The Trouble with Arizona | The New York Review of Books

The Trouble with Arizona | The New York Review of Books

Sad, sensitive reporting by Larry McMurtry, who knows the scene well.

World Cup Live: Netherlands vs. Spain - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com

In case you hadn't heard. Boy, Spain needed that! Some good news at last.
World Cup Live: Netherlands vs. Spain - Goal Blog - NYTimes.com

As you might expect, people are going wild here. Not only massing in the streets to cheer the players, but even going to restaurants and stores and buying things! Nobody had been buying much of anything for months. It's the "Yes we can!" fever. Though I must confess, after the fireworks and horn-tooting on Sunday night, Carboneras has been pretty quiet.

Community Response Saves Beaver Statue

Too funny for outrage.

Community Response Saves Beaver Statue — Blogging Censorship

Anybody who looks at this beaver's belly and sees "a depiction of two hands praying" is blinded by saintliness—or has never experienced an intimate encounter with a woman.

"The Red!"

One reason that natives and the rest of us who live in and love Spain are so wildly enthusiastic about "La Roja"—"The Red," so called for the usual color of their uniforms—is that our fútbol champions seem to be the only Spaniards who know how to work as a team. If only the políticos could try that, instead of constantly sabotaging one another maybe this country could climb faster out of its recession, or the 17 autonomous communities each scrambling for more rights than its neighbors, or the judges, so anxious when one of their number is a star player that they have to gang up to disqualify him (see my earlier notes on the disgraceful actions against Judge Baltasar Garzón, but he's not the only victim).

And the other reason is that those 11+ players (11 on the field plus the guys on the bench) and their trainer and support staff are—mirabile dictu—famous but with not even a whiff of suspicion of corruption. How rare in Spain, where the idea of the rich and powerful is that winning is everything, todo vale—that is, "anything goes"—in pursuit of political or other victory or money or sexual conquest.

And they are so good!

Oh, and I just discovered that Eduardo Galeano's magnificent book (cited in a recent blog) is available in English: Soccer in Sun and Shadow. (Now, why do Americans call fútbol "soccer"? It's played with the feet, which is why the English (who invented it) called it football. And why do we Americans give the name "football" to that other game, where the ball is not advanced exclusively by kicking but by throwing or carrying it while crashing bodily through opponents, instead of calling it, say, "war"?)

In about half an hour we'll be joining our buddies in the Asociación Cultural Levantisca to cheer on la roja and see just how good they are. ¡A por ellos, España!

(Not that I have anything against the Dutch. But it would be immensely satisfying to see a victory of "the Red" over "the Orange.")

Photo from as.com/futbol

Personal update

A friend I hadn't heard from for a while asked me what I was up to. Lots of things, really, too many to keep track of. There's the approximately-weekly essay on Spain (I try to post every Sunday, but sometimes life gets too complicated and, like today, it comes in late). There's guitar practice, flamenco and classical; maybe some day I'll be good enough to play for you. There's that overdue book we're writing for Norton on the history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America (the pre-Columbian section is done and now my co-author Susana & I have jumped all the way to the 20th century). And there's the novel I'm in the process of publishing and which should be available by fall. And ideas for two other novels that I've barely started. Travel, most recently to Paris, then Barcelona, then Madrid (see my blog entries on Paris, 2010/06/10, and "Barcelona or Madrid?"2010/06/23).

And something else that will no doubt surprise my old friend, and anybody else who has known me over the years: I've been seduced by fútbol. Me, who since a grade school flirtation with baseball (obligatory in a suburb of Chicago, with two major league teams), me who had never paid any attention to any professional sport. Until now.

In Spain, fútbol is a collective passion that I finally couldn't ignore. At first I had no idea what those 22 guys were doing on the field. Well, 20 of them, anyway—it was pretty obvious what the portero or arquero guarding the net was up to, but the maneuvers of the other guys as they scurried up and downfield were a mystery. I've now watched enough (on the tele) and read enough to enjoy a really good pass, or a steal of the ball, or—more rarely—¡gol! We've been reading Eduardo Galeano's marvelous Fútbol a sol y sombra, and like him, my enthusiasm isn't limited to any particular team. I'm glad that Spain has been doing so well, since I live in Spain, and I was disappointed that Argentina got so thoroughly wiped out by Germany, since we have a strong Argentinian attachment in our house, but I can root for a good play by Germany or Ghana (which started out well) or even Paraguay ("even," I say, because those boys were playing rough and playing not to win, but not to lose—and an all-defensive game is much less fun to watch). And it gives me something to talk about with folks in town here in Carboneras.

