Monday, January 13, 2003
On the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Victor Davis Hanson has an article on anti-Americanism that doesn't really say anything we haven't said here, but certainly does say it a lot better. One quibble: Hanson devotes a good bit of space to those fatuous celebrities who are stupid enough to anger their fans by attacking their country, and to European elitists and their patronizing gaze down their rather large, deformed noses, but not much to what I think is the real problem, the anti-Americanism of the average Western European Joe, the skilled blue-collar or the white-collar worker, the car mechanic, the accounts payable guy, the photocopier repairman, the administrative assistant. That's the guy whose opinion America has to change, and his opinion is now dominated by the leftist, socialist, big-government European civil servant / journalist / teacher class that runs the European media. Right now the average European Joe is still much more limited in his sources of news than the average American Joe. He gets six TV channels, plus, if he wants, some extremely non-intellectual channels on his satellite dish. If he lives in Catalonia he has his choice of five newspapers, none of which promote a free-market point of view. That's it. There are popular radio talk shows, but most of the commentators are socialist / progressive. All his news sources are either leftist economically / politically anti-American, or conservative nationalist anti-American. There's no cable TV, no conservative talk radio, no newsmagazines, no political magazines, no Web presence. Europe is, intellectually and politically, at about where America was in the late 70s. It's going to take them a few more years to realize that ideas we thought might be good (between about 1962 and the last gasps of the Carter administration) have proved not to be. They'll have to find it out for themselves, because they're not smart enough to learn from our experiences.
The Barça tied last night in Málaga, 0-0. The game sucked. It was such a dull, sloppily-played game that I went home from the bar at about minute 70, knowing no one would score. The team sucked. They're like thirteen points behind Real Sociedad and twelve behind Madrid. Or whatever. They suck. Most of the players are just plain mediocre. They all suck. I know their players are a lot worse than Madrid's and somewhat worse than Deportivo's and Valencia's, but it's starting to look like the Barça's not even as good as Celta and Betis. They suck. SLLLUUURRRRPPPP.
Here's the way elections work in Spain, and we'll take for example the Madrid municipal elections, coming up in May. Say there are 25 seats on the City Council. Each party nominates 25 candidates, who are called the party's list. Representation is proportional to the percentage of the vote the party gets. (This is simplified. The real system they use is d'Hondt's.) So say I'm the People's Party, the conservative PP, and I get 60% of the vote. That means that I get 60% of the seats, or 15 of them. So the top 15 names on my party's list go on the City Council. You need 5% of the vote, minimum, to get a seat, and the higher on the list you are, the more likely it is that you will get one of the party's seats. The top of the list of the party with most seats is the mayor. Coalitions are sometimes necessary. Right now the Socialists hold the Barcelona mayoralty in coalition with Initiative (the Communists) and the Republican Left, for example. The PP holds Madrid straight-out, and it also holds the mayoralties of most of Spain's larger cities.
There have been a few fireworks so far in the Madrid election. First the Socialists picked Trinidad Jiménez, an attractive female, as number one on their list, and chose a Glamour Shot of her, all dolled up in leather and looking come-hither, as the campaign photo. Of course, there were protests, from aggrieved feminists and from the other parties, as well as some Socialists who just thought it was kind of tacky. I figured the whole time it was a publicity stunt, since they retracted the picture and got even more newspaper space--the Vanguardia didn't even pick up on the story until the censorship angle on it came out--for "submitting to censorship". Then Prime Minister Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, announced she would run high on the PP's list for the City Council, and that gave them something to talk about on the radio for a few days. Now the Communist United Left's number two, Carlos Gutiérrez, has resigned his place on the ballot because it came out that he hadn't paid child support for this three kids. Real moral folks, those Communists. Ethical and all that. Responsible and the like.
By the way, we have, I think, four Communist parties in Spain. There's the United Left, the official CP for Spain, and then they had a split-off and some of their guys left to start another party, which has apparently sunk like a stone. In Catalonia, the United Left's arm is the United and Alternative Left, which itself is a split off Initiative for Catalonia, the Catalan nationalist Communists. That's fine with me. They're so dumb they can't even figure out that they should all get together.
There have been a few fireworks so far in the Madrid election. First the Socialists picked Trinidad Jiménez, an attractive female, as number one on their list, and chose a Glamour Shot of her, all dolled up in leather and looking come-hither, as the campaign photo. Of course, there were protests, from aggrieved feminists and from the other parties, as well as some Socialists who just thought it was kind of tacky. I figured the whole time it was a publicity stunt, since they retracted the picture and got even more newspaper space--the Vanguardia didn't even pick up on the story until the censorship angle on it came out--for "submitting to censorship". Then Prime Minister Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, announced she would run high on the PP's list for the City Council, and that gave them something to talk about on the radio for a few days. Now the Communist United Left's number two, Carlos Gutiérrez, has resigned his place on the ballot because it came out that he hadn't paid child support for this three kids. Real moral folks, those Communists. Ethical and all that. Responsible and the like.
By the way, we have, I think, four Communist parties in Spain. There's the United Left, the official CP for Spain, and then they had a split-off and some of their guys left to start another party, which has apparently sunk like a stone. In Catalonia, the United Left's arm is the United and Alternative Left, which itself is a split off Initiative for Catalonia, the Catalan nationalist Communists. That's fine with me. They're so dumb they can't even figure out that they should all get together.
Here's a good one. Right after the Prestige oil spill, an organization called Nunca Maís (Never Again in Galician) made a big old hoo-haw about the whole thing, and specifically spent a lot of time slamming the conservative People's Party, which governs in both the Galicia region and Spain, for having screwed up the whole thing. Nunca Maís tried to place the blame for the whole mess on the government, which after the shipwreck and spill might have taken different actions that might have been more successful, true. But they were faced with a crisis and did what they saw as best, and of course, they did nothing to cause the problem, as Nunca Maís implied. The organization did a lot of fundraising, too, and received money from people all over Spain who thought they were helping either a) the cleanup effort or b) the fishermen out of work because of the oil spill. Well, all the money went into divulgation and education and consciousness-raising on the part of Nunca Maís. That is, it went to bash the government. Interestingly enough, the folks behind Nunca Maís turned out to be the Bloque Nacionalista Gallego, the thoroughly obnoxious left-wing Galician nationalist political party. Contributors from all over Spain are now reclamando their money back, since they thought they were chipping in to help folks in trouble, not to fund a partisan political organization.
You want idiotarianism? We got idiotarianism! This article is from today's La Vanguardia. It's labeled "Analysis", and it's on page four in the International News section, making it the second lead story. It's by Rafael Poch, longtime Moscow correspondent, who has an amoral and realpolitik (according to his lights, however dim) view of the international scene. He believes that every action taken by a power has an ulterior motive, that there is always a hidden interest concealed behind everything any country does. Everything is a Bismarckian matter of balances of power. Since he who triumphs in such a world must be the most deceitful and the most ruthless, America, though not the root of all evil, is where evil is most deeply rooted. I get the feeling that he has been infected with this attitude by those who surround him in Moscow; the Latin mindset is also disposed toward Gnosticism, conspiracy theories, and general suspicion. (They think we're naive and innocent; we think they're cynical and corrupt.) Anyway, here's the article.
The Victim is North Korea
That is the title of an article by Gregory Clark published in the Japan Times day before yesterday. Clark is a veteran expert in Asiatic issues and president emeritus of the Tama University in Tokyo. He says the complete opposite of what 80% of the Western media (which dominate 95% of the world market) are saying, but he is completely right: the victim of this absurd "nuclear crisis" is North Korea.
Clark does not quote him, but let's start by reading "The Right Man", the latest book by David Frum. Have you heard of Frum? He is recommendable. Until last year he was one of the "plumbers" who wrote Bush's speeches. They asked him for "ideas to justify a war against Iraq", to be formulated in the State of the Union speech. He coined the term "axis of hatred", but those upstairs transformed it into the "axis of evil".
The Axis part reminded us of the Second World War, but it wouldn't stand up on one leg, so they added Iran and, at the last moment, North Korea. Baghdad-Teheran-Pyongyang fit well with Berlin-Rome-Tokyo, explains Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.
This has nothing to do with 9-11. It's a cheap Hollywood script and its primitivism is plainly obvious, but it's working, even with the "vassal states" (the term is Ignacio Ramonet's in the editorial of Le Monde Diplomatique) of the European Union. In Korea, Bush destroyed the 1994 accord. With it, Pyongyang agreed to dismantle its plans to build a nuclear plant capable of producing nuclear warheads in exchange for the normalization of relations with Washington, non-aggression guarantees, and two light water reacters, militarily useless, that would substitute for the one cancelled.
Bush destroyed the three things. As soon as he arrived in power, he said he "detested" the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il; he censured the policy of breaking the inter-Korean ice carried out by the South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kim Dae Jung; he stopped building the reactors, and not only did he interrupt the dialogue with North Korea, he stuck it in Frum's improvised axis, with a postscript added by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, mentioning North Korea among the countries susceptible to being the object of a "preventive nuclear attack".
In North Korea they didn't think it was a bluff, because another country placed in the same category, Iraq, was already being bombed and a military invasion was hanging over its head. Also because, in South Korea, the American army has nuclear arms stored. The expression "life or death" must sound fairly literal to the Pyongyang regime. The current crisis is nothing more than the Koreans' desperate demand (reclamación) to return to the 1994 agreement.
Everything North Korea has done since October--demand (reclamar) its right to defend itself by every means, dismantle the control mechanisms on its nuclear plants, and pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement--should be interpreted not as insanity, but as what it is: a desperate response. Its demand (reclamación) for guarantees that it will not suffer aggression, like Iraq and Yugoslavia, by the most powerful Army in the world, should be taken seriously, because it is reasonable. Fortunately, Moscow and Peking see it like that. Where is the European Union, our Europe?
Lemme see. This guy is proposing a European-Russian-Chinese alliance to support North Korea against American aggression. Sounds real smart to me. You guys can do a better job taking this apart than I can, so I won't bother. But I'll bet none of the rest of y'all can find a more idiotic screed published this year. I am, right now, declaring the above to be the Official Iberian Notes Dumbest News Article of 2003. Just a comment: the verb reclamar implies that the demand is just. One more: when the revolution comes, I personally vote we put Ignacio Ramonet up against the wall. He is that most hateful thing, a Hispano-French leftist intellectual, and he has all the worst qualities of the Spaniards, the French, the leftists, and the intellectuals without a single one of their redeeming virtues. OK, a third: somebody write David Frum and tell him he's been mentioned, nay, lauded, in this here geniusy commentary. I'd love to see his reaction.
The Victim is North Korea
That is the title of an article by Gregory Clark published in the Japan Times day before yesterday. Clark is a veteran expert in Asiatic issues and president emeritus of the Tama University in Tokyo. He says the complete opposite of what 80% of the Western media (which dominate 95% of the world market) are saying, but he is completely right: the victim of this absurd "nuclear crisis" is North Korea.
Clark does not quote him, but let's start by reading "The Right Man", the latest book by David Frum. Have you heard of Frum? He is recommendable. Until last year he was one of the "plumbers" who wrote Bush's speeches. They asked him for "ideas to justify a war against Iraq", to be formulated in the State of the Union speech. He coined the term "axis of hatred", but those upstairs transformed it into the "axis of evil".
The Axis part reminded us of the Second World War, but it wouldn't stand up on one leg, so they added Iran and, at the last moment, North Korea. Baghdad-Teheran-Pyongyang fit well with Berlin-Rome-Tokyo, explains Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker.
This has nothing to do with 9-11. It's a cheap Hollywood script and its primitivism is plainly obvious, but it's working, even with the "vassal states" (the term is Ignacio Ramonet's in the editorial of Le Monde Diplomatique) of the European Union. In Korea, Bush destroyed the 1994 accord. With it, Pyongyang agreed to dismantle its plans to build a nuclear plant capable of producing nuclear warheads in exchange for the normalization of relations with Washington, non-aggression guarantees, and two light water reacters, militarily useless, that would substitute for the one cancelled.
Bush destroyed the three things. As soon as he arrived in power, he said he "detested" the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il; he censured the policy of breaking the inter-Korean ice carried out by the South Korean President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kim Dae Jung; he stopped building the reactors, and not only did he interrupt the dialogue with North Korea, he stuck it in Frum's improvised axis, with a postscript added by the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, mentioning North Korea among the countries susceptible to being the object of a "preventive nuclear attack".
In North Korea they didn't think it was a bluff, because another country placed in the same category, Iraq, was already being bombed and a military invasion was hanging over its head. Also because, in South Korea, the American army has nuclear arms stored. The expression "life or death" must sound fairly literal to the Pyongyang regime. The current crisis is nothing more than the Koreans' desperate demand (reclamación) to return to the 1994 agreement.
Everything North Korea has done since October--demand (reclamar) its right to defend itself by every means, dismantle the control mechanisms on its nuclear plants, and pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreement--should be interpreted not as insanity, but as what it is: a desperate response. Its demand (reclamación) for guarantees that it will not suffer aggression, like Iraq and Yugoslavia, by the most powerful Army in the world, should be taken seriously, because it is reasonable. Fortunately, Moscow and Peking see it like that. Where is the European Union, our Europe?
Lemme see. This guy is proposing a European-Russian-Chinese alliance to support North Korea against American aggression. Sounds real smart to me. You guys can do a better job taking this apart than I can, so I won't bother. But I'll bet none of the rest of y'all can find a more idiotic screed published this year. I am, right now, declaring the above to be the Official Iberian Notes Dumbest News Article of 2003. Just a comment: the verb reclamar implies that the demand is just. One more: when the revolution comes, I personally vote we put Ignacio Ramonet up against the wall. He is that most hateful thing, a Hispano-French leftist intellectual, and he has all the worst qualities of the Spaniards, the French, the leftists, and the intellectuals without a single one of their redeeming virtues. OK, a third: somebody write David Frum and tell him he's been mentioned, nay, lauded, in this here geniusy commentary. I'd love to see his reaction.
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Jesús Gil II (c'mon, how can you defend Jesús Gil I? He dissed Luis Aragonés, the coach and lifetime colchonero, in public, and Luis Aragonés is much more the heart and soul of the Atlético than some sleazy corrupt building contractor who bought the team to increase his notoriety) of Atlético Rules would like everyone to know that it's cold in Madrid, and that the Madrid cold is more unpleasant as that back home in interior Oregon. The Barcelona cold can be just as unpleasant as that in Kansas City, because in KC inside your house and anywhere else you might go it's nice and warm. We've got central heating in the Midwest. We've got butane space heaters in Barcelona. You can't really justify central heating because the cold isn't too bad most of the time, so you put on the space heater in the living room when it gets chilly--it never gets below about 35º F here, but when it's 35º outside it's 55º inside, unless you're sitting in front of the space heater, where it's like 80º. The cats hang out around the space heater, especially when Remei is sitting in front of it eating roast chicken. Here in the back bedroom it's about 55º right now. I'm perfectly comfortable wearing a regular shirt and a cotton sweater, blue jeans, and two pairs of socks, except that my hands are getting cold. Fortunately, the faster I type the more exercise my fingers get.
Anyway, next week the weather will get back to normal, mild and sunny. I hope.
Anyway, next week the weather will get back to normal, mild and sunny. I hope.
Saturday, January 11, 2003
Here's an update on the "gypsy queen" story we talked about two days ago. (Part One of the story is here.) Seems that they packed up and left Sant Cugat, only to move down the road to Castellbisbal. The headline, from La Vanguardia, is, "Castellbisbal permits gypsies to stay extra day for party." It's also by Paloma Arenós.
After signing an eviction order yesterday to force some sixty trailers to leave the improvised gypsy campground that was set up on Thursday in Castellbisbal, the mayor of the municipality, Joan Playà, had a 180-degree change of attitude. Playà went to the Castellbisbal Sud industrial zone to learn the plans of the calé squatters. "They've asked me to let them stay the night here (Friday) because they want to have a party in the evening. They've promised they'll leave on Saturday at 10 AM and that they'll clean up the area," said Playà.
