Civil protest in Spain: Optimism of the will

The dismantling of the once-excellent public health, education and other benefits and destruction of labor rights, with no prospect of economic recovery from our deep recession, threaten to overwhelm Spaniards with "pessimism of the intellect".  The rising of the indignados, known here as "15-M", is a thrilling example of the only antidote,  "optimism of the will" —the determination to change the course of events, as Antonio Gramsci (following Romain Roland) liked to remind himself and others .

The following article has just appeared in the June issue of

THE VOORHIS VOICE

Edited by Ivan Light and published by The Democratic Club of Claremont (CA)

Thanks to Ivan  for his invitation to develop this analysis.

 Spain’s Indignados

By Geoffrey Fox

Last year’s mass movement of indignados in Spain, initiated May 15 (“15-M”), and evolving into protest occupations of the central plazas and marches, astonished government authorities and even participants. Inspired by protests in Tunis and Cairo, and encouraged by those in Greece and Portugal, the Spanish mobilization demonstrated further possibilities of democratic action in the Internet age, setting an example for movements as far away as Chile (the huge student protests) or the U.S. (Occupy Wall Street). But “15-M” was also a response to specifically Spanish political conditions.

This was the biggest in a series of volcanic eruptions against the legacy of the Franco dictatorship (1939-75) that began even before the election of the first Socialist party government, in 1983. Franco-ists and their allies have been entrenched in the judiciary, business sectors, and the Catholic Church, which still enjoys extraordinary legal and financial privileges. Democratic demands had erupted in mass mobilizations repeatedly in recent years, for example against military intervention in Iraq, the mishandling of a huge coastal oil spill, and attempts to use the 2004 terrorist bombing at Atocha for electoral advantage. Additional background included a series of corruption scandals, and the removal from office of judge Batasar Garzón, for investigating the current scandals and exhuming the crimes of the Franco dictatorship.  This was Spain’s political drama even as ordinary people endured an economic “crisis” that they blamed on those very corrupt officials and antidemocratic legacies. 

Police estimated 20,000 at the initial demos May 15 in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, and 130,000 nationwide, with the biggest gatherings in Barcelona, Murcia, Granada, Seville, Malaga, Alicante and Valencia. One reason for the big initial turnout was the date, exactly one week before nationwide elections for regional and municipal authorities;  another was the demo’s independence of any party or trade union sponsorship. The heated campaign of mutual blame for the economic crisis by the two principal parties had disgusted many voters with both. The governing Socialists had disappointed their supporters by bowing to pressure from Brussels and Berlin to freeze pensions and cut other benefits; and the right’s Popular Party, closely aligned with big capital and banking, offered no credible alternative. One of the popular slogans of 15-M was “Don’t vote for them!” and the initiating coordinating committee called itself “Real democracy now!” (¡Democracia Real Ya!).

The original protesters included experienced veterans of social action groups but they were joined by many younger “indignados” frustrated by their lack of employment or educational opportunities. In Madrid’s spacious Puerta del Sol after the speeches, hundreds of the youth decided spontaneously to stay the night. Their rousting by the police before dawn was the second main cause of the protest’s huge success: press and Internet coverage of the rough handling resulted in far larger crowds the next night, and  spontaneous encampments in other cities.

The veteran social activists and younger, unemployed  “indignados” were quickly joined by a broader cross-section of the electorate, including students and unemployed adults, fully-employed but worried workers and professionals, housewives, and retirees. They were articulate, informed and determined. Participants set up orderly camps, declaring that they would not leave until satisfied that they had accomplished something.

Mobilized by Internet social networks, e-mail, and SMS, not by a parties or unions, the coalition sprouted no leadership that could be pacified with minor concessions. The press sought out the cyber activists, who called themselves “¡Democracia Real Ya!” — “Real Democracy Now!”  — but cyber activists could not and did not seek to control over a mass consensual movement of  indignant people, the “indignados.”

The right-wing Popular Party at first imagined that the demonstrations could benefit them electorally, reasoning that indignados who boycotted the election would otherwise vote for the left. The right did win big, not just on May 22, 2011 but even more significantly in the parliamentary and presidential elections November 20. However, their political victory has deepened dissatisfaction with the political right and the whole political structure. The Socialist Party sought the protesters’ support, expressing sympathy with their grievances, but with little apparent success. The 15-M crowds had already decided that major parties and the trade unions were too bureaucratized were too embedded in the system to respond to their demands.

