Me and Don Quixote

A calm and quiet Saturday morning finds me on one of my favorite coffee houses, sipping an Americano and feeling the need to write. 

This has not been the easiest of weeks: at times panicked with lots of running around. I have been dealing with a problem with my visa renewal and an impending deadline 

Whether in the US, where I am from, or here, hitting the bureaucracy cold, with little idea of where you go or why, is hard, confusing, and frustrating. 

Yet this experience has been strangely pleasing.  

Towards the end, while speaking with one of those “nameless”, “faceless” bureaucrats, in this case named Roberto. I know because I asked. It suddenly occurred to me I did not have to go through all this. 

I could have hired someone, a lawyer—what in common Latin American Spanish is called, often despectively, a tintorillo. 

These are people who make their living helping people with government processes, whether scribing, negotiating, processing, or other. You used to, and maybe still can see, them gathered around the doors of government offices on little benches and at small desks, typewriter and carbon paper before them.

I would have gone high to a good lawyer who specializes in these processes as I did to get my initial visa. That process was smooth and a dream. I did learn, however, how many mistakes I would have likely made between what I thought the instructions and the wisdom on line—some of it garbage—said and how I operationalized it, put it into action. 

It was expensive to work with my attorney in California and her helper attorney in Madrid. But the process was clean and smooth. For a beginner, that was helpful. 

After a year, in part to save money and more to learn, I decided to forego that this time. Furthermore, a friend I made here in the community of Americans in Alicante told me in a coffee house where we had just met while waiting for a performance, to avoid spending the money and just do it myself.  

So I did.  Have I made mistakes, yes, and fortunately not fatal ones, although this week I wondered. In any case, this was my choice, and despite feeling often like someone taking a doctoral exam without having ever attended a class, it was worth it. 

I had to study hard, in a language I have spoken all my life but whose official variant in documents I do not know. I am learning this bureaucracy’s terminology and how they apply it to processes. Furthermore, as the ethnographer in me should know, I am learning the organization behind the terminology is simply not the same as in my  grasp of bureaucracy from my life experience. 

Duh, I am in a different country. This one may even have invented modern Bureaucracy, according to some scholars, back in the days of Charles the V of the Holy Roman Empire, when Spain ruled much of the globe and galleons navigated the oceans carrying legal documents, from Spain to its overseas territories, now called colonies often, and from them to it. 

Historians have field days—intellectual picnics—in the archives that hold this legal correspondence that still remains. Around five hundred years of it. 

How naĩve of me, when facing the modern rendition of this ancient organization of state to think it would simply be like what I knew. 

Of course, it also was not radically different. Max Weber, brilliantly grasped many of the fundamentals of bureaucracy in his early twentieth century sociology.

I spent hours, nay days, if not more, reading the complex and confusing instructions on line written to meet the needs of the bureaucracy, while also to instruct petitioners, as well as going deeper and reading the laws,. It was not just reading, but studying: back and forth and cross-correlating.

Then I had to put it into practice without even fully knowing if I had ti all right. 

The rudest moment of last week was when I took a document I figured was the right one, along with the form showing I had paid the tax required to present it. I found the right place to present it—after a few miles of walking from building to building in the hot August sun. This time, a nameless, somewhat stern but bemused man (I could see that in his eyes) looked at my passport and told me I had left Spain in March and had never re-entered though there I was sitting before him. 

I felt like all was a loss. I had gone to Turkey, but had flown back through Prague and Vienna, though none of those border posts had checked my documents or stamped my passport. I realized the document showed a lack and I could not prove otherwise. Fortunately Europe came to my rescue. 

I looked at him calmly and narrated briefly how I had returned and that I had no control over how Schengen authorities handled passports. 

He stayed stern, asked me a few more questions, returned my passport, and then said to my confusion and relief. “You do not need this document. Your procedure is going properly.”

There were more problems, of course. 

I had a program online to transmit documents to my file in Extranjería fail to authenticate the certificate on my laptop. I struggled with it, and after a good while realized I was being neurotic: doing the same thing over and over while hoping for a different reaction. 

Roberto, mentioned above, said “no worries. I’ll fix it for you.” and he did though he did not have to. 

He also submitted my documents. 

I learned in this that Extranjería can ask for documents but cannot upload them past the initial application. For that you must go elsewhere I now know where.   

A different bureaucrat—a delightful man named Jesús (breaking frame I told him in El Paso he would be called Chuy)—took time to tell me where and how I should go about submitting the documents and that otherwise my file was complete and there should be no problems. 

I felt like I was leaving both buildings having made friends.

Despite the difficult learning curve, I have found the Spanish bureaucracy to be filled with people who are interesting in themselves and live good, human lives, even if the institution is a bit disconcerting. 

