Report from the red zone: the struggles continue in Carboneras

And in all of Almería (the province). I just learned the other day that Almería was the last province to surrender to Franco's forces, 31 March 1939 -- two days after Jaén and 3 days after Madrid. It was not until Almería surrendered that the war was over. Except, it wasn't really over, merely interrupted for 36 years.

I'll have much more to say about this after I've had a chance to digest lots of new information and time to write it up in something clearer than my cramped notes. Besides the splendid little library of Carboneras (whose computer I'm using at this moment), there are all the splendid people, and the less splendid but nevertheless very interesting people, that I've been interviewing, in my quest to understand how Andalucía in general, and Carboneras and environs in particular, got so red (anarchists, socialists, communists). And of course there's snorkeling and trying to negotiate our way through the local bureaucracy (we're trying to build a house here). I'm getting deeply suntanned, mostly on my back -- because I spend almost all my water-time face down, watching all the bright-colored fish and seeking out the wonderful octopuses (octopoi? Is that the Greek plural?) in their reef caves. More later on the reds, both home-grown and the many who've come through or settled here from distant places.

España ha 20 años / Spain 20 years ago

Still in Carboneras. The Ayuntamiento has had the good sense to paint over the ugly graffitti I wrote about, and Susana has discovered where the real "moros" -- Moroccans, Algerians and others living in Carboneras -- hang out. They were delighted to see her friendly face in the little store where they can buy seasonings from home.

An interview of Mario Benedetti at his home in Spain (where he has spent many of his frequent exiles from Uruguay) reminded me why poetry is the noblest literary art. All else is "fiction," says Benedetti, and I know what he means. I have rarely committed poetry, but should do more -- not because I do it well (though maybe I can improve), but because it can be a more authentic expression of what one feels. Meanwhile, here is one of my few poems, written over 20 years ago on my first visit to Spain, in Spanish: Las cosas buenas de Andalucía.

Joda en Bédar

We interrupt our investigation of the intense struggles of Moros v. Cristianos, landed nobility v. starving peasantry, and -- continuing to the present day -- Reds (the dominant local political color, currently represented by the Partido Socialista Obrero de España, PSOE, in power in Carboneras, and the Izquierda Unida) v. Conservatives (I'm not sure what color is associated with them -- blue, maybe, or white). The investigation is proceeding well -- more on that later -- but we interrupted for very good reason: a wonderfully comical street festival in the compact little mountain town of Bédar. Five strolling musicians in yellow pants and straw hats (trumpet, trombone, saxophone and two drums) and five hyperactive clowns, variously striding and cavorting on stilts and step ladders, pedaling precariously on the steep narrow streets on unicycles, clambering up the iron grillwork on the houses, spraying kids from water bottles and enormous plastic boutonnieres, tossing candies and juggling balls, clubs, and so on. The strolling festivities began at 9 p.m., still very light out and not too late for the kids. We found our way (it wasn't easy) into the little town, perched on a peak behind other peaks, by about 20 past nine, and looked for the fun -- finally discovering we had driven into it. Fortunately, our SmartCar is so short that we could park it where there was no space, just as the man on high stilts came leading his merry crowd and all of the younger Bédar citizenry up the brick road, where there was now just room enough for stiltsman, unicycles, jugglers, musicians and kids and their parents to squeeze between our little car and the corner of the building opposite. We had driven in with our car's top open, so our little red car was immediately adopted as another theatrical prop. Stiltsman bent his long legs and rested his fanny on the edge of the car's roof and bent back as far as he could inside, just as though our car had been expected all along. We joined the revelers up more steep streets and down again, where they performed their finale -- with some lucky kids and embarrassed adults plucked from the town square to participate -- with juggling and feats of ridiculous physical prowess (jumping over a low stool, with much fanfare from the musicians, and then piling up more stools and, after great suspense and drum rolls, stepping around them). The jugglers were really good, one especially, but the others could keep up when he got them into a three-man exchange of missiles. Then the one who had seemed the most foolish and least talented of the clowns demonstrated superb drumming skills while teetering on a board across a cylinder rolling across another drumtop on top of a table in the plaza in front of the ayuntamiento. The kids were screaming with delight, and by then the littler ones seemed mostly ready for bed. And so were we. We got home to our supper a little before midnight. Oh, and there was a full moon, which we could see through our open top as we drove along the mountain edge over the water between Mojácar and Carboneras-