But how to create real democracy? The absence of an executive committee or even a “majority rules” consensus prevented the emergence of a unitary of demands;  however,  there did emerge a broad consensus on what people did not want: huge bailouts of the banks, huge cuts in health and education budgets, more bureaucratic, non-representative rule. The term “indignados” came from a book written in French by Stéphane Hessel,  a Résistance veteran. The book’s title, Indignez Vous! might be translated literally as  “Get indignant!,” but  “Don’t put up with it anymore!” would be a truer fit.  Indignation is essential as a starting point for protest, but for real, lasting change, as Hessel himself emphasized, indignados have to agree on and work for clearly defined goals. To define these goals, one of the many committees that popped up in the Puerta del Sol set up suggestion boxes for proposals, and gathered nearly 14,700.  When finally analyzed months later, the demands ranged from “open lists” of candidates, to harsher punishments of corrupt politicians, to nationalization of the banks and even abolition of the monarchy. Here was enough material for several political initiatives, requiring different kinds of actions.

The camp-ins amounted to intense political self-education, including the practical experience of working with diverse people to meet the needs of such an improvised settlement. The camp alumni have taken those experiences back to their neighborhoods and created local action groups to act locally while continuing their debates to develop larger strategies for acting in the whole society.  Many of the 15-M veterans again thronged the plazas of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and other cities on the anniversary,  on May 12, 2012.  The crowds in the plazas were somewhat smaller, and though there were a few late night skirmishes with police, they mostly respected the police order against setting up tents or sleeping bags. This has led some reporters to speak of exhaustion but that prospect is unlikely because the rallies are only the most visible part of a movement that has grown deeper and wider in 2012.

Meanwhile, the larger situation of Spain in Europe and of all of Europe in the world are getting worse, and activists realize that it will take more than mobilizations and neighborhood actions to create employment, restore social services,  and realize their many other demands. But, roused from their torpor, the two big union federations and the parties of the  left (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Izquierda Unida, and regional left parties) are now finding common ground rather than spending all their energy competing for the same constituents as in the past. Together they are making broader demands, and introducing more internal democracy . Demonstrations have become almost weekly events, with 15-M and unions joining forces, including in the broad labor-community general strike last march against the rightwing “labor reform”  that simplified the process of firing workers, and nullifying labor contracts while reducing economic equality. The indignados have not made a revolution, but should it come, they will be better prepared thanks to all their collective work since 15 May 2011.

Geoffrey Fox is an American author who resides in Almeria, Spain. He is the author of

 A Gift for the Sultan and other books. His blogs:  Literature & Society and also Lecturas y lectores.

Alzheimer's Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories

Further evidence (as though any were needed) that our most fundamental psychological need, and the only way we can imagine that we understand anything, is to spin a story about it. "It" being the narrative string connecting sights, smells, memories, and everything else. It's what dreams are made of, and theology, and scientific theories, and all our human relationships.

Alzheimer's Patients Turn To Stories Instead Of Memories : Shots - Health Blog : NPR

Plus of course our novels, short stories and poems. Like the ones these patients are creating.

The most explosive writer of the late 20th century?

Cinema Libre: Norman Mailer

Was Norman Mailer "the most important writer of the second half of the 20th century"? That's what Mary Dearborn (Mailer: A Biography) says in this 85-minute documentary on the life and lovers, boorish violence and charming gestures, rapier wit and bludgeon insults of this most contradictory American celebrity. 

Mary Dearborn's appraisal sounds over the top but — You know? It's not entirely absurd. He was in all events one of the heavyweight contenders on an era when a whole raft of writers was competing to be the most attention-getting, outrageous and provocative. It wasn't easy to be more provocative than Gore Vidal,  Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, or other contemporaries, or to outshine as a prosemaker that older generation of Hemingway and Faulkner, but Mailer did his damnedest. 

Like Vidal, he participated in politics as a candidate for office — not the Senate, like Vidal, but for mayor of New York. Like Hunter Thompson, he'd fuel himself on alcohol and drugs (though unlike Thompson, he was not a firearms enthusiast). Like Kerouac and other writers he admired, he wrote fast and furiously. And, most of all like Hemingway, he tried to live the experiences he wrote about, from war to prize-fighting to political campaigning.

