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

 

 

 

 

Conversation While a Front Approaches

 

The air is cooler this morning, as I sit on my terrace above the street. Not much, just a few degrees. But it makes a difference.  My plants seem more relaxed. 

A front bludgeon’s its was across the peninsula bringing much cooler air. Most of the peninsula can expect thunderstorms and rain, sometimes heavy rain from its clubs and tackles.  Alicante’s capital city will miss out. It will be somewhat cooler but dry. I would love the rain.

I lived for years on the Mexican Border, in El Paso, when young, and grew up with the drama of monsoons in July. Very dry land and arroyos that fill up quickly bringing flash floods even into the city.  

This small corner of Spain, is that dry, perhaps even more so than my El Paso. 

Rain seldom visits us here, even though the spring was unusually rainy. We have days after days of intense, bright sunshine. 

Still, you can see water-carved gullies all over this desert land, just like in El Paso, only more so. 

We get clouds and cooler weather, but storms, no matter how much they bluster and bludgeon across the peninsula, tend to skip over us.  The ones that don’t carve the landscape.

I am sure the reasons are meteorologically complicated though the  obvious answer is that we are in the rain shadow of the mountains that rise on the coast and the uplift to the great Spanish plateau.. 

A few weeks ago, Alicante and water was a topic of conversation when I met a movie-star handsome Ph.D.student in a cafe who has lived here for years while studying in the university. He is Palestinian from Gaza. 

Instead of spending more than a few sentences on the genocide, he steered our conversation elsewhere, such as to Alicante City and his impressions as a Levantine Arab. 

To him, Alicante feels like an Arabic city. Everywhere he turns he finds styles, concepts, and words from the Arab world. 

He said the city’s name, Alicante, sounds to him like an Arabic phrase which means a place with no water, a very dry place.

Alicante was an Arabic town and the Arab castle still sits above the city (with Christian accretions) on Mount Benacantil). 

Over the centuries, Alicante has had much back and forth with Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with Morocco. 

Indeed, this city is one of two in Spain with the largest percentage of foreigners among its inhabitants, some 23%. This is the official number composed of people with residence permits. The actual number is much larger. 

In the Province of Alicante the largest number of immigrants is from the UK, mostly an older group of retirees and sunny-beach seekers from the land of green and rain, However, in the city, the largest group is from Morocco, followed ever more closely now by Colombians.

Before the Arabs, Alicante had an indigenous population. Then Phoenecians came here, probably to take advantage of its port. The Romans, built a small city here, called Lucentum, the place of light. A small set of its ruins can be visited north of Mount Benacantil. 

Spain as a whole was a very important Roman province and people still speak versions of its language. Iberia was a center of the empire. 

In fact, the first non Italian Emperor came from from Sevilla, then Hispalia. He was the very gay or bi emperor Trajan who was popular and had a huge impact on the entire empire. 

I devoured a book review this morning in El Pais for a new book about him by the historian David Soria (Trajano, el mejor emperador Desperta Ferro 2025).

Sevilla located on the Guadalquivir river was a Roman place. Then the Goths intervened and later Sevilla became an important city in Arab Spain. 

Arabic flourished here though much of the population retained versions of their Latin now Arabized. This is reflected in contemporary Spanish where even simple words like shirt (camisa) or cotton (algodón) are Arabic.

But there is an historical break when Alicante—like other places in Spain—carried out an ethnic cleansing.The Arabized and Islamic population was driven out and people from Catalonia and Aragon were brought in to repopulate the area. Centuries elapsed before Arabs again became a significant part of the population as they are today. It was in the nineties that Moroccans began here in numbers. 

In all of this one hears the fears of the right wing types who speak out against immigration as a threat to the Spanish nation and to ideas of population replacement. However, the majority of the non-immigrant population of Alicante favors immigrants and tries to embrace them and let them know they, like rain and cool air, are welcome. 

Another numerous group of immigrants that is growing perhaps faster than Moroccans is not Arabs, but is composed of Ukranians, most fleeing Russia’s devastating adventure. 

Monday morning, as I went into one of my favorite places, where the air conditioning was fortunately strong because it had not cooled off in the night, I was warmly greeted by a woman who works by the front window rolling shaping and forming dough.  This morning, she was cutting pieces of focaccia. 

She asked how I was and whether my eyes were better (I have had an infection in both eyes and a reaction to Ciprofoxin).  When she verified the swelling was gone and my lids had almost returned to their normal color, she said “I had my eye operated on last week.”

In Spain, she said, they do not do the operation and so she had to return to her home country, Ukraine. Her city, as she said is close to the Russian border.

I was doubly surprised because I had thought she was Argentine, as almost every other worker in this cafe and Italian food shop is. I was also surprised she returned to a war zone for her surgery. She said, in response: “When you live there you mostly just go on with your life. You can’t let the war stop you.”