[Apologies: I wrote this on Sunday but somehow neglected to post it until now. Since I wrote it, an association of victims of Franco in Spain has brought suit against Luciano Varela, the judge who is charging Garzón, and organizations of human rights activists in Argentina have filed another suit, charging Varela with precisely the offense he has accused Garzón of: "prevaricación", which in Spanish law means knowingly exceeding (abusing) one's authority.]
I've long admired Judge Baltasar Garzón. My alter ego, Baltasar Lotroyo, even took his name when he sprang into existence 5 years ago. I have on my desk a biography I bought, oh, probably in 2003 or '04 (Garzón: El hombre que veía amanecer, by Pilar Urbano. Plaza & Janés, 2000.) When he organized public round-tables with international jurists and other experts on human rights, at New York University, we attended (we were still living in New York City in 2005), and I was thrilled to run into him one night outside a supermarket and shake his hand -- he seemed pleased and surprised to be recognized.
I admire him the same way and for the same reasons I admire certain other courageous judges, professionals who are dedicated to the law and are willing to take professional and even physical risks to go after the powerful when they have done grievous wrong. There are many, fortunately (though they remain a minority in the profession). I'm thinking especially of Julio César Strassera, the Argentinian judge in the case against the military junta that had directed the "dirty war." I had the privilege of interviewing him when I was preparing my book on Argentina. As he made clear to me, and says again in this more recent interview, he had not sought this case, but it simply fell to him as the most experienced judge on deck when it came up. He was not a radical, had no known sympathy for the politics of the presumed leftists the military had been murdering and "disappearing," but he carried on, striving to do his duty in the face of threats against his life and with a public still cowed by the years of terror.
I'm also thinking of Juan Guzmán in Chile. And Carla Ponti, and many others.
Like most people outside of Spain, I first heard of Garzón when he ordered the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet for violations of human rights -- a bold action for a Spanish judge, because it was a first use of such powers in this way and because Pinochet had important allies, within and beyond Spain. And many judges would have been, and in fact were, too intimidated to prosecute powerful politicians. Garzón's initiative provided crucial support to courageous Chilean judges who had been stymied in attempts to bring Pinochet to trial for horrendous abuses, and encouraged other judges to prosecute human rights violators beyond their borders when local judges were unable or unwilling to do so. (See Universal jurisdiction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)
What is going on in Spain now in the trial of Garzón is a campaign by judges of the other kind, those who see themselves as the minions and executive servants of the powerful, to suffocate those jurists like Garzón who would dare use the law to unmask the corruption and crimes of their patrons. We shouldn't be surprised. We've known at least since Marx laid it out for us, 150 years and more ago, that the laws are made to protect those with power and property, and they consider judges to be there to protect them -- declarations of "equality before the law" and so forth notwithstanding.
Ridiculous and contorted as is the case against him, it looks like Garzón may lose this battle and his position on the court -- which would be a victory not only for the ideological heirs of Franco, but all those politicians (concentrated in the Partido Popular) who can't keep their hands out of the till. Spain's most famous judge (Garzón is surely the only Spanish judge most people outside the country have even heard of) will no doubt find dignified employment somewhere, maybe teaching, maybe in an international court, but Spanish justice will be deeply wounded. And Garzón's example will continued to inspire at least a few new jurists.
2010/04/13
2010/04/05
Penitents, pedophiles and politicos: Holy Week in Spain
I've committed myself to writing a weekly essay on Spain, and now the week is almost up. (In Spanish calendars, the week starts on Monday, so today is the last day.) This week has been holy week, Spain's great festivity of suffering, and it has been mostly occupied with penitents and pedophiles.You can see some of the penitentes here. In towns across Spain, guys get dressed up in robes and the conical headgear and masks of the condemned sinners of the Inquisition, supposedly to show that they are repentant of their own sins, and parade in mock solemnity. They look so spooky that, when the Ku Klux Klan was looking for ways to scare people, they imitated the costume. Every town does it a little differently. In some places they beat drums, in others they blow horns, in most they just march and sway ponderously in processions before the heavy litters, or tronos, of the virgin or the crucified Jesus or both.
