Of Apples and Saudi Offerings

Next stop on the Camino a Ítaca, a look back more than fifteen years to a taxi ride across Crater in Aden, Yemen and a curious perspective on colonialism. Click over here for the published Spanish version or read the English version below. 

From the outside it looked like most of the taxis that you see across the developing world. Years of ferrying people across crumbling roads, and often lack thereof, take their toll on these essential services. Here in Aden, Yemen, where few people own their own car, they are even more vital, as this biblical city is set on peninsula broken up into three distinct and very separate parts.

It’s a city that is at least as old as written history. Some say when the book of Ezekiel speaks of the Garden of Eden, it was referring to this baking volcanic rock that sticks out into the gulf of Aden. If indeed it once was a lush, green playground for the forbearers of humankind, the punishment was severe. Times have since changed and all that is left is rock, sand and dust.

As we got in, I quickly noticed that this wasn’t your average taxi. A suspicion that was proven true when the wizened old driver turned around and asked me, in an English that would have sounded familiar to his ex-colonial rulers, where we wanted to go.

I found out that he had worked for the English before they were expelled in the late 1960’s and hadn’t forgotten a word since. As he fondly reminisced about life under British colonial rule, I couldn’t help but ask if he didn’t prefer living in the current, albeit flawed democracy. “Democracy!” he spat, “give me a king like they have in Oman, Saudi Arabia or even our old ruler the Queen of England any day.” The anti-monarchist in me grew curious, even if it meant that his driving got even more erratic as he became more excited. “Kings rob at the beginning of their rule but as they get comfortable, they let some crumbs fall for the common people. These ‘democrats’ though, only have four years and steal everything, leaving nothing behind for us!”

Greed however is one of the most addictive of the cardinal sins and once you get a taste for expensive Vega Sicilia wine, it’s hard to drink the local pitarras. When Juan Carlos betrayed his fascist minders and opted for democracy over dictatorship, even war criminals the likes of Henry Kissinger congratulated him. It looked like a new Garden of Eden and a literal example of having your cake and eating it too.

His decision though, is less magnanimous than it seems. The West was increasingly uncomfortable with the anachronism of a dictatorship in its midst, so why not change a caudillo for a king? Europe is full of moth-eaten parliamentary monarchies that retain the medieval idea of hereditary heads of state. So why not one more?

Unlike his generous Saudi friends though, constitutional monarchs are terrorised by ballot boxes. The chance that their subjects might outgrow their sadomasochistic urge to be dominated disturbs their pampered sleep. Here’s where the taxi driving Methuselah might have been half right, this anxiety seems to drive ‘democratic’ monarchs to develop a taste for the crumbs too.

But even if they do, everyone has the right to the presumption of innocence, ex-kings included. A trial by the media is as immoral and as unfair as a monarchy. This citizen deserves the same as other mortals, a trial in a court of law. Only then will even the most submissive masochist see that magnates need to be shown the exit of Eden.  

Gods and Civil Servants

Stability or ... much needed change.
The next stop on the Camino a Ítaca...civil servants and premature death. Read the original Spanish version here or the English below.

The frayed, red and white plastic tape spun around in the wind, cordoning off the area like a crime scene. Large blocks of faded plastic lay like bleached whalebones poking out of the sand on some remote beach. Then there was the silence. Streets and squares, normally so full of life, were reduced to leaves blowing under empty swings that shifted in the breeze.

The empty, cordoned off children’s playgrounds during the lockdown is one of the pandemic scenes that I will never forget. The hollow squares next to them, with their chained up plastic tables and chairs, looked like just another quiet Sunday morning but the red and white tape strung between the lampposts was a potent symbol of something very, very wrong.

Children’s parks here in Spain have always intrigued me. In a country that is so child-friendly, I always have always wondered why the majority of children’s parks are so poorly equipped. It often seems as though they are urban planning afterthoughts, acting solely as a complement to the adjoining terraces that do bring in some money to the town hall’s coffers. Yet under the lockdown, one lie empty while the other simply ceased to exist.

The rather morbid image brought to mind that, much in the same way that gods reflect their creators, parks too reflect those that bring them into existence. They are both products of people’s desires, fears and prejudices and both bear the indelible stamp of those that create them.

Their inspiration also comes from parallel sources. Divine inspiration has been known to reveal golden plates to con men in places like New York state, but it almost invariably seeks out poor and illiterate souls living in wretched conditions for its immutable message. Messages that demand unquestioning faith and the occasional genocide in return for questionable future promises.

The inspiration to build parks, in contrast, comes from a more earthly though not altogether less conceited source. One that also has the habit of making questionable future promises. Politicians make promises to their flock, but it’s the civil servants that make them a reality. Public servants that also live in a wretched state.

Blasphemy some may say. After all, the myth of the carefree civil servant is almost as potent and ingrained as that of people rising from the dead, but is it necessarily true?

Once the poor souls have memorized their temarios, regurgitated them and passed go to collect their posts, funcionarios are also damned to live under a system that is as ridged and unforgiving as the harshest interpretations of scripture. They find themselves managed by rules that few really understand and find that, no matter what they do or even how well they do it, the rewards are metaphysical at best.

This stifling structure is reflected in the parks’ design. The kids have few risks to manage and take, no real opportunity to move from one stage to the next. It’s safe, sterile and like the public corps, a premature graveyard of whalebones and ideas.

During this temporary truce with the disease, kids have returned to the parks. Even if they are no zip lines or natural spaces, they still manage to create and to figure out a way to have fun despite the controlled environment. Symbols that even the hardest held myths can be overcome.