Face to Face in Spain

 Face to Face in Spain

You think seasons change slowly, from day to day though sometimes the change feels dramatic. A storm system rolled through bringing rain and colder temperature. Voilà it is fall.

in this way, I just roll along in my day to day life. Most things seem the same. With my focus on what I am reading, thinking, and writing, I miss much else until something breaks into my consciousness, such as this morning. I sat down in a cafe to have my breakfast of yogurt and granola with fruit when a pigeon suddenly flew up almost vertically in front of me. 

On the TV, replays of the encounter in congress between Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s presiden, and Alberto Nuñez Feijóo the head of the main opposition Partido Popular was playing.  After months of seeing this image weekly when I sit down … I mean,  this is news in Spain. Like a bullfight, the politicians wave capes at each other while hiding their swords. The only thing missing is a ground pawing, snorting ton of racing flesh, the bull.  I guess to each other, their opponent is that stinky and frightful beast with spear-sharp points on their horns. 

The debate per se is not what grabbed me. Like Spaniards, I am used to politicians throwing bull pies, at each other. Some of circular messes are fresher than others and splat, while others are hard and strike with a crunch.  One or the other, they stink and may hurt.

If we need to gather these redolent masses of bovine waste, I would rather it be as fuel for a stove to heat up some soup or a rich stew. We could all stand and sit together to share a fresh meal from a rustic stove, the kind that has fed humans for millennia.

The debate qua debate has not broken into my normal reverie of thought. Instead, it was three things. 

First, the country’s president and his main opponent or even the leaders of both main opposition parties, the two mentioned plus the ultra-right Santiago Abascal, stand at their seats in congress, in the hemicircle of wooden desks and chairs, as if the same as every other member of Spain’s lower chamber of congress, that of the deputies,

I cannot image a US president appearing in congress without first hearing the blaring sounds of Hail to the Chief played by a Marine band while everyone else stands to receive him. My county’s president needs a sound track as if in a hollywood movie and needs to have people show obeisance. 

In Spain, I have seen the president enter at the same time as other delegates, just one of the group of the country’s law makers and managers. This flattening of distance, literally because the US hierarch stands or sits on the dais raised above the members of congress arrayed before him—to date it has only been a him, stuns me. 

We Americans are supposed to be equals, though people love to reduce that to being equals in opportunity rather than in substance, while Mr Trump, the current claimant of the US presidency, wants to reduce it further and remove equality in his attacks on Diversity, Inclusion, and, Equality, the policy and training program that was found in many institutions throughout the country before a tide of orange tan sprayed it away. 

To vastly simplify, in the ritual and drama of our encounters between our president and congress, we emphasize hierarchy, exclusion, and difference, HED. This is an increasing norm in our supposedly class-free society. 

Second, Spain’s president gets sharp questions and slams to his face from his opponent, who stand for all the members of the opposition. You can imagine, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo standing up to the towering lodge pole that is Pedro Sanchez. 

Feijóo follows a custom I do not understand of some Spaniards using their maternal last name, rather than their paternal one, since his first surname is Nuñez. 

In any case Feijóo is reported to stand a respectable 1.79 m which translates to 5.79 inches. Nothing to sneeze at.  

In contrast, Sanchez is 1.9 meters, or 6’ 2”. You only really see the difference on TV when they stand close to each other. In congress they sit on opposite sides of the horseshoe- shaped forum and so seem much more equal, though the one is the president and the one is merely a deputy and the leader of the opposition party that came very close to winning the last Presidential elections. 

The head of government, Spain’s king, for the record, stands taller than Sanchez at 1.97 meters, or 6’ 5.52”. He is recorded as the tallest living king on earth.  I have to say I am surprised by how many very tall Spaniards I see on the streets around me. I often feel like I am in Amsterdam that way. 

Height aside, Feijóo has a strong intellect and experience. His team also spends hours tooling lines and data that can draw blood. His darts, spears, and sword are very sharp. He is very much a worthy contender. But then so is Sanchez sometimes, his are sharper and, they are often snappier. 

That the two submit to this public striking and bleeding is hard to imagine for someone schooled in American political life.  But in this ritual warfare, the public issues of the day are vetted and discussed, educating and providing talking points to the public.  

Third, these debates, and they are debates—not the schooled-for TV forums the US holds only during elections to show off the made-up, and well prepared candidates to the public in something that pretends to be a World Wrestling theatrical competition—take place regularly in what are called Control Sessions as part of congressional responsibility of oversight. 

In the US we hold committee meetings behind closed doors and call that oversight—well they do demand documents and so on, before hand, but the image is of a beleaguered member of government dominates. It is never the President sitting in front of a panel of inquisitors and always on the edge of burning with the hot chile that gets shoved down his pants.

As a symbol of democracy, the President of Spain appearing as an equal before the lower house is powerful. That it is frequent makes it even more stronger. 

In the land of thistles and olives, congress can also have the President of the country appear to answer on particular issues before the country and on the legislative agenda.  Today, for example, Sanchez will appear, comparecer to use the special verb in Spanish which rearranges power. Sanchez must respond to authority that is not him. He is the object and not the subject today. Just a day ago he and Feijóo did their thing in congress. In the US our President thinks he is always the subject and all of us the objects of his being. 

