Yes we could!

Last night at friends' place in SoHo we watched the returns on all the channels -- even the Cobert-Stuart silliness, but mostly CNN -- with breaks for a delicious supper prepared by our hostess. We cheered vocally or silently as the Obama tally rose, while outside, as soon as he'd hit the winning number of 270 electoral votes, all Hell broke loose. Or Heaven. Or just terrestrial Exuberance. It was after midnight, after McCain's gracious and responsible concession speech and then after Obama's almost calm but elated appearance before millions of noisy fans in Chicago's Grant Park, after elegant Michelle in black and red and those pretty girls, after Joe Biden and his wife and son and little blond grandchildren and his tiny, grinning mother, after Jesse Jackson's tears and scenes of jumping and shouting before the cameras there in Grant Park and in Rockefeller Center and in front of the White House, and after a last glimpse of the subdued and somber faces at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, we smiled and hugged and said goodnight to our friends, and went out into the unseasonably warm SoHo night and the knots of buoyant revelers. It was like a second Halloween, but with patriotic rather than witchcraft themes. A young women all covered in red and white tinsel pirouetting on the subway stairs, on the subway platform a man of maybe 30 grinning and spinning for cameras to flair his kilt fashioned from the American flag. Those two and most of the others were all white, but with them was a young black woman whose glee was all in her loud voice rather than her costume, and five or six others who joined in the revelry. This crowd seemed to have snowballed, with a core group raising chants -- "Yes we can!" and then, as though just realizing what had happened hours earlier, "YES WE DID!" One girl leaned far forward from her seat into the subway car aisle and fairly screamed, "Now the great thing is you can go to foreign countries and not pretend to be Canadians! It's OK to be American!"

Yeah. That's how we all feel. We now, for the first time in at least 8 years, feel proud of this country. "It's OK to be American!" In fact, we're damned proud that we and our countrymen proved all the forecasts of a racist boycott so wrong. We've elected the best man, and his color just shouldn't matter. Except that it does, in a good way. It does matter that we, all of us, have shown that we can get beyond our racial anxieties, even if we haven't made them go away entirely -- because that will take a lot more work, and a lot more equality of opportunity.

The guy in the flag urged us to join them at Union Square as they ran from the 6 train to continue on the express to the real uptown, to Harlem, to party all night. He and the little group around him were all white, but they knew they'd be welcomed tonight in black America and they wanted to join the fun. We grinned and wished them well.

See also this good essay by Mark Engler, The Day After: Keeping Obama Accountable

Literary practice

Long before the Internet, my friend Karla and I used to exchange quirky and silly letters, she from San Francisco and I from New York. She always made her envelopes from colorful magazine pages, careful to find an appropriately allusive or absurd, image. We also went to a lot of trouble crafting our prose, each glad to have the other as audience for our literary practice.

I miss those weird images. But nobody fabricates paper envelopes for snailmail anymore, so I now have to look for her strange humor, her insights beamed intensely at some unexpected corner of experience, in her web page, Rabbits, Toyen, and so forth. And instead of typing up a letter and stamping it, I'll answer her comment on my blog (on re-entry to New York, below) here.

Yes, it's true, I'm back at work on a novel I worked on for a couple of years and then put aside for a couple more, after trying and failing to get an agent to represent it. It's now much better -- story easier to follow, the conclusion more satisfying -- and this time, if I don't engage an agent, I intend to publish it myself. My aim is to finish the revision before we leave New York (mid-December), because as soon as we get back to Spain I have to focus on finishing an entirely different book, one that's under contract, on a history of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) in Latin America.

The novel's working title is A GIFT FOR THE SULTAN. Here's the premise: In the summer of 1402, the stand-in emperor of besieged Constantinople, the nephew of Emperor Manuel II (who is off in Western Europe seeking aid), secretly sends a delegation to the Ottoman sultan with the keys to the city, a rich tribute of silks and gold, and a 13-year old princess -- Manuel's bastard -- for the sultan's son's harem, and this surrender package is entrusted to a dashing and violent Ottoman gazi (part bandit, part holy warrior) to deliver to the sultan. But before the gazi and his gang can complete delivery, the sultan and his horde are destroyed by Timur-i-Link ("Tamerlane") -- so the caravan of Greek-speaking, Christian urbanites and their treasure, including the young princess, and the rough Turkish horse archers led by the gazi are suddenly missionless in the mountains of central Anatolia, which has suddenly become infested by panicked deserters and survivors of the sultan's military disaster. And then... Well, that's what I'm working on.

