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. 

A Few Scattered Thoughts on Violence Coming Home

As many of you know, when a new, and therefore, young professor, I researched and wrote on violent attacks on Latter-day Saint persons and property in South America.

Almost thirty-two years later, an LDS ward in Michigan suffered a deadly attack worse than anything from the guerrilla violence of those days. Nonetheless, there are, perhaps, some things to learn in a comparison.

One very troublesome comparison: the United States is moving ever closer to the tactics honed by the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile of silencing opposition and disappearing people (for now immigrants or those who are similar to them, but it threatens to do so with citizens and opponents as well.) 

A key difference: the US president and wannabe dictator has practiced a tactic of encouraging his followers to violence against enemies, such as the congress on January 6th, and then practicing legalistic and journalistic denials, as well as finger pointing at a mirage, Antifa and democrats, liberals, “sicko leftists” in general. 

This includes the counterfactual idea that violence stems from the left and not from the right. The fact that much violence is from lone wolves on the right who seem unorganized and receive no specific orders allows their politics to be denied and disavowed. 

The US tends to see politics as a partisan and group issue. Individuals, per se, cannot be originators of politics unless they are influenced by or derive their ideas from some established group with a political ideology that they exemplify. 

Names for ideologies are created from fever dreams among agitators and creators such as wokeism, ideology of gender, etc. Rightwing ideologues, such as  Christopher Rufo of the Manhatttan Project, spend time thinking them up and actively marketing those labels among the right, often with only dubious empirical referents. His baby is the now powerful label “Critical Race Theory”. He borrowed the label from academics, gave it a new though perhaps related set of meanings, and marketed it.  

The more current bugaboo is DEI that exists to define bureaucratic practices and values which when refocused and redefined becomes a “horror” to be attacked and undone. 

Back to the comparison. In the late eighties and early nineties, the heyday of guerrilla violence against Mormonism, Latter-day Saints and much of the press could not grasp that their proselyting and  building chapels was seen as a political act and could be made a political target. Instead, the onus was put on “bad people” or “irrational actions’ as a kind of denial. 

While there were interests of power in this, there also was simply an inability to realize that our way of thinking and defining things is not universal; that what we label as good can also be labeled as bad. 

In the case of the LDS young man who killed a political figure with the gun of his own ideas, there is a denial he could be “one of us”.  We tend to insist that some nefarious political ideology or spending too much time online and “transgenderism,” a newish bugaboo, must have caused a transformation in him.  

What we prefer not to see, are the tensions within our own community whether we are MAGA or Mormons that contribute to and even may provide the sociological base for the violence. 

The murderous attack on a Ward in Michigan this last weekend with the dramatic, almost cinematic, entry to the building and murder of worshippers was much more Hollywoodesque than anything that took place in Chile or Bolivia against Mormons.

Whatever the legal motives, those have yet to be determined and announced, the act takes place in a political context: the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Mormon Utah by a probably inactive LDS young man. It is no surprise, sadly, that the accused killer in MIchigan is of MAGA and deploys its symbols, while at the same time displaying vigorous anti-Mormon feelings. 

Please note, his ideas are not simply from right-wing, Evangelical radio and posts. He evidently lived in Jeremy Ranch, near Park City for some period of time and may well have absorbed Utah’s home-grown anti-Mormonism. 

That would be background to this set of oppositional ideas of various institutional addresses becoming charged with the drama at UVU and a single bullet from an old deer rifle taking down a prominent Republican figure who, to be sure, was controversial within elements of the Right. That charging would also give Kirk’s violent defense through revenge weight and power. 

There is another charging to be looked at, and that is the local issues in the killer’s area of Michigan that make the LDS Church controversial. It is useful to see how we are perceived.

In any case, the officials of law enforcement will investigate and bring charges. In both the case of the Orem shooter and the Michigan one. We will have to assess and learn though I, as an old and now retired professor, am very sad about the political situation in my country that is escalating violence.  

War and Rumors of War

Sunday morning, the gray sky spits random drops. I am told that tomorrow it will rain, but for now the cloudiness is a strange relief for eyes and skin from the bright sunshine of this White Coast of Spain, a name that sounds strangely like cataracts.

While sipping my morning coffee, I read the news—and sometimes the anti-news of Instagram and TikTok online.

This morning El País, Spain’s great daily, wrote about Trump’s missile shake just off the coast of Venezuela—a baboon like display of reddened, macho missiles to dominate male challengers. 

Of course this notice includes a mass of fictitious fantasy about some drug cartel led by Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela who continues in power even though he lost the last elections, something Trump dreams of. 

Maduro also shakes; he flies his planes and organizes his military in a pounding-the-chest display of bravery against the combover-ed, spray-tanned Trump. 

