Super Villains and Ultra-Right Protectors, a Nightmare

 

True confession:  I am in a tourist cafe owned by an American whose mother is Spanish eating bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and sausage. I just felt a need for traditional American heart attack food.  So sue me. 

I promise, Mediterranean for lunch at home, ‘cause I’ll make it. Lentil salad and merluza fish fillets.

As I was sipping my latté, six or so too-blond young women with perfect English and very pale skin sauntered in. If I heard right when they were speaking to each other, they were Scandinavian of some sort and looked for all the world like a set of coeds on the East sides of Salt Lake City or Provo, Utah. 

Of course, I was as blond—now gray, and am very pale, although the sun has probably left me tinted with a distinct shade of shrimp-over-a-hot-fire.

Foreigners in someone else’s country at a time when immigration, rising rents and supermarket inflation is all a theme, as is Putin’s and Trump’s meeting in the former Russian colony of Alaska tomorrow. I hear the ultra nationalist right in Russia is all a twitter, demanding that state, with its oil and minerals be returned to the once Tsarist State with its onion domes restored. 

Tourists and foreigners abound here.  Alicante may well be the large city with the highest relative parentage of foreign born residents in Spain, although we are next to the beer-sun-and doom British enclave of Benidorm, as well as just south of Russian and Dutch colonies. 

The conservative press reminds us that Franco, the brutal or great dictator of the mid twentieth century did all kinds of good things for Spain. In fact, according to them, everything good has its roots in Franco. In a fit of development he organized the Mediterranean coast for the massive building of hotels and beaches and then marketed it heavily to northern Europeans and the British for their holidays. 

Of course, that created a demand for labor—while Spaniards were working and sneaking chocolate and beer in Switzerland and in many other countries. 

To meet that new demand for hands, shoulders, and arms, Franco and then the later post-Franco governments coordinated the emptying of rural areas of men and women. In Alicante, they came from local areas, and then from La Mancha, Murcia and further away. 

One can hear their varied accents and dialects still in workers bars where they have their morning café con leche and have a morning smoke while laughing and arguing loudly. 

The city is tearing down Franco period public housing, which later government sold to people, since they are in desperate need of upkeep and modernization. Mid-rise towers are appearing like mushrooms in their place.

Immigrants from North Africa, Latin American and subSaharan Africa are filling the need for workers while we expats (sigh--a rant for another time) increase pricess and demand.

Spain is Spain and has its own ways. But it is also Europe and the rules of the European community have impacted urban design and government processes. Although not from the community’s governance per se, the European ultra right is also changing Spain while claiming to protect a vision of traditional Spain, you know bull fights and women in lace mantillas behind fans next to their adoring husband.

Without the bulls, lace, or mantillas similar things are appearing throughout Europe and even in the neo-Putin US. After all, the Russian Macho Maximus is a promoter of a Christian, nationalist, racist, Europe, and Euro-America. He has helped the existing, Ultra right, post WWII, groups of neo-Nazis, religious traditionalists and nationalists, anti feminists, and, God-knows, anti-Queers. 

To that list, I should add, anti-asylum seekers, anti-immigrants, and anti-Muslims.

Why this rant? First of all, I am in a café which in Spain they can call a bar and people often rant in bars. Maybe i shall take up the habit. 

Second, the Pumpkin clone who has become Maximus for a time—a painful multi-season reality show, has sent the Guard into the streets of Washington DC where they are using telescopes and sometimes magnifying glasses to find the relatively rare crime they are supposed to stop. Military guards, claiming to protect the people from enemies the right imagines and propagates  wide and far on screens large and tiny, like Lex Luthors and Jokers. 

There is more. The morning paper tells of Ultras in Iceland, many of them former criminals, who are patrolling their Island as vigilantes to stop a crime-wave by asylum seekers that no mainstream analyst can find, and to protect their social welfare system from the horrible drain these new-comers represent, though again, evidence of this must ride icebergs in the arctic sea. No one, outside of dreams of whaling or catching walruses and seals for the winter, can find it.

The article mentions that this is not simply an Icelandic phenomenon, but like Hollywood movies of super heroes (ok I added that), it is found throughout Europe including Spain. To that I add, including the US.

I wish I could just change the channel or even better cancel this survivalist nonsense, but alas, TikTok and X have not given me that super power.  

Done with my breakfast and my rant—for now—I’m gonna go out walking and look at gulls and pigeons as the day’s heat grows.  

Ciao.

As Cretaceous Raptors Escape

The day was wan when I walked out of my building an hour or so after dawn as if exhausted after a long cold night. The cold knifed through my jacket and flicked my ears like a bully in school.  

Across the street, a man often sleeps on cardboard. At dawn he lifts it up and spreads it out to make a privacy barrier for his ablutions and to change clothes. Different people occupied that nook today, a woman in a wheelchair who I could not see well, and a bearded, blond young man, standing with his head resting against the blue tile wall. 

