After a long dry spell, there's bloggable stuff today! La Vanguardia is reporting that outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar will call general elections for March 14. His People's Party, led by his successor Mariano Rajoy, is expected to march to an easy victory, most likely scoring the PP's second straight absolute majority. Just in case Rajoy can't pull it off, Convergence and Union has been driven into the PP's arms by its exclusion from the Catalan regional government and would likely vote with the PP on most issues, though it probably wouldn't join a coalition--unless the rewards offered were very high.

Rumor has it that Aznar's future plans--he's still quite young and apparently in excellent health--include either the presidency of the European Union, a post I would be greatly relieved to see him in, or the secretary-generalship of the UN. Whatever, he is leaving the party and turning it over completely to Rajoy. This is something that Socialist former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez failed to do with his own party; after he was defeated for reelection by Aznar in 1996, Felipe held onto his parliamentary seat in the Congress of Deputies. This meant that Felipe was still, if not actually running the party, a very important figure within it, and none of his successors (Almunia, Borrell, Almunia again, and Zapatero) has been able to build themselves up publicly as undisputed party leader; also, much of the real power in the party, who got appointed to what job, remained in the hands of Felipe rather than his successors. Felipe is finally going away this year; he will not run for Parliament again. During the last four years' term he's set an all-time record for absenteeism. He doesn't give a damn anymore and let's hope he's gone for good.

I say "let's hope" because I really believe that a two-party system is the healthiest kind for a country to have, and in order for it to work properly both of the leading parties have to be strong and capable and responsible. Right now Spain does not have a responsible opposition party. The Socialists are a disorganized joke with nothing positive to contribute to the political discussion, and they're seen that way even by people who dislike the (personally quite dislikeable) Aznar. This is good for the PP in the short run, and I'm happy about it since it means that we'll have competent leadership over the next four years. But it's bad for the health of democracy in the long run to have a weak second party over the long term.

I actually see the political situation in the US and Spain as being quite similar. In both countries you have a popular conservative leader (let's telescope Aznar and Rajoy into the same person, since Rajoy is going to run a "you've never had it so good as with the PP" campaign) who is hated by the hard left. Said hard left is moving for control of the opposition party, and a few "right-wing" members of the opposition have switched over to the governmental party. The followers of the hard left are all very intense, but there just aren't that many of them, and they'll never be able to beat the majority, who are pretty content in both countries. But the hard left's absolute hatred for the conservative leader is their real motivation in opposing him so strongly. Prediction: A conservative win in Spain in March and a conservative win in America in October, with the leftist party sunk in mutual recrimination at least until 2008. Prediction number two: If Howard Dean wins the Democrat nomination, Joe Lieberman will vote for Bush. He won't say anything about it, and it's a secret ballot so we'll never really know, but Mr. Lieberman and possibly Mr. Gephardt know in their hearts that this guy is dangerous both for the party and the country.

This is kind of interesting. There's this guy named Robert Garside, who bills himself as "The Runningman", and who claims to be the first person to have run around the world. Mr. Garside certainly seems to thrive on publicity and to enjoy basking in the loor of multitudes, and he has said some pretty mushy-headed politically correct stuff about diversity and ecology. He's received a lot of coverage from local progressive-minded media outlets around the world.

Two things are true. Mr. Garside has been a lot of places, though a lot of his yarns ring false. And he can run; he was able to run 72 miles in one outing before witnesses. Now, the fact that this is the most he can do means something, as we will see, but it's still pretty impressive.

However, there are also some people who are convinced that Mr. Garside is a fraudster. There is one guy who seems to devote his life to proving that Mr. Garside is a fake. His site, Ultramarathon World, certainly seems to demonstrate that most of the things Mr. Garside claims to have done are impossible for anyone. And Sports Illustrated, the reliable American sports weekly, pretty much puts Mr. Garside's claims to rest (and portrays him as a megalomaniac paranoid to boot). Just another pious-mouthed phony, more concerned with his own image than anything else.

And another beautiful romantic dream comes to an end...No! Wait! There's more! Mr Garside is now billing himself as "The Swimmingman", and says that he is going to swim around the world, starting in June 2004. Well, I tell you what. I sure wish I'd known about this a couple of weeks before so I could have picked him for the Dead Pool.

Normally we'd have plenty to say about the news and all the other fascinating stuff happening around here. However, there's not much news, not even any America-bashing of note. I guess the Vanguardia's staff is still working off their New Year's Eve hangovers.

Over the last few days big headlines in the Spanish press were given mostly to the increased security on flights between Europe and the US. Apparently several flights were canceled, many were delayed, and a couple were escorted by military planes. Interestingly, the fact that the Spanish air traffic controllers went out on strike one day, causing 40% of Spanish flights to be canceled, got very little press comparatively.

Also, the Vangua has made a little stink about the photographing and fingerprinting of people coming to the United States on visas. Now, it seems to me that the US can establish whatever requirements for people entering its territory that it wants. Getting a photo and a fingerprint taken is not precisely an onerous requirement for visitors; in fact, smart travelers welcome security on the grounds that it's less likely they'll get blown up with it than without it. It seems that although Spaniards do not need a tourist visa to enter the US (if they're going to stay, they need a work or a student visa) and so the great majority of Spanish travelers face no additional hurdles to entrance, the Vanguardia still thinks the whole thing is "humiliating". The Brazilians have retaliated by photographing and fingerpringing Americans entering Brazil, exclusively for harassment purposes. If they want to behave like third graders, we can't stop 'em. So silly, putting empty pride before safety.

My guess is that something was really up over the Christmas season and that the added security measures at airports were a response to that. We'll find out someday.

There is no political news from over here. The usual suspects are blowing hot air but nothing of any substance is actually going on, fortunately. Next time somebody does something interesting we'll let you know.