The trailers arrived there after being expelled on Thursday by the mayor of Sant Cugat, Lluís Recoder. Those camping in Castellbisbal yesterday were visited by the president of the Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia (FAGIC), Manuel Heredia, who volunteered to act as mediator between the community and the City Council. He was disappointed by the lack of responsibility of the group. "They don't have a valid spokesman. Each one says something different, that they'll be here ten days, that they're on vacation for a month...This is chaotic," he said with irritation.
The supervisor of the Philadelphia Evangelical Church of Catalonia, Ricardo Díaz, said that he has no knowledge that these nomads belong to his religious congregation, as they have reiteratedly insisted. The principal excuse for the settling down in Sant Cugat was the celebration of the wedding of the "gypsy queen", a 17-year-old adolescent. "Maybe some of them are believers and know the Evangels, but we don't know anything about them as a religious community in Spain," warned Díaz, worried that they might take advantage of the good name of the congregation in their own benefit.
Paloma's not a bad young reporter; she's new, I've never seen her by-line before this series. She's been to the campsites and she's gone out and gotten some good quotes. She needs to pare down her style; it's much too wordy in a typically Spanish sort of way. She also needs to improve her lead paragraphs, which don't give you the answers to all the six questions right away but screw around and waste space. But she got the story.
I imagine that having a thousand gypsies come to your small town is rather like having a biker rally show up. Now, they're probably harmless, but they're definitely going to make their presence known, and some actions that flout community norms are going to take place. The best policy is to grin and bear it; as long as nothing seriously nasty happens, which is unlikely if you treat them with decency and respect, everything will be more or less fine. But you want to move them on. Maybe only one bunch of adolescents shoplifts in the local supermarket, no biggie. But if it happens every day, which it's likely to, pretty soon it becomes a biggie. There's a big party with a lot of noise and drinking and a couple of fights, we can live with that. One night. Two is pushing it. Three is not acceptable. But you're at risk, because they might retaliate if they think you're mistreating them. So you treat them with kid gloves and hope and pray that they just move on with no trouble and as soon as possible.
They gave Manuel Heredia the back-page interview today. It's a long one but it's interesting.
Q: What's all this mess about the wedding of a gypsy queen that was going to happen around here?
A: We gypsies don't have kings or queens. They're calling the bride a queen in an affectionate way. The bride is from a Ludari family...
Q: Ludari? What's that?
A: Among gypsies there's a great variety of groups: the calés (those from Spain), the Caldera (Kalderash?)...The ludari are Hungarians, with very large, nomadic families.
Q: Ah. So what are they doing around here?
A: A big Ludari family came to the Vallés (north of Barcelona) years ago, while another part travels around southern France and other countries. I wouldn't rule out that the groom, visiting here now, and tired of being far from his bride, "stole" her!
Q: Stole? What do you mean?
A: It's a way of asking for the bride's hand that obligates the father to get them married immediately. Because, if they don't, it means the dishonor of the father!
Q: But they've packed up the campsite: what will happen to the bride and groom, to that father?
A: They'll get married somewhere near here, for sure, ha, ha! The authorities have forced them to move away from where they were because today there are still not campsites with facilities for these big gypsy campouts, as there are in France.
Q: Are you a nomad, too?
A: No! We calés are sedentary: we've always had our own house! My grandfathers were, one, a horse dealer, and the other, a peddler, at fairs and farmhouses down in Granada. But both families had their houses!
Q: Were both grandfathers gypsies?
A: Yes, I'm gypsy on all four sides, I'm a "seven-and-a-half rib" gypsy!
Q: And are gypsy weddings always so elaborate? They said this one would last days and days...
A: Before they were, because the payos (non-gypsies) refused to deal with gypsies, so the families did everything themselves: buy everything, share it out...And that takes days! Not today, now we go to a payo restaurant, we pay, and that's it. But we make it as Pharoahonic as we can, that's for sure!
Q: By the way, those are some cars, trailers, and satellite dishes the Ludari have! They're rich!
A: No. They're nomads! That is, all their capital is here, what you see. And they can't drive small cars because they wouldn't make it up the hills: all the money that you put into your house, they put into their cars and trailers!
Q: OK, but there must be some rich ones...
A: There are poor gypsies and rich gypsies, but every gypsy dies poor!
Q: Why?
A: Because gypsies spend it all while they're alive. He works to live, he doesn't live to work! But when we decide to do something, we're the best! We put heart, faith, and care into it...
Q: Let's go back to the wedding: do you still check the virginity of the bride before the wedding?
A: Yes. That's sacred! Before the wedding, an expert woman (we call her the "gardener") meets with the bride and, among dirty jokes, gives her the virginity test, which the father's honor depends on. And the test is shown to the father.
Q: The honor of the father?
A: Of course. It's as if your daughter got a college degree and showed it to you: you're proud of her because that means she hasn't been doing what she shouldn't. The handkerchief with the mark of the three roses of her virginity is like that diploma; your daughter hasn't been doing what she shouldn't!
Q: The three roses?
A: Yes, certain little wrinkles in the handkerchief...
Q. Did you do that with your daughters?
A: No, because they married payos, and they (the husbands) didn't ask me to do the test.
Q: Does it bother you that they're married to payos?
A: No. I just want them to be happy. And they are, so I'm thrilled!
Q: Aren't you gypsies a little sexist?
A: Ask that to the gypsy women. They'll tell you they're the happiest women in the world! Look, a gypsy won't do anything, anything! without the previous agreement of his wife. And look at them at any celebration: jeweled, beautiful, tall, splendid...
Q: What happens if a gypsy beats his wife?
A: With the payo law, nothing! With ours, yes: the gypsy council will rule that that man must distance himself from the woman until further orders. And if he doesn't obey, then the woman's family has the right to act against him.
Q: You dictate forcible divorces, then...
A: But correctly done! Not like those that the payo judges dictate. When a mare has a foal, the foal is part of the deal!
Q: That's from your grandfather, right? Explain it to me.
A: The children should stay with the mother. What's all this moving the child around from one side to the other? No! That's dividing the child in two, traumatizing him! Children, with the mother.
Q: I see that you have your own laws...
A: We gypsies don't care about being from one country or another, one ideology or another, one system or another, we don't care if this square is called the Plaza de España or de la República. The gypsy only belongs to his family, and to nothing or nobody else!
Q: But there are other things in life...
A: Yes. God. All us gypsies believe in God. Look: in Spain they've expelled Jews, Muslims, they've gotten rid of everyone different. They tried as hard as they could with us, and here we are! Couldn't it be because God is helping us a little?
Q: Maybe, but...is anybody else?
A: Fortunately, there isn't any more institutional racism. Social racism...that's another story. My struggle now is pressuring gypsy parents so that not a single gypsy child drops out of school. We have to be educated and finally get some political power!
Q: In order to defend the family.
A: Everyone defends his own family. Look: you'll never see a single old gypsy in a nursing home! And if we ever see one, we'll expel his family! Because anyone who does that....is no longer a gypsy.
One thing I like about Spanish journalism is the lack of political correctness. The interviewer, Victor M. Amela, pulls no punches and isn't afraid to challenge the interviewee. Heredia seems like an ideal representative of a discriminated-against group, ready to stand up for his people and proud of his heritage but also ready to compromise, be realistic, and set goals to work toward. I'm not nearly as sanguine as Heredia about women's place in gypsy society, but it could be a lot worse, I suppose, and his goal of education is laudable. Heredia admits, though, that his people hold no allegiance to Spain or Catalonia; frankly, this is a rejection of full integration into payo society. It's a little contradictory to want the privileges of the payo lifestyle without assuming all the responsibilities; still, I imagine that improvements in gypsies' educations and job skills will lead to a growing identification with society in general.
Also, it's an excellent sign that both Heredia's daughters are married to payos and he doesn't mind. Ethnicity and race and sex make up the last taboo left in America, according to Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, who are normally of the disposition that racial issues in America are not as dividing as they may seem. The Thernstroms say that these days, whites, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians have no problems intermarrying and are doing so more and more frequently. The sexual / marriage taboo has disappeared between these four groups for all practical purposes. Anecdotal evidence from my life supports this idea. (I also believe that religious differences, whether someone is non-religious or Jewish or Catholic or whatever brand of Prod, make little difference these days in America. Hell, I'm not sure I ever nailed a Protestant chick way back in the unrestricted free-agent days, and that was the 80s.) However, blacks tend to be more unwilling to marry outside of the black group, and the other four groups are more unwilling to marry into the black group. This taboo has lessened a lot in recent years, but a goodly percentage of whites would still object to their kid marrying someone who was black, and an even higher percentage of blacks would object to their kid marrying someone who was white. Fortunately, those numbers are dropping, but we're not color-blind yet back home in America. Here in Spain, though, there are really four groups, payos, gypsies, Arabs, and miscellaneous immigrants. Spanish people--that is, payos--have no problem marrying miscellaneous immigrants. Arabs--well, if the guy is integrated here and speaks Spanish and doesn't make her wear the burqa and has a job and the like, most payos wouldn't kick up much of a fuss, less if the guy was born here, and even less if the Arab is a Christian. Gypsies and payos still normally do not intermarry except at the very lowest social level. Heredia's daughters, I hope, are part of a trend toward making gypsy-payo intermarriages less taboo.
After signing an eviction order yesterday to force some sixty trailers to leave the improvised gypsy campground that was set up on Thursday in Castellbisbal, the mayor of the municipality, Joan Playà, had a 180-degree change of attitude. Playà went to the Castellbisbal Sud industrial zone to learn the plans of the calé squatters. "They've asked me to let them stay the night here (Friday) because they want to have a party in the evening. They've promised they'll leave on Saturday at 10 AM and that they'll clean up the area," said Playà.
The trailers arrived there after being expelled on Thursday by the mayor of Sant Cugat, Lluís Recoder. Those camping in Castellbisbal yesterday were visited by the president of the Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia (FAGIC), Manuel Heredia, who volunteered to act as mediator between the community and the City Council. He was disappointed by the lack of responsibility of the group. "They don't have a valid spokesman. Each one says something different, that they'll be here ten days, that they're on vacation for a month...This is chaotic," he said with irritation.
The supervisor of the Philadelphia Evangelical Church of Catalonia, Ricardo Díaz, said that he has no knowledge that these nomads belong to his religious congregation, as they have reiteratedly insisted. The principal excuse for the settling down in Sant Cugat was the celebration of the wedding of the "gypsy queen", a 17-year-old adolescent. "Maybe some of them are believers and know the Evangels, but we don't know anything about them as a religious community in Spain," warned Díaz, worried that they might take advantage of the good name of the congregation in their own benefit.
Paloma's not a bad young reporter; she's new, I've never seen her by-line before this series. She's been to the campsites and she's gone out and gotten some good quotes. She needs to pare down her style; it's much too wordy in a typically Spanish sort of way. She also needs to improve her lead paragraphs, which don't give you the answers to all the six questions right away but screw around and waste space. But she got the story.
I imagine that having a thousand gypsies come to your small town is rather like having a biker rally show up. Now, they're probably harmless, but they're definitely going to make their presence known, and some actions that flout community norms are going to take place. The best policy is to grin and bear it; as long as nothing seriously nasty happens, which is unlikely if you treat them with decency and respect, everything will be more or less fine. But you want to move them on. Maybe only one bunch of adolescents shoplifts in the local supermarket, no biggie. But if it happens every day, which it's likely to, pretty soon it becomes a biggie. There's a big party with a lot of noise and drinking and a couple of fights, we can live with that. One night. Two is pushing it. Three is not acceptable. But you're at risk, because they might retaliate if they think you're mistreating them. So you treat them with kid gloves and hope and pray that they just move on with no trouble and as soon as possible.
They gave Manuel Heredia the back-page interview today. It's a long one but it's interesting.
Q: What's all this mess about the wedding of a gypsy queen that was going to happen around here?
A: We gypsies don't have kings or queens. They're calling the bride a queen in an affectionate way. The bride is from a Ludari family...
Q: Ludari? What's that?
A: Among gypsies there's a great variety of groups: the calés (those from Spain), the Caldera (Kalderash?)...The ludari are Hungarians, with very large, nomadic families.
Q: Ah. So what are they doing around here?
A: A big Ludari family came to the Vallés (north of Barcelona) years ago, while another part travels around southern France and other countries. I wouldn't rule out that the groom, visiting here now, and tired of being far from his bride, "stole" her!
Q: Stole? What do you mean?
A: It's a way of asking for the bride's hand that obligates the father to get them married immediately. Because, if they don't, it means the dishonor of the father!
Q: But they've packed up the campsite: what will happen to the bride and groom, to that father?
A: They'll get married somewhere near here, for sure, ha, ha! The authorities have forced them to move away from where they were because today there are still not campsites with facilities for these big gypsy campouts, as there are in France.
Q: Are you a nomad, too?
A: No! We calés are sedentary: we've always had our own house! My grandfathers were, one, a horse dealer, and the other, a peddler, at fairs and farmhouses down in Granada. But both families had their houses!
Q: Were both grandfathers gypsies?
A: Yes, I'm gypsy on all four sides, I'm a "seven-and-a-half rib" gypsy!
Q: And are gypsy weddings always so elaborate? They said this one would last days and days...
A: Before they were, because the payos (non-gypsies) refused to deal with gypsies, so the families did everything themselves: buy everything, share it out...And that takes days! Not today, now we go to a payo restaurant, we pay, and that's it. But we make it as Pharoahonic as we can, that's for sure!
Q: By the way, those are some cars, trailers, and satellite dishes the Ludari have! They're rich!
A: No. They're nomads! That is, all their capital is here, what you see. And they can't drive small cars because they wouldn't make it up the hills: all the money that you put into your house, they put into their cars and trailers!
Q: OK, but there must be some rich ones...
A: There are poor gypsies and rich gypsies, but every gypsy dies poor!
Q: Why?
A: Because gypsies spend it all while they're alive. He works to live, he doesn't live to work! But when we decide to do something, we're the best! We put heart, faith, and care into it...
Q: Let's go back to the wedding: do you still check the virginity of the bride before the wedding?
A: Yes. That's sacred! Before the wedding, an expert woman (we call her the "gardener") meets with the bride and, among dirty jokes, gives her the virginity test, which the father's honor depends on. And the test is shown to the father.
Q: The honor of the father?
A: Of course. It's as if your daughter got a college degree and showed it to you: you're proud of her because that means she hasn't been doing what she shouldn't. The handkerchief with the mark of the three roses of her virginity is like that diploma; your daughter hasn't been doing what she shouldn't!
Q: The three roses?
A: Yes, certain little wrinkles in the handkerchief...
Q. Did you do that with your daughters?
A: No, because they married payos, and they (the husbands) didn't ask me to do the test.
Q: Does it bother you that they're married to payos?
A: No. I just want them to be happy. And they are, so I'm thrilled!
Q: Aren't you gypsies a little sexist?
A: Ask that to the gypsy women. They'll tell you they're the happiest women in the world! Look, a gypsy won't do anything, anything! without the previous agreement of his wife. And look at them at any celebration: jeweled, beautiful, tall, splendid...
Q: What happens if a gypsy beats his wife?
A: With the payo law, nothing! With ours, yes: the gypsy council will rule that that man must distance himself from the woman until further orders. And if he doesn't obey, then the woman's family has the right to act against him.
Q: You dictate forcible divorces, then...
A: But correctly done! Not like those that the payo judges dictate. When a mare has a foal, the foal is part of the deal!
Q: That's from your grandfather, right? Explain it to me.
A: The children should stay with the mother. What's all this moving the child around from one side to the other? No! That's dividing the child in two, traumatizing him! Children, with the mother.
Q: I see that you have your own laws...
A: We gypsies don't care about being from one country or another, one ideology or another, one system or another, we don't care if this square is called the Plaza de España or de la República. The gypsy only belongs to his family, and to nothing or nobody else!
Q: But there are other things in life...
A: Yes. God. All us gypsies believe in God. Look: in Spain they've expelled Jews, Muslims, they've gotten rid of everyone different. They tried as hard as they could with us, and here we are! Couldn't it be because God is helping us a little?
Q: Maybe, but...is anybody else?