Carboneras, Chapter I: Blood on the Sand

The first thing we saw yesterday as, at around 6 or 7 p.m. we headed to the beach (good time of day -- the sun goes down around 10) was the aggressive graffitti. Crude white letters painted on the new washroom shed on the east end of the beach spelled out FUERA PUTOS MOROS. ARRIVA ESPAÑ (the graffitist, besides misspelling, had failed to calculate room for the final A). On the adjoining, shorter wall the complaint was spelled out in further detail: NOS ESTAN INVADIENDO ENTRETODOS. VAMOS A ECHARLLE (there's that spelling difficulty again) HUEVOS. Both walls are decorated with crude swastikas and other mysterious symbols: an A with extended crossbar, like wings, a cross through a circle.

Pretty scary. Is it really serious? There are plenty of bored young men in this little town, trying to amuse themselves by racing loud motorscooters at 1 and 2 in the morning. There are also maybe a score or so of immigrants, very noticeable in a town of about 5,000 permanent residents. Rumanians, Bulgarians, at least one family of black Africans, and possibly some "moros" (used loosely to include Moroccans, Algerians and other North Africans). But are the bored Spanish youth capable of violence? I know they don't typically know much history, but surely they are aware that "Arriba España" was the slogan of the Franco forces; I doubt though that they are aware that when he invaded Spain to overthrow the Republic, Franco's troops were the Moors he had commanded in Ceuta. This morning I photographed the graffitti, framing the shot to include the Moorish watchtower on the peak behind the town.

There has been a lot of blood on these beaches, some real and some theatrical. This is where they filmed "Lawrence of Arabia", where the 12th century watchtower plays the part of a Syrian castle and the sand as the desert of the fertile crescent. After the Catholic Monarchs (Fernando & Isabel, in case you've forgotten) chased the Nazarí­ Moors out of the area in 1488, and out of Granada (their last stronghold) in 1492, they and their successors had trouble staffing the watchtower, because the area -- depopulated after the expulsion of the Moorish agriculturalists -- was so isolated and vulnerable that the Spanish guards kept getting kidnapped by corsairs from the Barbary Coast. That is, the Moors returned, over and over again, and because their correligionaries the Ottoman Turks controlled the Mediterranean at the time, there was no one to stop them. They would pillage and burn and carry off "old Christians" (as distinct from newly converted former Muslims) as slaves. In one famous raid in 1573, they carried off more than 240. That, the Marqués del Carpio (then owner of the land all around here) decided, was the last straw. And with all the speed of cumbersome monarchy, some 20 years or so later (no exact record remains) the kingdom began building its fort, the Castle of San Andrés. Meanwhile, since the Battle of Lepanto (where Miguel Cervantes, not yet a famous writer but a mere sailor, lost the use of a hand), the Ottoman dominion had ceased and the danger of raids must have diminished.

I've begun trying to find out something about this little place that we have been visiting for years, and only today did I discover this history. The town exists mainly because the State required a garrison here. By 1850, the garrison of San Andrés was 28 men. The town had 300 houses for 450 "vecinos" (I suppose that meant "heads of households") and 1,800 "souls", a church, a plaza, a boys' school with 30 pupils and a budget, and a girl's school with 10 "discí­pulas" and no budget. (Wonder what they taught them? Whatever it was, I guess the girls didn't need books.) The main industry was fishing (it still is -- wonderful abundance of many kinds of fish), plus agriculture and mining (lead, later iron). Very poor. The land is terribly dry, and an especially prolonged drought in the 1870s drove many to emigrate. When people hear Susana & me talking, they take us for Argentines (she actually is; I just talk like one), and they hurry to tell us stories of relatives who emigrated to Argentina.

More blood in the sands in the 1930s. This was a "red zone," and still is -- the Socialist mayor has been in power for decades. I plan to interview some old timers, both reds and whites. And I hope also to find out what people have to say about the immigrants, and whether the "Arriba España" crowd is any kind of threat. More later. Hasta luego.