Neither could probably go a round or two against each other in a ring.  Much better is playing each other’s enemy to strengthen Maduro and give Trump so called “penis-points”. The Urban Dictionary defines these as “bonus points given to someone of the male gender for being a person of male gender.”

Trump needs to prove that to himself given his Vietnam War draft dodging, his insults to purple heart holders, and his declaration now of a Department of War whose purpose is to win. To Trump the basis of masculinity is a person who never apologizes, often cheats, and always wins. By definition. 

In any case, Trump spouts about drug shipments but seems to have destroyed a  migrant boat. Many legal analysts are calling an act of simple murder.  Meanwhile his minion, the red-eyed and wimpy voiced Hegseth declares that a Department of War, in its focus on winning cannot follow the law.

Sounds like the whine of losers to me. 

Unfortunately, genital rattling of this sort can lead to accidental explosions even from the most experienced edger.  

And then we end up with the messiness of death and mayhem which will require decades and a fleet of swift-boat, Hollywood writers and film makers to gain a narrative that is less one of lack of control. 

As sadly pornographic as all that is, a different couple of article snagged my attention. 

I read about a Danish man of Syrian origin who had spent three years in a Spanish prison, condemned as a terrorist for ostensibly fighting with ISIS in Syria, his parent’s homeland. It turns out that he did not do so but rather was in Syria as a Danish spy. The article notes how difficult it has been for Denmark’s spy agencies to come clean about this and how insulated justice officials, in Denmark and in Spain are from the machinations of their various spy agencies. In this case, it is amazing a couple of Danish spy-masters came clean in public. 

This made me reflect on how intelligence officers, in the spheres of Trump, Maduro, or in this case Copenhagen and Madrid, poison ordinary social waters by creating double purpose in individuals. 

You meet and interact with someone. They me be who they seem but they also may be agents of some other interested party and you might be compromised. 

To many of you this might sound like a “yeah-sure, David” moment.  

I get that. But you must remember my father’s graduate student at the University of Utah (who later became a Mexican congressman and met me at the airport in Mexico City when I flew through there on my way home from Bolivia after two years) was a KGB spy when a college student, something my father never knew. The congressman worked for the same agency that formed Vladimir Putin. 

With that messiness of the world—and not being able to trust people to be who they say they are—in mind, I read another article about the mercenaries who fight for Russia in Ukraine.  In this case, the article spoke of subsaharan Africans, but I was reminded of Colombians.

Next door to Venezuela and one of the countries liberated from Spain by Simon Bolivar in the early nineteenth century, Colombia is like a gorgeous person internally mangled by violence and poverty, as well as the interests of larger powers, such drugs.

While most Colombians are amazing and charming with accents that seduce, the country suffers from the disappearance of young men who are forcefully recruited into criminal gangs, military service in which young men fight against their own people, and the growth industry of working as an underage assassin, a sicario. 

The country has produced a veritable army of men seared by violence without reasonable options for employment. Among many other paths to exit the country and get better wages is that of mercenary.

Many men are well trained from their military years but find closed doors at home. It is tempting for them to leave their country and swim the international waters of floating mercenaries. 

One day, some months ago, a friend from Colombia brought someone to my home. He had met him among the mass of immigrants here in Alicante (where Colombians are the largest group of Latinos). When this guest and I talked he mentioned he had just come from fighting as a mercenary for Ukraine. 

I now hear he has returned to the battlefields in Ukraine as a means of sending money home for his daughter who soon will be a teenager.

The war in Eastern Europe is not so far away nor is its reality. Alicante also has a large number of Ukrainians, Russian and Ukrainian speaking. They are all seared by that conflict. I talk with Ukrainians every day as I also do with Syrians, Palestinians, Venezuelans and more. 

The pages of news, with Trump’s fantasies of defeating with his masculine energy the Tren de Aragua that he has fictionalized into something it is not, and now the made-up Cartel de los Soles; the massive missile attack on Ukraine this weekend, and the inhumane violence in the Middle East become very real ever time I step into the streets and go to a café.

I live on the White Coast of Spain without cataracts—they were surgically removed. It is peaceful here, but the fogginess of a violent world is in Alicante’s sunshine

 

 

 

 

Return of Mammon in a Changed Form: Ideology of Gender in Spain’s Congress

Sitting in a coffee house above the main Plaza in Cusco, Peru, more thirteen or so years ago, I heard the chants of a demonstration marching around the square. 

That in itself was far from weird. The Plaza is a ceremonial center of the region, province, and city of Cusco. Demonstrations, parades, marches, processions, vuvuzeles, bands, loudspeakers, speeches, masses, saints; they all appear at one time or another. 