I'm not sure why they do this -- if you ask them, they usually just refer to "tradition," as though condemned by inertia to keep doing something they don't really understand. Most of them, at least the ones I've talked to, don't have anything very serious to repent. Meanwhile the Church's pedophiles, and the bishops who protected them, remain mostly unrepentant, though greatly embarrassed that their secret has got out.
But enough about holy week. We can look instead at the unrepentant Partido Popular, whose greater sins have also been revealed in these past weeks. Not just Jaume Matas, until recently the PP's president of Baleares, was stealing millions. Back on the mainland, in Valencia, Madrid and even Galicia, the party was financing itself by selling favors to business interests, collecting the cash as "black money" -- under the table, unaccounted for, illegal. But are they even sorry?
One of the more incongruous aspects of the Holy Week processions is the eagerness of politicians to participate in them. But if they march in full penitente regalia, you might not recognize them. So here in Carboneras, the Socialist Party mayor and councilmen & women march behind the trono unmasked and unrobed, bestowing blessings and implicit appeals for votes with a smile and a wave. What would Pablo Iglesias, that old Marxist and founder of the Socialist Party, say?
2010/04/02
Amy Tan: Chance & creativity
These two brief oral essays by Amy Tan are charming and well-aimed. The first, about what her closet suggests about her disordered consciousness, is especially funny, and (I think) will be recognizable to you as it was to me: We all keep disordered closets in our minds.
Two Essays | Narrative Magazine
Her remarks on her second topic, "Serendipity"reminded me of unexpected discoveries in my recent work, set in and around Constantinople in 1402 and the world-changing battle at Ankara (Timur, or "Tamerlane," defeated the Ottoman sultan, incidentally saving Constantinople from the Ottoman siege).
At the beginning, I knew I had to bring together the fiercest of Ottoman warriors with the gentlest of Byzantine Christian princesses, who would have to be a daughter of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. But she would have to be nubile in 1402 and Manuel didn't marry until 1392, so she would have to be a bastard and yet treated as a princess. But was this historically plausible? Dubious, I went ahead anyway and created the mystically inclined, quick-witted bastard princess Theodota.
And then in my more-or-less random readings of everything I could find about the period I discovered Zampia, a real bastard daughter, whom Manuel cared for enough to marry her to a nobleman. And then, a Turkish friend surprised me with the information that the name I had invented for my Ottoman warrior, combining the words for "lion" and "hawk" -- Arslanshahin -- was in fact a well-known and fairly common name; she directed me to an Istanbul telephone directory, where I found several.
In these and other instances, my research kept confirming things I had already invented. That's what Amy Tan would call serendipity. I think it really has to do with being open to discovery, and to "listening" to an epoch or setting so we can anticipate the things that will fit.
Two Essays | Narrative Magazine
Her remarks on her second topic, "Serendipity"reminded me of unexpected discoveries in my recent work, set in and around Constantinople in 1402 and the world-changing battle at Ankara (Timur, or "Tamerlane," defeated the Ottoman sultan, incidentally saving Constantinople from the Ottoman siege).
At the beginning, I knew I had to bring together the fiercest of Ottoman warriors with the gentlest of Byzantine Christian princesses, who would have to be a daughter of Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. But she would have to be nubile in 1402 and Manuel didn't marry until 1392, so she would have to be a bastard and yet treated as a princess. But was this historically plausible? Dubious, I went ahead anyway and created the mystically inclined, quick-witted bastard princess Theodota.
And then in my more-or-less random readings of everything I could find about the period I discovered Zampia, a real bastard daughter, whom Manuel cared for enough to marry her to a nobleman. And then, a Turkish friend surprised me with the information that the name I had invented for my Ottoman warrior, combining the words for "lion" and "hawk" -- Arslanshahin -- was in fact a well-known and fairly common name; she directed me to an Istanbul telephone directory, where I found several.