Guess what, it is so in my country as well. 

I remember when Motor Vehicles refused to renew my driver’s license and the gruff agent at the desk would not tell me why. It turns out that somehow I had improperly been put on an offenders list. Once the confusion was resolved, requiring me to spend considerable time on the phone with different people, the same man unsmilingly and with no sense of irony gave me my license. 

So, although in a fit of frustration some time, I may eat my words, for now, I can only say that I continue to find Spain to be a delight and its bureaucracy to be no worse than mine though I am fidning the agents to be friendly and helpful. 

And, more importantly, I am learning much even if there is no degree certificate at the end of this schooling, just a greater appreciation for Don Quixote and Cervantes’ wisdom.

The Right and the Church, a Very Spanish Challenge

Catholicism, the historical rock of Spain, showed cracks and breaks this last few weeks. In this it displays some of the challenges faced by Churches during these years of a resurgent Ultra Right.

The Spanish Bishops’ Conference publicly criticized the efforts of the Ultra party VOX in Murcia to ban Muslims from celebrating public prayers or ceremonies in order to protect the heritage and traditions of Spain. 

VOX then criticized the Church for its position on immigrants and accused it of timidity given how mired it is in the latest reports on sex abuse in the Church. 

Now, the Archbishop of Tarragona, and president of the important Tarraconense Bishops Council, Joan Planellas, is striving to build a nuanced wall between the Church and the claims of the Nationalists of VOX while also providing pastoral council to the Catholic base of VOX, a group opposed to abortion, gay marriage, and increasingly to the immigration of Muslims which VOX paints as antithetical to Spanish traditions.  

“A Xenophobe cannot be a true Christian,” Planellas strongly asserted.  A true Christian must “love. To love deeply is the message of the gospel. To love your neighbor is to try to make others happy” in evident contrast with hatred of Muslim immigrants.

While he hoped to draw the distinction between ideas and the changes they take on when they become political slogans, the line between love and xenophobic hatred became the headline. 

Within the Church the issue is not always so clear. El País reported that the Bishop of Asturias, for exsmple, called muslims “moritos”, a troubled and dismissive term. The Archbishop of Taragona insists this opinion is simply not in line with the majority of Spain’s Bishops. He asks political leaders to stop polarizing the issue of immigration lest it lead to problems such as in France.  

Yet, Santiago Abascall, the head of VOX, sees an opening and is likely to continue to pick at it it for political advantage even if that means disagreeing with and challenging publicly Spain’s clerical hierarchy although with certain gentleness. 

Behind this conflict is the old idea that Spain and Catholicism should fit together like hand and glove. In truth they never have, yet Spain has lived centuries of political and religious projects to make them so. 

In the Franco period, the Church was one of the main props of the dictator’s state marginalizing the religious left from power in the Church and to innoculate Spanisard against cultural modernism.  

After the coming of democracy. before the pederasty scandal, that alignment contributed to the Church’s loss of popular support. Within the Church, however, the political right and the support of the state have not always been accepted. The Church is a very complex and varied institution. 

I am learning about Spain given my background as a Latin Americanist. Let me give some examples from there—especially since the contemporary nationalists, the Hispanists, insist that Spain’s American domains were never colonies but part of Spain and given that Spain and Latin America are historically interconnected over and over again.  

In the sixteenth century, the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas, the Spaniard Bartolomé de las Casas, strongly and publicly criticized the colonial secular order and the exploitation of indigenous peoples. His suits ended up in the courts of Spain and have left a legacy, from within the Church of support for less privileged and non-Western people that still have an impact today. 

 Another more recent Dominican articulated the Theology of Liberation while a professor at Peru’s Catholic University, Gustavo Gutierrez. This movement took off, and not solely on the basis of his influential work, it gave a heart ache to the anti-Communist and hence anti-Left Pope John Paul and the Catholic right more generally including to Spain one of the major suppliers of clerics to Latin America.  

Specifically, the Cardinal of Lima, Juan Luís Cipriani of the very powerful and very Spanish Opus Dei, saw Liberation Theology as a barbarism and attempted to destroy it. Father Gutierrez proved untouchable, in part because of the institutional separation of the Catholic University from the ordinary hierarchy of the Church.  Gutierez survived until age took him, while Cipriani suffered a less fortunate demise. 

The much celebrated Cardenal of Opus Dei, Cipriani, supported a very right wing religious organization that caused his downfall, the Sodalitium of Christian Life. It grew up among privileged young people in Lima and spread to become very powerful and numerous. 