A: Fortunately, there isn't any more institutional racism. Social racism...that's another story. My struggle now is pressuring gypsy parents so that not a single gypsy child drops out of school. We have to be educated and finally get some political power!
Q: In order to defend the family.
A: Everyone defends his own family. Look: you'll never see a single old gypsy in a nursing home! And if we ever see one, we'll expel his family! Because anyone who does that....is no longer a gypsy.
One thing I like about Spanish journalism is the lack of political correctness. The interviewer, Victor M. Amela, pulls no punches and isn't afraid to challenge the interviewee. Heredia seems like an ideal representative of a discriminated-against group, ready to stand up for his people and proud of his heritage but also ready to compromise, be realistic, and set goals to work toward. I'm not nearly as sanguine as Heredia about women's place in gypsy society, but it could be a lot worse, I suppose, and his goal of education is laudable. Heredia admits, though, that his people hold no allegiance to Spain or Catalonia; frankly, this is a rejection of full integration into payo society. It's a little contradictory to want the privileges of the payo lifestyle without assuming all the responsibilities; still, I imagine that improvements in gypsies' educations and job skills will lead to a growing identification with society in general.
Also, it's an excellent sign that both Heredia's daughters are married to payos and he doesn't mind. Ethnicity and race and sex make up the last taboo left in America, according to Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, who are normally of the disposition that racial issues in America are not as dividing as they may seem. The Thernstroms say that these days, whites, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians have no problems intermarrying and are doing so more and more frequently. The sexual / marriage taboo has disappeared between these four groups for all practical purposes. Anecdotal evidence from my life supports this idea. (I also believe that religious differences, whether someone is non-religious or Jewish or Catholic or whatever brand of Prod, make little difference these days in America. Hell, I'm not sure I ever nailed a Protestant chick way back in the unrestricted free-agent days, and that was the 80s.) However, blacks tend to be more unwilling to marry outside of the black group, and the other four groups are more unwilling to marry into the black group. This taboo has lessened a lot in recent years, but a goodly percentage of whites would still object to their kid marrying someone who was black, and an even higher percentage of blacks would object to their kid marrying someone who was white. Fortunately, those numbers are dropping, but we're not color-blind yet back home in America. Here in Spain, though, there are really four groups, payos, gypsies, Arabs, and miscellaneous immigrants. Spanish people--that is, payos--have no problem marrying miscellaneous immigrants. Arabs--well, if the guy is integrated here and speaks Spanish and doesn't make her wear the burqa and has a job and the like, most payos wouldn't kick up much of a fuss, less if the guy was born here, and even less if the Arab is a Christian. Gypsies and payos still normally do not intermarry except at the very lowest social level. Heredia's daughters, I hope, are part of a trend toward making gypsy-payo intermarriages less taboo.
Friday, January 10, 2003
Check out this piece of Salvador Dalí alleged art. It's pretty tame compared to some of the stuff on display at the Dalí Museum in Figueras, an hour and a half north of Barcelona by train. I am not a big fan of Dalí; he was a notorious publicity hound and his work is superficial, though he was imaginative and good at tricking the eye. Still, his real aim in life was to be rich and famous, live in high style, and épater les bourgeois, and at those feats he succeeded brilliantly.
In today's news, the Federal Appeals Court in Richmond has ruled that the President, as commander-in-chief, may indefinitely detain American citizens suspected of being "enemy combatants" without filing charges or providing access to a lawyer. The judge said, "Whatever his nationality, anyone who takes up arms against the United States in a foreign theater of war can effectively be described as an enemy combatant and treated as such." This decision only applies to two people, Yasser Esam Hamdi and José Padilla. The Supreme Court is not likely to hear an appeal. Another federal judge had already ruled that the treatment of the prisoners at Guantánamo was legal. There go the anti-war folks' challenges to the legality of American actions.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, 80% of bank employees went out on a two-day strike, and the transport workers' union has called a two-day strike to start Monday, January 13. These guys are the Venezuelan Teamsters and they're going out against the government. With the transport workers and the oil workers out on strike, Chávez can't claim that the opposition to him is only middle-and upper-class. The Vanguardia's correspondent, Joaquim Ibarz, with whom I have had my differences, reports, "The opposition can count on the majority of civil society, a majority that is mobilizing, that is active, that will listen to any call that is made on it that concerns disobeying and ignoring the government...Chávez has been radicalizing his discourse over the last several days...he can't manage to reactivate the petroleum industry, which is vital in order to normalize the country. The government has neither the management skills nor enough political leadership to get the principal source of income back to work." Let's hope Chávez falls by the end of the month with no bloodshed, though if they want to go Ceauscescu on his ass it's fine with me if they don't kill anyone else. Unfortunately, Venezuelan papers are reporting that the government is going to use groups of armed civilians (otherwise known as "vigilante gangs", "lynch mobs", and "death squads") and Army elements to "contain the people's protests". How the international Left can support this man I have no idea.
An interesting phenomenon is that when people, whether Spaniards or Americans, get back from living several years in the United States and come back to Spain, they suddenly love America. It's so convenient, the waiters pay attention, you can get anything you want, everything's clean, and so cheap, people are so responsible, and you've got elbow room to move around a little, and people smile at you, and the streets get fixed and the phones work, there are tennis courts in the park, and there's often something good on TV, and the food's really not that bad, and how come Wal-Mart doesn't come to Spain? I've seen this syndrome over and over, and I went through it once when we came back here in 1994. Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, the X-man, former Vangua correspondent in the US, is going through it now. When he was in America he couldn't say anything good about it, but now that he's back here everything was so wonderful over there.
Anyway, Barcelona's Socialist mayor, Joan Clos, gave a "state of the city" address, and here's Mas de Xaxàs's sidebar column:
Mayor Joan Clos lives in the contradiction of being American and anti-American. He dreams of a world government that would neutralize the imperialism of the United States. He doesn't say it in so many words, because he speaks in dialectic meanderings, but he makes it clear that he does not like the Bush Administration. He believes that 9-11 is "a clash of civilizations" and that the possible war against Iraq would "finish off the revenge" for those attacks. He criticizes the "divine references" that Bush often makes and, against them, assures us that "in Europe we work for secularism, the separation between Church and State, republicanism in the French sense of the word." French republicanism, however, was inspired by American, and both of them by the Enlightenment. Mayor Clos confuses the religiosity of one man with that of a republic that protects the Church from the interference of the State. The progressive (here with its literal meaning, that of making progress) and businesslike nucleus of Joan Clos's discourse, however, is very American.
I might also point out to Mayor Clos that the United States is the country whose Constitution separates Church and State, and that the Spanish State is not secular at all; its official religion is, of course, Roman Catholicism. On your income tax form there's a checkoff; if you mark Yes, a small sum of your tax money goes to the Catholic Church. Mayor Clos also errs when he praises French republicanism; Spain, remember, is a constitutional monarchy with King Juan Carlos as titular head of state. It ain't no republic, and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party does not call for the removal of the monarchy. As I recall, the French cut their king's head off when they declared their republic back in the good old days; I certainly hope Mayor Clos is not really calling for the decapitation of Juan Carlos, who seems like a perfectly nice, normal guy except for his (and his family's) mild speech defect.
Joke. Crown Prince Felipe goes to his father the King and says, "Papá, soy gay." The King responds, "No. Yo soy el Gey, y tu madre es la Geina."
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, 80% of bank employees went out on a two-day strike, and the transport workers' union has called a two-day strike to start Monday, January 13. These guys are the Venezuelan Teamsters and they're going out against the government. With the transport workers and the oil workers out on strike, Chávez can't claim that the opposition to him is only middle-and upper-class. The Vanguardia's correspondent, Joaquim Ibarz, with whom I have had my differences, reports, "The opposition can count on the majority of civil society, a majority that is mobilizing, that is active, that will listen to any call that is made on it that concerns disobeying and ignoring the government...Chávez has been radicalizing his discourse over the last several days...he can't manage to reactivate the petroleum industry, which is vital in order to normalize the country. The government has neither the management skills nor enough political leadership to get the principal source of income back to work." Let's hope Chávez falls by the end of the month with no bloodshed, though if they want to go Ceauscescu on his ass it's fine with me if they don't kill anyone else. Unfortunately, Venezuelan papers are reporting that the government is going to use groups of armed civilians (otherwise known as "vigilante gangs", "lynch mobs", and "death squads") and Army elements to "contain the people's protests". How the international Left can support this man I have no idea.
An interesting phenomenon is that when people, whether Spaniards or Americans, get back from living several years in the United States and come back to Spain, they suddenly love America. It's so convenient, the waiters pay attention, you can get anything you want, everything's clean, and so cheap, people are so responsible, and you've got elbow room to move around a little, and people smile at you, and the streets get fixed and the phones work, there are tennis courts in the park, and there's often something good on TV, and the food's really not that bad, and how come Wal-Mart doesn't come to Spain? I've seen this syndrome over and over, and I went through it once when we came back here in 1994. Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, the X-man, former Vangua correspondent in the US, is going through it now. When he was in America he couldn't say anything good about it, but now that he's back here everything was so wonderful over there.
Anyway, Barcelona's Socialist mayor, Joan Clos, gave a "state of the city" address, and here's Mas de Xaxàs's sidebar column:
Mayor Joan Clos lives in the contradiction of being American and anti-American. He dreams of a world government that would neutralize the imperialism of the United States. He doesn't say it in so many words, because he speaks in dialectic meanderings, but he makes it clear that he does not like the Bush Administration. He believes that 9-11 is "a clash of civilizations" and that the possible war against Iraq would "finish off the revenge" for those attacks. He criticizes the "divine references" that Bush often makes and, against them, assures us that "in Europe we work for secularism, the separation between Church and State, republicanism in the French sense of the word." French republicanism, however, was inspired by American, and both of them by the Enlightenment. Mayor Clos confuses the religiosity of one man with that of a republic that protects the Church from the interference of the State. The progressive (here with its literal meaning, that of making progress) and businesslike nucleus of Joan Clos's discourse, however, is very American.
I might also point out to Mayor Clos that the United States is the country whose Constitution separates Church and State, and that the Spanish State is not secular at all; its official religion is, of course, Roman Catholicism. On your income tax form there's a checkoff; if you mark Yes, a small sum of your tax money goes to the Catholic Church. Mayor Clos also errs when he praises French republicanism; Spain, remember, is a constitutional monarchy with King Juan Carlos as titular head of state. It ain't no republic, and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party does not call for the removal of the monarchy. As I recall, the French cut their king's head off when they declared their republic back in the good old days; I certainly hope Mayor Clos is not really calling for the decapitation of Juan Carlos, who seems like a perfectly nice, normal guy except for his (and his family's) mild speech defect.
Joke. Crown Prince Felipe goes to his father the King and says, "Papá, soy gay." The King responds, "No. Yo soy el Gey, y tu madre es la Geina."
I saw my London Irish friend Murph last night. I went over to his house and we played with his kid, Patrick, who is three and a half. Patrick asked for a glass of wah-tuh, in his British accent. Murph, who was in the kitchen, didn't hear and I relayed the message, "Patrick wants a glass of wah-ter." Patrick spoke up and said, "No. Wah-tuh." Well, he was right according to his standards, so I didn't argue the point. Murph said that Patrick corrected his pronunciation once, too. Seems that Patrick was watching a Barney the Dinosaur video in which there appears a character named Bob, pronounced "Bahb" in American because, well, Barney's an American purple dinosaur. Murph made a reference to the character, saying something like "What's Bob ("Bawb" in British) doing now?" And Patrick replied, "Not 'Bawb'. 'Bahb'." So Barney the Dinosaur's pronunciation trumps Dad's. Murph claims to have explained that Barney just talks funny like John and Clark, but I bet Patrick remained unconvinced.
Our page view count is through the roof because both Andrew Sullivan and PejmanPundit linked to the interview with Susan Sontag that we translated out of the Vanguardia. So, all you idiotarians, be careful what you say in Spain because Iberian Notes is watching you. Don't think you can get away with America-bashing quotes intended only for foreign consumption anymore. And, for all you new visitors, we'd sure appreciate it if you'd look around and stay a spell.
Andrew Sullivan asked about the rest of the interview with Susan Sontag; I only translated the part that was interesting. If you want to see the whole thing in Spanish, though, it's in the "La Contra" section of the December 30 Vanguardia.
Andrew Sullivan asked about the rest of the interview with Susan Sontag; I only translated the part that was interesting. If you want to see the whole thing in Spanish, though, it's in the "La Contra" section of the December 30 Vanguardia.
Jesús Gil, the most obnoxious owner ever of a Spanish soccer team, says on his blog, Atlético Rules, that the Fulton County alleged animal shelter in Atlanta has an 82% kill rate, meaning thousands of dead cats and dogs and other animals. Well, in Barcelona the animal shelter has gone no-kill (except for sick and dangerous animals). As a fellow host-city of the Olympic Games, Barcelona officially challenges Atlanta to measure up to our standard. If Atlanta can't do it, why not? Will Atlanta allow Barcelona to be superior? Fellow-bloggers and blog-readers concerned about animals--I mean people against unnecessary cruelty, conservationists, folks who respect animals, folks who want to do no unneeded harm--ought to write to the Atlanta city council and ask them why they can't do what Barcelona can do.
The mayor of Atlanta's e-mail is mayorfranklin@ci.atlanta.ga.us, so you can send her an e-mail. Her name is Shirley Franklin.
The mayor of Atlanta's e-mail is mayorfranklin@ci.atlanta.ga.us, so you can send her an e-mail. Her name is Shirley Franklin.
Thursday, January 09, 2003
Here's a translation of an article from today's Vanguardia by Paloma Arenós. The headline is " 'Royal' wedding in Sant Cugat / Thousands of guests camp in the city for the wedding of a 'gypsy queen' ".
They're having a major celebration and they've taken over some private lands to show it. According to her parents, inhabitants of France but of Hungarian origin, on January 16 the "gypsy queen" will get married in Sant Cugat del Vallés (a Barcelona suburb). Since the beginning of the year, a trail of 200 trailers from all over Europe--yesterday they were still arriving--have installed themselves on a vacant lot near the Boehringer company's building, between Rubí and Sant Cugat, with the intention of celebrating a big caló wedding. Beginning tomorrow, Friday, there will be ten days of unstoppable partying, and it's predicted that 300 more trailers will arrive from Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and even Morocco.
The protagonist of the event is Moraica Lobis, a 17-year-old adolescent, whose father, José Lobis Costa, "is a Hungarian gypsy prince, according to our tradition," says Josefa, the proud mother of the bride. Moraica will marry a boy fom Naples. Why have they come to Sant Cugat? "We have a lot of relatives that live here and in Rubí, and it was a very good meeting point," some say. "Besides, we didn't have anywhere else to go, and we're having a wedding with the whole international gypsy people invited," Lobis points out. The mother of the bride explains that "We don't have any money to move on somewhere else," and yesterday asked for some open lands, offering to "pay whatever". Josefa explains that they wanted to put up a gazebo on the vacant lot to "celebrate a big wedding," but continual police surveillance--they record license numbers and ask for ID every time someone enters or leaves--has put a damper on their plans. "We're afraid they'll kick us out," she comments.
Now some French musicians are playing, some little kids are running around between the trailers, the Mercedes, and the BMWs, farther along some women are showing off their party dresses...This squatting has not pleased the Sant Cugat city government at all. The mayor, Lluís Recoder (CiU--Catalan nationalist), ordered the thousands of people concentrated on a vacant lot on Calle Prat de la Riba to give up "this illegal campsite" before 2 PM this afternoon. If this decree is not obeyed, Recoder will call in the National Police and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan regional police) to carry out the order.
The city government laments that since the various families arrived, "they haven't stopped giving different excuses to stay: first they've camped here because they have sick relatives, then their vehicles have broken down, and the last one is the wedding of the alleged bride." The president of the FAGIC (Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia), Manuel Heredia, was surprised at the news of this massive campsite. "Neither the city government nor anybody else has told me about this officially. Tomorrow (today) I'm going to investigate to find out their plans, " he said, after pointing out that the area "has traditionally been used by nomadic gypsies." Heredia wants to make sure people know that "In the Spanish, French, and English gypsy traditions, the figure of the gypsy queen does not exist. Perhaps they're calling her that in an affectionate way, as if they were saying she was beautiful."