The Barca sucks. They got creamed last weekend by Racing of Santander 3-0. This team isn't good enough to even come in sixth in the League and make the UEFA competition. The forwards are so bad that the coach, Frank Rijkaard, tried youth teamer Sergio Garcia as the starter against Racing. The move was not effective. Luis Enrique got hurt in practice, broke his cheekbone. This at least means we will not see him louse up any more plays this season. FC Barcelona simply isn't any good. Of the "big" European teams--Man U, Liverpool, Juventus, Milan, Inter, Bayern, Ajax, Real Madrid, a couple of others--Barcelona is by far the worst. I wanted to see them punished by the karma of soccer for their atrocious behavior last season, what with the antiwar demo and the Serbofascist coach and the game against Qaddafi's son's team and the pig-throwing incident and their refusal to obey League authority, but this is worse than even I'd hoped for.

Blogging will continue to be rather light from now until I finish this project I'm working on. Don't worry, we're not going away, not at all; we'll be here at least two or three times a week. If there's a pickup in the news, of course blogging will be heavier, but over the last couple of weeks there's been a welcome hiatus in the Department of Bad News for us to comment on.

With absolutely no inside knowledge of the subject, but after reading in a variety of sources, I predict that the fighting in Iraq will basically end by next summer. I think the capture of Saddam gutted them, I really do, I think the Coalition is winning a lot of hearts and minds, and I think that Bush and Blair have decided they're not going to lose this one, no matter what the French say. (That is Iberian Notes's only prediction for the New Year. We are going to do a retrospective piece on our predictions for 2003 sometime pretty soon.)

I'm going to make one more prediction. As meat consumption increases a great deal in the Third World since those areas are almost all getting richer, it will drop in the wealthy West. I think Great Britain, where according to polls over 10% of people claim to be vegetarians, is showing the lead on this issue. We rich Westerners can afford whatever we want to eat, and it's arugula and radiccio salad with chevre! Seriously, we've done so much making conditions for poor people better (of course I know they're nowhere near perfect) that the next objective of Those People Who Are Better than You's main campaign is going to be the expansion of vegetarianism and increased attention toward animal rights. I'm no Food Fascist, I criticize no one for eating big steaks. People are naturally omnivores, that's the way evolution came out, and I am not denying that fact. But as we begin to see that mammals are capable of reason and fear and affection and contentment and anger and just about every other human quality except language, I believe that more and more people will decide to be vegetarians in theFirst World.

Here's some more La Vanguardia (from Monday, December 29) red meat for all you right-thinking folks out there. The author is Lorenzo Gomis and the title is "Imitating Bush". I think it's supposed to be satirical, although it's hard to tell sometimes.

I don't know whether to confess. I, sometimes, imitate Bush. I don't do it secretly, behind closed doors. I do it in the street whenever I remember to. I don't know whether anyone notices, but I must admit it gives me a certain satisfaction. Then I can look at the horizon without fear. I feel optimistic. I advance with no fright, convinced that what I'm going to do is right, that it's good for the world, although maybe not everyone recognizes it.

My imitation, I must say quickly, is not political. I don't like Bush's politics. And this isn't new. I went out on the street with many neighbors, probably with many readers too, in order to say that we didn't think it was right to go to war against Saddam Hussein without even a majority on the UN Security Council. There were many of us of all kinds saying no to that war. I even saw a couple of professor friends of mine floating among the crowd, each one on his own.

We managed to get Bush the elder to speak about Barcelona. The Bush family didn't miss the fact that there was a lot of skepticism here about what they said about Saddam having arms of mass destruction and that in three quarters of an hour they could blast us with them if we didn't get thim first. He was able to convince such important statesmen as Blair and Aznar and tell them anecdotes in the Azores, but he didn't convince thousands and thousands of us Barcelonese. Me among them.

So I am anything but a fan. I don't like it, either, that he doesn't want to sign the Kyoto protocol, or that ke keeps world trade so unbalanced on his side, demanding that others open their markets and maintaining barriers on his own part.

Why do I imitate him, then? I discovered Bush's secret when he reappeared after September 11th. He wasn't in the White House. He wasn't at his ranch in Texas. No one really knew where he was. Maybe in a barracks or in a camp, well-protected and looking at maps. And, suddenly, he reappeared.

I watched him on the screen to see if his face said anything to me. And I saw him marching gracefully, elegantly, confidently. He stuck his chest out. As he stuck his chest out, he pulled his rump in. He breathed. He looked up discreetly. And above all he walked. He set his pace solemnly, feet straight forward, not too slow, moving his arms firmly, his elbows a little out from his torso. He saw some admirers off to the right and waved to them with his arm, moving his fingers happily. Lifting his arm allowed to stick his chest even farther out, looking at the cameras. Maybe it was the cameras, or the cameramen, who he was waving at. He smiled at the world that watched him in fear. Bush's gait gave out so much confidence!

Since then, every time I see him on the screen, and he's on it a lot, I observe him. He sticks his chest out. He walks martially. He waves at the people whom he always sees, looking off to the right. He smiles, almost grins. As he smiled, not long ago, on Thanksgiving Day, at Baghdad airport, when he said he was looking for some hot food. Then he held up, like a flag, a plastic turkey, and he handed out personally a little real meat to two or three trusted soldiers who were near him, admiring the apparition.

His politics might be bad, but his gait inspires confidence. It fills you with security in him. And I, hearing people say I am beginning to walk bent over*, with my back inclined and my head a little bent, thought: What if I imitate Bush? I haven't achieved anything in particular, I fear. I can't stick out my chest like him, but I come close, I stand up taller, move my arms, mark a pace. And with such small results, I already note that I breathe better, I see that the world is an agreeable place, I feel optimistic, I think I will do something to benefit other people very soon.