It was created by Luís Fernando Figari. among others, in 1971. Figari, though Peruvian, leaned strongly toward the Spanish Falange, the Fascists, and over the decades came to be taken as a charismatic and almost untouchable religious hero and political influence.  

In El País, sociologist Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio wrote last year  “My hypothesis is that the Sodlitium belongs to a political project. It is the resurrection of fascism in Latin America using the vertebral connections of the church.”

Figari’s power continued until the Vatican intervened and gave credit to reports of his sexual abuse of youths within the Sodalicio. Figari was not alone in this use of sexual power. Under Pope Francis, the Vatican did what had seemed impossible earlier. It closed Figari’s Sodalitium and excommunicated him. This was a double blow: both against pederasty and also against the powerful right wing of the Church. 

While Opus Dei, founded in Spain by José María Escrivá may indeed maintain some untouchability, its first Cardinal, Cipriani, was undone by Sodalicio, and his years of creating enemies from his rabid capitalism and more general opposition to popular movements in society and in the Church.

Indeed Francis moved to bring Opus more directly under Vatican authority and reform it. Still, it and its related groups, is very strong among the American Catholic Right Wing, including the Supreme court and members of the Administration and congress. The US Catholic right has been a strong force of opposition to the reformist Francis as well as one of the most important supports for the regime of Donald Trump.

The Church, as led now by the Agustinian Pope Leo, faces this difficult political terrain of a still powerful Right Wing in the Church in the Americas and in Spain, while also containing a progressive Church. 

VOX sees this and is, I believe, deliberately pounding crack lines in the Church it to see if it can splinter the left from the right and from Church legitimacy despite the Archbishop of Tarragona’s hasty denial of such a possibility. The hope for VOX would be for the right to gain ascendency within Spain and within the Church. 

After all, Spain and Catholicism should go together, I expect he feels, like hand and glove which unity is supposed to be a key of Spanish tradition.  

A Vivid Fear

There you are, and we are talking.  It doesn’t matter who you are, whether I love you or just barely know you. You are a you. 

We are talking and I am happy. I like to learn about you and generally enjoy sharing myself with you, whoever you are.  

To be honest, some times I am shy and find it difficult to be with other people. A social anxiety can take over, and has often, since I was young, where I absolutely fear you might see me and find me worthless. 

That was not an uncommon experience when I was a boy. I would meet another boy and hope I had met a friend. After we talked and it looked like things were going well, they met the other guys in the class or the neighborhood. Then, they turned on me, sometimes violently. They realized there was some sort of stigma on me—I never really knew what, just that I had been judged a pariah. 

That was then, when pubic hair had only a year or two on my body. It laid a pattern and became a model of fears deep within me. I have lived some sixty years since then and have slowly relaxed my fears and come to really like other people and enjoy talking, even if there are still triggers that can make me cringe, turn inwards, and try to proactively wall my self up and lock the gate. 

That minefield, I have learned to negotiate, mostly without explosions. A new one has appeared. Like yesterday. 

We were having a good conversation. You had told me about a friend of yours who had just been diagnosed with advanced bone cancer. In turn, I was sharing with you my experience of having AML, Acute Myeloid Leukemia as an older than average patient. 

In the midst of my sentences, when words just came from inside and found my voice, suddenly a silence, a gap. 

A word was missing. I knew its content and where it should be, but there was nothing for my voice to deploy. 

Ok, I vamped. I talked around it hopefully without making its absence obvious. After a bit, thankfully a relatively short one, the word appeared. I spoke it, relieved and continued with my portion on our conversation. 

Another gap, another silence, and another. 

My path to interacting suddenly seemed a cobbled path  with lots of dirt and few stones to step on. 

Shame wanted to take me over. I did not let it, but had it insisted, I would have spoken it and the problem I was having instead of keeping it inside.

Sometimes this silence came attached to another within me.  Normally, when I stumbled because the stone was not there, I remembered that there was a ground and that I knew what the word was supposed to say.  

At times, the lost stone pairs with a loss of the ground. There is a bigger whole where I seem to have not retained a memory, even one important to me. 

Before you can say, there, there. this is just part of growing older. I know that the massive chemotherapy that saved my life caused the loss of much memory and I am slowly learning what. It is when I loose that ground beneath me that I realize chemo had its way.

There is more, my friend. Believe me, I wish it were that simple. 

When my energy level drops, or when I am not exercising enough, It feels like my mind is actively throwing away knowledge and experience. Once I eat or get a bit of a workout, things may return to normal, but I become aware of how fragile this mind is and how easily iI could be treading that slippery slope towards forgetfulness that claimed my grandfather and my aunt. 