In these and other instances, my research kept confirming things I had already invented. That's what Amy Tan would call serendipity. I think it really has to do with being open to discovery, and to "listening" to an epoch or setting so we can anticipate the things that will fit.
2010/04/01
My latest disguise
I just received the reviews by the "expert reviewers" of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, based on the excerpt consisting of the first three chapters of A Gift for the Sultan. One of them surmised that my novel must take place "at the height of the Holy Roman Empire in Turkey" -- which I can forgive. There must be a lot of people who confuse the Byzantines and their rivals. It was all a long time ago.The other review was more surprising. The reviewer was convinced that the author of this "more or less religious-themed historical science fiction story" must be a "young woman of religious bent." The reviewer wasn't much interested, because "I don't read science fiction, nor religiously-themed works."
Me either.
From p. 61 of July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20)only for academic discussion, evaluation, research and complies with the copyright law of the United States as defined and stipulated under Title 17 U. S. Code.
Armageddon is us!
Check it out. A photo essay on the military presence in our nation's capital. By Laurie Arbeiter.
2010/03/23
Health and justice (not so healthy)
"This Obamacare is moving us toward a system like Europe, and that's a disaster!" smirked a protester in front of the U.S. Capitol last night (to an interviewer from Spain's Channel 1 news).
It's that kind of abysmal ignorance that makes me keep writing these notes. You know of course that the health reform bill just passed is nothing like the health plans in Europe, which are far better in almost every way than what we've had in the U.S. and still better than the (much improved) system foreseen by this bill. The Spanish system is far from perfect, but it's free and universal (for Spaniards and anybody else from the European Union or other countries with reciprocation agreements). To avoid delays in treatment, many people supplement their social security coverage with private insurance, but because the state system is always available (and thus the private insurance not absolutely necessary), such private plans are far cheaper than in the U.S., and private doctor's fees are very low. We as U.S. citizens are not supposed to be covered by the free system (the U.S. has no reciprocation agreement with Spain), but the few times we've had to go to a clinic or hospital for something, the doctors have waved away our offers of payment. But a lot of Americans don't know that and won't believe you if you tell them. But I keep telling them anyway.
The U.S. can learn a lot from Spain about how to deliver health care and about several other things besides flamenco dancing and gourmet cooking, such as high speed rail and harnessing wind-power. But Spain, like the U.S., is a bundle of contradictory forces, and there are some things in this country that are as embarrassing to cultured Spaniards as the "Tea Party" is us Americans abroad. Among the great Spanish embarrassments is one I've mentioned before, the (in)justice system.
Getting judges to make fair decisions, independent of political loyalties or economic incentives, is always a problem, everywhere. And in its recent finding that coporations can spend all they like on election campaigns because they, like persons, should enjoy "freedom of speech," the U.S. Supreme Court has again struck a blow against democracy, as it had (for example) in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Bush v. Gore (2000).
But for all its problems, the U.S. system gives you a better chance of a fair hearing in politically sensitive cases than the one in Spain, where the bias in favor of the hard right and the liberals has become even more obvious than usual in the past couple of months.
A note on terminology: Americans think of "liberal" as being "left." In Spain, and in Europe generally, "liberals" are one part of the right, or "conservative" forces. They are the radical pro-business, free-enterprise types that Ayn Rand celebrated, akin to the neo-cons of the U.S. The "Greed is good" crowd. They push for privatizing services such as health and education and turning them into businesses, from which they and their friends can profit. Other main currents of the right include surviving fascists nostalgic for Franco, extreme Catholics nostalgic for the Inquisition (there are quite a few of those still around), white supremacists and intolerant nationalists, motivated more by ideology than by the bottom line. Politicians who call themselves "liberal," like Esperanza Aguirre, president of the Madrid autonomous community, are generally too sophisticated to let racism or religion interfere with their efforts to turn a fast euro. But they have no problem joining with the fascists and racists in street demonstrations or other actions to torpedo the Socialist Party and the trade unions and other groups that try to rein in their money-making efforts -- on the principle that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The problem with the justice system is that it is riddled with judges representing one or another of these right-wing tendencies. Some of them were sworn in under Franco. Many more of them were appointed by Aznar, who (following his mentor Fraga) pulled together the Popular Party as a coalition of fascists, nationalists and liberals (in the European sense). And in the Spanish system, judges choose other judges to sit on the higher courts.