It's all true, except the princess -- I made her and the gazi up, though both are plausible. Manuel II did in fact have bastard children (we even know the name of one of them, Zenobia), his nephew Ioannis did attempt to surrender in Manuel's absence, and the plot did in fact fail because of Timur's victory. (Christopher Marlowe's most famous tragedy is about some of these same events, but his version is much more fanciful.) Marriage of Christian princesses to Turkish chieftains had in fact become frequent in Constantinopolitan diplomacy, and gazis as wild as my guy were also real. What I'm trying to imagine is the relationships between frontier Muslim Turks and sophisticated Christian urbanites in this tumultuous period of confused and diffuse alliances.

The larger effects of Obama

The well-known Spanish-language journalist Fidedigna Fuentes has just interviewed me on the larger meaning of the Obama presidential campaign, for the journal Iberomundo. There I try to explain the phenomenon to readers from Latin America and Europe, who are both puzzled and fascinated by these developments. You can read the interview (that is, if you read Spanish) on the blog of my colleague Baltasar Lotroyo. Ms. Fuentes titled the piece, “¿Presidente Obama? - EE.UU. y el mundo”.

Impressions on re-entry

We landed at Logan Airport on October 9, just over two years since we had left the States for Spain. And then on the 14th we got to Newark Airport and New York City, which had been our home for the previous 30 years or more. Nothing seems to have changed. It feels like it always did, but maybe a little better because we're older and freer and because the weather has been so exceptionally good. We plan to be here until December 14, when we return to Madrid and then to our new home in Carboneras, Spain (for pix, see blog below for October 13).

We had lots of reasons to return. We have to get our possessions (mostly books) out of storage and decide which to ship to Spain and which to give away, arrange for the shipping, settle some accounts (financial, not personal grudges), apply for official Spanish residency (you have to do it from your home country), and see old friends. And we just wanted to renew the feel for the place and get a sense of what's happening in this country in this year of turmoil and, for us Obama supporters, exceptional hope. And of course to vote. The reason for going first to Boston was the 45th reunion of my Harvard graduation class. That's Harvard Square in the photo above. In better shape but still recognizable as the place I used to cross a dozen times a day 49 to 45 years ago.

Our Harvard and Radcliffe re-uners all lodged at a beach-side resort inn in North Falmouth on Cape Cod, close to Woods Hole which I'd never before seen. This was a very gentle way to return to the U.S. The trees were all turning beautiful colors, the Atlantic air had an enlivening smell, the New Englanders were all full of smiles and greeted strangers with a bright "Good morning" of "Afternoon" as the case called for. The area felt much as it did when I first arrived at Harvard 49 years ago, only without all the freshman anxiety. I saw many good friends from the past and made a few new ones, and also we got to spend some time with my older son and his family, in nearby Walpole. Then on to the Big Apple, for more serious affairs.

The news from Wall Street (not to mention from Afghanistan, Guantánamo and many other places) has been alarming, but our on-the-ground experience so far has been altogether normal, calm and pleasant. The subway is still ugly, noisy and crowded, but efficient. The people all involved in their personal projects but quick to respond to any new interruption -- much quicker than, say, people normally in Carboneras. We like New York culture, that quickness, that ability to turn one's attention to a new event, quickly appraise a situation and react and, unless it's really exceptional (9/11, for example), immediately drop it and turn one's attention to something else. It's what we expect in big cities, including Madrid or Buenos Aires, but here people are especially quick. Not necessarily smarter than smaller town people, just quicker to react and -- a true virtue -- quicker to drop something that doesn't deserve more attention. In Carboneras (pop. 7000), as in many other small towns I've known in the U.S. and in Latin America, nobody ever drops anything, no matter how trivial, hanging on to grudges and remembered favors for years or even generations. People seem always to be looking back instead of to where they're going. Maybe because they don't think of themselves as going anywhere. Here, it's "What have you done for me lately?" Or more accurately, "What are you going to do for me now -- or what can I do for you?"

So why, you ask, do we choose to live in Carboneras? Because it is so comfortable, comforting even. Not just the climate and the sound of the waves (we're on the edge of the Mediterranean), but also because the slower pace of life has its virtues. People don't respond to you instantly, and they also don't turn away from you to some other matter instantly. Slow to accept, but also caring and concerned once they've made the attachment. And by now, after two years of continuous residence, following earlier extended stays, we have become very strongly attached to many people there. We know their children's names, ages and interests (and are careful to get appropriate birthday and First Communion gifts), their own concerns and desires, and we get together with many of them just for the pleasure of it and not for any business or professional concern, far more frequently than we ever did with friends in New York.