Actually everything's going pretty well for us here in southern Spain, better than for a lot of people we know here. By a combination of luck and smart decisions by the smarter half of this couple, we got ourselves cushioned just in time before the "crisis"—as this deep economic recession is mislabeled. (A "crisis" is supposed to be a turning point, but so far the bankers and economics ministers haven't agreed on where to turn and seem to be hoping for a miraculous return to the old system. But I digress.)

My only problem is that I've fallen a few decades behind in my schedule. I was supposed to become a famous novelist by the time I was 45, and a good guitar-player in my 20's. I was also supposed to be fluent in French (I'm part way there) and German (long way to go still) and a couple of other languages by now. (I hadn't really planned to learn Spanish; it just happened.) And to have written more books. I haven't abandoned any of these projects, but it looks like I'll be obliged to live a little longer than I had expected to get them all done.

Insult to Catalonia?

The rhetoric around the new estatut of Catalonia has become so heated that you might get the impression that something momentous was underway. And really, something is, but not what you might think from the blizzard of verbiage.

For those who haven't been tuned in: In 2006 Catalonia (Catalunya, in their language, català), one of Spain's 17 "autonomous communities", submitted a proposed reform of its 1979 governing charter (estatut) for approval by the Spanish parliament (las Cortes) and courts, with great fanfare and mobilization of Catalan public opinion. Now, after four years of confused and heated debate, Spain's Constitutional Court has voted to accept most of the clauses but not all of them, and has re-interpreted the most controversial statements in a way that at least some Catalans find deeply offensive.

This wordy and detailed document (several times longer than the U.S. Constitution, for example) included several provisions and rhetorical flourishes which excited opponents to paroxysm, resulting in a major anti-estatut and anti-Catalan campaign orchestrated mainly by the Partido Popular. What they objected to mostly were the declaration that Catalonia is a "nation" (nació), the priority of català over castellano (the main language of Spain) in government dealings and public education, and the arrogation of exclusive rights over certain waterways that also serve neighboring autonomous communities. The Partido Popular's campaign involved a demand for an all-Spanish plebiscite on Catalonia's estatut (something that hadn't be required of any of the other autonomous regions which were also reforming their charters), the collection of signatures against it, and even an attempted boycott by other Spaniards of Catalonian products, especially the bubbly wine known here as cava (essential for New Year's Eve and other celebrations).

This anti-estatut campaign stimulated the Generalitat—the Catalan government, currently a tripartite coalition headed by the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC)—to intensify its opinion-mobilization campaign in favor of the new charter, which was also supported by the main opposition parties in Catalonia. This near-unanimity within the autonomous community can be explained by some of those rhetorical flourishes, inserted to appeal to Catalan nationalists. Some Catalans celebrated their own non-binding plebiscites, a political stunt which drew few voters, almost all of them pro-estatut, proving nothing. More impressively, supporters mobilized virtually the entire press of Catalonia, including "progressive" and "conservative" newspapers, whether printed in castellano or català, to demand "respect" for Catalonia from other Spaniards, namely by approving the estatut. Meanwhile, as the Constitutional Court dithered and debated, the president of the Generalitat challenged the legitimacy of the Court to pronounce on this issue at all—since several judges whose terms had long expired were still sitting on the court (due to a stalemate between the Partido Socialista and Partido Popular, which had to agree on the replacements).

Nobody's happy with the court's final decision, but probably not much will happen. The Generalitat got most of what it wanted, except that they cannot demand that all their citizens speak català in order to get services, and instead of describing themselves as a "nation" they have to settle for being a "nationality". What will happen with the dispute over who controls the waterways is still to be resolved. The present government of the Generalitat may fall in the next elections (the economic crisis is even more important to voters than the handling of the estatut), but even if the right-wing Catalan nationalists return to power, Catalonia is not about to secede. Spain needs its 7 million+ people (almost one-sixth of the total Spanish population) and its industry and commerce, and Catalonia needs Spain, which is its principal market. 

This whole brouhaha has been just one more of the symptoms of the difficult and continuing transition from the centralist and authoritarian government of Francisco Franco to the decentralized and democratic Spain that is still emerging. The original, 1979 charters of autonomy left many issues ambiguous and (of course) failed to anticipate new social and political needs of 30 years later. The revisions of most of those charters have gone fairly smoothly, but the particular histories of Catalonia, the Basque Country, and to some extent Galicia, each with its own language and national aspirations, make negotiations more delicate.