The best analysis I've seen of the right-wing skewing of Spanish justice appeared in today's El País, in an opinion piece by sociologist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Los jueces en la política española. Unlike the U.S., where a single Supreme Court is genuinely supreme, Spain has three high courts, none of them clearly superior to the others: the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Court, and the General Council of Judicial Power. All (though each in a slightly different way) are highly politicized, subject to maneuverings of the political parties (in one case resulting in a stalemate between the Socialists and Populares, and thus no changeover of conservative judges whose terms have expired) and divided into factions of different ideological tendencies.
And this is what has made it possible for the Spanish justice system to prosecute its best-known, most independent and most prestigious judge, Baltasar Garzón, and thus to protect two objects of his judicial inquiries: the corrupt pols of the liberal (neo-con) tendency, caught in flagranti taking money and other favors for land deals, and the fascist and extreme nationalist groups opposed to any investigation of Franco-era crimes. And because of the multiple currents of the right, joined together against their common enemy, Garzón, they have brought multiple cases against him. The cases are absurd and would have been thrown out in any rational court system -- in fact, the government fiscal (roughly equivalent to attorney general) has asked that they be dismissed, but judges of one or another of the right-wing tendencies have persisted, even admitting the Franco falangistas and the ringleader of the PP's huge corruption network as accusers.
Garzón has received enormous support, both from ordinary Spanish citizens (including especially surviving relatives of Franco's victims) and from human rights advocates around the world. But the system grinds on, denying him privileges (including the opportunity to respond in court) ordinarily granted, especially to sitting judges.
And it's hardly consolation to think that things could be worse. We could, for example, be seeking justice in Italy.
It's that kind of abysmal ignorance that makes me keep writing these notes. You know of course that the health reform bill just passed is nothing like the health plans in Europe, which are far better in almost every way than what we've had in the U.S. and still better than the (much improved) system foreseen by this bill. The Spanish system is far from perfect, but it's free and universal (for Spaniards and anybody else from the European Union or other countries with reciprocation agreements). To avoid delays in treatment, many people supplement their social security coverage with private insurance, but because the state system is always available (and thus the private insurance not absolutely necessary), such private plans are far cheaper than in the U.S., and private doctor's fees are very low. We as U.S. citizens are not supposed to be covered by the free system (the U.S. has no reciprocation agreement with Spain), but the few times we've had to go to a clinic or hospital for something, the doctors have waved away our offers of payment. But a lot of Americans don't know that and won't believe you if you tell them. But I keep telling them anyway.
The U.S. can learn a lot from Spain about how to deliver health care and about several other things besides flamenco dancing and gourmet cooking, such as high speed rail and harnessing wind-power. But Spain, like the U.S., is a bundle of contradictory forces, and there are some things in this country that are as embarrassing to cultured Spaniards as the "Tea Party" is us Americans abroad. Among the great Spanish embarrassments is one I've mentioned before, the (in)justice system.
Getting judges to make fair decisions, independent of political loyalties or economic incentives, is always a problem, everywhere. And in its recent finding that coporations can spend all they like on election campaigns because they, like persons, should enjoy "freedom of speech," the U.S. Supreme Court has again struck a blow against democracy, as it had (for example) in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Bush v. Gore (2000).
But for all its problems, the U.S. system gives you a better chance of a fair hearing in politically sensitive cases than the one in Spain, where the bias in favor of the hard right and the liberals has become even more obvious than usual in the past couple of months.
