gets popped by Billy that they chicken out of helping Johnny and Sammy jump Billy, finding various excuses for doing so.
Well, Johnny and Sammy do jump Billy and they win; Billy doesn't even get the chance to pop either of them just because they're so fired up and pissed off and ready to kick Billy's ass good. Gerhard, Jacques, and Guy have now gained the benefits of Johnny and Sammy's ass-kicking on Billy: ie, Billy isn't going to be pushing anyone around anymore, not even them--but they haven't taken the risk of Billy's smacking them one. They therefore feel ashamed; that is, somebody else did something courageous which they chickened out of doing themselves. They don't like to feel ashamed; therefore, they will say that Sammy and Johnny aren't really so tough, that they cheated when they jumped Billy, that they beat up Billy too badly after they got him down, that they just did it because they want to take over Billy's extortion racket, and even that Billy wasn't such a bad guy after all and that Sammy and Johnny were the real bad guys because, after all, they were the ones who started the violence when they jumped Billy.
That's what they call self-justification, a way of relieving the cognitive dissonance caused by Gerhard's, Guy's and Jacques's desire to maintain their good opinions of themselves and their certain knowledge, which they are unwilling to admit consciously, that they didn't have the guts to face Billy.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
I just put up a post on EuroPundits--check it out. It's the nastiest America-bashing piece I've seen for a long time, so I just had to translate and fisk it. It's by Xavier Rubert de Ventós, a person who should be read out of polite society starting now for being flat-out evil by nature. From the Vanguardia, of course.
Here's a wackjob piece on why Catalonia ought to be independent by Rubert de Ventós, which someone else has briefly commented upon. It's in Spanish and I'm not going to translate all that crap.
Here's a wackjob piece on why Catalonia ought to be independent by Rubert de Ventós, which someone else has briefly commented upon. It's in Spanish and I'm not going to translate all that crap.
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