The Spanish system of "autonomous communities" is unique, neither completely centralist nor completely federalist. Areas that will continue to be subject to intense and sometimes acrimonious negotiation include (not just for Catalonia but for all 17 communities): control over rivers that flow through more than one "community"; the content and language of public education; distribution of tax revenue both internally (to provinces and municipalities) and externally (to the central government); access to and regulation of public health facilities (for example, until very recently the community of Navarra refused to accept the legalization of abortion, though this had been made Spanish law by the Cortes), and telecommunications, immigration policy, and so on. But Spain is not "breaking apart" (as the alarmists in the Partido Popular like to claim). It is evolving.

Comunidad autónoma - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre
Catalonia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Potosí and us

Now that global capitalism has crashed once again, it may help order the mind to look back on how it all began. This is one of the multiple agendas of the complex, exhausting, sometimes exhilarating exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía, Principio Potosí / ¿Cómo podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?

It is the premise of this multimedia, multinational, multiartist, intensively interactive show—it comes with a roadmap inviting the conscientious viewer to cross and recross the big exhibition space many times, to pause before videos or graphics or installations, and even to climb platforms and ladders to view everything in proper sequence—that it was the silver of the Cerro Rico ("Rich Mountain") of Potosí in the Bolivian Andes that made it all possible. That's the mountain, disguised as the Virgin Mary, or rather fused with her (silver made sacred) in an anonymous 1720 painting reproduced in the show. This high Andean mountain with its seam of silver (now in Bolivia) was sacred to the community there, but to the Spanish conquerors all that was sacred was the wealth they could extract from it, and raping and ravaging the mountain was of no concern.

The Reina Sofía show traces how the rich silver lodes of Potosí financed the global spread of the then new "system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life"—as Marxist scholar Ellen Meiksins Wood defines capitalism in her indispensable little book, The Origin of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999).

This was radical break from pre-capitalist market, trade or pillage economies, which were often brutal and violent but did not buy and sell human labor (there were lots of slaves, but not organized slave markets) nor regard profit as the highest goal. Those pre-capitalist exploiters were far more intent on glory and immortality (as a tour of the ruins of ancient Egypt recently reminded us).

For Wood, the shift began with the enclosures in England in the 15th century or earlier, and she doesn't mention Potosí. But what gave it a big boost, and expanded London's force as a market vortex, was the wealth sucked out of new colonies in América, especially Potosí.  As the curators of the Reina Sofía show (Alice Creisher, Max Jorge Hinderer, Andreas Siekmann) write in the exhibition guide, the king of Spain had so many debts that as soon as the treasure galleons reached the Port of Cádiz, bags of silver were transferred directly to the ships belonging to his creditors elsewhere in Europe—England chiefly.

But the museum show is not only about Bolivia and the careless, more or less accidental genocide in the Americas (the conquerors didn't set out deliberately to wipe out the native population, and sometimes even lamented the suffering they had caused, but they had to have that silver!). It also wants us to see the parallels to the grinding down of humans in other parts of the world to feed the insatiable monster of profit and luxury for the few. A group of Russian performing artists have contributed a powerful video of a theater piece, about the collusion of political bosses, the Orthodox church, the arts establishment, criminal gangs and a consortium from  the Arab emirates to build a huge Gazprom Tower in St. Petersburg (illustration), over the opposition of conservationists and others. The link takes you to the architects' page. But here you can see the theater piece itself without even traveling to Madrid; whatever the merits of the argument, we loved it as proof that there are still Marxists (and Brechtians) in Russia. Chto Delat: Songspiel (The Tower).

Another narrative strain is about the superexploitation of Chinese workers, and their communal resistance efforts, including songs and workshops with artifacts made by children. And there are videos of performance pieces by indigenous women in La Paz, subverting the whole colonial concept of Christian submission in a dance by a rebellious virgin and the stripping naked of the colonial rulers in familiar old portraits. And graphs and documents on workers in Dubai, along with a heavy critique of Seville's Dubai-financed art biennial.