This is not the first time the city council has had to deal with a gypsy campsite. Along with the FAGIC, they have been working for months for the sociolaboral integration of another group of gypsies who in April moved out of some government housing in Rubí and camped next to the Molins de Rei highway within the Sant Cugat city limits.
I love that phrase, "sociolaboral integration". I think it means "get a job and move out of your house trailer".
This is what I know about gypsies, and it's not a whole lot. There is a group of at least several hundred who have lived here in Gràcia for years and who are "sociolaborally integrated" just fine. They've adopted the Catalan language and have a perfectly respectable reputation. There is another group in the downtown Raval neighborhood around the Calle de la Cera who are also sociolaborally integrated; they're known for producing musicians like Peret. These people never cause any problems, either, and are a welcome addition. However, there's a group living up on El Carmel, a hillside above the city, and they've got a nasty reputation as thieves, drug dealers, and general dirtbags that is at least partially deserved. I won't go up there, mostly because I have no reason to. And the worst neighborhood in town is Can Tunis, down between Montjuic and the commercial harbor, which is Barcelona's hard-drugs supermarket. Taxi drivers won't go there. Some of its inhabitants are gypsies. All of them are criminals. They're isolated out there on the other side of the Ronda Litoral, the coastal-side loop around the city. Every couple of weeks some junkie gets himself run over trying to cross the freeway on foot. Can Tunis is as bad as any neighborhood in Kansas City.
You will see gypsies working as scam artists on tourists downtown; the most common is the woman who pushes a carnation upon you and asks for one peseta. If you let yourself get distracted or, even worse, get out your wallet, your pocket will be picked. The ketchup scam is pretty common; they'll squirt ketchup on you while you're sitting outside and then, while "cleaning you up", among a thousand apologies, they'll steal your wallet. Another one is that of asking a tourist for directions to someplace really obvious, like the Ramblas, and picking his pocket while he's trying to say "Over there" or something like that. Groups of kids surrounding you, waving pieces of cardboard in your face to confuse you while they go for your wallet, are now a lot less common than they used to be.
Gypsies in Spain have always been severely discriminated against; Spaniards almost universally dislike them, though leftists won't admit it, and many gypsies have become famous musicians and dancers. Gypsies are all thought to rob, cheat, and steal, and it doesn't help their cause that a lot of them do. Nomadic gypsies are more disliked than those who have settled down; some of those who have settled down, like our gypsies here in Gràcia, are quite well-liked. Of course, none of them rob, cheat, or steal. The gypsies are considered to have a different culture from Spaniards in general and to live according to their own code of behavior and laws. They're thought to be secretive around non-gypsies. Common stereotypes are that "Gypsies won't steal from each other, but they think it's all right to steal from payos (non-gypsies)", "Gypsy men don't work, only the women work", "Don't mess with gypsy women if you value your life, because the men are really jealous", "Gypsies all carry knives and are expert knife-fighters", "Gypsies look poor but they really have a lot of money", "Gypsies eat dogs and cats", and the like. I once read this, written by a Spaniard whose name escapes me, "The Americans and the English think we are savage, hot-blooded, passionate, jealous, violent; they think of us in a way not dissimilar from the way we think about gypsies." From what I can gather, Spanish gypsies all can speak Spanish, but they also have their own language called caló. I've never heard caló spoken, but there are some songs that use it, even by a group as poppy as the Gypsy Kings.
Most Spaniards are very curious about gypsies but don't really know very much about them. I certainly don't, and a lot of what I know comes through the filter of the prejudices of Spaniards. By the way, I'm not dissing the Spaniards as bigoted racists. Some of their stereotypes have foundation in truth. Gypsies commit crimes in disproportionate numbers. With honorable exceptions, they do not tend to be model citizens. They openly flout many of society's established norms. That's not the reputation you usually get if you, as a group, are hardworking, studious, and sober. I mean, say, the Germans are hardworking, industrious, and sober, at least most of the time. The gypsies are the anti-Germans, if that makes any sense.
They're having a major celebration and they've taken over some private lands to show it. According to her parents, inhabitants of France but of Hungarian origin, on January 16 the "gypsy queen" will get married in Sant Cugat del Vallés (a Barcelona suburb). Since the beginning of the year, a trail of 200 trailers from all over Europe--yesterday they were still arriving--have installed themselves on a vacant lot near the Boehringer company's building, between Rubí and Sant Cugat, with the intention of celebrating a big caló wedding. Beginning tomorrow, Friday, there will be ten days of unstoppable partying, and it's predicted that 300 more trailers will arrive from Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and even Morocco.
The protagonist of the event is Moraica Lobis, a 17-year-old adolescent, whose father, José Lobis Costa, "is a Hungarian gypsy prince, according to our tradition," says Josefa, the proud mother of the bride. Moraica will marry a boy fom Naples. Why have they come to Sant Cugat? "We have a lot of relatives that live here and in Rubí, and it was a very good meeting point," some say. "Besides, we didn't have anywhere else to go, and we're having a wedding with the whole international gypsy people invited," Lobis points out. The mother of the bride explains that "We don't have any money to move on somewhere else," and yesterday asked for some open lands, offering to "pay whatever". Josefa explains that they wanted to put up a gazebo on the vacant lot to "celebrate a big wedding," but continual police surveillance--they record license numbers and ask for ID every time someone enters or leaves--has put a damper on their plans. "We're afraid they'll kick us out," she comments.
Now some French musicians are playing, some little kids are running around between the trailers, the Mercedes, and the BMWs, farther along some women are showing off their party dresses...This squatting has not pleased the Sant Cugat city government at all. The mayor, Lluís Recoder (CiU--Catalan nationalist), ordered the thousands of people concentrated on a vacant lot on Calle Prat de la Riba to give up "this illegal campsite" before 2 PM this afternoon. If this decree is not obeyed, Recoder will call in the National Police and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan regional police) to carry out the order.
The city government laments that since the various families arrived, "they haven't stopped giving different excuses to stay: first they've camped here because they have sick relatives, then their vehicles have broken down, and the last one is the wedding of the alleged bride." The president of the FAGIC (Federation of Gypsy Associations of Catalonia), Manuel Heredia, was surprised at the news of this massive campsite. "Neither the city government nor anybody else has told me about this officially. Tomorrow (today) I'm going to investigate to find out their plans, " he said, after pointing out that the area "has traditionally been used by nomadic gypsies." Heredia wants to make sure people know that "In the Spanish, French, and English gypsy traditions, the figure of the gypsy queen does not exist. Perhaps they're calling her that in an affectionate way, as if they were saying she was beautiful."
This is not the first time the city council has had to deal with a gypsy campsite. Along with the FAGIC, they have been working for months for the sociolaboral integration of another group of gypsies who in April moved out of some government housing in Rubí and camped next to the Molins de Rei highway within the Sant Cugat city limits.
I love that phrase, "sociolaboral integration". I think it means "get a job and move out of your house trailer".
This is what I know about gypsies, and it's not a whole lot. There is a group of at least several hundred who have lived here in Gràcia for years and who are "sociolaborally integrated" just fine. They've adopted the Catalan language and have a perfectly respectable reputation. There is another group in the downtown Raval neighborhood around the Calle de la Cera who are also sociolaborally integrated; they're known for producing musicians like Peret. These people never cause any problems, either, and are a welcome addition. However, there's a group living up on El Carmel, a hillside above the city, and they've got a nasty reputation as thieves, drug dealers, and general dirtbags that is at least partially deserved. I won't go up there, mostly because I have no reason to. And the worst neighborhood in town is Can Tunis, down between Montjuic and the commercial harbor, which is Barcelona's hard-drugs supermarket. Taxi drivers won't go there. Some of its inhabitants are gypsies. All of them are criminals. They're isolated out there on the other side of the Ronda Litoral, the coastal-side loop around the city. Every couple of weeks some junkie gets himself run over trying to cross the freeway on foot. Can Tunis is as bad as any neighborhood in Kansas City.
You will see gypsies working as scam artists on tourists downtown; the most common is the woman who pushes a carnation upon you and asks for one peseta. If you let yourself get distracted or, even worse, get out your wallet, your pocket will be picked. The ketchup scam is pretty common; they'll squirt ketchup on you while you're sitting outside and then, while "cleaning you up", among a thousand apologies, they'll steal your wallet. Another one is that of asking a tourist for directions to someplace really obvious, like the Ramblas, and picking his pocket while he's trying to say "Over there" or something like that. Groups of kids surrounding you, waving pieces of cardboard in your face to confuse you while they go for your wallet, are now a lot less common than they used to be.
Gypsies in Spain have always been severely discriminated against; Spaniards almost universally dislike them, though leftists won't admit it, and many gypsies have become famous musicians and dancers. Gypsies are all thought to rob, cheat, and steal, and it doesn't help their cause that a lot of them do. Nomadic gypsies are more disliked than those who have settled down; some of those who have settled down, like our gypsies here in Gràcia, are quite well-liked. Of course, none of them rob, cheat, or steal. The gypsies are considered to have a different culture from Spaniards in general and to live according to their own code of behavior and laws. They're thought to be secretive around non-gypsies. Common stereotypes are that "Gypsies won't steal from each other, but they think it's all right to steal from payos (non-gypsies)", "Gypsy men don't work, only the women work", "Don't mess with gypsy women if you value your life, because the men are really jealous", "Gypsies all carry knives and are expert knife-fighters", "Gypsies look poor but they really have a lot of money", "Gypsies eat dogs and cats", and the like. I once read this, written by a Spaniard whose name escapes me, "The Americans and the English think we are savage, hot-blooded, passionate, jealous, violent; they think of us in a way not dissimilar from the way we think about gypsies." From what I can gather, Spanish gypsies all can speak Spanish, but they also have their own language called caló. I've never heard caló spoken, but there are some songs that use it, even by a group as poppy as the Gypsy Kings.
Most Spaniards are very curious about gypsies but don't really know very much about them. I certainly don't, and a lot of what I know comes through the filter of the prejudices of Spaniards. By the way, I'm not dissing the Spaniards as bigoted racists. Some of their stereotypes have foundation in truth. Gypsies commit crimes in disproportionate numbers. With honorable exceptions, they do not tend to be model citizens. They openly flout many of society's established norms. That's not the reputation you usually get if you, as a group, are hardworking, studious, and sober. I mean, say, the Germans are hardworking, industrious, and sober, at least most of the time. The gypsies are the anti-Germans, if that makes any sense.
The Vanguardia is reporting that Hugo Chávez has brought in strikebreakers to work the oil wells in Venezuela; their incompetence has caused spills and fires at oil facilities. The El Palito refinery has suffered two serious accidents in three days, including one that caused fifty-foot-high flames and an enormous cloud of smoke that covered the whole town, and oil has been spilled all over Lake Maracaibo. In a town called Anaco the oil spilled managed to work its way into the sewers and the water supply. Where are the environmentalist leftists who are so worked up about the Prestige oil spill? Where are the labor unions, who should be screaming bloody murder at both Chávez and Lula da Silva for strikebreaking? And Lula's a union man himself! One of the accidents at El Palito included a large explosion which killed one worker and injured others. Journalists who tried to get access to the huge refinery were kept out by Chávez's "Bolivarian Circles", gangs of street-fighting thugs comparable to Hitler's SA. Only eight percent of Venezuela's normal daily oil production is being produced due to the strike. The banks, meanwhile, which have been on semi-strike--open three hours a day--are going on a two-day full strike. Not even credit cards will work. The Venezuelan people are showing real courage, putting their jobs and their bodies on the line for freedom. Chávez must go.
In political news, Rodrigo Rato, economics minister and "vice prime minister", has officially announced that he'll be a candidate to succeed Prime Minister Aznar when he steps down at the end of 2004. He looks like he has a very good shot at the position, since he's known for being competent and boring. Spain has been into competent and boring for the last ten years or so, after fourteen years of charismatic Socialist leader Felipe González. Rato is not especially popular, but he's respected and not disliked. Aznar's wife, Ana Botella, who does not call herself "Ana Botella de Aznar" (nobody uses that formula any more), is going to run for a seat on the Madrid City Council. She's certainly intelligent and qualified enough. This wouldn't be something new around here; Felipe González's wife, Carmen Romero (according to rumor, she's the official wife and González has had a series of, uh, close female friends. Then again, Aznar is probably the only prominent male in Spain who isn't rumored to have had a series of extramarital affairs) was a Socialist deputy in Parliament for years; for all I know, she still is. Also, in France, both President Chirac and Prime Minister Raffarin's wives hold political posts, one on a city council somewhere and the other in a regional parliament. By the way, there's a nice sex scandal shaping up in Germany; Chancellor Schröder, according to the German sensationalist press, is having an affair with a well-known German female TV personality. He's suing a small paper that broke the story, but the biggest German paper, Bild, and the British Mail on Sunday have both headlined it. Schröder has already won one libel lawsuit; in May, he won a judgment against a news agency that had reported that he dyed his hair. Schröder apparently has rather Clintonian proclivities; he's currently on his fourth wife.
This morning I was walking home from the clinic and I passed through the Plaza del Nord. There was a toddler playing in the dirt there and his overdressed mom was yelling at him to get up and get out of the pile of crap he was sitting in. The kid paid no attention and Mom screamed at the top of her lungs, "Em cago en la Mare de Deu!" (I shit on the mother of God, in Catalan.) Only in Spain.
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Here's a piece of outright stupidity and ignorance from José Martí Gómez in today's Vanguardia. He gets his own space at the bottom of the op-ed page every day to make three or four short comments of unfailing imbecility.
A reader sent me a photocopy including the carve-up of the pie of the United States budget for the new year. 51.63% goes to military spending and the rest is chump change: 6.78% for education, 6.39% for health care, 4.30 for the justice system, 3.78% on housing, 2.61% on labor and employment, and 1.04% for Social Security, just for a few examples. General indignation. That's the least it deserves. (No hay para menos).
Mr. Martí Gómez is obviously too goddamn lazy to bother doing anything like, I dunno, LOOKING THINGS UP. If he'd gone to the Office of Management and Budget website, he'd have seen this as the proposed 2003 budget:
Discretionary Spending:
Defense $368 billion
Non-defense $405 bn
of which
Health and Human Services $85.9 bn
Education $50.3 bn
Housing and Urban Development $31.5 bn
Justice $21.9 bn
Energy $21.0 bn
Mandatory Spending:
Social Security (federal pensions) $472 bn
Medicare (health care for old people) $231 bn
Medicaid (health care for poor people) $159 bn
Other mandatory spending $297 bn
Interest payments $181 bn
Total spending $2128 bn
Receipts $2048 bn
Deficit $80 bn
According to the real 2003 federal budget, defense spending is 17.3%, not the 51.6% that Mr. Martí Gómez's photocopy claims. Yeah, great, some schmuck sends me a photocopy and what's the first thing I do? Why, put it in the paper without even bothering to check it! You'd be seriously disciplined on an American newspaper if you pulled a dumb stunt like this, publishing something that's blatantly false without the most minimal fact checking. I mean, what I did was to google "budget 2003 united states" and the first thing on the list was the Office of Management and Budget. It took about fifteen seconds. Here's the link if you want to check it out yourself.
Additionally, of course, this is the federal budget. Education, transportation, housing, public services, justice, and other such things are largely the responsibilities of state or city governments (which have the power to tax in the US), not of the federal government; that is, the $50.3 billion that the federal government will spend on education does not include the money that the states and municipalities will be spending.
A reader sent me a photocopy including the carve-up of the pie of the United States budget for the new year. 51.63% goes to military spending and the rest is chump change: 6.78% for education, 6.39% for health care, 4.30 for the justice system, 3.78% on housing, 2.61% on labor and employment, and 1.04% for Social Security, just for a few examples. General indignation. That's the least it deserves. (No hay para menos).