Can you imagine how this would rearrange power in Washington. His mighty orangeness would definitely fill his diaper were he subjected to such. 

We talk about co-equal branches of power, but that is a formality. The presidency has been seizing more and more power to itself. 

I shall not stay here before the TV. Instead I shall go look for leaves to kick through—oops, I forgot; I shall be lucky to find even one leaf. I guess I shall have to find pumpkins to carve. Nope, they are not here either. 

Well, I guess I shall just go hunting for things that like pigeons fly up before me. 

The Growth of the Follón

Mornings begin when I open my cel and begin to read the news, mostly these days from El País in Spanish. In English, the New York Times, and the Guardian. 

While the technology has changed, from newsprint to laptop to cel, the habit has stayed the same. Indeed it is one I inherited from my father. He would sit at the breakfast table with the morning paper open in front of him.

To be honest, I do miss going looking for the big fat Sunday Times and spending a good part of the day and then the week reading it. 

Criticisms of the news are also par for the course. One learns to read multiple sources and look for patterns and what is more or less trustworthy and verifiable. 

Of course, all this is a small part of my reading, but a key one. 

Spain has a rich tradition of journalism and for years I have read El País, although not daily, unlike now. I have loved they way it supports writers such as Vargas Llosa whose conservatism came increasingly to trouble me.  

Now, of course, V. LL. would seem quaint in the face of the bombastic and mendacious ultra right propaganda that increasingly dominates air waves as well as print media.

That is not yet the case in Spain where there is still a strong culture of print journalism. 

Yet, you could wonder how would I really know since I only watch TV when in a café where it is on. I miss out on this important site where opinion is manufactured and played out. I also miss out because I do not watch the right influencers nor spend much time on news Tik Tok or Instagram. 

Evidently, according to El País, I am really missing an important phenomenon in which the ultra right interests are strongly invested.

I read a few articles about a handsome youth and right wing trouble maker, Vito Quiles, native of near-by Elche, Italian Father and Spanish mother. 

He could just be one of the seemingly infinite number of attractive faces, bodies, and provocative personalities that trouble the waves around us and appear whenever we turn on out machines. 

However, Quiles is becoming more and more celebrated by Spanish media as a provocative voice of the Ultras with all the hormonal passion of an undereducated  young man. 

Though more handsome, he is reminiscent of the recently martyred man of the eternally boyish name, Charlie Kirk. In fact, El Pais mentioned them both in an article where it claimed Quiles, despite trying to upend college campuses, does not have the talent of St. Kirk.

But he is the young male face of the ultra right which is increasingly gaining force among college age males. 

Like Kirk, it appears he is dependent on the sponsorship of older, wealthy men. El País also noted that the Ultra leader, Santiago Abascal, through his foundation,  spends an ungodly amount of money supporting right wing media. He hopes, following the model of the US, that right wing media will open the door for the growth and support Abascal and his party Vox's inflammatory arguments.   

In this is something key, a vicious circle of citation in which external facts play little to no role. Instead the currency is support for its politicians and ability to agitate the public. The keystone of this edifice is a web site, “La Gaceta de la Iberosfera”, which trolls for voices and ideas that would support Santiago Abascal, the head of VOX in his and other partisan's arguments. 

Abascal then cites the Gaceta in his speeches and arguments which then quotes him. El País notes that much information on the recent focus on immigration, particularly from Africa—north and Sub Saharan, is false and never corrected. 

I respect journalists who, despite having a stance, actually go into the world and gather information. I suppose phone calls or emails are a legitimate substitute at a time of limited resources and enormous pressures on their day. But the do not replace in my mind getting out into the streets to see and to interview.

This does not include helicopter journalism. dropping from the air for a few camera shots and sound bites before being beamed up again to go somewhere else. It should mean spending time weighing and living the story they propose to report. 

Sigh, helicopters and emails are for more popular, especially if they give verisimilitude to what the journalist already thinks or what his or her employers already know. 

I love to see journalism that respects the task of the reporter to gather and verify information, especially when it runs counter to established ideas. And, I love thinkers with the depth of Vargas Llosa, even if I came to dislike his liberalism no matter how well he established it and argued for it.

His bias came to seem to me not unlike the passion the character Fonchito felt for his step mother in one of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Elogio de la Madrastra, in Praise of the Step mother. 

In reading authors like Vargas Llosa or like the many writers for El Pais, The New York Times, and the Guardian, you learn the back-feelings of thinkers and actors of your day. 

And through the reading, you can also learn much about the day’s events and challenges. 

You also learn language. While reading about Vito Quiles in El País I learned a new and useful word, follonero, he who makes follones. A follón is a mess and follower is, for me, the translation of the English trouble maker.

Somehow follonero seems to me less serious than the English troublemaker, kind of like Quiles with his youthful looks and actions.

It makes the Ultras seem playful, while in the US they seem deadly serious and painful, a plane dropping shit on the public. In both cases, they stink.