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. 

 

 

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. 

 

 

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.