I owe all of this, you see, to the president of the United States, who, although his policies are bad and dangerous and scorns world authority and the smaller countries, knows how to advance, walking around the world in an optimistic manner. There is nobody who you can't learn something useful from. It's a question of observing and finding the good side, as photographers do.

I, like millions and millions of human beings without an American passport, would like to have a vote in the United States when it's time to elect the President. It is a democratic principle that those who are affected by the decisions of an authority should have a voice and a vote at the time it is elected. Even though it were a few tenths or hundreds of the vote. Then I promise I will not vote for Bush. But that doesn't mean that walking is not stimulating, awakening, imitable. Check out those who are told they walk bent over, shrunken, indecisively. This makes them much older. Then I murmur the mantra. The mantra is Bush. And I stand up taller. You can learn something from everybody.

Just a few comments: 1) I don't think anyone in the Bush family particularly cares what a bunch of political illiterates do on the streets of Barcelona. 2) We had a 14-0 majority on the Security Council, and, anyway, who cares what the Security Council thinks? The only times we ever had their approval for anything we did were Korea, Gulf War I, and the Balkans. I don't think anybody else ever bothered to get UN authorization before invading his neighbors. 3) In 1997 the US Senate voted 95-0 not to ratify the Kyoto treaty. (Thank God.) That's what pretty much put the kibosh on that one, not anything Bush ever did. 4) I agree with Mr. Gomis on the American hypocrisy regarding both free trade and government subsidies to producers. I just read somewhere that the US, EU, and Japan spend $230 billion of taxpayers' and consumers' money per year on ag subsidies. That's repulsive. I do commend Bush on ending the "Steel War". Which he himself started. 5) Note that Mr. Gomis perpetuates the plastic turkey meme yet again.

Also note the underriding themes: Bush has style but no substance. He is foolishly optimistic. These are common European ideas about Americans in general: poorly educated, ignorant, arrogant, naive, innocent, superficial, blindly Christian. Useful stereotype for Americans to use regarding leftist Europeans: poorly educated, ignorant, arrogant, corrupt, cynical, paranoid, blindly Gnostic. Not to mention dishonest. And lousy writers, especially if they're Spanish. Or, for that matter, Catalan.

The comment about voting in American elections made by Mr. Gomis is a common European braincramp. Most of what is decided in American elections are, of course, domestic matters. What Europeans might know about that is nothing. And why should anyone who holds no loyalty--and pays no taxes--to the US be able to vote in a US election? Also, if we let you vote in our elections, does that mean we get to vote in yours? Finally, of course, the "democratic principle" cited by Mr. Gomis is a principle that operates WITHIN independent states, not AMONG them. I don't recall the Athenians giving the vote to the Spartans.

*According to my Larousse Spanish-English dictionary, a pretty good paperback edition, the verb "to bend over" is "encorvarse". Mr. Gomis spells the past participle "encorbado". This is a major spelling error. Mr. Gomis is an idjit.

Interestingly, in US high schools, if I remember correctly, misspelled words were penalized but didn't mean instant death from a teacher. Punctuation, however, was major, and if you had a run-on sentence it was all over. I think this is because English spelling is damnably difficult, while punctuation follows a set of rules that can be memorized. Even English teachers occasionally make spelling mistakes, but they had their punctuation rules down. In Spain the emphasis seems to be the other way around; Spanish spelling is very regular (what some erroneously call "phonetic") with only a few exceptions, so if you make a mistake like Mr. Gomis did, it means you're ign'rant. Native Spanish teachers kill their students for spelling errors, but don't do so for punctuation mistakes. This is why every goddamn Spanish kid insists on putting a comma after the subject of a semi-longish sentence because he doesn't know the difference between a defining clause and a hole in the ground.

The Jedman has something to say. Y'all had better listen. Some underestimate the Jedman. They do so at their own peril. Those who think the Jedman is stupid are by definition less intelligent than he is.

We should be back to regular blogging very soon. I put my folks on the airplane this morning; we were happy to see them again, as always. One thing we did was visit the new Caixa Forum building, an art thingie that la Caixa's foundation has set up. (It's really an old building, some sort of industrial complex that they've redone very impressively.) They had a huge exhibition of photos by Cartier-Bresson and another one of Flemish Renaissance paintings from thge Hermitage in St. Petersburg; I particularly liked the portraits and the interior scenes. I don't do too well with cherubim and putti and the like. They had a bunch of paintings by Rubens, but I only liked the portraits. My art history prof once said that Rubens was extraordinarily prolific, and that the reason why is that--from about mid-career--he'd plot out the composition and then his extensive corps of students would do most of the work on the painting themselves. Rubens himself would do the faces and the hands.

What with the temporary exhibits at the Caixa Forum and the others at La Pedrera (which belongs to the Caixa de Catalunya, la Caixa's closest competitor and also a nonprofit, like all Spanish savings banks), we've usually got something worth going to see. In addition, the Picasso often has good temporary exhibits; I remember one on Steinlen and another on Derain which included some stuff by Cezanne. For a city with a lot of pretty good museums--the Picasso, the Miro, the Museum of Modern Art (Casas, Rusinyol, Llimona, etc. in the Parque Ciudadela), and the MNAC, the Catalan National Museum of Art, up on Montjuic, with a good Gothic collection and a spectacular Romanesque collection--Barcelona is lacking in big-time permanent collections like, say, in the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, or the Chicago Institute of Art.

You could argue that both medieval and fin-de-siecle Barcelona are themselves damn good permanent collections, and you'd be right, but I must say that Barcelona gets at least five traveling exhibits per year that are worth a visit. That almost makes up for not having a big permanent collection. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.

