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

Complaint: Barcelona Business has our URLs wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a list of black men lynched in Paris:

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

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

Anyway, I have no illusions about human nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Military Situation, July 31, 1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. Leading Up to the Bomb

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

But the Japanese would not surrender.

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

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

Source: The Second World War, John Keegan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noam Chomsky:

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

praised Mao's China--during the Cultural Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. The Committee Makes Its Recommendation

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

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

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

Source: Truman, David McCullough.

II. Bombing Civilians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MUSHROOM VEGGIE RICE

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

CREAM OF VEGETABLE SOUP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this what the Old Europeans are objecting to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check this one out. Seems that many well-known people, including George Galloway and Charles Pasqua, were on the take from Saddam. He paid them off with oil coupons. The only person listed as a venial corrupt bribe-taker in Spain is some journalist called Ali Ballout, who seems to be the correspondent for Al-Jazeera in Spain. Here's a piece by Mr. Ballout which is not precisely pro-Coalition. Here's another one, an interview with some Aussie, in which he is called "Jihad Ali Ballout" and is rather pro-Saddam. This is a nice piece in which Mr. Ballout brags about how smart Saddam is. And here's a piece from the Guardian in which Mr. Ballout hoodwinks them.

This interview with Mr. Ballout is in Spanish. Here's a piece from the Washington Times in which Mr. Ballout lies through his teeth. And this is an article in which Mr. Ballout defends the Saddam Fedayeen / common criminal / foreign Islamic fanatic in their actions.

That ought to be enough evidence that Mr. Ballout, an important executive at Al-Jazeera and identified as a resident of Spain, is a paid agent of Saddam Hussein. that is, he is corrupt slime. He wouldn't criticize Saddam if his life depended on it, which it probably does, actually.

Now, when will the rest of the journalists who believed Mr. Ballout's broadcasts and articles and based their own reporting upon them rectify? Probably never. What would you expect, anyway.