And far more than any of them, even more than Hemingway, he outraged and openly insulted feminists. Though — or because — as he and many of his lovers said, he "loved" women. "Love" can mean many different things. In his case it meant that he strongly desired to couple with them, to possess them, to please them. And imagined that he was pleasing them by being outrageous, by talking dirty in public or even, in a drunken drug-fueled rage that is one of the most impactful moments of the documentary, attacking and stabbing his wife under the apparent illusion that he was a bullfighter and she the bull.


And he also wrote some of the most powerful descriptions of death and killing, of male rage. Drawing on and channeling his own rage to make us feel and shiver with the shot, the stab, the punch, the fuck. His themes were always sex and violence. His problem, that he didn't know the difference. Violence was always orgasmic, sex to be complete had to be violent.

He wasn't always a great artist — sometimes he was just a stupid clown. But he could be a great artist, and sometimes was. Maybe his most important work is the nonfiction (Armies of the Night, etc.). But — for him and I think in reality — it's all "fiction," because every supposed fact is really a distortion through somebody's way of viewing and describing events. And that's why a work that the reader knows is "fiction" can be truer, because it avoids the pretense of objectivity and openly calls on the reader to draw on his or her own experience to feel and complete the story. This is an insight from one of the "Extras" in the DVD, from an interview in Mailer's last year of life (2007).


This addition to the abundant Mailer literature — no writer seems to have attracted more attention — doesn't give us much in analysis of why America could grow and celebrate such an enormous ego, despite the suggestion in the title "Norman Mailer, The American"— that is, that he and his fame were uniquely American phenomena.  That's something for us to think about. Something about "America" made him possible. 

What the documentary does offer is a lively composite of videoclips and interviews, some of them insightful and others revealing the incomprehension of people Mailer had stunned — most notably, Adele Morales Mailer, the wife he took for a bull and nearly killed. Except for Adele's very personal account of that fateful night, most of this stuff we knew before.  But the documentary is most interesting, to me and probably most writers, for the scenes of Mailer himself, talking about life and writing.  If you get the DVD, don't miss the snippets of his remarks, at widely different times of his life, in the "Extras." Mailer was very intelligent, and occasionally — but only occasionally, and only when sober — he was also wise.

Just released by Cinema Libre 

Check out these video clips: http://vimeo.com/album/1917630 

Also worth reading, this obit from the New York Times, by Charles McGrath: 
Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Dies at 84

Corporate debt causing woes in Spain

All the more reason to think that the PP (Partido Popular) government's drastic budget cuts (and the "labor reform" cheapening firing) are just the opposite of what we need here. It's not the government deficit that is causing the crisis, but rather the crisis of the private economy that has caused the deficit.

In Spain, Grupo A.C.S.’s High Debt Reflects Country’s Finances - NYTimes.com

Imaginary friends on absurd adventures

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A small group of gentlemen with the leisure and resources to do whatever they choose, and without having anything particular to do, accompany Mr. Samuel Pickwick on his adventures to explore the more curious portions of the world — as long as they are not more than a two-day stagecoach drive from London, and there is assurance of a comfortable inn at their destination. There follow 57 chapters of silliness, in which Dickens alternately lampoons and lovingly illustrates personalities and customs — some truly absurd — of laborers, lawyers, medical students, journalists, coachmen, servants, businessmen and the idle and pretentious sub-aristocracy of the 1820s (supposed period of the Pickwick Club) or '30s (the novel began to appear in 1836).

Young Dickens (then 25) was invited to write text to accompany comic sketches of sportsmen by illustrator Robert Seymour, and at first he seems to have had no clear idea of how to develop it nor anything about the characters beyond the funny names he assigned them and the physical appearance that Seymour had given them. After the first installments, Seymour (who had a history of mental problems) committed suicide, but by that time Dickens' narrative inventions had already taken priority, so that instead of the text following the sketches, the sketches had to illustrate the new text, as other artists (R. W. Buss, briefly, and then Hablot Knight Browne, "Phiz") succeeded Seymour. Among the more memorable episodes is Pickwick's unequal litigation with the shyster lawyers Dodson and Fogg and Pickwick's subsequent sojourn in debtors' prison because he refuses to pay the obviously unjust sentence of costs and compensation for a breach of promise he never made (brought by a hysterical widow who mistook the overly-polite Pickwick's inquiries about lodgings as a proposal to marry). The story eventually becomes clear and the characters more clearly defined, especially Pickwick's cockney manservant Sam Weller, the quick-witted scoundrel Jingle, and Sam Weller's marvelously drawn coachman father, full of false wisdom mispronounced, generous and well-disposed to all but ready to fight for honor and justice when he thinks these have been offended.