This made the plaza a fascinating place to hang out and the coffee house, Cappuchino, on the upper floor, a delight—when not overwhelmed with a mix of German, Dutch, English, Chinese and God knows what else from the tourists who throng the city for a day or two. They also intrigued me but Cusco held my focus. 

This day, there was just something in the marchers’ voices, though I could not hear them clearly with my late middle-aged ears. 

I crept to one of the balconies and edged the tourists there to peer out. I saw a small and a bit ragged group of working class Evangelicals with signs decrying educational criteria for their children and especially the obscure, apparently simple, while horribly baroque. and faulty combination “ideology of gender”.

Later, that duo would appear in massive marches in Lima in support of overturning a democratically elected president and as part of an international jeremiad, that now is embodied in Trump’s regime within the US and its attacks on transgender people, and on the notions of DEI. 

Well, this morning, when I was shuffling online through Spain’s daily of record, El País, I saw that the mime of international right wing memes in search of power, Spain’s Ultras, VOX, will hold hearings on the ideology of gender in Spain’s Congress today. They wish to attach it, whatever it is, to “false accusations”, I assume of sexual and gendered violence.  

Since I first came across this then new yet bedraggled term like a raggedy doll all stitched all together from pieces of cloth that did not fit well. 

Two of those rags torn from other dresses and shirts were ideology and gender. 

So simple, apparently, yet what a moth bitten mess. 

My immediate reaction was, wait a minute gender is not, per se, an ideology but is a scientific term, a heuristic (to be way too academic), in short an intellectual tool that, borrowed from notions of genre and grammar, was useful in showing and explaining problems in the idea of sex (as a human kind)—i.e. female and male. 

It also allowed us to look at configurations of sex historically and show subtleties and changes.

It seemed a confusion of dominant ideas, i.e. sex is natural and unchanging, eternal, a given of human kind, i.e. a culture and an ideology, with intellectual tools for showing their less than given reality.

Ideology is such a tired and troubled word which I struggled with for my dissertation. In one way it can be a kind of Marxist and specifically French structuralist thought. It also is a tool of parties and their organization like sects around credos. 

In its simplest sense, for me, lay the simple notion that culture and more precisely idea have some relationship with their social usage, and the groups that generate and maintain them. Yes, in the final instance, to quote a somewhat demented Frenchman, the infrastructure (the economic, social , and political order) sets boundaries and formative pressures on ideas and their organization. 

This is all just nightmarishly complex, because it is hard to wrestle to the ground something so ephemeral as an idea or organization of ideas, an ideology. Like a greased pig, it will slip out of your words (your hands) the minute you think you have snared it and hold it. Nonetheless, it did, does, serve, as a useful intellectual tool. 

But for those creating ex nihilo, I mean naming like God or Adam, an ideology there seems to be a stable order of things outside of words, that words label and make visible.  

Oh my—too much nominalism and realism—difficult philosophy—before breakfast. I can feel the milk in my coffee curdling as I sip it. 

In the usage of the demonstrators, ideology presumed a set of ideas that were false and sinful, i.e. against the real, natural stable order derived from God, the absolute, the ending and the beginning.  

This sets out a theological and political battle not a scholarly one, though it snags terms from scholarship and mangles them. 

The second term, gender, is also complex but for now at its root is a similar notion that the term misuses language to deny the obvious and the godly, that there are only two sexes—as the Orange dictator wannabe declared in Washington—although Vatican documents and those of natural law scholars are already filled with such assertions about reality.  

Unlike, academic terms in the strict sense, they come with powers that discipline them, keep the apparent reality stable and connected to a word, sex, despite all the ice-dancing scholars and philosophers have pointed out in any attempt to seize a reality and label it while keeping both the reality and the label stable. 

Well, it turns out this mish mash of two troubled terms became useful to French and Italian right wing Catholics to name a heresy and a political/religious/academic movement they wished to work against. So they did, along with fellow travelers among Evangelicals, Mormons, and others,; as well as with a big-little man trying to reclaim and rebuild a nationalist Church and identity in Mother Russia.

Over maybe thirty years, the dyad has moved from the margins to the front lines of Ultra Right Wing politics on an increasingly global basis. 

It has become a frontal attack on feminism, Gay and Trans thought and realities. It also is a desperate hope to re-stage and re-claim a Patriarchal, Western family all the while fewer and fewer people see its value. 

Power to challenge, declare heresy, and burn at the stake is the goal. Yes, power. 

The pulling of levers by the Great Oz—them—that we are not supposed to see, while they tell us up is down, right is left, man is man and has god given natures, while woman is woman similarly with a god given nature.  

Forgive me, I must run to the bathroom behind the espresso machine and puke.