Ronda, Provincia de Málaga, España

Sorry for the delay in writing. It's not always easy to find both an internet business and the time to write when you're busy exploring ancient Moorish castles and even more ancient Iberian cave paintings, plus the many layers of Spanish and other cultures on top of those. We left JFK in New York on July 4, on a Spanish charter airline, Air Plus, and arrived in Málaga the morning of July 5 -- groggy, but not totally wiped out, because we both had managed to sleep a few hours in the cramped seats of the plane. We rented a SmartCar -- an engineering marvel, exactly half the length of a "normal" car, but so cleverly designed that we could fit ourselves and our luggage. It's a lot of fun -- it turns in no space at all, can be parked almost anyplace you could fit a motorcycle, and, if it weren't that the Andalucian sun is so brutal even as late as 8 or 9 at night, we could put the top down. We had a scare yesterday, though. On Sunday we had parked on a little street in Ronda, unaware that we had picked a loading zone -- which was OK until 3 pm on Monday (all business in Andalucia closes down from about 1 to 4 or 5 pm, but it seems that truck drivers wake up from siesta a little earlier). It was about 4:30 when we went to get our little red car, and there was a tow truck backing up to haul it away! It wouldn´t have required much effort from the tow truck. The city cop supervising was annoyed with us, pointed out the "loading zone" signs, and told us to get the car out of there -- which we gladly did. If we had had to get it out of the pound, it would have cost us muchos euros and hours of annoyance.

A few memorable moments (not involving tow trucks): the Roman theater in the city of Malaga (there should be an accent over that first "a" but Blogger is screwing up all the accents), discovered by accident during excavations in the 1960s, where in the 1960s and 70s rebellious directors and actors used to stage plays by Aristophanes, Euripides, et al., with veiled anti-Franco messages (not veiled heavily enough -- the Guardia Civil came down hard on them). This was a reminder of the Roman occupation of Andalucia, where Romanization occurred faster and more thoroughly than in the rest of Hispania. It was near Seville that the Romans defeated the Phoenicians -- earlier colonial occupiers -- in 206 BC. Then came the Vandals (from whose name we get Andalucia, I recently read) in the 4th century AD, then the Visigoths a century later, and then the first "Moors" -- Berbers from Morocco, led by Tariq, who was invited by one Visigothic faction to help fight another one, and ended up seizing the whole territory. They defeated the last Visigothic king, Rodrigo, in the early 8th c., and took control of the entire Iberian peninsula but for a Christian mountain redoubt in Asturias. All of this history (except the Vandals, who left few traces) is visible today in this province. More memorable moments (not remembered from centuries but only days ago): the Pasaje de las Chinitas, where stood the Cafe Cantante de las Chinitas made famous by a poem of one of Malaga's best known sons, Federico Garcia Lorca. It's a narrow pedestrian passageway, now filled with little stores and bars, but the Cafe Cantante is now a textile shop. The Alcazaba, where the Moorish rulers lived, right next to the ancient Roman theater (which the Moors must have known about; it disappeared under new construction after the Moors themselves had disappeared). As in many towns of Andalucía, the Christian conquerors built their church on the base of the former mosque, which gives the churches a peculiar, un-Christian shape. The central space of a Moorish mosque tended to be cubic, the ceiling rising as high as the width and length of thefloor. Christian churches of the period (15th-16th centuries) were, in other places, usually cruciform. Wonderful seafood (mariscos) at the Marisqueria Alaska; a thin, poor, but skilled guitarrist sitting in a passageway on Sunday morning, playing for coffee money. I stopped to listen more closely when he started to play one of the pieces that I've been practicing, because I like it and wanted to hear how to play it better. I thought it was by Fernando Sor, but he said no, it was anonymous, and he was sure it had been composed by sentimental priests (but surely in the time of Sor, early 19th century). The music and the lesson were easily worth the 2 euros I left him, and he was happy to have his coffee money at last). Parque Natural in the spectacular mountain forests between Malaga and Ronda. Ronda itself, once the home of an independent taifa, or Moorish kingdom, but conquered in 1485 by Fernando el Catolico (just seven years before he captured Granada and his wife, Isabel, dispatched a Genoese seafarer to go find India). The old part of Ronda is on the east side of the Tajo, one of Spain's great rivers, which here cuts deep through the rock ("tajo" means cut) making the Moorish castle unassailable from the west. We had a room in the Hotel Don Miguel, No. 101 (ask for it if you are in Ronda), on the west bank, with a balcony looking into the rough vertical walls of the gorge, where rock doves (we call them "pigeons" in New York) flutter and swirl and perch easily on the nearly shear rock face. Much more, of course. Yesterday we drove to Arcos de la Frontera, merely an hour from Ronda, the westernmost of the "white towns". This too was for a time an independent little taifa, but it was taken by the Christians under Alfonso el Sabio in 1285 -- a terrible earlier blow to Muslim hegemony. The Muslims by this time were having the same problem as the Visigoths 500 years earlier. They were fighting so much among themselves that they could not unite against the common enemy, whereas the Christians had finally gotten themselves more or less united. So, there went the neighborhood. It was a war between two monotheisms, but one was more monolithic than the other.

