The WHOLE Cookie Jar

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to a time when I realized that all that glitters is definitely not gold. Despite the face it puts on regarding individual rights, when they come up against entities too big to fail, we know who the winner will be. Click over to read the original in Spanish or read the English below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I remember it like it was yesterday. There on the news stood the prime minister of the country at the time, Jose Luis Zapatero, smirking like a five-year-old who had just stolen a cookie when he thought his mother wasn’t looking. Next to him stood the president of BBVA, Francisco Gonzalez Rodriguez. His smile was much less naïve and read something along the lines of a cartoon villain. It was the crooked look of the stereotypical bad guy from an 80s movie that had not only stolen a cookie, but had in fact stolen the deed to the entire jar. It was that kind of smile. The two leaders were giving a news conference where they both talked of their shared desire and compromise to make the workplace more flexible, more humane. A shared goal to transform the workplace into a space that would enable working parents to better conciliate their work-life balance.

My Spanish at the time was much weaker than it is now and I turned to my wife to make sure that I was understanding everything correctly, but she had no time to help. She had just come home for a quick bite to eat before having to return to her job at one of Mr. Gonzalez’s bank branches. Even though her contract officially stated that her workday ended at 3pm, she, and the rest of her colleagues who had recently joined the bank were well aware of the fact that those who ‘went the extra mile’ would be the ones that would have their contracts renewed. Those who worked for the hours that they were paid for, well Francisco’s snide grin said it all.

I remember that moment so well because it was one of my first awakenings to the fact the hypocrisy that I had experienced my whole life in North America, was also well-entrenched on this side of the Atlantic. We could delude ourselves in the belief that our ‘western’ democracies valued people’s rights above all else, but when those rights came into conflict with the interests of entities that are ‘too big to fail’, deep down inside we know who the winner will always be.

Fast forward to the small print in today’s news and I see that the banks are once again planning to make people’s working lives easier to conciliate with their families. This time by asking them to stay home permanently. Conservative estimates say that perhaps more than 10,000 jobs are set be lost in a banking industry that is still making profits. Yet suggest that the industry be reigned in and pay back the loans they received from the government after the last crisis and you’re branded a communist by those who claim to be on another ‘side’. Criticize the left for renouncing to represent the workers, you’re told you’re aiding the fascists.

And here’s where those smiles get even broader. Rather than confronting the real problems of our day to day lives during this global pandemic, we’ve somehow stepped back in time. Back to 1936 with slogans like liberty or communism or ‘o me votais a mi o vuelve el franquismo’ (vote for me or the fascists are coming) and that’s just where they want us. Squabbling over peripheral social issues instead of effecting deep systemic reform all the while they’re busy stealing the cookie jars. 

'My' Side, 'Your' Side

In this week's Camino a Ítaca I look back at a surreal experience in deepest Arkansas and how some feel the past so strongly that they actually feel a living part of it. Click over to the original in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The poor woman had obviously had way too much to drink, and judging how the regulars at the bar judiciously avoided her, it probably wasn’t the first time she found herself face down in an ashtray. We took the locals cue and continued to ignore her when she suddenly lurched over the bar, knocking some of the other clients bottles over in the process, and repeated what she had been slurring for the past half an hour, “You goddam Yankees stole my niggers! You bastards took away my slaves!”

I have to admit that I was a little confused. At first, I didn’t have a clue what she was raving on about, seeing as I am Canadian and all. But there we were, taking a break between sets at a gig in a bar in the southern state of Arkansas when I realized that the woman had obviously overheard my bandmate’s accent. An accent that distinctly marked him, to anyone who had seen any of the Hollywood gangster movies, as someone who had grown up in one of the boroughs of New York City. Hearing it, she had decided to direct her drunken rage at us.

One mystery solved, but I was still confused.  

What had this woman been drinking that would lead her to believe that something that had happened more than a century ago was somehow a personal affront to her? What kind of selfish narcissism allowed her to believe that a historical event that happened so long ago was the main cause of her problems? What kind of substances had she ingested that would lead her to think that she was an actual combatant in a long dead war? Worse yet, what kind of person would want to identify with something as abhorrent and horrendous as slavery? Yet there she was, floundering like a fish in the growing pool of spilt beer on top of the bar. Something had drastically failed along her path.

She’s not alone in her lostness. Just a few months ago we saw enraged masses waving Nazi flags assaulting the US capitol building. A flag that symbolizes an ideology that half a million of their forefathers died fighting against. A flag that represents the nightmarish horrors of places like Auschwitz and Dachau. A flag they now called their own. Turn on the TV and you’ll see LGTBQ protestors proudly wearing Che Guevarra t-shirts, identifying themselves with a regime that would have had them sent to labour camps, and perhaps even executed for their orientation. We see nostalgic neocommunists tweet on their iPhones about the need to do away with private property before settling down to watch Netflix in a second flat that their parents’ bought. Closer to home here in Spain, politicians and their acolytes talk of winners and losers of a war that was fought generations ago. A civil war in which there were only losers among the masses. Yet, there is still talk of ‘your’ side and ‘mine’, as if their coiffed hair had suffered the lice of the trenches. As if I'm somehow a member of a side simply because I don't agree with you?

Ideals from the past can obviously be supported, just as they can be rejected. But to claim ownership of these, to somehow assert ones membership as part of something long past seems as delusional as that poor woman wriggling in that pool of cigarette butts and stale beer on that bar in lost Arkansas.