And when we feel an urge for the hecticness of urban life, we can always go to Madrid, just under 600 km. away, where we have a tiny apartment right in the center. It's not New York, but it too has busy people, full cultural agendas (with theaters and concerts much more affordable than in NYC), and a highly varied multi-ethnic population (Africans, East Europeans, Latin Americans et al.) with their varied cuisines and rhythms and dress.

But now we're in New York City and looking to take full advantage of its opportunities in these two months, not just to settle our pending affairs (old business) but also to advance our writing and intellectual projects (facing forward, into the future). Susana has to prepare a lecture she's scheduled to give a week from Monday at Notre Dame University and I have to finish the re-write of the novel I've had underway for a long time. And we both have to make progress on the book we have under contract on the history of the built environment (architecture and urbanism) in Latin America. The bookstores and the New York Public Library will be a big help here. So now that we are settled into the apartment we've rented on the Upper East Side, and have got our Internet connection adequately established, we have to get to work. And of course, see old friends, and shows (last night we saw the Icelandic circus version of Woyzeck at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a wildly inappropriate, amusing and terrifying version of Georg Büchner’s surreal tragedy which deserves a separate blog), and galleries, and generally have a good urban New York time.

Algarrobico & the perils of decentralization

In his latest blog entry, Winnipeg-based urbanist Christopher Leo asks, URBAN GROWTH AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE: ARE STRONGER LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ALWAYS THE ANSWER? Here Chris examines examples of successful planning in Ontario that challenge his usual enthusiasm for decentralization.

As I told him, I'm glad to see that he continues to rethink his positions, keeping from getting locked in a box of his own devising. Anyone who has been watching urban misdevelopment in Spain is aware of the perils of extreme decentralization of authority. In our immediate vicinity, our little town (pop. 7000) of Carboneras has been making national headlines over a hotel allegedly (and I believe in fact) constructed on protected parkland and onto the supposedly protected coast. Aspects of approval authority are split among municipality, provincial government (in this case, province of Almería), and the Junta, or regional government, of Andalucía (a region covering seven provinces including Almería), above all of which is the national government and its several, sometimes bickering, ministries.

Here in Carboneras, town hall appears to have fiddled with the map of the park boundaries so as to evade regulations, with the connivance of the provincial government, and granted all the necessary permits for a hotel developer (including participation of George Soros) to build the monster. What was in it for the locals was, first, opening up more of the surrounding parkland to their own development projects (hotels, golf courses in this waterless land, luxury summer homes), and secondly (useful for political purposes) the employment opportunities the new hotel would supposedly bring (the wives of fishermen could become chambermaids), as well as the shorter-term building contracts of local companies. So they tore into the mountain and built the multistoried hotel on Algarrobico beach, practically up to the water line.

Only Greenpeace and a local pro-ecology group raised a cry while this thing was going up. Finally, when the structure was all up and they were just finishing the interiors, planning to open for business this past summer, the central government took notice. In a whole series of court decisions (each one challenged and requiring a new hearing) the whole operation has been declared illegal, the junta (Andalucian regional government) swallowed its embarrassment and demanded the thing be torn down, and found provisions in Spanish law saying they did not have to compensate the builders because their permits (never before challenged by the junta) were all illegal. Carboneras town hall, the mayor in particular, refuses to admit defeat however and they and the developers are still mounting challenges.

For a video of the Greenpeace action (12 August 2007) where they painted the word "Illegal" (ilegal in Spanish) on the façade of the hotel, see this article in El Mundo.

On a personal note, Susana & I are now in New York City, until Dec. 14, so I'll be reporting from here when I get a chance. The interruption of my blogging was due mainly to having to give all our attention to finishing the building project in Carboneras (see previous blog for photos) and getting ready for this trip.

Our castle in Spain

Buzón

Our 8-unit condominium, designed by Susana Torre with the collaboration of Carboneras architects DA-3 Estudio (Carmen Alcaide, Paco Caparrós and Enrique Bejines), is now (nearly) completed. Click on image to see 17 photos taken last week by Chantal Le Lièvre.

European v. American political consciousness: II

Here's another response to my friend Don Monkerud's query, about differences in political awareness and attitudes between Europeans and people in the U.S. This from Dan Bessie, in France:

Without doing a long sociological study, I believe that greater European political sophistication (and less idiocy - though there is certainly plenty to go around, witness Le Pen in France, right wing quasi-fascist nationalism in the Serbian countries, etc) has to do with a number of factors:

1. They have a longer and more recent association with working class struggles than do Americans. Though much weaker than they once were, socialist and communist parties are both in power in several places (socialists in Spain), communists in a few hundred cities throughout France, Italy and in other countries, and most European countries have unions that still exert far greater influence on economic events than is true in America.