A modestly chi chi neighborhood, mine is a dowager whose wealth may dissipate if not careful. Yet a block and a half toward the sea, a group of women recently opened an elegantly appointed  bakery coffee house. It fills most mornings. The croissants are like those in France and they serve specialty coffee as well as much else. Their Spanish-style breakfast toasts are well crafted with a touch of flair. 

The other day, while out walking—it was warm then, I dropped in to get a brownie take-out. This chocolate madness now appears everywhere it seems, though seldom do they please this gringo’s palate. The woman who was helping me, also blond with a smile that could melt ice at a hundred paces, recommended I try a particular one of the three they offered. I made them, she coyishly said. 

I asked how she got into baking. She said she was from Huelva in Andalucia and had studied cooking and baking there, Spanish and classical. She has worked throughout Spain and now joined in this venture. I took it with me into the plaza in front of the Church with a noisy bell tower, where I sat among many other people and pigeons. 

Well, the pigeons were often flying, the people not to my knowledge. What a hit of dark chocolate—the brownie almost sent me into the air. It was melt in your mouth soft under a light crust.  

I have wondered about the homeless I see on the streets here. On the nearby, elegant avenue Federico Soto, in front of a the flagship Corte Ingles department store and right next to Alicante’s miracle-mile of shopping,  where the Avenue’s benches in white marble make a corner walled on two sides, a grizzled, bearded man lives, his library stacked high and wide. Plastic sheets are carefully folded, as are his bedding and his clothes.

When I first arrived, I stayed with friends in a neighborhood I had visited before, one that may be the poorest and roughest in the city. Homelessness there seemed harsher to me as well as partially fueled by the easy availability of whatever drugs the young men across the street on the hill were selling, People were careful to keep control of their space, in fear of the homeless, the addicts, and others who might just move in and take over--so they said.

I have met a woman from Poland, who attends one of my book groups, and is a social worker with the homeless, though I have not yet had a real conversation with her on the issue. 

Like the US, Spain has a housing crisis and I suspect the homelessness is a partial result of the issue, though I do not really know. I just see the homeless. They are different from the beggars who also populate Spanish streets, especially in relatively well off neighborhoods. 

While there are needy, such as the man from Cádiz who found himself here with not enough money to return home, they are joined by those whose ordinary work is begging. The latter are masters of separating passersby from their cash. 

These include a whole group of Albanian woman. One older Albanian woman with her young dog occupies a niche by the Santander Bank. Bible and crucifix in hand she is the veritable image of suffering older, Catholic woman. Nonetheless, early one morning, I saw her arrive at her place of work athletically riding a personal electric scooter. She seemed a wave rider on the surf of Santander.

I do not begrudge people doing the time-honored task of begging by working our fantasies and fears, except when I feel scammed. This is a venerable profession and plays a social role. 

However I am not writing about the ethics, morality, or sociology of begging. Instead this all, even if tangentially, fits into the housing crisis here. It is simply often hard to know what's what. 

The building I lived in while visiting here, in the hard scrabble neighborhood, was built in the fifties by the right wing dictatorial government as worker housing. It is in a neighborhood of four or five story complexes of multiple apartments. A plaque on mine attested to that history. Somehow the building was privatized. The owner of my flat lives in the US and contracts with a management company to handle the apartment’s affairs. 

This is all relevant because I read in today’s El País that, according to the Socialist Government Spain had a large supply of publicly built housing that “somehow’ had become private property. 

Much public discussion has been about AirBnB removing private housing from the rental market to let them short term at far higher rates that a normal rent would provide. 

Much ink, passionate rhetoric, and demonstrations have focused on this. Sometimes they have taken an anti-tourist and even anti-foreigner flair. Yet the Government, while recognizing this, has spoken about the lack of public housing and publicly funded construction as a control of the rental market. Of course the opposition argues for a more robust vendor’s market with financial assistance to buyers to qualify for mortgages. As is often the case, the two sides speak past each other.  

Earlier this year, Barcelona imposed rent controls as a means of addressing this problem. Yesterday Blackrock, as well as a whole flock cretaceous raptors that soar over the globe, announced it was withdrawing from the Barcelona market. Its peers quickly followed. They say the controls mean they can no longer make the profits they had anticipated. 

With some chagrin, I have to acknowledge that as a relatively well off retired professor, I am part of the group of foreigners coming into the local housing market and providing upward pressure. To be honest, I do not have a good answer to that concern, though I am  trying to integrate into my building community (as they call it) and learn as much as I can. I shall have to write another time about the difficult complexities of “expat”  as a category that encloses me, as opposed to “immigrant” another category that is very troubled in today's world.

The sun is well up and the day is warming up from its earlier 5 degrees centigrade. I'm going back outside,