Mr. Martí Gómez is obviously too goddamn lazy to bother doing anything like, I dunno, LOOKING THINGS UP. If he'd gone to the Office of Management and Budget website, he'd have seen this as the proposed 2003 budget:
Discretionary Spending:
Defense $368 billion
Non-defense $405 bn
of which
Health and Human Services $85.9 bn
Education $50.3 bn
Housing and Urban Development $31.5 bn
Justice $21.9 bn
Energy $21.0 bn
Mandatory Spending:
Social Security (federal pensions) $472 bn
Medicare (health care for old people) $231 bn
Medicaid (health care for poor people) $159 bn
Other mandatory spending $297 bn
Interest payments $181 bn
Total spending $2128 bn
Receipts $2048 bn
Deficit $80 bn
According to the real 2003 federal budget, defense spending is 17.3%, not the 51.6% that Mr. Martí Gómez's photocopy claims. Yeah, great, some schmuck sends me a photocopy and what's the first thing I do? Why, put it in the paper without even bothering to check it! You'd be seriously disciplined on an American newspaper if you pulled a dumb stunt like this, publishing something that's blatantly false without the most minimal fact checking. I mean, what I did was to google "budget 2003 united states" and the first thing on the list was the Office of Management and Budget. It took about fifteen seconds. Here's the link if you want to check it out yourself.
Additionally, of course, this is the federal budget. Education, transportation, housing, public services, justice, and other such things are largely the responsibilities of state or city governments (which have the power to tax in the US), not of the federal government; that is, the $50.3 billion that the federal government will spend on education does not include the money that the states and municipalities will be spending.
An article appeared in yesterday's Vanguardia that made me so indignant that I've just barely managed to calm down. It reports the publishing in Spanish of a 1993 Italian book by "Communist militant" Rossana Rossanda and Carla Mosca consisting of interviews with Mario Moretti, leader of the terrorist gang the Red Brigades. The Red Brigades are most famous for the 1978 kidnap-murder of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. (I think they killed an American general or someone like that, too, among their other sundry crimes.)
Says Ms. Rossanda, "The Red Brigades were not a criminal or terrorist group, but a political phenomenon." Look, the emergence of the Green Party is a political phenomenon. The claim of both the old Italian Communists and neo-Fascists to have become democratic parties is a political phenomenon. The fact that the Nader voters threw the 2000 election to Bush is a political phenomenon. Killing people and blowing up stuff for political reasons are terrorist crimes.
Ms. Rossanda also says that "the Red Brigades used political violence, but they were neither inspired by nor organized like the IRA or ETA. Their objective was not to sow terror indiscriminately." Oh, so they only terrorized the people who deserved it, huh? Bullshit. I remember the stories out of Italy in the late '70s, and there were terrorist attacks right and left (literally) in those days. Seemed like every day there was another bomb in the Rome airport. (I remember a '70s board game in which one had to build up an airline. The worst possible destination was Rome because like every three turns there was a hijacking there.)
Moretti, in the book, claims that he personally killed Moro. "I wouldn't have let anyone else do it. It was a terrible test. You wear the scar for the rest of your life." Oh, how psychologically tragic. Moretti's life should have been pretty short after his arrest and conviction for murder and terrorism; the noose, the firing squad, the guillotine, or the lethal injection would have been appropriate methods of ensuring that he would not be long troubled by his scar.
And these Italian so-called journalists are apologizing and making excuses for him. Ahh, Europe, the continent where the Americans are brutal warmongers but the Red Brigades are idealist dreamers.
Says Ms. Rossanda, "The Red Brigades were not a criminal or terrorist group, but a political phenomenon." Look, the emergence of the Green Party is a political phenomenon. The claim of both the old Italian Communists and neo-Fascists to have become democratic parties is a political phenomenon. The fact that the Nader voters threw the 2000 election to Bush is a political phenomenon. Killing people and blowing up stuff for political reasons are terrorist crimes.
Ms. Rossanda also says that "the Red Brigades used political violence, but they were neither inspired by nor organized like the IRA or ETA. Their objective was not to sow terror indiscriminately." Oh, so they only terrorized the people who deserved it, huh? Bullshit. I remember the stories out of Italy in the late '70s, and there were terrorist attacks right and left (literally) in those days. Seemed like every day there was another bomb in the Rome airport. (I remember a '70s board game in which one had to build up an airline. The worst possible destination was Rome because like every three turns there was a hijacking there.)
Moretti, in the book, claims that he personally killed Moro. "I wouldn't have let anyone else do it. It was a terrible test. You wear the scar for the rest of your life." Oh, how psychologically tragic. Moretti's life should have been pretty short after his arrest and conviction for murder and terrorism; the noose, the firing squad, the guillotine, or the lethal injection would have been appropriate methods of ensuring that he would not be long troubled by his scar.
And these Italian so-called journalists are apologizing and making excuses for him. Ahh, Europe, the continent where the Americans are brutal warmongers but the Red Brigades are idealist dreamers.
My pal Clark and I have been having an argument down there in the Comments section after I blasted Lula da Silva. Clark says, basically, that I shouldn't be so quick to make judgments and that I should give Lula a chance before criticizing him.
My real answer, I suppose, is that if Lula behaves in accordance with the way he's talked over the years, then he doesn't understand that democratic capitalism is the only system that really works. See, Francis Fukuyama was right. History, with a capital H, has come to an end. Remember, Fukuyama's a Hegelian and he believes in using dialectic. His definition of History is the dialectic process among the various forms of government--oligarchy, theocracy, monarchy, Communism, feudalism, mercantilism, anarchism, thugocracy, and the lot. Democratic capitalism has proven itself superior to all the rest; its last enemy standing, Communism, fell in 1991. Sure, there are states that have not accepted democratic capitalism, and states that have not been at it long enough to see the positive results, but it's really pretty easy to see that the successful countries in this world are all democratic capitalist. Also, among Third World countries, the closer they are to democratic capitalism, the better off they tend to be. I would say that democratic capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for national success.
(History with a small h, the chronicle of the things that have happened, of course will continue for as long as the human race is alive.)
Lula da Silva is not a democratic capitalist. What he is, more than anything, is a Latin American populist union man and career politician. He likes Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. All the Spanish idiots who always get everything wrong love him. His supporters are the usual suspects. That is all I need to know to be able to figure out that this guy is going to take Brazil down the good old nationalist-Socialist trail, and the Socialist trail leads to nowhere but disaster.
My real answer, I suppose, is that if Lula behaves in accordance with the way he's talked over the years, then he doesn't understand that democratic capitalism is the only system that really works. See, Francis Fukuyama was right. History, with a capital H, has come to an end. Remember, Fukuyama's a Hegelian and he believes in using dialectic. His definition of History is the dialectic process among the various forms of government--oligarchy, theocracy, monarchy, Communism, feudalism, mercantilism, anarchism, thugocracy, and the lot. Democratic capitalism has proven itself superior to all the rest; its last enemy standing, Communism, fell in 1991. Sure, there are states that have not accepted democratic capitalism, and states that have not been at it long enough to see the positive results, but it's really pretty easy to see that the successful countries in this world are all democratic capitalist. Also, among Third World countries, the closer they are to democratic capitalism, the better off they tend to be. I would say that democratic capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for national success.
(History with a small h, the chronicle of the things that have happened, of course will continue for as long as the human race is alive.)
Lula da Silva is not a democratic capitalist. What he is, more than anything, is a Latin American populist union man and career politician. He likes Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. All the Spanish idiots who always get everything wrong love him. His supporters are the usual suspects. That is all I need to know to be able to figure out that this guy is going to take Brazil down the good old nationalist-Socialist trail, and the Socialist trail leads to nowhere but disaster.
Monday, January 06, 2003
Here's Susan Sontag from a Vanguardia interview published on December 30:
Sontag: I've lived in Paris for a long time, and in other countries in Europe. I'm attracted by its culture, its willingness to debate...Most of the things I like are in Europe!
Interviewer: What do you dislike about the United States?
S: That the whole primordial dream was overrun by consumptionism, the ideology that "to live is to buy". That's the ideology today. It makes the people stupid, it makes their principal values shopping and having fun.
I: I've read that you've said you're ashamed of being American.
S: No, that's an incorrect headline, and I thank you for allowing me to clear this up: what I'm ashamed of is not being American but the aggressive American foreign policy and the warlike exercise of political power by the Bush Administration!
I. Saddam's worse: he murders his people!
S: Saddam is the worst monster in the world! He is hateful, like Islamic fundamentalism. But the United States is hateful for its imperialistic fundamentalism!
I: The United States has saved Europe several times, it's provided solutions...
S: Not everything my country has done has been negative, but today the United States isn't a solution, it's a danger! A world dominated by the United States would be horrible, and Bush's imperialism frightens me. I hope Europe will show us a road to follow.
I could give a take on this interview from any number of different angles, but perhaps the most interesting is that of "consumptionism". It's not an ideology, in the first place, it's more like a lifestyle. In the second place, I think the Europeans mean by it what we mean by "materialism". There are materialistic people everywhere, not only in the United States; there's a lot more conspicuous consumption here in Barcelona than there is in Kansas City, and the freakin' world capital of conspicuous consumption has always been Ms. Sontag's Paris. Third, nobody is in favor of consumptionism or materialism. It's the easiest imaginable straw man for a dissatisfied social critic to knock down, but let's get real: nobody really believes that "to live is to buy". Now, many people like nice things, and there's nothing wrong with that if they can afford them. Many people enjoy shopping. What's wrong with that? I hate it, myself, but if you like it, that's OK with me. Some people are concerned with keeping up with the Joneses, but if they're that insecure, that's their business, and the Joneses phenomenon exists everywhere, not just in America. In fact, it's much more common in newly wealthy countries like Spain, where the generation born in the late Forties and Fifties is the first to enjoy real wealth at a mass level, than it is in countries like the States where people are more used to having money. And a lot of people have a lot more money than they know what to do with everywhere in the West, because the West's system of democratic capitalism is the one that works. Maybe that's really what Ms. Sontag objects to. Oh, yeah, as for the value of having fun, hell, remember that bit about "the pursuit of happiness", the right to do as you please as long as you don't interfere with anyone else's right to do the same.
By the way, it's interesting that the Left is now the side of the ideological spectrum that criticizes materialism or consumptionism or whatever you want to call it, but the original people who the original middle-class Leftists were trying to reach were precisely the poor workers of the Industrial Revolution. And their message was, "You're poor and exploited and that's why you don't have your share of material things. Join us and everybody will get his share." The Left's message is still "Income is unfairly distributed, and you, the poor, aren't getting your share of the wealth." So they're promising the people more material things, yet they criticize an excess of materialism at the same time.
Sontag: I've lived in Paris for a long time, and in other countries in Europe. I'm attracted by its culture, its willingness to debate...Most of the things I like are in Europe!
Interviewer: What do you dislike about the United States?
S: That the whole primordial dream was overrun by consumptionism, the ideology that "to live is to buy". That's the ideology today. It makes the people stupid, it makes their principal values shopping and having fun.
I: I've read that you've said you're ashamed of being American.
S: No, that's an incorrect headline, and I thank you for allowing me to clear this up: what I'm ashamed of is not being American but the aggressive American foreign policy and the warlike exercise of political power by the Bush Administration!
I. Saddam's worse: he murders his people!
S: Saddam is the worst monster in the world! He is hateful, like Islamic fundamentalism. But the United States is hateful for its imperialistic fundamentalism!
I: The United States has saved Europe several times, it's provided solutions...
S: Not everything my country has done has been negative, but today the United States isn't a solution, it's a danger! A world dominated by the United States would be horrible, and Bush's imperialism frightens me. I hope Europe will show us a road to follow.
I could give a take on this interview from any number of different angles, but perhaps the most interesting is that of "consumptionism". It's not an ideology, in the first place, it's more like a lifestyle. In the second place, I think the Europeans mean by it what we mean by "materialism". There are materialistic people everywhere, not only in the United States; there's a lot more conspicuous consumption here in Barcelona than there is in Kansas City, and the freakin' world capital of conspicuous consumption has always been Ms. Sontag's Paris. Third, nobody is in favor of consumptionism or materialism. It's the easiest imaginable straw man for a dissatisfied social critic to knock down, but let's get real: nobody really believes that "to live is to buy". Now, many people like nice things, and there's nothing wrong with that if they can afford them. Many people enjoy shopping. What's wrong with that? I hate it, myself, but if you like it, that's OK with me. Some people are concerned with keeping up with the Joneses, but if they're that insecure, that's their business, and the Joneses phenomenon exists everywhere, not just in America. In fact, it's much more common in newly wealthy countries like Spain, where the generation born in the late Forties and Fifties is the first to enjoy real wealth at a mass level, than it is in countries like the States where people are more used to having money. And a lot of people have a lot more money than they know what to do with everywhere in the West, because the West's system of democratic capitalism is the one that works. Maybe that's really what Ms. Sontag objects to. Oh, yeah, as for the value of having fun, hell, remember that bit about "the pursuit of happiness", the right to do as you please as long as you don't interfere with anyone else's right to do the same.
By the way, it's interesting that the Left is now the side of the ideological spectrum that criticizes materialism or consumptionism or whatever you want to call it, but the original people who the original middle-class Leftists were trying to reach were precisely the poor workers of the Industrial Revolution. And their message was, "You're poor and exploited and that's why you don't have your share of material things. Join us and everybody will get his share." The Left's message is still "Income is unfairly distributed, and you, the poor, aren't getting your share of the wealth." So they're promising the people more material things, yet they criticize an excess of materialism at the same time.
FC Barcelona won its second straight League game to jump to eighth place, and there's still more than half the season left. Barça stomped Recreativo de Huelva, the worst team in the First Division, 3-0 at home, on an own goal, a hard shot from outside the area by Rochemback, and a nice give-and-go between Cocu and Motta that Cocu chipped in from short range. Hey, Xavier, you said I blew all my football cred by wanting to use Cocu and Gabri as defensemen; well, last night, Cocu played defense and Gabri was going to before he was scratched due to injury; Gerard took his place. It worked. Agreed, against el Recre, but it worked. Now let's see how they do against midtable Málaga next week. By the way, both Saviola and Riquelme were benched last night. So was Mendieta. The standings are now Real Sociedad 36 points, Real Madrid 33, Deportivo 29, Valencia 28, Celta 27, Betis 26, Mallorca 23, Barça 22. Mallorca will fall by the wayside. Betis and Celta will be tougher to catch. Valencia and Depor aren't too far away, nor does either team have significantly better players than Barcelona. They are within range if Barcelona manages to put together a decent non-losing streak--if they win a few games and tie a couple. Madrid is out of range, and does have significantly better players than Barça. If they keep playing like they're playing--they beat Valencia 4-1 last night--they'll win the League this year for sure. As for Real Sociedad, they're beginning to stagnate just a little. Three of their five best players--De Pedro, Xabi Alonso, and Kovacevic--were out with injuries last night, and they don't have a deep bench. They're good, but they'll be caught, at least by Madrid and possibly by somebody else. Here's a prediction for the League 2002-03: Real Madrid, Valencia, Real Sociedad, Deportivo, Barcelona, Betis, Celta. Barça fails to qualify for the Champions' League.
Here's my classification of the Barça squad based on their performance this season:
Stars (significantly better than average, guys who can really make a difference): Kluivert, Puyol.
Superior (above average, the kind of guys that a good team can use): Xavi, Luis Enrique, Cocu, Overmars.
Replacement (average guys who are generally available on the market; you can easily buy someone as good) with Future Potential: Saviola, Riquelme, Rochemback, Motta, Iniesta, Navarro. These guys are young and are likely to become Superior players and are worth holding onto as a long-term investment. A couple of them will fail and one just might become a Star. If I had to bet on one to become a Star, it'd be Iniesta.
Replacement Forever (you should sell these guys and get someone cheaper): Gabri, Gerard, Dani, Mendieta, Bonano, Enke, Reiziger.
Just Get Rid of 'Em Now: De Boer, Christianval, Andersson, Valdés.
Already Gone (to Benfica): Geovanni.
In comparison, Real Madrid has five Stars (Ronaldo, Figo, Zidane, Raúl, Roberto Carlos), and the rest of their starters are Superior. They never have to play anyone worse than a Replacement guy with potential. Neither does Depor or Valencia. Barça, on the other hand, just has too many guys who were thought to be Stars who are really Replacements with potential, or just plain Replacements.