Well, it's January 1 and Amish Tech Support's Dead Pool is closed to entries, so I can now post my list. Here it is:

1. Jacques Derrida, philosopher, 7/15/1930
2. Noam Chomsky, linguist, 12/7/1928
3. Fidel Castro, statesman, 8/13/1926
4. Yasser Arafat, statesman, 8/24/1929
5. Jesse Helms, statesman, 10/18/1921
6. Jack Kevorkian, physician, 3/6/1928
7. Norman Lear, television executive, 7/27/1922
8. Norman Mailer, author, 1/31/1923
9. Augusto Pinochet, statesman, 11/25/1915
10. Harold Pinter, playwright, 10/10/1930
11. Arthur Miller, playwright, 10/17/1915
12. Oral Roberts, religious leader, 1/24/1918
13. Andy Rooney, commentator, 1/14/1919
14. Pete Seeger, folksinger, 5/3/1919
15. Gore Vidal, author, 10/3/1925

Here's an article from La Vanguardia's Lack of Culture section on Wednesday. It's by Eduardo Martin de Pozuelo and the X-man, Xavier Mas de Xaxas, and is titled: "9-11: the conspiracy." These geniuses are the ones who floated a conspiracy theory in the Vangua a few months ago about supposed bulges in a photo of one of the planes that hit the WTC.

A conspiracy fever has taken hold in Europe and America. Thousands of citizens on both continents devour as much information as they can find about the possibility that the terrorist attacks committed in the United States on September 11, 2001, were not the work of Islamic extremism but part of an unprecedented internal conspiracy.

Books by a wide variety of authors have sold millions in Germany, France, and Spain, dealing with different aspects of an alleged plot, and fed by the lack of a solid official version. Books and dozens of websites analyze the attack against the WTC in New York or on the Pentagon to the smallest detail, and tell us that what we were shocked to see on television in September two years ago was the greatest plot of all time, which is already known as Operation Pearl.

"Have the Germans entered into a state of acute paranoia?" asked Le Monde upon discovering that their neighbor has succumbed before the thesis of a conspiracy and that Andreas von Bulow--ex-Secretary of State for Defense, es-minister of Research and Technology in Helmut Schmidt's cabinet, and an Social Democrat MP for 25 years--is now better-known for his book about the CIA and 9-11 than for his time in the front ranks of German politicians.

Even the German newsweeklies could not resist polling their compatriots. A surprising result: 31% of Germans under 30 years old do not exclude the possibility that the American government itself was behind those dramatic events. The figure "drops" to 19% when the whole German population is considered, without age classifications.

Von Bulow--who does not hide that since his time as a MP he has thought the worst of the secret services--has sold more than 100,000 copies of a book in which he analyzes from a very personal perspective the "non-credible" aspects, in his eyes, of 9-11, in order to conclude that it would have been impossible for the CIA not to have known about Al Qaeda's plans. His thesis connects with the fact, admitted by the Bush administration, that the CIA and FBI did not share all the information that they had about the danger of a major terrorist attack. Nevertheless, Von Bulow goes a little farther and implicates the Mossad in the conspiracy and speculates about the possibility that the airplanes that crashed were piloted by remote control.

Other authors who have sold well more than 100,000 copies who have ridden the great conspiracy wave. They include Matthias Brockers and Gerhard Wisnewski: the first, an old journalist from the Berlin daily Der Taz, and the second, a regular contributer on ZDF, the second-largest German television channel. Brockers claims that the suicide pilots on those planes are still alive, while Wisnewski, who enjoys greater credibility, questions the entire event of 9-11 and develops the theory that the WTC buildings were demolished with explosives placed in their interiors. Every time the subject comes up, the video of the collapse of building number 7--the second tower to collapse--is considered an undeniable proof of a controlled demolition by fans of intrigue.

Although Germany contains a potent squad of official unbelievers, France is the source of the books with the greatest world impact. The mentor is Thierry Meyssan, the founder of a virtual organization called the Voltaire Web which includes journalists, politicians, and professionals from various fields who are firm believers in the conspiracy and in the author of "The Great Imposture" and "Pentagate", in which he denies that a civilian airplane piloted by a suicide terrorist crashed into the Pentagon, in favor of the thesis of a missile. In Spain, Pilar Urbano in her book "Chief Atta" also shows incredulity at this aspect.

An analysis of the conspiracy theories shows that a substantial part of the matter is related to the airplanes hijacked by the Al Qaeda commandoes. Basically, either they deny that the airplanes that crashed were the same as those that were hijacked that morning--that is, there was a substitution of airplanes--or they affirm that there were explosives and military missiles involved.

Regarding the first plane that crashed, of which there are only two known films, both from a distance and imprecise, the authors question whether it was a Boeing and raise the idea of a missile or a smaller airplane. Regarding the second plane--the one that crashed into the south tower--a series of reports published in La Vanguardia has increased the doubts. On the Internet web sites that deal with the subject, it is already being called the "pregnant plane", in reference to the strange protuberances that appear on its fuselage and which this newspaper revealed.

The conspiracy theories reach their peak when they deal with the attack on the Pentagon and the case of the airplane that disintegrated in Pennsylvania. American Airlines flight 77 took off in Washington at 8:20 AM, destination Los Angeles. Half an hour later the air traffic controllers lost track of it, and almost forty minutes later the Air Force received orders to search for it. Half an hour ago the WTC had already been hit. At 9:38 AM on September 11, 2001, two minutes before the fighters arrived, AA 77 crashed into the Pentagon, opening a small hole, similar to one which could have been produced by a missile. The security cameras did not film the airplane and at that very moment incredulity began, the conspiracy theory was born, and the questions that Thierry Meyssan answers according to his own criteria flowered: If the pilots weren't experts, how could they have achieved such a tight turn? Why is there no wreckage of the Boeing in the photos? Why didn't the Pentagon's security cameras catch the airplane? Why is the damage so limited?...