And repeated denunciations of the Catholic Church's complicity in exploitation, not only in colonial America, but in the Spanish civil war and the Franco regime. And let's not forget The Karl Marx School of the English Language, another Chto Delat production from Russia, where you can hear Russians trying to enunciate in English Karl Marx's famous description of "the rosy dawn of capital"—the primitive accumulation from places like Potosí. It's a strange thing to hear in an art museum in Madrid, where you can't expect everyone to follow Russian-accented English, but in the complex context of the whole show, for those of us who can follow the text, it was a welcome reminder of a powerful and extremely relevant text.

Barcelona or Madrid?

Back to Spain (Madrid right now) and a familiar Spanish keyboard. We left Paris (Beauvais, the little airport an hour's busride from Porte Maillot), for Barcelona on Saturday. Our Ryanair flight to Reus (another little airport for low-cost airlines about an hour and a half from the city) was so long delayed that we were too late for the bus and had to wait 3 hours, until after midnight, for a trip to the city. Plaça de Catalunya was still hopping at 2 in the morning, mostly noisily drunk young foreigners.

We like Barcelona, and even thought of buying a little apartment there for when we need a dose of urban life. But we didn't. One reason was that the prices for what we thought were attractive spots, in the Ciutat Vella and the Born, were prohibitive, and most required long climbs up flights of narrow stairs. The other reason was that, as charming as the city is to visit, you wouldn't want to live there. Not if want to be more than a tourist, but a participant in the society. That at least was our impression, from the tone of political debates and what we could learn of cultural events. So we opted for Madrid, a much bigger city (3,256,000 pop. vs. Barcelona's 1,621,537), less charming but lots more active.

Our impression was confirmed by friends, none of them Catalan-born but all long-time residents of Barcelona (20 years or more) and fluent in Catalan. (Fortunately they were also fluent in "Spanish", i.e., Castilian, so we could communicate.) As they could tell us from their own experience, cultural and professional opportunities (a stage for your theater production, a publisher for your magazine or book, advancement in a government office or private company) are (with rare exceptions) tightly controlled by networks of old boys (and maybe some old girls) from established Catalan families. It's so bad that some of the most creative Catalan artists have chosen to make their careers in other parts of Spain and/or in that other language—most noisily, the irreverent playwright and producer Albert Boadella (that's he, sitting on the toilet). And if a Catalan artist such as Joan Manuel Serrat or writer (Javier Cercas, Ana María Matute, Carlos Ruiz-Zafón and many, many others) wants to perform/publish in Spanish (the only way to reach a far larger and international audience), he or she must be prepared to face hostility from the Barcelona intellectual elite.

As Susana points out, all cities are run by coteries of little clans or "mafias" (in Argentina we call them camadas) trying to advance only their own. But in bigger, more diverse cities, like Madrid or New York, their are too many of them for any one to hold a monopoly. Beautiful Barcelona has a lot to offer, but there's an awful lot it withholds.

Boadella photo from Don't Disturb Magazine
Catalan writers in Spanish (article in Spanish)

Too much to say from Paris

One of the commonest reasons a would-be writer sits paralyzed before a blinking computer screen or a blank sheet of paper, or the tribe's singer commands attention but is unable to speak, is that there is too much to say. Another reason might be that he is using an unfamiliar French keyboard where the letters are in unexpected places. But let's return to the first impediment. The keyboard doesn't stop me, it just makes everything painfully slow. And it's late here, so all I'll attempt tonight is a brief list of thoughts that this return to Paris brings to mind.

Some context: a tiny apartment in Montmartre (18è arrondissement), rented this week so I can be at the presentation of a book (Above Ground, where I have a story) this Thursday at the Village Voice Bookshop here. Susana and I arrived on Saturday, and so far we've experienced:

• Palais de Tokio, the museum of contemporary art now showing "Dynasty", exhibition of 40 installations by upcoming (if they're lucky) young artists;
• The headquarters of the Parti communiste français, a big and graceful building by Oscar Niemeyer, that can be my "hook" to talk about what has happened and what is happening with the Left in France;
• The funiculaire up to the top of the Butte Montmartre, now supporting the huge and ugly Basilique du Sacre Coeur, but important to me for an earlier memory that the big church (with its around-the-clock prayer services) was meant to erase. That was where the revolt that sparked the Commune took place, 18 March 1871. The Paris Commune, a defining episode of the European and global Left--well, that's one of those topics on which there is too much to say: So far I've only made one small attempt, in a short story, but I'll come back to it again. And again it will be through fiction, to try to reach the sensation of such exuberant hopes and disappointment;
• Musée du Quai Branly, vastly improved since our earlier visit--another topic I'll want to write about when I'm back to my familiar keyboard.