2. Europe has seen two world wars rage across it. Hardly anyone here, including the British, who were bombed extensively, has been untouched by it. Fascism never touched America in the same way, in spite of the number of American deaths during WW II.

3. Large numbers of Europeans travel internally, speak more than one language (several in some cases), and thus have developed a much broader international outlook than that developed by the more or less continuing provincialism of the vast majority of Americans.

4. European media is much more open to being critical of leaders than is American media. American media fears not having access to a candidate. If, for example, the corporate owners of American media conglomerates should let too many of their reporters and commentators really nail McCain-Palin on the issues and on their lies, and, heaven forbid, they should get ELECTED, they might not have ACCESS. So their motto is, I believe, "don't bite the hand that might feed." (Since access is their bread and butter.) Most European commentators are fairly open in their political views (not all, but many more than in the States. During the last election I was in the UK when the results were coming in, and commentators on almost every station were saying substantially the same thing - "What's going on with the Americans? They must be nuts to vote for that guy Bush again.")

5. And yes, far fewer Americas travel than Europeans (though again, a lot of Europeans travel internally).


Europe is not without problems. TV watching is big and addictive here just like there. There are almost as many dumb programs (but a much higher number of quality programs as well). This (France) is also very much a consumer society. But it's someone less focused on big splashy cars and huge TVs (though there are those as well) and more on things like family vacations, seeing that the kids are well prepared for college and careers, etc.

Most Europeans are aghast that America doesn't have a national health plan in place. Here (in France and most of Europe) it's taken as a national RIGHT. Most also know that in terms of overall quality of life - health care, education, environment, standard of living, all the other things that go into making up "the good life," that America (contrary to what most Americans believe) is not #1 (Actually, France is). America, depending on which report one reads, is either #3, 4, 5 or 6 in line).

Are we happier living in Europe? On the whole, yes. But neither Jeanne nor I were unhappy in America.

Our greater happiness, I guess, comes more from what we do than from the actual conditions of life. Because the conditions of our lives here are more or less the same as they were in the States, in terms of standard of living. Some things are much less expensive (health care, for example: Jeanne had to pay about $6000 per year for an "ex-pat" policy for major medical in California. And that one had a $5000 deductible PER INCIDENT. Since she's a member of the EU (as are all Brits), she gets the same health benefits she'd get in the UK - which is about 80% (like Medicare), and spouses, even if they're not EU citizens, get the same benefits. To make up the difference we pay an annual "top up" policy of about $1500 for the BOTH of us. When we go for a doctor visit (GP) we pay a flat 23 Euros. (about $32). More for specialists We get about 75% of that back from the top up plan. Except for a very few things, all medication is included in the top up plan, so it's virtually free.

Food in restaurants are more expensive in general. Food in supermarkets is about the same, but there are a lot of items that the French consider "essential" that are very low in cost (bread, wine of course, canned veggies, etc). Gas is very high (about $7.00 a gallon).

We left the U.S. for a number of very specific reasons:

1. Why do the same thing all our lives? (That's one thing that was very important for us.)

2. Jeanne has family in the UK and she can see them more often. (You can literally fly from here to the UK for as little as about $2.00 sometimes - plus taxes, bringing it to about $25.), because a low cost Irish airline, RyanAir, would rather fill seats in the off season than have an empty airplane, since they fly back and forth to several French airports several times a day.

3. We are central to lots of places to drive to. Barcelona, about 7 hours, Paris about 6, etc, etc. (We've been to Spain once since we've been here, are going again in October, and have also been to Paris and Berlin. Aside from about three trips to the UK and two back to the States - which is getting very expensive now for air fare).

4. We like France a good deal. We live in an area of gently rolling hills, farms, small quaint villages, very friendly people for the most part, and etc. Lots of nature (France is more than 40% forest land).

Shh! Don't think about the colossus

The crash of the construction industry with its bankruptcies and now soaring unemployment, the air disaster in Barajas last month (where we lost a good friend), the absurd and cruel distortions of the judicial system (people kept in prison because the judge forgot they were there, others never sent there although they were condemned and go out to commit more crimes, the divvying up of judicial slots to party loyalists), the constant arrivals of half-dead, and sometimes dead, would-be immigrants on the coasts -- Spaniards have a lot to think about these days. But there is one very big thing that they have been trying not to think about for nearly 70 years. And if, by misfortune or carelessness, they did think about it, they were afraid to mention it. Now -- seemingly all of a sudden -- people are daring to speak, mass graves are being dug open and analyzed and those long-silenced events are being treated as news, and to lots of Spaniards the wartime and post-war atrocities of Francisco Franco's troops, allies and government are news.