The lack of a solid official version that can answer so many questions--there is a website that, playing with the date of the attack, poses 911 doubts--feeds conspiracy theories. Many of the unanswered questions asked by the cited authors may be the fruits of opportunism or the--possibly in good faith--imagination of the friends of the strange. However, the federal commission of investigation has criticized the secretism that the Bush Administration practices. The possibility exists that the American government may not have the answers that it is being asked for and also that some of the answers it knows are not being publicized in order not to make the memories of that day more painful. It is more than probable that this is the truth regarding the airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania, that Boeing from which several passengers managed to telephone their families before, according to the official story, in a heroic action, overpowering the hijackers and preventing the plane from crashing into the Capitol or the White House itself. However, diplomats from the United States and the European Union believe that the plane was really shot down in order to prevent it from crashing into the president's residence.

Perhaps the explanation for this publishing and media boom is that of Rudolf Stoiber, professor of communications at the German university of Bamberg, who considers 9-11 a totally irrational deed while we humans need a rational explanation and look for one for everything.

Oh boy. That was a good one. First, it's appalling how many "cultured and well-educated" Europeans are willing to believe this crap. That is the truly irrational. What's so hard to believe? Osama Bin Laden financed a group of Islamic fanatics who hijacked four airplanes and crashed three of them into significant buildings in the United States. Most of it's on film and the rest of the "official version" is backed up by thousands of pages of documentation. The case is airtight. Bin Laden himself proudly claimed responsibility.

What I imagine is that these Illustrated and Enlightened Europeans are incapable of believing that the evil nasty United States could ever possibly be in the right, so they have to make up imbecilic far-fetched wild guesses in order to convince themselves that the USA is really still bad and evil and that the poor Taliban and Al Qaeda are the innocent victims of another Yankee frameup which is backed by the Jews for the purpose of stealing the Arab nation's oil and humiliating the proud Muslims (and the French into the bargain) again.

Also, the Europeans tend to be Gnostics by nature, believing that there is some secret powerful person or organization that really controls everything like a puppetmaster. The United States, Israel, and the Jews (and their evil stooges like the CIA and the Mossad) fit perfectly into their Gnostic scheme as the secret powerful pullers of the strings. And the Europeans are not nearly as bad as the Middle Easterners can be.

Finally, let me point out that the authors of this article are responsible for floating two conspiracy theories, the one about the mysterious bulges appearing on the outside of the second plane that hit the WTC (this one they proudly brag about starting) and the one about the military shooting down the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania and then inventing the story about the passengers retaking the plane from the hijackers.

Happy goddamn holidays. I haven't been blogging much because my folks are in town and so sightseeing and hanging out has been taking up most of my time. It's nice to see them; they haven't been over here in a while. We took a couple of daytrips: to Montserrat, to Tarragona and Santes Creus, and to Ampurias. They're all worth a trip. I don't know why Tarragona is so little-known as a tourist destination, since it's full of both Roman and medieval stuff, including a first-class history and archaeology museum, and isn't too far from decent beaches. If you're not real picky, Tarragona itself has a beach across the train tracks from the amphitheater. Some of the old city is pretty run-down, the train tracks make an ugly gash along the seaside, and there's nothing worth seeing in the new city except for a stroll along the pleasant Rambla Vella and a Modernista building or two. I've also never had a decent meal there. But it's still definitely worth a trip.

There's always an art exhibition in La Pedrera worth seeing; I don't usually miss them. They usually run about three months or so; I particularly remember one on Giacometti and another of Durer engravings. This one was of 16th and 17th century drawings from the French national library; they had a nice set of Durers, again, and some extremely good portraits of the French royal family, mostly by a guy I'd never heard of before named Francois Clouet. Travel tip: They charge a hefty fee for a tour of La Pedrera, and it is a complete tour; if that's what you want, then pay the fee. If you just want to get inside the building, though, tell them you're going to see the art exhibit. You'll be able to skip the long line at the ticket office, look around inside one of the patios, and see the exhibition.

I have never been much of a fan of politician, columnist, and TV chat-show guest Pilar Rahola, as readers of Iberian Notes undoubtedly know, but she's one of the few leading Catalans (Catalans? Europeans) who has taken a stand and spoken up against European anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. For this she is to be congratulated despite her general obnoxiousness. Here's an interview with her that was picked up by FrontPage magazine. She doesn't say anything particularly original; it is a sign of the deep anti-Semitism in Europe that Pilar Rahola is about the most distinguished person we can find saying such morally obvious things.

Check out Trevor at Kaleboel. He's on a trilingual roll, as usual. The boys at HispaLibertas have lots of good stuff for Spanish-speakers, also as usual. And Puerta del Sol has plenty of good cultural stuff on Spain, if you need a little break from us aggressive polemicists.

Check out this article on military contracts in Iraq coming Spain's way. Good move by the Administration, demonstrating to the pro-Americans that America and the Administration appreciate Spain's role on the international scene as America's stalwart ally. It demonstrates to the neutrals that there are at the very least pragmatic advantages to siding with the Americans, and that the Americans are trustworthy allies who keep their promises. And it's just another slap in the face for the anti-Americans. They're going to be so pissed off. (Link from USS Clueless.)

In the same vein, here's a paragraph from Den Beste at USS Clueless (he's one of the best commentators on foreign affairs I know of):

In looking for international allies to try to restrain America and protect himself against invasion, Saddam bet the farm on the French, Germans and Russians and the UN. He bet on the idea that it was somehow possible to force America to act in certain ways against its will, that it was possible for diplomacy in the UN to block American military action. After Bush and Blair and Aznar publicly made their announcement last March that they had given up on the UN and would attack anyway, Saddam lost that bet. And his ignominious capture a week ago made clear just how poor of a bet it had really been, and just how badly he had lost.