Geoffrey Fox introduces Above Ground
Le siège du Pcf d'Oscar Niemeyer
Butte Montmartre, 18 mars 1870

Losing the narrative in Spain

It's probably just as well that Elena Salgado (economics minister and 2d vice president) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (president) have not asked my advice about how to rescue the Spanish economy and their government, but maybe they should—they've clearly run out of ideas and when they pretend to have some, end up contradicting each other. Maybe following my counsel wouldn't save them (I fear it's too laate for that), but it could at least lend a little dignity to the débâcle.

In case you haven't been following, here's what's been happening. Zapatero and his ministers, facing a "crisis" that has hit Spain harder than any other major industrial economy in Europe (see my earlier blogs on why), have suddenly announced drastic cuts of social benefits they had promised never to cut. This is supposed to reduce the deficit, but since it is also sure to slow the recovery and cut government income to cover essential costs, it may not even do that. Cutting those benefits has also meant alienating the Socialist Party's usually steadfast supporters, the unions, who very reluctantly are finding themselves forced to strike. Reluctantly, because they know that damaging the government can only benefit the other major party, the Partido Popular, which they expect to be much more anti-labor. Yet the union leadership feels forced to respond to the anger of their members in order to preserve their own legitimacy as leaders, and their most powerful weapon has always been a strike. So they call a strike that they know will have no effect except as a demonstration of anger, and certainly won't help revive the economy. The government cannot be forced to reverse the cuts, and the strikers cannot reach their real targets, if there really are any.

If the government asked me, I'd tell them (I'm a writer, so this is the way I see things) that a big part of their problem is that they don't have a good story. It has always been an essential part of any successful leadership to explain why we are where we are and where we're going and how we plan to get there. An outstanding contemporary example has been Fidel Castro: such a magnificent story-teller that he has been able to keep a very large proportion of the Cuban population loyal to his vision even through the most disastrous crises—some of them crises that could easily be blamed on his faulty decisions, but not the way he tells it.

But that's an extreme example. Here's another one: Obama. A different vision (from Fidel's), but a coherent one that he can explain convincingly. You don't have to convince all of the people, but you have to convince a large part of them if you want them to follow you.

Zapatero used to have a story, kind of flimsy and contradictory, but good enough for his purposes of getting elected and cobbling together enough votes from different parties to pass important legislation. The story was that he represented some kind of socialism-lite, never clearly defined beyond what he called its good "talante" or, roughly, vibes. A socialism that was conciliatory (always open to dialogue), in favor or rights for all kinds of minorities including invalids (subsidies for caretakers was one of his proudest legislative victories), homosexual marriage, a more liberal abortion law; a socialism that would always favor workers and pensioners, and a socialism that would maybe free the state just a little bit from the stranglehold of the Catholic Church. Where all this was going, that is, what sort of society he imagined he was constructing, was never even mentioned (a big difference from earlier Spanish socialists), but it didn't matter, because the other guys—the unpopular Partido Popular—was so awful on just these issues.

Now with these deep cuts, he's disappointed everybody who was trying to believe in him. He's lost his story.

It may be too late for him (who will believe him now if he reverses policy again?), but the Socialist Party should still be able to recover. If the Populares win the next elections because the Socialist supporters stay home (a likely scenario), their government is almost sure to be dependent on the support of other parties and their famously indecisive leader, Mariano Rajoy, can be counted on to botch things so badly that voters will hunger for an alternative. So a PP government, if it happens, will probably be brief. But the Socialists will need to recover their story.

And they have one. It's just that their current leadership has forgotten it, or has chosen to ignore it. The Socialist Party think tank run by Jesús Caldera has elaborated a vision of where Spain should be going, toward a more equitable, more efficient, better educated and freer society exploiting Spain's great human and natural resources. They came up with a sensible plan that was published and cheerfully ignored. And that one-man think tank Felipe Gónzalez, the man who recreated the Socialist Party and led it after Franco and who new presides over the European Community's council of "wise men", also has some excellent ideas; he has always been one of Spain's most convincing storytellers. And there are other thinkers, younger ones, who will emerge and be heard. But they've got to get their story together.

(For my earlier comments on Caldera's think tank, on Felipe González and other Spanish issues, just click on the keyword "Spain" below.)

El Banco Mundial advierte de que la situación de España es "muy grave" — ELPAÍS.com