A note on terminology: Americans think of "liberal" as being "left." In Spain, and in Europe generally, "liberals" are one part of the right, or "conservative" forces. They are the radical pro-business, free-enterprise types that Ayn Rand celebrated, akin to the neo-cons of the U.S. The "Greed is good" crowd. They push for privatizing services such as health and education and turning them into businesses, from which they and their friends can profit. Other main currents of the right include surviving fascists nostalgic for Franco, extreme Catholics nostalgic for the Inquisition (there are quite a few of those still around), white supremacists and intolerant nationalists, motivated more by ideology than by the bottom line. Politicians who call themselves "liberal," like Esperanza Aguirre, president of the Madrid autonomous community, are generally too sophisticated to let racism or religion interfere with their efforts to turn a fast euro. But they have no problem joining with the fascists and racists in street demonstrations or other actions to torpedo the Socialist Party and the trade unions and other groups that try to rein in their money-making efforts -- on the principle that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
The problem with the justice system is that it is riddled with judges representing one or another of these right-wing tendencies. Some of them were sworn in under Franco. Many more of them were appointed by Aznar, who (following his mentor Fraga) pulled together the Popular Party as a coalition of fascists, nationalists and liberals (in the European sense). And in the Spanish system, judges choose other judges to sit on the higher courts.
The best analysis I've seen of the right-wing skewing of Spanish justice appeared in today's El País, in an opinion piece by sociologist Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Los jueces en la política española. Unlike the U.S., where a single Supreme Court is genuinely supreme, Spain has three high courts, none of them clearly superior to the others: the Constitutional Tribunal, the Supreme Court, and the General Council of Judicial Power. All (though each in a slightly different way) are highly politicized, subject to maneuverings of the political parties (in one case resulting in a stalemate between the Socialists and Populares, and thus no changeover of conservative judges whose terms have expired) and divided into factions of different ideological tendencies.
And this is what has made it possible for the Spanish justice system to prosecute its best-known, most independent and most prestigious judge, Baltasar Garzón, and thus to protect two objects of his judicial inquiries: the corrupt pols of the liberal (neo-con) tendency, caught in flagranti taking money and other favors for land deals, and the fascist and extreme nationalist groups opposed to any investigation of Franco-era crimes. And because of the multiple currents of the right, joined together against their common enemy, Garzón, they have brought multiple cases against him. The cases are absurd and would have been thrown out in any rational court system -- in fact, the government fiscal (roughly equivalent to attorney general) has asked that they be dismissed, but judges of one or another of the right-wing tendencies have persisted, even admitting the Franco falangistas and the ringleader of the PP's huge corruption network as accusers.
Garzón has received enormous support, both from ordinary Spanish citizens (including especially surviving relatives of Franco's victims) and from human rights advocates around the world. But the system grinds on, denying him privileges (including the opportunity to respond in court) ordinarily granted, especially to sitting judges.
And it's hardly consolation to think that things could be worse. We could, for example, be seeking justice in Italy.
2010/03/18
Sects and violets
My mother was a lover of sects and violets. African violets gave her a pleasure whose source I never quite understood: whether their color, their fuzziness, or their function as reminders of some pleasant time.
I can't be blamed for the violets, but her interest in sects may have been mainly my fault. She probably would have remained content with a vague Protestantism as soft and fuzzy as her violets (especially in its vision of the afterlife). But she accompanied me -- that is, she observed and reflected upon my behavior -- as I searched for the One Great Truth somewhere in the nebula of hints and promises of Protestant Christianity. When I was 13 or 14 I thought that I had found it in Christian Science, that extreme expression of American positive thinking (evil, illness or misfortune are mere illusions). Before I even finished high school I had given up that attempt at faith in the Incredible, but my mother persisted, partly because the Scientific Statement of Being had the added attraction (for her) of having been written by a woman.