It's a pretty good paragraph that's part of a typically very good piece, but I reproduced it because of the name I put in italics. Right up there with George Bush and Tony Blair. (The world always forgets gutsy Prime Minister Durao Barroso of Portugal, the guy who actually hosted the summit meeting in the Azores.) A regular American guy with a good deal of knowledge and good sense, Steven den Beste, ranks Aznar and Spain right up there among the leaders and countries that count. If he thinks that way, then I'll bet a lot of people in positions of power are thinking something similar. Just another reason for us to consider Jose Maria Aznar the best Spanish leader since Philip the Second; he's raised Spain to a level of international influence it hadn't had since about Felipe Segundo's reign.

It's a damn shame that Aznar is stepping down, but he made a promise eight years ago (that he'd only serve two four-year terms), and he's living up to it. I have a good deal of confidence in Mariano Rajoy, Aznar's successor. And I think we would be a bunch of total and complete fools if we did not vote for Rajoy and the People's Party, the PP, the center-right party, in the upcoming March general election. Spain counts internationally. Let's keep it that way.

Our friends the ETA just can't get their Christmas message across. They had the lovely idea that they'd contribute to the holiday spirit with an impressive fireworks display in Madrid's Chamartin Station. They attempted to plant two suitcase bombs containing twenty kilos of dynamite each on the Irun-Madrid Talgo, the first-class fast train, which were to go off when the train arrived at its destination in the middle of Madrid's bustling main railway station. If they'd gone off hundreds of people would have been killed or injured.

Fortunately, what with all the police successes against the ETA, they're down to a bunch of amateurs as operatives. One of the two terrorists was caught looking suspicious in Irun. He was detained and his baggage was checked and, whaddya know, it was filled with dynamite. This made everybody real suspicious. They stopped the Talgo at Burgos and evacuated it, and there they found the other bomb, which had been planted on the train by the other terrorist involved.

Congratulations to the police for saving us from a tragedy that might even have reached 9-11 scale.

Spaniards aren't bigots and racists. Naah. Only Americans would stoop so low as to be prejudiced against someone because of his national origin, as some leftist Spaniards never tire of reminding us.

According to La Vanguardia, the central government's Center of Sociological Research did a poll in which they asked "Which country's citizens do you trust least and for which country's citizens do you feel the least sympathy?"

Results:

1. Moroccans: 27.4% distrust, 23.7% unsympathetic
2. Americans: 17.1% distrust, 16.1% unsympathetic
3. Colombians: 14.9% distrust, 10.6% unsympathetic

This puts the lie to the standard Spanish assertion that it's not the American people they dislike, it's the government. This survey torpedoes that common canard. Also, it indicates the climate of pure racism that Moroccans and other Arabs encounter in Spain.

Hurry up and post your lists over at Amish Tech Support's Dead Pool. I've got mine in and it's a doozy. You'll want to read the rules first, of course, so that's what I linked to. Then you can make your picks right there.

Here are some free suggestions for your Dead Pool draft choices (for Iberian Notes readers only, of course) that I didn't use.

Arthur C. Clarke 12/16/1917
Walter Cronkite 11/4/1916
Olivia de Havilland 7/1/1916
Kirk Douglas 12/9/1916
Saul Bellow 6/10/1915
Milton Berle 7/12/1908
Marlon Brando 4/3/1924
Sid Caesar 9/8/1922
Woody Harrelson 7/23/1961

I think all these people are still alive.

Back to politics. Socialist Pasqual Maragall has assumed office as prime minister of the Generalitat, the Catalan autonomous regional government. He had to pay a price, of course: his allies the Republican Left got the Cabinet posts of "chief of staff" and three others, and Communists Initiative for Catalonia got two Cabinet seats. Now we'll see what happens.

First, nothing much is going to change, I don't think. I doubt that after four years of Maragall in the Generalitat our lives will be very different. Now, Maragall's priorities ought to be more or less balancing the Generalitat's budget (with some large cuts in the Department of Culture, preferably), improving the efficiency of Generalitat relations with the central government and the various local mayors in order to get things done faster and more efficiently, administrating the end of the educational "reforma" and the changeover to something more like the old system (they adopted dumb American ed school ideas. It failed. Aznar and the PP shot it down), and investigating several prominent members of Convergence and Union to find out where the skeletons are buried.

His priorities should not be wasting everybody's time jabbering about unnecessary and dangerous constitutional reform, taking the part of one extreme wing or the other in the Catalan culture wars, spending jillions of euros on poorly planned megaprojects, dissing the Americans, trying to imitate the Basques, or complaining about Catalonia's "fiscal deficit".

(Note: this is one of the most common themes of Catalan nationalists. It seems that some people have determined that Catalonia as a whole pays a lot more money in taxes than it receives in the form of government spending, though none of their figures have ever convinced me. The reason is obvious: Catalonia is one of the two or three richest regions in Spain, and so many people with high incomes pay high income taxes. Also, many companies are based here, and they pay big money in taxes, too. Finally, since Catalonia is richer than average, consumption is higher than average, too, and so the state gets more money per capita in VAT in Catalonia than it does in the rest of the country.

My opinion is that the Catalanists are guilty of a fallacy. They are confusing Catalonia as an entity with Catalans as individuals. You can make the argument that, per capita, individual Catalans tend to pay more in taxes than they get back in government services, but that's because as individuals they are high-income and a lot of government spending goes to lower-income areas. If Catalans lived anywhere else in Spain, assuming their income was the same, they'd pay the same amount of taxes. So individual Catalans are not discriminated against, taxistically, for being Catalans. They are discriminated against for being richer than average. I thought that's what a nice solidarious leftist welfare state is supposed to do. It's called progressive taxation. As for government services, according to Mariano Rajoy in La Vanguardia, the PP central government has raised spending in Catalonia to 16% of government spending in Spain. That's about the percentage of Catalans in the population of Spain, so I don't see how anyone can deny that the central government divides up its spending fairly.)