What took so long? Fear works, as we've seen in post-war Germany, post-dictatorship Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other places. It works to silence people, sometimes because the trauma of extreme violence has left them in a state of semi-shock, unable to pronounce the horrible truth even to their own children; and sometimes because of fear of the consequences to those children if others know what happened to their parents. It has worked more thoroughly for longer in Spain than in those other countries, because the Franco fear regime lasted so much longer, almost 40 years: from the first massacres on June 18, 1936, until some months after the death of the monster in November 1975.

"Don't mention that! You'll just open old wounds!" protests Rajoy, leader of the Partido Popular. No, say the survivors and grandchildren of the massacred, our wounds have never healed and never will until we know just what happened to our loved ones and where their remains are now. It's a lot like Srebrenica, multiplied many times all over the map of Spain. Today's El País includes such a map, showing the location of known mass graves. Presumably there are many others yet to be discovered. The sons, daughters and grandchildren, plus other truthseekers -- including prominent historians and novelists like Dulce Chacón, Manuel Rivas and others -- have been pushing for years for an accounting, have coaxed terrified oldsters to murmur their horrid memories, and have formed associations pressuring local, regional and the national institutions for their records. Now finally a judge, Baltasar Garzón, after pursuing Pinochet, the Argentine generals and other miscreants abroad, has ordered the armed forces, the police and the Catholic Church (which knows more than it lets on) to open its archives.

If you want a comprehensive story of the Spanish Civil War, with a balanced treatment of the atrocities on both sides and ample demonstration that the White Terror was many times more brutal than the Red Terror, not just in numbers of victims but in the deliberate cruelty, you could do worse than read Antony Beevor's The Battle for Spain. I may have more to say about this book later. Especially important is his argument about the role of the Communists -- the Republic could not have survived without them, but also could not survive with them in the leadership.

Illustration: El coloso, long attributed to Francisco Goya but now thought to be by another hand.

Unsophisticated Europeans

One of my American friends has the impression that Europeans are much more "politically sophisticated" than Americans, and he has been asking me and other European residents why. So after pondering and writing up a response, I decided to post it here, because other people may be interested in joining the discussion.

Voters in Rome salute their victorious mayor, Gianni Alemanno, in April.

I don't think Europeans generally are more sophisticated politically than Americans, though they are more aware and respectful of other countries -- for pretty obvious reasons. Countries are smaller, the foreigner is much closer. "Respect" doesn't mean "like" -- but it's a starting point. Every family in Carboneras (the southern Spanish town I live in) has at least one member who worked for years in France, or Germany, or Holland or some other country. A surprising number of barely educated people are bi- or even trilingual, just because of life experience. Those people tend to be tolerant and open-minded toward all other cultures, which is good.

But they are no more likely than ordinary Americans to have any coherent, critical understanding of the Big Issues that they are always being asked to vote on. Global warming, nuclear energy, national immigration policy (even people who have been emigrants themselves are likely to panic about "too many immigrants", esp. when the economy tightens), national economic policy, religion in schools (as hot an issue in Spain as in the U.S., with the difference being that here the Church -- which still has a big hold -- is on the defensive while in the U.S. the churches are on the offensive, trying to gain privileges like those the Catholic Church enjoys in Spain). The irrational right has been able to mobilize huge demonstrations to demand, among other things, the repeal of the law to teach basic citizenship (mainly tolerance of religious, racial and sexual differences) in the public schools, because only the Church has the right to discuss morality (and the Church's teachers should be paid by the State, i.e., all the taxpayers, whether religious or not). In the last legislature (2004-2008), they accused Zapatero of "destroying the family" because of laws recognizing homosexual marriage, abortion, etc. Now those same people -- a very large minority -- are outraged because a judge (Baltasar Garzón) is requiring ecclesiastical, state and military authorities to open their records so that families can find out when and how their loved ones were murdered during the civil war and Franco-ist postwar years, and where they are buried. None of this is sophisticated.

Before you overpraise the sophistication of European voters, it would be good to analyze the recent votes in Italy. Show business trumps argument. Berlusconi & Co. have blamed all the country's problems on the Gypsies, and now that they've forced a census, they are surprised to find that there aren't that many of them. But no matter, it just feels good to send your cops out to beat up a couple of Gypsy kids or to egg on the crowds to burn down a Gypsy homestead.

Alternatives: Cuba tries to make a socialism that grows

But can it succeed? The Cubans have proven so resilient and Cuban institutions so resistant to joining the "There is no alternative" crowd, that they may just make this work. It's a small economy, but its methods may again -- as they have been repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s -- be a model for other low-income countries. From the Financial Times: A revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Raúl’s Cuba By Richard Lapper