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. 

Days of the Dreaded Sun

The dreaded sun of late July has already appeared.  Though its heat never dissipated through the night, it is burn up the streets even more.

Being very pale and someone who has had cancers removed from his skin,  as well as blistering sunburns, I have never been one of those blonds who beginning as early as possible in late April begins losing his shirt and seeking every opportunity to be near reflective water. I have never developed that tawny tan that blonds get.

I slather sunscreen whenever I go outside in the day, and try, desperately try, to stay in the shade. I watch the sun on the ground, on people, and on buildings, from places where its mostly absent.

Still the beaches fill with people in daytime and northern and Eastern Europeans turned red abound.  

If only I were like my poet friend who goes to the beach at night, when the moon slides across the sky, and tucks himself into the waters of a slowly cooling sea. 

It is not only the sun that is hot, politics is also roaring and sparking, as are fires in some of the peninsula’s mountain forests. 

Last week I wrote about Torre Pacheco, a town in the melon fields filled with Moroccan agricultural workers. The right sought to create an image there of villainous criminal migrants, words that might as well have spring from the fiery tongue of an Orange hate-monger in Washington.  

The Ultras poured in, young men hoping for thuggery and to achieve some nationalist dream, internet goons and influencers, as well as politicians. The police came out and cordoned off the majority Moroccan neighborhood, arrested thugs and politicians, the latter for illegal hate. Spaniards also came out to support the immigrants whether just to pollsters or in more concrete actions.  

The Ultras tried again, in another town, a suburb of Madrid.  Again failure.  But their professional tongue waggers with colorful capes as if they could be national symbols, instead of mass producers of prairie pies, keep trying.  For some reason, the conservatives who are not Ultra, are refusing to denounce them, even while hoping their stink draws flies who vote conservative.  They play a dangerous and polluting game. 

But people are talking. Immigration is a constant theme.

It could still mire the Socialist President Sanchez whose wheels are mired in the thick mud of corruption.  

However, the opposition, conservative party, the PP, sprang a corruption scandal of their own. One can hear its hissing from their political tires. Their vehicle slows.

It is a hot summer, hotter than average. The papers occasionally publish deaths; already they number more than a thousand for Spain for two months. Mostly deaths of poor people and elderly, I am told. 

Still the days have turned noticeably shorter, and soon it will be August when many take vacation. The heat will still be here, but its abatement comes closer. 

Honestly, this year, I will not mind when the day comes I put my shorts away for the year. 

 

Braves Running in Violence at Dusk

 

As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing. 

Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage. 

Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.

Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.  

It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems

Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.

That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes. 

I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here. 

Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.

Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.

The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands. 

But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory. 

At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy  is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work. 

The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal. 

Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women. 

Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp. 

To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.

Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).

Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante. 

History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence. 

I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants. 

Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers.  More is sure to come.