Today we plan to see some much more ancient signs of human settlement, cave paintings from long before the arrival even of the Phoenicians, before there was a Spain. Then back to Malaga, and tomorrow we drive through Granada and Almeria up to our destination, the little town of Carboneras.

BTW, somebody seems to have hijacked my e-name. If you get a "call for help" or invitation to play a game from "gefox", that's not me. Hasta luego.

Letters from Spain

We're off to Spain later today, and will be there till the end of the month. Next blog entry will probably be from an Internet café in Malagá or possibly the humble, always active little computer center in Carboneras, Provincia de Almería, on the Costa del Sol. It may be a day or so before I get a chance to put anything new here. Among the things I want to write about (but am too busy packing right now to do so): Can you have "good" politics presented in "bad" art? And what about politics itself as (performance) art? Last night we saw part one (nearly three hours) of La Commune (Paris, 1871). (We were too exhausted to stay for part II, which is almost as long.) I have a lot I want to say about that movie, and about the Commune, which has been a passionate interest of mine for a long time. And of course, there will be a lot about Spain.

Meanwhile, for a sample of how I would dramatize the Commune, I invite you to take a look at my screenplay, Courbet and the Red Virgin.

“Flirting with Fascism”

A friend just sent me this article (see link below) by John Laughland, on Michael Ledeen's enthusiasm for what he describes as the revolutionary Fascist "movement" in Italy, as distinct from Mussolini's authoritiarian "regime."

I found it fascinating. I had read and reviewed (for some obscure leftish academic journal edited by Alvin Gouldner) the interview of Renzo de Felice (mentioned in the article) when it came out. I think Ledeen is right about many things, especially the revolutionary character of the Italian Fascist movement in its early days. Quite similar to the romantic revolutionary ideas of the early Falange in Spain -- Primo de Rivera and his followers. There were also revolutionaries among the early Nazis (the Strasser brothers, notably).

"Revolution" here does not imply anything like equal justice and opportunity, which is what socialists usually have in mind. Fascist, Falangist and National Socialist revolutions were allied with romantic notions of nation and "race." Fascist, etc. "revolution" does share with Marx's, Lenin's and other "left" concepts of revolution a faith in creative destruction to be achieved by mobilization of the masses.

The fatal flaw in Ledeen's argument, I think, is the fantasy that "movement" can be separated from "regime" in actual practice. As soon as D'Annunzio actually had to govern Fiume, he had to stop mobilizing people -- because people in motion are likely to turn you out of power. And as soon as Franco or Mussolini or Hitler were able to consolidate power, each rapidly eliminated (or in the case of Franco, marginalized) the "revolutionaries" in his ranks.

And the fatal flaw in the revolutionary fascists' thinking and practice is the love of chaos for its own sake, which leads to such aberrations as the Falangist slogan "¡Viva la muerte!" There is no thought, or even tolerance, of a plan to mobilize the masses to create new institutions where their participation can become regularized. That is, they are not tearing down autocracy in order to build social democracy (which is what I think Hugo Chávez believes he is doing). Chaos is the antithesis of government, so whoever ends up as the strongest in the chaotic war of all against all will have to impose some kind of order. If routinized democracy is not permissible, then it has to be authoritarian and top-down from the boss. In Italy the slogan was "Credere, obedere, pugnare". In Germany, "das Führerprinzip".

Flirting with Fascism, by John Laughland

Roque Dalton - ¡ayayayay!

A few nights ago, when an anxiety attack (something to do with money, and Bush's war on democracy, and so on) was keeping me awake, I reached for my Virtual Prozac. I keep it in many varieties and flavors on the poetry shelf above my desk. It usually works. But on this occasion, I made the stupid error -- I should have known better, but was too groggy to keep some devil from guiding my hand -- of pulling out Poesía escogida of Roque Dalton.

For those of you who never knew -- which has been most of the world, even when he was alive -- and for those who have forgotten -- which is almost everybody else -- Roque Dalton (b. 1935) was a Salvadoran law student driven by the crude lawlessness of his country to commit poetry. He committed quite a lot of it, and survived two firing squads, gangs of murderous thugs, torture, animal attacks and outraged husbands while scrambling from one revolutionary posture to the next, in Central America and then Eastern Europe and back to Central America. Ultimately he was executed on May 17, 1975 by his supposed comrades in El Salvador's Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación Nacional, acting out the roles that Bertolt Brecht decades earlier had assigned to Chinese revolutionaries in "The Measures Taken" (Die Massnahme).