In college I read up on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and my college roommates briefed me on Judaism. Some Baha'is took me to their splendid mosque-like temple in Boston (also, incidentally, home of the Mother Church of Christian Science). Baha'ism was appealing, with its claim of the ethical oneness of all religions -- that is, disregarding their peculiar dietary, sartorial and other ritual demands. But if all the gods are the same God, then what is God if not Us? The rules of behavior that the Baha'is claim to find in all the great religions (those that have survived for many generations and that appeal to the largest numbers of believers) are simply those that work best for the survival of our species: don't murder, don't steal, help one another out when someone is in trouble.
By this time I was also reading Marx. We make ourselves and our social orders, and every social order contains forces capable of destroying that order and creating a new one, and we are therefore free to make or destroy if only we understand that we have that power ("consciousness"). I liked that. And although today I would not call myself a "Marxist" (neither would Marx), many of his expressions and his whole approach to philosophical issues remain part of my thinking.
What I would call myself today is a "pragmatist." When I read Rorty, or Peirce or William James, I feel that I'm in a conversation with like-minded friends. Also, Jeremy Bentham (despite his unmusical prose), Benjamin Franklin or Voltaire (much better stylists), all of them (to my mind) pragmatists avant la lettre -- that is, before Peirce invented the term and James and Dewey and others popularized it. It is not an exclusively American philosophy (I've already mentioned Bentham and Voltaire), but it is especially typical of America, a country where anything is believed to be possible and it's up to us to realize those possibilities.
We have no choice but to make choices, though for many people the choice is to deny that we have any choice. That is, they choose to submit themselves to some higher authority (such as Allah, Jehova or karma). Pragmatism, or Marxism, in my reading of it, or any philosophical starting point that denies a higher authority and absolute moral judge, requires more courage than many people can muster. You have to be willing to assume responsibility for your own actions and your own decisions of right and wrong. And to face the music when things go wrong, making do with whatever you have at hand and not expecting some miracle to save you.
I enjoyed this essay by Stanley Fish, which says in more detail and a more complicated vocabulary pretty much what I had worked out for myself, with a lot of help from the authors I read. The problem now is how to survive as a pragmatist in a world full of fanatics. Sometimes the most pragmatic option is to pretend to believe.
Pragmatism’s Gift - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
I can't be blamed for the violets, but her interest in sects may have been mainly my fault. She probably would have remained content with a vague Protestantism as soft and fuzzy as her violets (especially in its vision of the afterlife). But she accompanied me -- that is, she observed and reflected upon my behavior -- as I searched for the One Great Truth somewhere in the nebula of hints and promises of Protestant Christianity. When I was 13 or 14 I thought that I had found it in Christian Science, that extreme expression of American positive thinking (evil, illness or misfortune are mere illusions). Before I even finished high school I had given up that attempt at faith in the Incredible, but my mother persisted, partly because the Scientific Statement of Being had the added attraction (for her) of having been written by a woman.
In college I read up on Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and my college roommates briefed me on Judaism. Some Baha'is took me to their splendid mosque-like temple in Boston (also, incidentally, home of the Mother Church of Christian Science). Baha'ism was appealing, with its claim of the ethical oneness of all religions -- that is, disregarding their peculiar dietary, sartorial and other ritual demands. But if all the gods are the same God, then what is God if not Us? The rules of behavior that the Baha'is claim to find in all the great religions (those that have survived for many generations and that appeal to the largest numbers of believers) are simply those that work best for the survival of our species: don't murder, don't steal, help one another out when someone is in trouble.
By this time I was also reading Marx. We make ourselves and our social orders, and every social order contains forces capable of destroying that order and creating a new one, and we are therefore free to make or destroy if only we understand that we have that power ("consciousness"). I liked that. And although today I would not call myself a "Marxist" (neither would Marx), many of his expressions and his whole approach to philosophical issues remain part of my thinking.