Here's my classification of the Barça squad based on their performance this season:
Stars (significantly better than average, guys who can really make a difference): Kluivert, Puyol.
Superior (above average, the kind of guys that a good team can use): Xavi, Luis Enrique, Cocu, Overmars.
Replacement (average guys who are generally available on the market; you can easily buy someone as good) with Future Potential: Saviola, Riquelme, Rochemback, Motta, Iniesta, Navarro. These guys are young and are likely to become Superior players and are worth holding onto as a long-term investment. A couple of them will fail and one just might become a Star. If I had to bet on one to become a Star, it'd be Iniesta.
Replacement Forever (you should sell these guys and get someone cheaper): Gabri, Gerard, Dani, Mendieta, Bonano, Enke, Reiziger.
Just Get Rid of 'Em Now: De Boer, Christianval, Andersson, Valdés.
Already Gone (to Benfica): Geovanni.
In comparison, Real Madrid has five Stars (Ronaldo, Figo, Zidane, Raúl, Roberto Carlos), and the rest of their starters are Superior. They never have to play anyone worse than a Replacement guy with potential. Neither does Depor or Valencia. Barça, on the other hand, just has too many guys who were thought to be Stars who are really Replacements with potential, or just plain Replacements.
Francesc-Marc Álvaro of La Vanguardia cites an imaginary friend of his as saying, "Nobody talks about what is really in our interest...Do you know why nobody is protesting the National Library's demential measure to separate Catalan and Valencian as different languages in its cataloguing? Do you know why we live in a country where, despite the use of Catalan in the schools, there are almost no toys available in Catalan? Do you know why the politicians don't really support the official recognition of the Catalan national soccer team, with the exception of friendly matches?" The imaginary friend then says that the silent majority in Catalonia is concerned about these issues and that--conspiracy theory alert!--the central government in Madrid manipulates people's feelings on a daily basis.
No. About 20% of Catalans, the Cataloonies, actually care about these things, and they're so obsessed with them that they think about nothing else. Going back to George Orwell's indispensible "Notes on Nationalism", "A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of comparative prestige...his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations...Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception." Only a nationalist--an uncommonly stupid nationalist--could get worked up about something so ridiculous as a Catalan national football team. (Or, for that matter, burning the American flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school.) Fortunately, most people in Catalonia are more worried about such issues as prices, economic growth, unemployment, housing, crime, education, health care, transportation, and the like.
No. About 20% of Catalans, the Cataloonies, actually care about these things, and they're so obsessed with them that they think about nothing else. Going back to George Orwell's indispensible "Notes on Nationalism", "A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of comparative prestige...his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs, and humiliations...Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception." Only a nationalist--an uncommonly stupid nationalist--could get worked up about something so ridiculous as a Catalan national football team. (Or, for that matter, burning the American flag or saying the Pledge of Allegiance in school.) Fortunately, most people in Catalonia are more worried about such issues as prices, economic growth, unemployment, housing, crime, education, health care, transportation, and the like.
Venezuela is at the point of complete collapse. The rumors are that "a state of exception" will be declared, which will allow the Chávez government to shut down the press and force the banks to open, among other things. All constitutional guarantees to the citizenry can be suspended. A TV poll says that 81.5% of the Venezuelans will not abide by the "state of exception", although I have no idea whether they've got any choice in the matter. One thing, though, is that when the shooting starts, which it will, Chávez will not go down without a fight. The people have turned completely against him except for his hard core of lumpenproletariat (that is, poor and not too bright or law-abiding) supporters, less than 10% of Venezuelans. Meanwhile, the month-long general strike is hurting the government badly; it will have to suspend payments on its international debt if the strike goes on into February. Chávez had already wrecked the Venezuelan economy with Peronista-like reckless social spending of money the government didn't have, and lack of economic professionalism and competence on the part of the government. Now he's not collecting any tax money, either, and the economy has ground to a halt. There's not even any oil, since the workers are striking, and Lula da Silva has to send oil from Brazil to prop Chávez up. The banks are threatening to strike, too, and the government has announced that it will intervene if they do. 40% of the Venezuelan banks' money is on loan to the government, which means they are hostages; it the government doesn't pay back what it borrowed, they crash. The two big Spanish banks, Santander and Bilbao Vizcaya, hold $1.5 billion in Venezuelan government bonds; their investment is starting to look like it's really worth about $1.50. Venezuela is at the brink. If Chávez won't step down, which he won't, the military needs to step in. If the coup in Chile in 1973 was justified, which I think it was (NOTE: the killing of some 4000 people in the wake of the Chilean coup was NOT justified), this one is even more so.
According to the World Almanac per-capita income in Venezuela was $8000 in 1999. Chávez has probably managed to cut that in half, and with the strike, people's incomes are approximately $0. No situation like that can last long.
According to the World Almanac per-capita income in Venezuela was $8000 in 1999. Chávez has probably managed to cut that in half, and with the strike, people's incomes are approximately $0. No situation like that can last long.
Sunday, January 05, 2003
I just heard an ad on "Internet radio" for a website that gives weather forecasts. The characters were these layabout British lout rock stars who are very obviously supposed to be the Gallaghers from Oasis. (The actors are obviously Americans doing Spinal Tap British accents--Spinal Tap may also be an inspiration for the ad.) One of them suggests trashing the hotel room, and the other says, "Wait, let's check the weather so we'll know what it's like outside when we get thrown out." I laughed. I'm not going to use the service, though. Who needs to around here? The weather's always the same. Predictably nice but kind of boring. As for Spinal Tap, it never came out in Spain. They've never heard of it. Someone ought to release it on video.
Saturday, January 04, 2003
Here's some wonderful news. The Barcelona "animal shelter" (perrera) has become a real shelter. It's gone no-kill. From now on the only animals that will be put down are those that are sick or dangerous. In 1999 86% of dogs and 98% of cats were put down, and in 2002 36% of dogs and 27% of cats were given the lethal injection. In 2003 those percentages will be almost zero. An organization called the Altarriba Foundation is taking over the Barcelona pound; they run the shelter in Mataró, exposed a couple of years ago as a dog pound that put down animals inhumanely. 85% of animals in the Mataró pound get adopted as pets. All we can say is great, terrific, swell, etc. Altarriba is also managing 31 colonies of stray cats within Barcelona, sterilizing them and giving them basic care. We must admit that Jordi Portabella of the Republican Left is the pro-animal guy on the City Council. Because we're soft on animals too, we give you leave to vote for Portabella when the municipal elections come up, probably in May.
Here's an article from Slate about the New York Times's buying the Washington Post's share of the International Herald Tribune. Those of us who have lived in Europe for a long time have a soft spot in our hearts for the old IHT. Until we all got computers between '95 and '97, we depended on the IHT for news from America. We got all the big news filtered through the Spanish perspective from La Vanguardia, El País, and either Spanish or Catalan TV. We didn't get the little news, though; if it wasn't something related to international affaris, a very important political initiative, or something sensational, the Spanish media didn't pick it up. So we depended on the IHT, which cost about four times what a local paper cost (so it was a fairly serious investment; Spanish daily papers have always cost the equivalent of a buck, two bucks if you consider purchasing-power parity. When I got here in '87 the Vanguardia cost 60 pesetas. Now it's a euro, 166 pesetas), for the baseball scores, what was up in Congress, the last thing the president said, the comic strips, the latest fads and trends, the reviews of whatever books were coming out, and what a lot of people bought it every day for, the market quotes.
I remember budgeting myself to buy it twice a week, back when I had a really crappy job. I also remember that, if you had one, you didn't toss it, you gave it to someone else when you were through. I distinctly remember rather pushily asking people if I could have theirs when they were finished--I've always been pretty generous but also pretty demanding, and I'm especially demanding for reading material. If you knew me personally, you'd always be lending me books. You'd always get them back, but sometimes not for like six months.
Anyway, though, when you got a computer you didn't need the IHT anymore. You got all that stuff and more off the Internet. Even when Internet was expensive, which it was over here in 1997, it was a lot cheaper than buying the IHT every day--and if what you were interested in was the stock quotes, the Internet could give them to you minute-by-minute. Suddenly we didn't need the IHT anymore. Now that hotels have Internet connections for their guests, you won't even have to buy it if you travel to another non-American city. I haven't bought the Herald Tribune since the very day I got my Internet connection.
The article from Slate said that the Times paid $70 million for the Post's share, and speculates that Howell Raines is going to put big money into the IHT. I think it's a rotten idea and that the Times is going to lose a ton of money, because the Net is going to knock the IHT out of business sooner or later. Why buy the IHT when you can get the Kansas City Star, Time, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Fox News, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, the New Republic, and everything else you want for free? And now that there are Internet cafés everywhere in the world, even in the fifth pine tree, even in Assboink, Idaho, where an hour of Internet surfing costs a dollar or two, who needs a thin sixteen-page paper with five or six pages of it taken up by ads and the market quotes? Sad day for the Times...wait, I hate the Times! And Howell Raines! And the whole Times staff except William Safire! Good. I hope they go broke on this big-time loser of an acquisition.
I remember budgeting myself to buy it twice a week, back when I had a really crappy job. I also remember that, if you had one, you didn't toss it, you gave it to someone else when you were through. I distinctly remember rather pushily asking people if I could have theirs when they were finished--I've always been pretty generous but also pretty demanding, and I'm especially demanding for reading material. If you knew me personally, you'd always be lending me books. You'd always get them back, but sometimes not for like six months.
Anyway, though, when you got a computer you didn't need the IHT anymore. You got all that stuff and more off the Internet. Even when Internet was expensive, which it was over here in 1997, it was a lot cheaper than buying the IHT every day--and if what you were interested in was the stock quotes, the Internet could give them to you minute-by-minute. Suddenly we didn't need the IHT anymore. Now that hotels have Internet connections for their guests, you won't even have to buy it if you travel to another non-American city. I haven't bought the Herald Tribune since the very day I got my Internet connection.
The article from Slate said that the Times paid $70 million for the Post's share, and speculates that Howell Raines is going to put big money into the IHT. I think it's a rotten idea and that the Times is going to lose a ton of money, because the Net is going to knock the IHT out of business sooner or later. Why buy the IHT when you can get the Kansas City Star, Time, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Fox News, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, the New Republic, and everything else you want for free? And now that there are Internet cafés everywhere in the world, even in the fifth pine tree, even in Assboink, Idaho, where an hour of Internet surfing costs a dollar or two, who needs a thin sixteen-page paper with five or six pages of it taken up by ads and the market quotes? Sad day for the Times...wait, I hate the Times! And Howell Raines! And the whole Times staff except William Safire! Good. I hope they go broke on this big-time loser of an acquisition.
I'm listening to an early-morning country radio show on a station called "Clear 99" from Boonville / Columbia, Missouri, the heart of Little Dixie. So far they've already played "You're the Reason Our Kids Are Ugly" and "When the Squirrel Went Berserk in the First Uprighteous Church". Also, down at the Lake of the Ozarks, they're having "Eagle Days". Eagles flock to the lower Midwest in winter; we've been to the same thing at the wetlands wildlife refuge north of St. Joseph. They've got a ranger out there explaining all about eagles, and they've got at least one tame eagle (found as a fledgeling, grew up around humans, can't be released), or anyway they did last time I went. They've got a platform up with high-powered binoculars, and you can check out the huge birds close-up. They're tremendous and there are hundreds of them. Another place you can almost always see eagles in winter is downstream from the Massachussetts Street bridge over the Kansas River in Lawrence. The water's turgid there and is apparently warmer, which seems to attract raptors. Also, they have tame, or should I say caged raptors at the Deanna Rose Children's Farm in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb. These are all birds that flew into power lines or got hit by cars or got shot or something and are missing eyes or limbs, so they can't be released. The most enormous eagle I've ever seen, though, was at a mountain pass in the Maestrazgo, in Aragon. Remei and I got out of the car at this sign that said, "Yoquesécomosellama Pass, Niflores meters altitude" for a stretch, and suddenly this huge bird took off right under our feet. Only about fifty meters away from the road there was this enormous cliff and the eagle just soared off it and into the air over the valley. I swear its wingspread was eight feet. It was golden-brown and the sun glanced off it as it glided down and across.
Here's an excellent takedown of Commie historian Eric Hobsbawm, originally from the New Criterion, that Front Page picked up.
Betty from Sin Control is going to dar a luz--give birth--to a baby within a couple of weeks. Congratulations! Here are some more colloquial terms she uses in her blog that you might want to know. These are, again, standard Spanish "respectable" slang, known and used by everyone. As you know, this is a more or less weekly feature; this is the third installment.
alucinar--to marvel at something, to be, like, "Wow". Aluciné cuando vi el nuevo Ferrari de Pepe "El Quinqui".
pegarle una paliza a alguien--literally, to beat someone up. El polícia le pegó una paliza al okupa. Figuratively, to bore someone to death. ¡Deja de pegarme la paliza con tus historias de la mili!
trabajar como un negro--To work very hard. Literally, to work like a black man. El jefe me hace trabajar como un negro. This is not considered racist in any way in Spain and they don't mean anything pejorative by it. Spanish sensibilities toward race are not at anywhere near the fever pitch they're at in the PC Anglophone world. Another example can be seen these days on the streets of Barcelona. The Three Wise Men, the "Wizard Kings", bring children toys on January 6, and various stores have "real" Wise Men whose laps kids can sit on and whom children can ask for presents from. Traditionally, one of the Wise Men is black, and if they can't find a real black guy, they paint up a white guy in blackface. That is by no means considered racist, either.
montárselo bien--to get yourself fixed up with a good situation. Se lo ha montado bien--sólo trabaja tres días a la semana.
un/una cotilla--a gossip. Pili es una cotilla, siempre contando todo lo que sabe. Cotillear is "to gossip".
estar líado--to be busy. Estoy líado con mi nuevo proyecto. Also, to be romantically entangled. Paco y Maruja se han líado / están líados. Pepita tiene un lío--Pepita has a (casual) boyfriend.
Betty's blog is great for people who have an intermediate level of Spanish. She makes no errors (unlike most people do on the Internet), she's obviously careful to proofread, and she uses standard language with a lot of common colloquialisms that are pretty easy to figure out from the context. Reading her is like listening to a college-educated Spanish woman just chatting about everyday things, like real people do in everyday life. This is the most difficult thing to reproduce in a foreign language text--authenticity. Conversations in textbooks just never sound real. Betty is real. People working on their Spanish should check it out.
alucinar--to marvel at something, to be, like, "Wow". Aluciné cuando vi el nuevo Ferrari de Pepe "El Quinqui".
pegarle una paliza a alguien--literally, to beat someone up. El polícia le pegó una paliza al okupa. Figuratively, to bore someone to death. ¡Deja de pegarme la paliza con tus historias de la mili!
trabajar como un negro--To work very hard. Literally, to work like a black man. El jefe me hace trabajar como un negro. This is not considered racist in any way in Spain and they don't mean anything pejorative by it. Spanish sensibilities toward race are not at anywhere near the fever pitch they're at in the PC Anglophone world. Another example can be seen these days on the streets of Barcelona. The Three Wise Men, the "Wizard Kings", bring children toys on January 6, and various stores have "real" Wise Men whose laps kids can sit on and whom children can ask for presents from. Traditionally, one of the Wise Men is black, and if they can't find a real black guy, they paint up a white guy in blackface. That is by no means considered racist, either.
montárselo bien--to get yourself fixed up with a good situation. Se lo ha montado bien--sólo trabaja tres días a la semana.
un/una cotilla--a gossip. Pili es una cotilla, siempre contando todo lo que sabe. Cotillear is "to gossip".
estar líado--to be busy. Estoy líado con mi nuevo proyecto. Also, to be romantically entangled. Paco y Maruja se han líado / están líados. Pepita tiene un lío--Pepita has a (casual) boyfriend.
Betty's blog is great for people who have an intermediate level of Spanish. She makes no errors (unlike most people do on the Internet), she's obviously careful to proofread, and she uses standard language with a lot of common colloquialisms that are pretty easy to figure out from the context. Reading her is like listening to a college-educated Spanish woman just chatting about everyday things, like real people do in everyday life. This is the most difficult thing to reproduce in a foreign language text--authenticity. Conversations in textbooks just never sound real. Betty is real. People working on their Spanish should check it out.