He's sometimes funny, in a sick kind of way. Mainly the poetry is painful. And it brings back memories of the horrible torment of those years in Central America. Not the sort of thing to calm your anxieties.

But worst of all: He was a terrible poet. Irritating, complaining, unmusical. Maybe that was why they shot him (the story has always been murky -- some of those involved rose to be powerful figures in the FMLN, and didn't want to talk about it). Still, he fascinates me. I think that Roque Dalton's poetry was not in his poetry, but in his life. One could use that life as the thread to draw through the bright-colored, tear-stained tejidos of a whole era of Central America.

For a photo and links to his poetry and biography (if you read Spanish), go to La página de Roque Dalton.

Becoming Kate Hepburn

I was going to say something about Katherine Hepburn, but Verlyn Klinkenborg has said it better: "...a perfectly selfless egotism, a person so ravished with self-confidence that she had the capacity to illuminate everyone around her." Anthony Hopkins recalled, in an interview on All Things Considered yesterday, that when as a very young actor he was playing her son in "The Lion in Winter," Hepburn told him, "Don't act." Meaning, I suppose, Just do the part as yourself, without trying to be anybody else. That was the thing about Hepburn: she didn't act. Even when she was playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, she was always Hepburn.

Hopkins of course does act; his "Titus Andronicus" is nothing like his "Hannibal Lecter." But he comes from a different tradition. Anyway, I was planning to spend the rest of the morning being Kate Hepburn, practicing self-confidence -- but wait, that's a contradiction! I think instead I should just try to take her advice: Don't act. So if you run into me today, you'll just find me.

A historical note

I just came across this old file -- written in January 1991.
Gulf War I, Bush I

"SCUDS" SADDAM, AMERICAN-STYLE HERO
by Geoffrey Fox

America loves a bad guy, the tougher the better. A guy who knows how to keep cool until the moment to unleash his deadly violence. A guy who betrays no fear when surrounded by vastly superior forces, and who combines shrewdness, courage and malice to damage his enemies even when it appears that all is lost. "Hombre," by Elmore Leonard, besieged by Mexicans. Butch Cassidy in Bolivia, John Wayne in the Alamo, Eddie Murphy in Korea, Rambo in Southeast Asia. Even non-whites may apply: the half-breed Billy Jack against the forces of law and order in the southwestern desert. Or Jimmy Cagney. Whose haberdashery gets more publicity than John Gotti's? Whose smirks, mumbles and rampages than the many movie "Godfathers'"? The American paragon is insolent, intransigent, and dangerous.

Maybe we've been misreading Saddam Hussein. Maybe he isn't so all-fired hot on Islam. Maybe he doesn't give a damn (to be polite) about the Palestinians, or even about Iraqi sovereignty in Kuwait. Maybe he's just seen too many American movies. Or maybe--and this too is possible--the values he learned scrapping on the dusty streets of Tikrit weren't too different from our own. Which means that to prevail, you've got to act tough, whatever the consequences. And prevailing is the only game worth the candle.

So, if this is the script, where does that leave our guys? All those airmen and sailors and soldiers and marines, from 28 nations, with tons of bombs to drop and thousands of missiles and many times more airplanes than Saddam ever had--if this is the script, then our guys are the cops, or the federales, the hordes of lawmen fought off by the heroic renegade.

Some people have been comparing him to Hitler. But that was a different movie, more like the evil Ming against Flash Gordon. This guy may be evil, a scourge of society--his own and those of his neighbors. The poison gas against his citizens, the horridly costly war against Iran, the invasion and pillage of Kuwait, and probably lots more crimes we're only dimly aware of. But as any American movie-goer knows, what counts is coolness under fire. He'll probably go down in flames at the end, and people in this country aren't likely to forgive him, and hardly anybody outside of Iraq loves him, but everybody, from our president on down, respects him.

And if Arabs have been as deeply influenced as we have by American movies, long after he is gone, his exploits will be sung in the souks and coffehouses as the people wait for the rise of a new Scuds Saddam.

Geoffrey Fox has no special knowledge of the Middle East, but he's seen a lot of movies.