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

 

 

 

 

Binaries, Retirement, and the Long Fight

 El País, the paper that trumpets throughout Spain, loudly, published an interview with the Princeton bioanthropologist Agustín Fuentes. 

The main subject was Fuentes’ new book in Spanish and in English. Its title mildly says Sex is a Specturm; The Biological Limits of the Binary.  HIdden in that academic prose is a confrontation, an explosion of the basis for Trump’s attacks on Trans people and on so-called “wokeness in general around gender. 

The interview is much stronger. Fuentes, the American son of a prominent Spanish scholar Victor Fuentes who spent his career publishing and teaching in US Universities. Agustín states that the binary of man / woman, or indeed any binary to understand sex and gender is a failure. It is more philosophy than science, he avers. 

Other than the vigor of his argument and a tsunami of recent data pushing it, this is not new. Many of us have been teaching, writing, and arguing the same for more than two decades as the idea very slowly made its way into the scientific mainstream against great resistance and against data. 

That is not what I want to write about.  Instead, I note Fuentes’ courage to publish this when Trump is charging protection money from Universities and demanding they, as well as the whole scientific establishment establishment censor such ideas. 

Trump and the Republican party he has stormed know how Gramscian control works and how closing off institutional venues while stigmatizing ideas and giving them real costs changes discussion. It creates a new world of the given and makes the older the unspeakable. 

Fuentes acknowledge this and says to the interviewer, Matthew Raspanti, that he is working to recuperate Spanish citizenship for when Princeton is forced to get rid of him or it becomes too costly for him to research and write in Trump’s America.  

Curiously, Fuentes was on one of the last panels I attended at my last American Anthropological Society meetings, held ironically in Toronto, Canada.

He is impressive but I did not know that I was setting out on a path he might tread soon, academic exile. In my case, it was under the cover of retirement and was not the first time i had faced exile. 

I saw the thickening clouds of the ultra right and their attacks on higher education, especially on issues of gender and sexuality, as well as more generally what they loosely term ‘Marxist” ideas, 

I came of age during the early stages of flourishing of Western Marxism in the Academy. We read and critiqued it deeply. Nonetheless, I am strongly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, E.P Thompson, and many more. My basic approach is political economy with a focus on social formations and historical change. 

After being forced out of BYU because of my research and, even more, writing on guerrilla groups who attacked the LDS Church in Latin America, I found myself without a job, cut off from sources of funding for research, and so on. An important part of why has to deal with stigma, blacklisting, and so on.  

I kept writing and kept researching as best I could and found myself back in the Academy but in the wilderness of a department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and a bit later in a small program at a state college in the most right wing county of Utah. The very idea of academic freedom was contentious if it circumscribed power and collective political and social thought. 

Many of us professors fought and opened a space, as the college became a university and grew—driven by demographic demand. Nevertheless, the university faced constant vigilance from Ultra and less rigid conservative powers in Utah governance and in society. 

As they became more connected with a new ecology of Ultra Rightwing focus on higher education that was growing in importance and in Florida let to the take over of a college, I could see sharply carved writing on the wall. 

It seemed it would be less and less possible to teach what I was trained in and in which i had worked. When combined with personal physical issues, I decided to retire to Spain. It has been refreshing to be in a country where socialists are at the helm and are a strong force (though I am banned from working but not writing as a condition of my visa), such that even conservatives accept many basic ideas though the Ultra Right is growing.

I wish Fuentes well and encourage people to obtain his book and read it. This is the cutting edge of a great thrust of biological science that may be on the edge of erasure by power. I hope it continues to find a home on the margins. 

P.S. The following might interest some of you.  The Decline and Fighta for Academic Freedom and Integrity 

https://davidclarkknowlton.blogspot.com/2025/07/binaries-retirement-and-long-fight.html