Friday, January 03, 2003
Atlético Rules has a terrific post up, an interview with the Spanish ambassador to the UN. If you don't believe that Europeans who talk sense exist, listen to this guy. There's a link to the whole interview. Check out this well-informed Eurocritical blog called The Radical. I think the blogger's using the word "radical" with its original meaning, "from the roots". There's an excellent post on why foreign forces can be tried legally by US military tribunals (short answer: because there are precedents and the Supreme Court says it's OK). Cinderella Bloggerfeller links to this site called the Maoist Internationalist Movement that is laughable beyond belief. Click here for "What's Your Line?", their botanical classification of all the lefties in the united $tates of amerikkka, as they call it. They're down on "Brezhnevites", "Hua Guofengites", and "Miscellaneous Revisionists". Get this: they have a movie reviews section. Click here for their take on the Spanish Civil War as seen through Maoist eyes; then look through the list for movies you've seen, reviewed by someone who seriously believes that Socialism in the USSR ended in 1953. There's a brand-new one up of "The Sum of All Fears". It concludes that Communism is the answer. In case you were wondering.
The first two foreign leaders who Lula da Silva met with after his inaguration were Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Said Fidel, "Latin America is going through a desperate situation, comparable to the crisis that Cuba went through in 1959." Fidel added, "Leaders like Lula, Chávez, and me appear due to the accumulations of tremendous problems and the crisis that is affecting our nations. Leaders appear at moments of crisis, they are dreamers who are searching for a better world. I feel happy that our ideas are advancing." As a general rule, things that make Fidel Castro happy have the opposite effect on the citizenry. Don't be surprised when Lula drives Brazil straight over the cliff. Best-case scenario: Lula wrecks the economy and they pull a Joseph Estrada on him. Worst-case scenario: Lula wrecks the economy and it's Pinochet ´73 all over again. I advise the United States to be very publicly neutral, not friendly but not an enemy either, and to continue current trade relations with Brazil, so they can't blame us when it's Thelma-and-Louise time. (My favorite scene in the history of motion pictures occurs when Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis go over the cliff into the Grand Canyon. If only it could be true! And with Tim Robbins in the trunk!)
Five illegal immigrants drowned yesterday when their launch sank off Tarifa, in the Straits of Gibraltar. The boat was filled with some 45 Moroccan illegals when it ran aground on some rocks. Normally what happens is that the "agent" or "trafficker" or "coyote" or whatever you want to call him dumps the immigrants off fairly near the coast and they swim to shore--if they can. A lot of people drown like this; more than 70 bodies were found in 2002, and more than that number are likely to have died trying to cross the Straits. Another group was found in the vicinity, this one of 17 people, some African blacks, some Asians, and a Moroccan. This is not Spain's fault, in the sense that Spain has to have some kind of immigration policy; you can't just let everybody in all at once. It's a damn shame, though, that these poor, desperate people die trying to come to the Promised Land, and it makes me furious that rotten corrupt kleptocracies run the places these people are willing to risk their lives to leave. I also wouldn't mind taking the "coyotes" out and shooting them without further ado, but I guess we can't do that.
Two of those bastards got caught a couple of weeks back, one of whom (a Palestinian) had three warrants out for his arrest; the other one was Moroccan. They got locked up in the Málaga jail along with three other North Africans, apparently merely illegal aliens awaiting deportation. The Palestinian, who had a record as long as John Hol--well, pretty long, set the cell on fire last Friday. He and his fellow exploiter of immigrants were among the four to die, and the fifth is in critical condition. Four others, also illegals, are hospitalized. The Málaga calabozo had no plan in case of fire and the ventilation system was counterproductive, since as well as sucking smoke out it let fresh oxygen in, thereby fanning the flames. The victims died of burns, not of smoke inhalation. This kind of preventable tragedy--I wouldn't wish that way to die even on a trafficker of immigrants--is, unfortunately, not unusual here in Spain, the Country Without Safety Precautions. Slogan: "We Laugh at Death".
Top Ten Ways to Die in Spain:
10. Get burned up in a jail cell
9. Get run over by a moron local cop
8. Have a construction crane fall on your head
7. Try to save fourteen pesetas by buying unbottled "olive oil"; get poisoned
6. Fall off the Sagrada Familia
5. Get burned up in some disco with no emergency exit or worse, the emergency exit locked
4. Get flattened by the Euromed express train at an unmarked grade crossing
3. Get blown up because your neighbor has inadvertently turned a butane tank into a bomb while trying to hold an urban barbecue
2. Have a huge rock fall on your head off the façade of an officially recognized historic building while walking along the Paseo de Gràcia
And the winner is....
1. Get thrown into Barcelona Harbor by disco security guards!
All of these forms of shuffling off this mortal coil have been tried in Spain. They all worked.
Two of those bastards got caught a couple of weeks back, one of whom (a Palestinian) had three warrants out for his arrest; the other one was Moroccan. They got locked up in the Málaga jail along with three other North Africans, apparently merely illegal aliens awaiting deportation. The Palestinian, who had a record as long as John Hol--well, pretty long, set the cell on fire last Friday. He and his fellow exploiter of immigrants were among the four to die, and the fifth is in critical condition. Four others, also illegals, are hospitalized. The Málaga calabozo had no plan in case of fire and the ventilation system was counterproductive, since as well as sucking smoke out it let fresh oxygen in, thereby fanning the flames. The victims died of burns, not of smoke inhalation. This kind of preventable tragedy--I wouldn't wish that way to die even on a trafficker of immigrants--is, unfortunately, not unusual here in Spain, the Country Without Safety Precautions. Slogan: "We Laugh at Death".
Top Ten Ways to Die in Spain:
10. Get burned up in a jail cell
9. Get run over by a moron local cop
8. Have a construction crane fall on your head
7. Try to save fourteen pesetas by buying unbottled "olive oil"; get poisoned
6. Fall off the Sagrada Familia
5. Get burned up in some disco with no emergency exit or worse, the emergency exit locked
4. Get flattened by the Euromed express train at an unmarked grade crossing
3. Get blown up because your neighbor has inadvertently turned a butane tank into a bomb while trying to hold an urban barbecue
2. Have a huge rock fall on your head off the façade of an officially recognized historic building while walking along the Paseo de Gràcia
And the winner is....
1. Get thrown into Barcelona Harbor by disco security guards!
All of these forms of shuffling off this mortal coil have been tried in Spain. They all worked.
Check this out: the movie Slap Shot was based on a real minor league hockey team, and the "Hanson brothers" were real hockey players. This is hilarious.
Thursday, January 02, 2003
John Hawkins from Right Wing News asked a list of questions to several bloggers more distinguished than us about their predictions for 2003. We've already made our predictions, but just to get on the record, we'll answer the questions from the list.
1. War in Iraq before March 2003? Yes.
2. Saddam still in power Jan. 1, 2004? No.
3. Terrorist attack in the US killing more than 100 people? No.
4. Casualties on our side in Iraq war? Maximum a few hundred, maybe zero from enemy fire.
5. Syria still support Hezbollah? Really don't know. Doubt it.
6. Large battle in Afghanistan? No.
7. Independent Palestinian state? No.
8. Revolution in Iran? No.
9. US-North Korea sign deal to put end to NK nuke program? No because NK state will collapse, Bush wouldn't bargain with them anyway since they can't be trusted.
10. Yasser still in power? Yes, of the PLO, not as leader of a real state.
11. Anthrax case solved? Domestic or foreign terrorism? Unsolved, "lone nut" rather than conspiracy.
12. Osama? Already dead.
13. Dem pres candidate 2004? Nader-Barbara Mikulski 3% of vote. Independents McCain-Lieberman 41%, Bush-Rice 56%.
14. Bush end year above 60% in popularity? Yes.
15. Dow Jones above 10,500? No, with at least two more years of a slow economy, rather early 90s-ish; then another long growth period. Just guessing.
16. Human baby cloned? It's possible now. Won't be done, though, till the Chinese get hold of the technology in ten-twenty years.
Feel free to give your own answers in the comments section below, and we'll see how we've done twelve months from now.
1. War in Iraq before March 2003? Yes.
2. Saddam still in power Jan. 1, 2004? No.
3. Terrorist attack in the US killing more than 100 people? No.
4. Casualties on our side in Iraq war? Maximum a few hundred, maybe zero from enemy fire.
5. Syria still support Hezbollah? Really don't know. Doubt it.
6. Large battle in Afghanistan? No.
7. Independent Palestinian state? No.
8. Revolution in Iran? No.
9. US-North Korea sign deal to put end to NK nuke program? No because NK state will collapse, Bush wouldn't bargain with them anyway since they can't be trusted.
10. Yasser still in power? Yes, of the PLO, not as leader of a real state.
11. Anthrax case solved? Domestic or foreign terrorism? Unsolved, "lone nut" rather than conspiracy.
12. Osama? Already dead.
13. Dem pres candidate 2004? Nader-Barbara Mikulski 3% of vote. Independents McCain-Lieberman 41%, Bush-Rice 56%.
14. Bush end year above 60% in popularity? Yes.
15. Dow Jones above 10,500? No, with at least two more years of a slow economy, rather early 90s-ish; then another long growth period. Just guessing.
16. Human baby cloned? It's possible now. Won't be done, though, till the Chinese get hold of the technology in ten-twenty years.
Feel free to give your own answers in the comments section below, and we'll see how we've done twelve months from now.
The Media Research Center has given their awards for the worst reporting of 2002. Good God, some of these people are stupid. Everyone else has been linking to this, so I figured I would, too. Here's the link to the complete list. Check it out if you haven't already. You'll need to scroll down to find the awards, which confused me for a few seconds.
A couple of comments. One, that I've heard repeated over and over, is that Carter has been the best ex-President. Nonsense. Carter has been a publicity hound who has been publicly annoying the poor of the world for years. If I had to pick a best ex-President, it would be either John Quincy Adams, "Old Man Eloquent" of the House of Representatives (he was the guy who argued for the slaves in the Amistad case, so you've seen him in the movies); William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; or Theodore Roosevelt, who continued to play an important role in politics between the end of his term in 1908 and his death in 1919. Richard Nixon, who wrote several books on politics and international affairs after his resignation, would be fourth. Harry Truman was a party elder after his presidency, and a lot of Americans remember him because he lived so long, twenty years after his term ran out.
We bragged a while back that this blog had actually broken a story, the time we noticed that Noam Chomsky's department at MIT gave unanimous support to the anti-Israel petition going around a while back. We're calling co-dibs on another one, too, the story of Jessica Lange's dissing of America on September 25 in an appearance at a film festival in San Sebastián, which won one of MRC's awards. Both Iberian Notes (on its old site) and Atlético Rules had the story in translation for our readers the next day. It didn't hit the US mass media till more than a week later.
A couple of comments. One, that I've heard repeated over and over, is that Carter has been the best ex-President. Nonsense. Carter has been a publicity hound who has been publicly annoying the poor of the world for years. If I had to pick a best ex-President, it would be either John Quincy Adams, "Old Man Eloquent" of the House of Representatives (he was the guy who argued for the slaves in the Amistad case, so you've seen him in the movies); William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; or Theodore Roosevelt, who continued to play an important role in politics between the end of his term in 1908 and his death in 1919. Richard Nixon, who wrote several books on politics and international affairs after his resignation, would be fourth. Harry Truman was a party elder after his presidency, and a lot of Americans remember him because he lived so long, twenty years after his term ran out.
We bragged a while back that this blog had actually broken a story, the time we noticed that Noam Chomsky's department at MIT gave unanimous support to the anti-Israel petition going around a while back. We're calling co-dibs on another one, too, the story of Jessica Lange's dissing of America on September 25 in an appearance at a film festival in San Sebastián, which won one of MRC's awards. Both Iberian Notes (on its old site) and Atlético Rules had the story in translation for our readers the next day. It didn't hit the US mass media till more than a week later.
I was flipping through my Goode's World Atlas and came upon a world climate map, which explains a lot about why the world works as it does.
What looks like the most desirable climate zone for humans is Humid Subtropical. If you drew a line from Washington to about Wichita and then down to Corpus Christi, south and east of that would be the Humid Subtropical zone in the US. Its characterics are good rainfall, warm summers, and cool winters. Other important stretches of Humid Subtropical land are China south of the Yellow River valley, most of Japan, South Korea, and the northern Indian plain, helping to explain why so many people live in those areas. And there's southern Brazil and the Rio de la Plata drainage basin, also well-populated but ridiculously poor compared to what it ought to be. The Europeans who immigrated en masse to that area between about 1880 and the First World War managed to set up just disastrous governments at about midcentury. They tried almost everything but capitalism and democracy, and nothing they tried worked. What they wound up with was a system reminiscent of "bossed" cities in America in the early and middle 20th centuries. Now Argentina is a basket case and Brazil will be pretty soon, and there's just no excuse for this. They can't blame the Americans for the way they themselves screwed up and keep screwing up. You could understand their being poor if they weren't so obviously living in a place with all the geographic advantages of the southeastern United States.
North of the Humid Subtropical zone in the US is the Warm Summer Humid Continental zone, which also looks to be a great place to live. Draw a line from Boston straight across to about Buffalo, Flint, Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Fargo, and then down to Wichita, and Warm Summer Humid Continental is inside it. The winters are colder than in Humid Subtropical, but the rest is pretty much the same. The only other large Warm Summer Humid Continental zone in the world is China north of the Yellow River valley.
North of the Boston-Fargo line is the Cool Summer Humid Continental zone, which is not such a nice place to live in many Americans' opinion. It includes the inhabited parts of Canada west to Sasketchewan. In Europe, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki are in this zone, as is Poland and most of the inhabited parts of Russia. In this zone winters are very cold and summers cool. No wonder Russia has never been a prosperous country. You try and try and the climate's still like Duluth, Minnesota. Or worse, because a lot of Russians live in the next zone up, Subarctic. No one lives in the Subarctic part of Canada. It just isn't worth it for us to settle large communities of people up there. But the Russians didn't have much other choice except to expand into Siberia--and then Stalin made them go out there and build cities.
The other important zones in the US are Mediterranean, which includes Southern California, most of the Mediterranean coast including nearly the whole of Iberia, parts of Iran and Turkey, part of Australia, Capetown, and central Chile. This is a fairly small zone in terms of land area but a lot of people live in it. The rest of the US Pacific coast is Marine West Coast, along with most of Western Europe, another small zone. A lot of the Southwest is Tropical Desert, and the Great Plains are Middle Latitude Steppe. Tropical Desert has never been desirable, hell, it wasn't even habitable before aqueducts and air-conditioning, and Middle Latitude Steppe is pretty marginal land, not worth much without irrigation. It can support a sparse population, which is what it has in America. I mean, nobody lives in Wyoming or North Dakota. Or western Kansas.
Really, if you look at it, two-thirds of the Earth is water and one-third of it is land. I'd bet that the sum of the four most desirable climates, the Humid Subtropical, Warm Summer Humid Continental, Marine West Coast, and Mediterranean zones, isn't more than one-fifth of the land on Earth. (So one-fifth of two-thirds is two-fifteenths, which is the amount of land on Earth that is really desirable.) I'd also bet that two-thirds of the people on Earth live in one of these four zones, and I'm pretty sure that these are the only four zones either you or I would want to live in. Exception: what is called Undifferentiated Highlands on the map, which includes areas where the different climates depend on the altitude. Denver and Mexico City are both among the Undifferentiated Highlands.