Especially delightful to any of us in the trade are Dickens' wry comments on the craft of writing. There are many, including the nearly-illiterate Sam Weller's efforts to compose a love letter. But I'll quote only one, near the end (Ch. LVII) of this long serial, which is an observation on the work itself: "It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides." In this, his first long work of fiction, Dickens has succeeded to the delight of many thousands of his contemporaries and to generations ever since.

View all my reviews

David Damberger: What happens when an NGO admits failure | Video on TED.com

As a veteran of what we then called community development projects abroad — in my case, in the hillside barrios of Caracas — I recognized immediately the problem this young engineer is addressing. Our organization, like almost any NGO then or now, was shaped for the donors, not the end users, so if the project looked good, that was enough even if it didn't make people's lives any better.

I applaud the bold solution that Engineers Without Borders has adopted— acknowledging failure when it occurs and figuring out how to remedy it instead of replicating it.

David Damberger: What happens when an NGO admits failure | Video on TED.com

For more, check out the EWB Canada branch's Failure Reports.

The History of English in 10 Minutes Video | Smithsonian Magazine

Don't miss this! Get the real lowdown on how we got to where we are.

The History of English in 10 Minutes Video | Smithsonian Magazine

Thanks to Dirk van N. for forwarding.

Antitrust Primer for the Publishing Price Fixing Lawsuit

In the recent lawsuit between Apple and several big publishers on one side, and Amazon on the other, where Apple et al. wanted to let the publishers set ebook prices and Amazon wanted to be free to sell at any price (to undersell the publishers),  I was rooting for Apple et al. — because I'm an author and I saw their position as favoring authors, while not really hurting the consumer significantly. The Authors Guild has been arguing that the Amazon position, if it prevailed, would damage the whole publishing industry. Well, it has prevailed so far. The issues are complicated (it's the lawyers' job to make them so); here's an explanation by Jane Litte that should interest any other authors out there.

Antitrust Primer for the Publishing Price Fixing Lawsuit

And here's what Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild has to say about it: Grim news.

Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tony Judt's last book is his legacy, the closing lecture or set of lectures for the most important course this most European of Englishmen felt he had to impart to American college students like those he was teaching at New York University up until the last weeks of his life. He is mainly concerned to elucidate the successes, failures and future possibilities of social democracy, and to distinguish it from "liberalism", which not as the opposite of "conservatism", but rather the set of principles of individual freedom and tolerance of diversity that underpins most truly conservative thought. Though his hero is that eminent conservative John Maynard Keynes, an enlightened defender of capitalism, Judt is nostalgic for the European social democracy of the 1950s, when European states were powerful enough to impose their laws on corporations, and corporations were prosperous enough to provide funds for broader health, education and other social democratic programs. And even in the U.S., where "social democracy" was anathema (because it sounded like "socialism" which meant "communism" which meant everything evil), Democratic presidents (from FDR to LBJ) were able to increase social equality. But that time is past; as the current world-wide economic re-ordering makes plain, the kind of capitalism that could or would support social programs, and the power of states to command them, have all but evaporated before the triumph of finance capital, creating nothing itself and thus not increasing world wealth but merely seizing for itself and its billionaire leaders an ever greater portion.

"To put the point quite bluntly, if social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear." (p. 221) Fear that anything else — untrammeled finance capitalism or authoritarian dictatorship — will be far worse. Judt still thinks the nation-state can play a major role in preventing such disaster, but on the whole this is a thoughtful but ultimately pessimistic view he leaves us.

View all my reviews

An Overdose of Pain for Spain - NYTimes.com

This came out over a week ago, but I just saw it (thanks to a friend's recommendation) and it's still valid.
An Overdose of Pain for Spain - NYTimes.com