What I would call myself today is a "pragmatist." When I read Rorty, or Peirce or William James, I feel that I'm in a conversation with like-minded friends. Also, Jeremy Bentham (despite his unmusical prose), Benjamin Franklin or Voltaire (much better stylists), all of them (to my mind) pragmatists avant la lettre -- that is, before Peirce invented the term and James and Dewey and others popularized it. It is not an exclusively American philosophy (I've already mentioned Bentham and Voltaire), but it is especially typical of America, a country where anything is believed to be possible and it's up to us to realize those possibilities.
We have no choice but to make choices, though for many people the choice is to deny that we have any choice. That is, they choose to submit themselves to some higher authority (such as Allah, Jehova or karma). Pragmatism, or Marxism, in my reading of it, or any philosophical starting point that denies a higher authority and absolute moral judge, requires more courage than many people can muster. You have to be willing to assume responsibility for your own actions and your own decisions of right and wrong. And to face the music when things go wrong, making do with whatever you have at hand and not expecting some miracle to save you.
I enjoyed this essay by Stanley Fish, which says in more detail and a more complicated vocabulary pretty much what I had worked out for myself, with a lot of help from the authors I read. The problem now is how to survive as a pragmatist in a world full of fanatics. Sometimes the most pragmatic option is to pretend to believe.
Pragmatism’s Gift - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
2010/03/15
Egyptian interruption
I skipped last Monday's essay on Spain because I was on a cruise ship on the Nile, far from Internet connections and with other things on my mind. I'm writing up details of that trip on the Spanish-language blog (link below) that I share with my alter ego, Baltasar Lotroyo.
Our tour started in Aswan, whence some of us took a bus south (upriver) to Abu Simbel and the colossi of Ramses II. We then cruised downriver to Luxor, where we saw more remains of pharaonic, Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. From there we flew to Cairo, where we saw as much as you can see in three days -- we want to go back. More than that, Susana & I plan to study Arabic to get to know not only Egypt but the other countries speaking that language.
But not now. I have to avoid repeating an error that has has caused me great problems in the past: starting a new big project before I've completed the ones I have pending. That's why I took so long to finish my doctoral dissertation and many other things. Right now my biggest pending project is a book on Latin American architecture and urbanism, so if I take up any new language, it will have to be Brazilian Portuguese. Then, Arabic.
Same goes for smaller projects. Since I'm thinking and writing about Egypt this week, I'm suspending writing about Spain for now. I should have something thought-out about Spanish justice, or economy, or culture, to post next Sunday or Monday.
Our traveling companions were all (almost all) Spanish or Latin America. So that they can read my commentaries, I'm posting in Spanish. You can find them at Lecturas y Lectores.
Photo by Gilbert de Jong from Digital Wallpaper.
Our tour started in Aswan, whence some of us took a bus south (upriver) to Abu Simbel and the colossi of Ramses II. We then cruised downriver to Luxor, where we saw more remains of pharaonic, Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. From there we flew to Cairo, where we saw as much as you can see in three days -- we want to go back. More than that, Susana & I plan to study Arabic to get to know not only Egypt but the other countries speaking that language.But not now. I have to avoid repeating an error that has has caused me great problems in the past: starting a new big project before I've completed the ones I have pending. That's why I took so long to finish my doctoral dissertation and many other things. Right now my biggest pending project is a book on Latin American architecture and urbanism, so if I take up any new language, it will have to be Brazilian Portuguese. Then, Arabic.
Same goes for smaller projects. Since I'm thinking and writing about Egypt this week, I'm suspending writing about Spain for now. I should have something thought-out about Spanish justice, or economy, or culture, to post next Sunday or Monday.
Our traveling companions were all (almost all) Spanish or Latin America. So that they can read my commentaries, I'm posting in Spanish. You can find them at Lecturas y Lectores.
Photo by Gilbert de Jong from Digital Wallpaper.
2010/03/13
Robber Barons of Social Change
Mark Engler's review of Michael Edwards new book, Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World gives a neat summary of the weaknesses of philanthropic capitalism -- which is always more about capitalism (the bottom line) than about people's needs.
Toward Freedom - The Robber Barons of Social Change
Toward Freedom - The Robber Barons of Social Change
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