What looks like the most desirable climate zone for humans is Humid Subtropical. If you drew a line from Washington to about Wichita and then down to Corpus Christi, south and east of that would be the Humid Subtropical zone in the US. Its characterics are good rainfall, warm summers, and cool winters. Other important stretches of Humid Subtropical land are China south of the Yellow River valley, most of Japan, South Korea, and the northern Indian plain, helping to explain why so many people live in those areas. And there's southern Brazil and the Rio de la Plata drainage basin, also well-populated but ridiculously poor compared to what it ought to be. The Europeans who immigrated en masse to that area between about 1880 and the First World War managed to set up just disastrous governments at about midcentury. They tried almost everything but capitalism and democracy, and nothing they tried worked. What they wound up with was a system reminiscent of "bossed" cities in America in the early and middle 20th centuries. Now Argentina is a basket case and Brazil will be pretty soon, and there's just no excuse for this. They can't blame the Americans for the way they themselves screwed up and keep screwing up. You could understand their being poor if they weren't so obviously living in a place with all the geographic advantages of the southeastern United States.
North of the Humid Subtropical zone in the US is the Warm Summer Humid Continental zone, which also looks to be a great place to live. Draw a line from Boston straight across to about Buffalo, Flint, Green Bay, Minneapolis, and Fargo, and then down to Wichita, and Warm Summer Humid Continental is inside it. The winters are colder than in Humid Subtropical, but the rest is pretty much the same. The only other large Warm Summer Humid Continental zone in the world is China north of the Yellow River valley.
North of the Boston-Fargo line is the Cool Summer Humid Continental zone, which is not such a nice place to live in many Americans' opinion. It includes the inhabited parts of Canada west to Sasketchewan. In Europe, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki are in this zone, as is Poland and most of the inhabited parts of Russia. In this zone winters are very cold and summers cool. No wonder Russia has never been a prosperous country. You try and try and the climate's still like Duluth, Minnesota. Or worse, because a lot of Russians live in the next zone up, Subarctic. No one lives in the Subarctic part of Canada. It just isn't worth it for us to settle large communities of people up there. But the Russians didn't have much other choice except to expand into Siberia--and then Stalin made them go out there and build cities.
The other important zones in the US are Mediterranean, which includes Southern California, most of the Mediterranean coast including nearly the whole of Iberia, parts of Iran and Turkey, part of Australia, Capetown, and central Chile. This is a fairly small zone in terms of land area but a lot of people live in it. The rest of the US Pacific coast is Marine West Coast, along with most of Western Europe, another small zone. A lot of the Southwest is Tropical Desert, and the Great Plains are Middle Latitude Steppe. Tropical Desert has never been desirable, hell, it wasn't even habitable before aqueducts and air-conditioning, and Middle Latitude Steppe is pretty marginal land, not worth much without irrigation. It can support a sparse population, which is what it has in America. I mean, nobody lives in Wyoming or North Dakota. Or western Kansas.
Really, if you look at it, two-thirds of the Earth is water and one-third of it is land. I'd bet that the sum of the four most desirable climates, the Humid Subtropical, Warm Summer Humid Continental, Marine West Coast, and Mediterranean zones, isn't more than one-fifth of the land on Earth. (So one-fifth of two-thirds is two-fifteenths, which is the amount of land on Earth that is really desirable.) I'd also bet that two-thirds of the people on Earth live in one of these four zones, and I'm pretty sure that these are the only four zones either you or I would want to live in. Exception: what is called Undifferentiated Highlands on the map, which includes areas where the different climates depend on the altitude. Denver and Mexico City are both among the Undifferentiated Highlands.
Lula da Silva, Brazil's new president, was sworn in yesterday. I don't want to seem churlish--Lula, by all accounts, is a fine man, dedicated and compassionate--but I smell disaster coming. Latin American populist politicians are always a prelude to a big mess, and half a million people showed up at Lula's inaguration. He said that he would put an end to hunger in Brazil; the Vanguardia says that there are 54 million hungry people in Brazil, a third of the population. That can't be right. Brazil's per-capita income in 1999 was $6150 adjusted for purchasing power, according to the World Almanac. That's almost $25,000 for a family of four. Of course, the rich have a lot more wealth than the poor, and, yes, I've seen the documentaries about the favelas, but I seriously doubt that more than a very few people in Brazil don't get enough to eat. (Hell, I know people--I have relatives --in the States who don't make that much.) I imagine that the problem in Brazil is that the people's expectations haven't been met; they jumped ideologically from Marxism-syndicalism to free-market democracy in a bound and believed that democracy and capitalism would make them just as rich as the Americans. It hasn't happened yet. Things like this take a while.
So, anyway, Lula plans for a "peaceful and planned" agrarian reform, which sounds fishy to me. He stood up to the damn Yankees, saying that the Middle East crisis should be resolved "peacefully and through negotiations". He beat the patriotic drum, using language that would be laughed at by Europeans if it came out of an American mouth. He blasted what the anti-globos call "neoliberalism", saying, "Faced with the decline of a model that produced recession, unemployment, and hunger, of the failure of the culture of the individual and the hopelessness of the families, Brazilian society chose to change and made the change itself." Uh-oh. This kind of rhetoric tends to lead to large social-engineering projects. Lula is already faced with having to break two of his campaign promises; he can't raise the minimum wage or cut interest rates without touching off inflation. Let's see what he chooses. My hopes are not high, as two of the honored guests at the inaguration were Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez; Brazil is sending half a million barrels of gasoline to Chávez to help him deal with the Venezuelan strike. Way to go, Lula! That's what they call "strikebreaking" in union circles in America; it's the direct opposite of supporting the workers. I firmly believe that you can tell a man by the company he keeps, and Lula is cuddling up to dictators awfully fast. Prediction: He will be Brazil's Alan García. Brazil will suffer serious internal strife within a year or two, at least at the level of today's Argentina and possibly at the level of today's Venezuela.
One Carla Fibla has been sent to Baghdad by the Vangua as special correspondent. She has apparently been taken on the official Potemkin tour, you know, the one where they show you the infant formula factory and orphanage that the Americans blew up. She got some quotes. Said Yassid, "Saddam is like our father, our family, the leader for whom we will sacrifice our lives." Said Karim, "Bush is a coward...Saddam Hussein is the strongest leader, the best in the world.". Carla did point out that the journalists were allowed to talk to people on only one street, and said that "The official control of every word is constant, the inhabitants are observed by local authorities while they all agree on the same thing. The enemy is clear and the national attitude is unanimous." It also looks like Saddam set up a demonstration for the foreign journos. A thousand Iraqi kids with olive branches held a "peace march" while chanting slogans in favor of Saddam. Their teachers said that "They aren't afraid because they won't need anything while our president is with us" amd "Every Iraqi child knows what he has to do when war comes." There's a nice photo of the Iraqi kids, who have pretty clearly been indoctrinated into the Saddam Youth.
Mario Soares, Socialist ex-president of Portugal from 1986 to 1996, has a long, dull Vangua op-ed today with occasional bursts of America-bashing. He says that America is operating with "absolute indifference toward human rights and international law", and that the American "spirit of reprisal" is "the opposite of justice, international legality, and even a contradiction of common moral sense". He accuses America of wanting to carry out a "holy war" and says that that would be "the worst thing that could happen to us!" Soares calls Donald Rumsfeld "bellicose" and "threatening", "arrogant" and "imprudent". He accuses the Americans of treating their captives unjustly, and says that this is "a world like the one George Orwell described". And he finishes up by saying "Utopian alternatives may be the most realistic ones today."
The op-ed itself is a turgid mound of crap, poorly written and badly reasoned. And the brilliant Jean-François Revel would most distinctly tell the dull-normal Mario Soares to go to hell for having written this steaming pile of warmed-over socialist rhetoric that was dead and buried intellectually well over a century ago. This, my fellow Americans, is what European Socialists really believe. My vote is that we deal with European conservative and moderate leaders and let the Socialists understand that they are beyond the pale of respectability as far as we're concerned.
So, anyway, Lula plans for a "peaceful and planned" agrarian reform, which sounds fishy to me. He stood up to the damn Yankees, saying that the Middle East crisis should be resolved "peacefully and through negotiations". He beat the patriotic drum, using language that would be laughed at by Europeans if it came out of an American mouth. He blasted what the anti-globos call "neoliberalism", saying, "Faced with the decline of a model that produced recession, unemployment, and hunger, of the failure of the culture of the individual and the hopelessness of the families, Brazilian society chose to change and made the change itself." Uh-oh. This kind of rhetoric tends to lead to large social-engineering projects. Lula is already faced with having to break two of his campaign promises; he can't raise the minimum wage or cut interest rates without touching off inflation. Let's see what he chooses. My hopes are not high, as two of the honored guests at the inaguration were Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez; Brazil is sending half a million barrels of gasoline to Chávez to help him deal with the Venezuelan strike. Way to go, Lula! That's what they call "strikebreaking" in union circles in America; it's the direct opposite of supporting the workers. I firmly believe that you can tell a man by the company he keeps, and Lula is cuddling up to dictators awfully fast. Prediction: He will be Brazil's Alan García. Brazil will suffer serious internal strife within a year or two, at least at the level of today's Argentina and possibly at the level of today's Venezuela.
One Carla Fibla has been sent to Baghdad by the Vangua as special correspondent. She has apparently been taken on the official Potemkin tour, you know, the one where they show you the infant formula factory and orphanage that the Americans blew up. She got some quotes. Said Yassid, "Saddam is like our father, our family, the leader for whom we will sacrifice our lives." Said Karim, "Bush is a coward...Saddam Hussein is the strongest leader, the best in the world.". Carla did point out that the journalists were allowed to talk to people on only one street, and said that "The official control of every word is constant, the inhabitants are observed by local authorities while they all agree on the same thing. The enemy is clear and the national attitude is unanimous." It also looks like Saddam set up a demonstration for the foreign journos. A thousand Iraqi kids with olive branches held a "peace march" while chanting slogans in favor of Saddam. Their teachers said that "They aren't afraid because they won't need anything while our president is with us" amd "Every Iraqi child knows what he has to do when war comes." There's a nice photo of the Iraqi kids, who have pretty clearly been indoctrinated into the Saddam Youth.
Mario Soares, Socialist ex-president of Portugal from 1986 to 1996, has a long, dull Vangua op-ed today with occasional bursts of America-bashing. He says that America is operating with "absolute indifference toward human rights and international law", and that the American "spirit of reprisal" is "the opposite of justice, international legality, and even a contradiction of common moral sense". He accuses America of wanting to carry out a "holy war" and says that that would be "the worst thing that could happen to us!" Soares calls Donald Rumsfeld "bellicose" and "threatening", "arrogant" and "imprudent". He accuses the Americans of treating their captives unjustly, and says that this is "a world like the one George Orwell described". And he finishes up by saying "Utopian alternatives may be the most realistic ones today."
The op-ed itself is a turgid mound of crap, poorly written and badly reasoned. And the brilliant Jean-François Revel would most distinctly tell the dull-normal Mario Soares to go to hell for having written this steaming pile of warmed-over socialist rhetoric that was dead and buried intellectually well over a century ago. This, my fellow Americans, is what European Socialists really believe. My vote is that we deal with European conservative and moderate leaders and let the Socialists understand that they are beyond the pale of respectability as far as we're concerned.
Well, now that the Christmas holidays are come and almost gone--we still have Epiphany, the day of the Three Wise Men, or as they're called here, los Reyes Magos, on January 6--it's time to get down and do some serious blogging. On New Year's Eve, I stayed home and Remei went out with her friends Leonie and Elisabeth to this bar called the Sidecar, where what's left of the forty-year-olds who were hip and cool twenty years ago go to do stuff that was hip and cool twenty years ago. Like cocaine, which Remei says the bathroom was full of people snorting up while she had to pee and had to wait like fifteen minutes. You'd be surprised how much cocaine use goes on around here. Then again, maybe you wouldn't.
Parenthetical note: I hate holidays. The only thing I like is not having to work. As for the rest of it, it irritates me to have to get happy just because the calendar says I'm supposed to. Then everybody calls me a party-pooper, and I respond by asking them where they were the other 364 days of the year, when I would be perfectly willing to go out and do anything with anybody. Well, anything not including handcuffs, Crisco, amyl nitrate, and cigarette butts being put out on my bare flesh. You know what I mean. And as for going out to party on holidays, everybody else in Spain is doing it and there are huge crowds of once-a-year drunks who can't handle their liquor smashing empty cava bottles in the Plaza Catalunya. It's amateur night. Vomit, fights, broken glass, high prices, noise--who needs it? Well, if you want to get laid, I see your point, as holiday nights are normally excellent for getting-laid purposes since all the girls are drunk. But those of us who have already been claimed in the free-agent draft aren't looking for any of that.
What you're supposed to do on New Year's Eve is eat twelve grapes for good luck. As the church bells chime twelve times to mark twelve o'clock, you eat one grape per stroke of the bells. I officially gave this custom up at New Year's 2000 as it certainly wasn't bringing me any goddamn luck. Should you be in a Spanish home on New Year's, you will be given a saucer full of green grapes at about 11:45. Do not eat them now. The TV will likely be turned to the Puerta del Sol in Madrid on TV1 as a break from an atrocious holiday special variety show featuring the same loser TV personalities as last year. Do not eat your grapes until other people start, because first they're going to ring four times, the cuartos, to show that the hour is up; at quarter past, they ring once, at half past twice, at quarter to three times, and on the hour, you guessed it, four times. Then you will see people stuffing grapes into their faces. Do not worry, yourself, about doing this right, since nobody will be watching you. There are two schools of thought regarding what you have to do to get the good luck for next year. The first maintains that you must actually have swallowed all the grapes by the end of the twelfth stroke of the bells, which I consider to be physically impossible; the second only obliges you to have all twelve grapes in your mouth at the end of stroke twelve. This is quite doable, especially if you have a big mouth like me. I highly recommend deseeding the grapes first in the minutes leading up to the big moment.
I do not know where this custom comes from. There are those who say it's a traditional Mediterranean thing and it symbolizes the endless cycle of life, since the grapevines come back every spring, and that the grape is an essential part of the Mediterranean culture, and so on. Then there are those who say the alleged custom was invented in the Twenties by some guys who had some grapes to sell.
Parenthetical note: I hate holidays. The only thing I like is not having to work. As for the rest of it, it irritates me to have to get happy just because the calendar says I'm supposed to. Then everybody calls me a party-pooper, and I respond by asking them where they were the other 364 days of the year, when I would be perfectly willing to go out and do anything with anybody. Well, anything not including handcuffs, Crisco, amyl nitrate, and cigarette butts being put out on my bare flesh. You know what I mean. And as for going out to party on holidays, everybody else in Spain is doing it and there are huge crowds of once-a-year drunks who can't handle their liquor smashing empty cava bottles in the Plaza Catalunya. It's amateur night. Vomit, fights, broken glass, high prices, noise--who needs it? Well, if you want to get laid, I see your point, as holiday nights are normally excellent for getting-laid purposes since all the girls are drunk. But those of us who have already been claimed in the free-agent draft aren't looking for any of that.
What you're supposed to do on New Year's Eve is eat twelve grapes for good luck. As the church bells chime twelve times to mark twelve o'clock, you eat one grape per stroke of the bells. I officially gave this custom up at New Year's 2000 as it certainly wasn't bringing me any goddamn luck. Should you be in a Spanish home on New Year's, you will be given a saucer full of green grapes at about 11:45. Do not eat them now. The TV will likely be turned to the Puerta del Sol in Madrid on TV1 as a break from an atrocious holiday special variety show featuring the same loser TV personalities as last year. Do not eat your grapes until other people start, because first they're going to ring four times, the cuartos, to show that the hour is up; at quarter past, they ring once, at half past twice, at quarter to three times, and on the hour, you guessed it, four times. Then you will see people stuffing grapes into their faces. Do not worry, yourself, about doing this right, since nobody will be watching you. There are two schools of thought regarding what you have to do to get the good luck for next year. The first maintains that you must actually have swallowed all the grapes by the end of the twelfth stroke of the bells, which I consider to be physically impossible; the second only obliges you to have all twelve grapes in your mouth at the end of stroke twelve. This is quite doable, especially if you have a big mouth like me. I highly recommend deseeding the grapes first in the minutes leading up to the big moment.
I do not know where this custom comes from. There are those who say it's a traditional Mediterranean thing and it symbolizes the endless cycle of life, since the grapevines come back every spring, and that the grape is an essential part of the Mediterranean culture, and so on. Then there are those who say the alleged custom was invented in the Twenties by some guys who had some grapes to sell.
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