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar flew to Iraq on Saturday to visit the troops there. The left is accusing him of imitating Bush and is making wisecracks about the new European media meme of the alleged plastic turkey. Says Socialist heavy hitter Jose Blanco,

(Aznar's) American-style visit to Iraq shows that he is following Bush's and his interests' style of conduct, which is bad and shameful. (This model) of imitating Bush has led us to an illegitimate war without the permission of the United Nations and which was declared on the basis of false arguments...The world today is more unsafe and there are thousands of innocent lives who are victims of this decision; it is unacceptable for Azanar to follow step by step the instructions of the President of the United States.

Blanco is an idiot, obviously, but an awful lot of people around here believe him.

I had an unpleasant incident in one of the local bars, the Barracuina on Joan Blanques, last night, in which I was harassed for being American. One gentleman kindly informed me that he hated all Yankees and another taunted me with shouts of "Heil Hitler!" and Nazi salutes. I did not punch anybody. Most people around here are pretty decent. These guys were jerks.

The other media meme going around is that, of course, Saddam's capture was some kind of dirty trick. See, nothing can be as it appears because Bush and the Americans are bad people who always lie. So, obviously, Saddam's capture was a setup in order to help Bush in the polls. Exactly how or why it was a setup is still something I'm not very clear about, but we'll let that ride. There's a cartoon in the Vanguardia today showing Bush dressed like a cowboy playing golf and talking on his cell-phone, in which Bush says, "Hold off on capturing Bin Laden until a month before the elections."

Well, the defeat and capture of Saddam has had one positive effect at least; the Libyans are giving up their WMD. The Brits are saying that Qaddafi was close to an atomic bomb. Libya had been recently busted by the Americans for trying to import missiles from, you guessed it, North Korea.

The Vangua runs some interesting stats on Catalonia. One-fourth of our education spending goes to subsidizing private schools. Unemployment in the third quarter of 2003 was 9.2%. Per capita monthly income is 1620 euros. Housing costs double the Spanish average in Barcelona. 5.1% of Catalans are immigrants from foreign countries. Catalonia produces 18.4% of Spain's GDP. Our GDP per capita is 101% of the European Union average.

So far the Vangua has published a total of zero letters to the editor on the capture of Saddam.

There's a nice piece over at Slate on the American / European artist James McNeill Whistler, including images of several of his most important paintings. I like stories about art. There should be more.

There's a little discussion down in the Comments over the status and health of Catalan. It was a good question because the guy who asked it was clearing up a doubt he had. If you have any other questions that you're afraid might seem "too simple", go ahead and ask and we'll answer them.

Somebody who posted left this link, showing how many blogs are produced in what languages. No surprise, English is first by an enormous amount. Portuguese (I assume blogging must be very big in Brazil) is second, and Farsi is third. That means there's been a blog explosion in Iran. People are expressing themselves in public. That just encourages me to be more optimistic, and I am optimistic, about Iran's future. I would not be surprised to see more evolution toward democracy in Iran, and I just bet the change will be peaceful. Polish is fourth, meaning blogging has caught on there in a big way. This is great news, meaning that Poland is into advanced technology so that it's part of everyday life now. It's a great sign of progress. Catalan is quite high on the list, and Spanish doesn't do very well at all when you figure it has so many speakers. Then again, a lot of them are poor, but i see Brazil as much more tuned in to the Internet than the rest of Latin America.

I was most surprised at the high ranking of Icelandic. There are more than 6000 blogs in Icelandic. Iceland has 200,000 inhabitants. There are no Icelandic diasporas of refugees or immigrants, like with the iranians and the Poles. Assuming each blogger has only one blog, that means that 3% of Icelanders are bloggers. And they all know English, so they can blog bilingually if they want to reach a wider audience.

Well, it's Christmas in Barcelona and a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of politics, of course. Actually, before we get into that, it's time for the year-end obligatory piece on the Catalan holidays. Let's list some peculiarities:

a) There are often family gatherings on the 24th, 25th, 26th (only in Catalonia), 31st, and 1st. Each extended family will do something on one or two of these days, and if you've got a couple or three extended families, you may find each one occupied. On New Year's Eve one normally stays home with all the folks watching TV (all the stations bring out TV specials with big stars) and then goes out after eating the grapes at midnight.

b) Everybody in Spain "eats the grapes" at midnight on the 31st; you eat 12 grapes, one with each stroke of the bell. It's the universal good-luck tradition. I insist on peeling and deseeding mine first. They think I'm a weirdo, but they'd think that anyway. This tradition either a) goes back to time immemorial or b) was started by some guy who had some grapes to sell back in the '20s. Most likely it's a real tradition from somewhere in particular that became nationalized in the '20s or so. I'll have to ask my mother-in-law on this one.

c) Church bells in Spain strike once on the quarter hour, twice on the half, three times on three-quarters of an hour, and four times on the full hour. Then, and only then, after the four strokes for the hour (known as the cuartos), does one begin to eat one's lucky grapes, one on each of the twelve strokes for twelve o'clock midnight. Therefore, everybody reminds one another not to start eating the grapes until the cuartos have finished. One year on TV1 the reporter blew the call and started counting with the cuartos and so everybody in Spain had bad luck that year or something awful like that. It's still talked about today.