So my friend, when the rhythm of my conversation slows for a fraction of a second, and you become aware I am searching for a word, please see it for what it is:

A desire to engage and interact, even if it becomes more difficult as the days advance. Sadly, I realize, my will, my commitment, may not be strong enough to overcome this challenge as my years continue. I may really be facing the end, pasting a vapid smile on my face while my eyes show little comprehension.  I sincerely hope not, but of that I have so little control. 

Super Villains and Ultra-Right Protectors, a Nightmare

 

True confession:  I am in a tourist cafe owned by an American whose mother is Spanish eating bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and sausage. I just felt a need for traditional American heart attack food.  So sue me. 

I promise, Mediterranean for lunch at home, ‘cause I’ll make it. Lentil salad and merluza fish fillets.

As I was sipping my latté, six or so too-blond young women with perfect English and very pale skin sauntered in. If I heard right when they were speaking to each other, they were Scandinavian of some sort and looked for all the world like a set of coeds on the East sides of Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah. 

Of course, I was as blond—now gray, and am very pale, although the sun has probably left me tinted with a distinct shade of shrimp-over-a-hot-fire.

Foreigners in someone else’s country at a time when immigration, rising rents and supermarket inflation is all a theme, as is Putin’s and Trump’s meeting in the former Russian colony of Alaska tomorrow. I hear the ultra nationalist right in Russia is all a twitter, demanding that state, with its oil and minerals be returned to the once Tsarist State with its onion domes restored. 

Tourists and foreigners abound here.  Alicante may well be the large city with the highest relative parentage of foreign born residents in Spain, although we are next to the beer-sun-and doom British enclave of Benidorm, as well as just south of Russian and Dutch colonies. 

The conservative press reminds us that Franco, the brutal or great dictator of the mid twentieth century did all kinds of good things for Spain. In fact, according to them, everything good has its roots in Franco. In a fit of development he organized the Mediterranean coast for the massive building of hotels and beaches and then marketed it heavily to northern Europeans and the British for their holidays. 

Of course, that created a demand for labor—while Spaniards were working and sneaking chocolate and beer in Switzerland and in many other countries. 

To meet that new demand for hands, shoulders, and arms, Franco and then the later post-Franco governments coordinated the emptying of rural areas of men and women. In Alicante, they came from local areas, and then from La Mancha, Murcia and further away. 

One can hear their varied accents and dialects still in workers bars where they have their morning café con leche and have a morning smoke while laughing and arguing loudly. 

The city is tearing down Franco period public housing, which later government sold to people, since they are in desperate need of upkeep and modernization. Mid-rise towers are appearing like mushrooms in their place.

Immigrants from North Africa, Latin American and subSaharan Africa are filling the need for workers while we expats (sigh--a rant for another time) increase pricess and demand.

Spain is Spain and has its own ways. But it is also Europe and the rules of the European community have impacted urban design and government processes. Although not from the community’s governance per se, the European ultra right is also changing Spain while claiming to protect a vision of traditional Spain, you know bull fights and women in lace mantillas behind fans next to their adoring husband.

Without the bulls, lace, or mantillas similar things are appearing throughout Europe and even in the neo-Putin US. After all, the Russian Macho Maximus is a promoter of a Christian, nationalist, racist, Europe, and Euro-America. He has helped the existing, Ultra right, post WWII, groups of neo-Nazis, religious traditionalists and nationalists, anti feminists, and, God-knows, anti-Queers. 

To that list, I should add, anti-asylum seekers, anti-immigrants, and anti-Muslims.

Why this rant? First of all, I am in a café which in Spain they can call a bar and people often rant in bars. Maybe i shall take up the habit. 

Second, the Pumpkin clone who has become Maximus for a time—a painful multi-season reality show, has sent the Guard into the streets of Washington DC where they are using telescopes and sometimes magnifying glasses to find the relatively rare crime they are supposed to stop. Military guards, claiming to protect the people from enemies the right imagines and propagates  wide and far on screens large and tiny, like Lex Luthors and Jokers. 

There is more. The morning paper tells of Ultras in Iceland, many of them former criminals, who are patrolling their Island as vigilantes to stop a crime-wave by asylum seekers that no mainstream analyst can find, and to protect their social welfare system from the horrible drain these new-comers represent, though again, evidence of this must ride icebergs in the arctic sea. No one, outside of dreams of whaling or catching walruses and seals for the winter, can find it.

The article mentions that this is not simply an Icelandic phenomenon, but like Hollywood movies of super heroes (ok I added that), it is found throughout Europe including Spain. To that I add, including the US.

I wish I could just change the channel or even better cancel this survivalist nonsense, but alas, TikTok and X have not given me that super power.  

Done with my breakfast and my rant—for now—I’m gonna go out walking and look at gulls and pigeons as the day’s heat grows.  

Ciao.