d) La Vanguardia has several much-loved idiotic traditions. They have a poetry contest and some kid with at least one Catalan surname who writes about peace and why don't people just understand wins every year. They write the same story every year the day before the Christmas lottery, for example, explaining that they've been drawing annually since 1836 or whatever and that the first prize has hit in Madrid 38 times and in Barcelona only 21 and that numbers ending in a five are the most commonly drawn for the top prize and all that. Also, they insist on running their annual article about caganers and how the foreigners just don't get it and think it's silly. But the foreigners are really the silly ones, of course, because they don't have all these great time-honored Catalan traditions to follow.

e) Caganers are these figurines, little guys wearing red barretinas (the Catalan national hat, rather like a cross between a beret and a stocking cap--yes, I think it's pretty retarded-looking too) squatting down and taking a dump. The dump is always brown and curly, resembling a Dairy Queen chocolate ice cream. These things are placed in your pesebre (creche, Nativity scene, whatever you call it where you come from) behind the stable and the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus and the camel and whatever. I think it's just anal gross-out humor, which the Catalans are notorious for appreciating (they love movies like Porky's, and Blazing Saddles is considered a classic here), but I've heard convoluted explanations like it's innate Catalan irony and scepticism and independent-mindedness showing itself in irreverence toward that which is to be worshiped. Or whatever. Anyway, whenever a foreign reporter comes across these thingies, which are on sale at the street stalls of pesebre stuff near the Cathedral during the holidays, he does a human interest feature story on the little buggers because they just don't do stuff like that in Kansas.

f) The Christmas lottery is drawn on December 22, next Monday, and it's a long-standing national tradition. 200 series of 66,000 different numbers are sold. The thing is that a full ticket--one series of a number--costs 200 euros, so the tickets are parceled out into decimos (one-tenth of a ticket) for the ordinary Joe at 20 euros. If your decimo is the lucky number drawn for first prize, you win 10,000 times 20 euros, that is, 200 grand. There are 1999 other people who have the same decimo you do and have won the same 200 grand. In addition, there are several other quite lucrative second, third, and fourth choices. The fun is that traditionally, neighborhood groups buy up a bunch of decimos, parcel them out, and sell them in portions of, say, two euros each with a 50 cent extra charge for the benefit of the group. That would mean that a maximum of 20,000 people might own pieces of the winning number and get twenty grand apiece. So the TV reporters always announce that the money has been "muy repartido" and that it has hit in "un barrio popular". That is, the tickets were sold in small pieces to a lot of people in the area of the lottery administration where the tickets were originally acquired. It's kind of a more Socialist or more communitarian or whatever kind of lottery--instead of one guy hitting it for fifty million bucks over the next eighty years or whatever, several thousand people, many of whom know one another, hit it for twenty or forty or two hundred thousand euros, paid in cash with no taxes on it. The TV shows the celebration live; they always cut to the lottery shop and then to a bar with a bunch of working-class folks swigging cava. If you're going to bet, this is about the best bet you can get on a lottery, as the payout is half the money collected and there are no taxes on winnings. I always buy a few two- and three-euro tickets, and hit a fourth prize in 1998 for about $1600 in money of that time.

g) Typical holiday food: Chicken or turkey, roast, with either shrimp or prunes or both. Chicken soup for New Year's, with carn d'olla, which is this large meatball cooked with the soup. Don't ask what's in it. Sort of a steak stew with wild mushrooms called fricando. Expensive fresh fish. Inexpensive frozen crustaceans. Turron, which we'd call almond brittle.

h) You have to listen to this damn song that goes

Pero mira como beben los peces en el rio
Pero mira como beben por ver a Dios nacido
Y beben, y beben, y vuelven a beber
Los peces in el rio por ver a Dios nacer

over and over whether in a supermarket line or a cafe or anywhere else where they've got the radio on.

I wrote a different version:

Pero mira como beben los chungos en el bar
Se quedan sin dinero, te salen a robar
Te quitan la cartera y vuelven a beber
El poli en la esquina no lo ha querido ver

I like mine better, though I wrote it while living in the Virrei Amat neighborhood, which was rather more chungo-ridden than here in Gracia.

Here's Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro from Monday's La Vanguardia:

Oh, the poor defeated! Besides all the opinions, all the political interpretations, the capture of Saddam Hussein is, in the first place, a humiliating defeat of the Arabs, it is a victory of the United States and the West over prostrate peoples, over disoriented Eastern countries, over states with precarious roots and of an ambiguous identity.

Hmm. Baghdad Bob Fisk is saying that the Iraqi nationalists, because they've been so humiliated, will overcome the Yankee invaders and occupiers. Tikrit Tommy disagrees, it seems. Note the emphasis on "humiliation". Why should anyone but Saddam and his partisans feel humiliated? The great majority of people around the world who want nothing more than a decent government that actually fulfills its responsibilities should be joyous at the fall of such a killer. It seems, though, that when an anti-American can't think of anything else to slag the Yankees with, he accuses them of humiliating somebody.

And why should anyone feel sorry for the guys who have just lost in Iraq? They were as bad as the SS. I feel no more sympathy for them than for any SS Gruppenfuhrer on the run back in '45.

Saddam Hussein, who in 1998 (sic) had loyally followed the American messages to attack Iran, considered a danger because of the risk of the expansion of its Islamic revolution, has been Objective Number One of the Bush Administration, which has made him its scapegoat....

We did not tell Saddam to go attack Iran, in 1998 or at any other time. Period. If Tikrit Tommy can prove we did, I will be willing to personally buttslam him in the Plaza Catalunya.

...It is false that only the supporters of Saddam Hussein form part of the resistance: there are very diverse groups implicated in this national struggle and some have been bloody enemies of the dictatorship...Iraq had started on the road to undiputable social, economic, and cultural development thanks to the 1972 nationalization of oil. Saddam must be tried under the recently constituted Iraqi court, and let us avoid the pornography which was caused by the horrible murder of his sons Uday and Qasay. Oh, the poor defeated of Iraq!

I simply have no comment. None is adequate.