Sacamantecas...Here Comes the Bogeyman!

The specter of something dark and frightening runs through this week's Camino a Ítaca. Progressive politicians afraid of their own shadow look on with terror as real-life Bogeymen and women ride the wave of their indecisiveness and inaction. At least I learned a great new word out of it, sacamantecas. Click over to read the original article published in Spanish in el Hoy or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I grew up in the 70s in western Canada. Back then, when an authority figure, most likely your parents, wanted to frighten children into good behavior, they would say ‘watch out or the bogeyman will get you’. Many immigrants to the area had Polish, Ukrainian or Russian roots and if their children misbehaved they were told that another creature, Baba Yaga, would come for them and use their bones to build her house in the woods.

These threats didn’t only occur in families with European backgrounds. The Inuit people of northern Canada had a similar figure, the Qallupilluit, a mythical creature with long nails and green slimy skin that was said to kidnap misbehaving children.

Here in Spain you have to look no further than Goya’s etching, que viene el Coco, to see that this figure, meant to tame and domesticate children. is universal.

Parenting has changed since then. We now can no longer imagine letting a child ride shotgun on your lap in the car, let alone traveling without a seatbelt. The idea of threatening a child with an icy death in the waters of the Artic for a small offense or suffering an eternity burning in sulfur in hell for a sin against the Judeo-Christian tradition borders on child abuse.

Yet if parenting has changed so much, why haven’t political parties evolved too? If these paternalistic empty threats are no longer considered effective or even moral, why do they continue to use them?

After months of unprecedented inflation, protests have finally erupted from two of the most punished sectors of the Spanish economy, the rural environment and the lorry drivers who transport their goods. Sectors that have seen their businesses pushed to the edge by the unfair practices of a neoliberal model whose intrinsic goal is to achieve maximum profit, no matter the costs. Yet these protests were scoffed at, said to be composed of far-right factions and señioritos on horseback. It's true, they were there, but so was the village grocer who also likes to go hunting at weekends.

What about your electricity bill? Have you turned down your thermostat because Borell asked you to do so? Or had you already done so because you had to choose between leaving it at 20 degrees or eating meat twice a week?

Yet where are the trade unions? Where are the general strikes? Has the joke of ‘just wait until the right governs and then they will see how we protest’ become reality?

The threat of the bogeyman has worn thin. The populist siren song of the extreme right only grows stronger while the left continues to fret about who can access bathrooms rather than directly confront the abusive practices that have seen petrol and energy companies registering record gains while inflating prices.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Social democracy needs to take a firm position in this world of greedy bogeymen before they take power and remove what remains of our labor rights.

Real life Baba Yagas exist. They sit in places like the Kremlin and fund extreme right groups from Puigdemont’smafia to the Calle Bambu. It’s time to act before el Coco moves from myth to reality.

How do you Say your Surname?

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to my childhood and then turns to the deadly present. A look at War. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in El Hoy or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The first day of school was always an anxious time for me. My biggest worry wasn’t necessarily regarding our new teacher or how difficult the material would be. What I constantly fretted about was how my new teacher was going to pronounce my surname. Were they going to mangle it and make it sound more ‘foreign’ than it actually was, or would they make it sound somehow ‘English’? I agonized over which way were they going to pronounce the ‘u’ and if they were going to place an emphasis on the ‘h’, which is pronounced in English. Those seven letters have raised a lot of questions throughout my life.

Being born and raised in Canada, I’ve had people read my surname and surmise I had some distant First Nations ancestry simply because of the way it sounded. Conversely, I’ve also had people believe that I was Japanese, at least until they met me in person. As someone from the ‘new world’, the possibilities were endless.

It wasn’t until I moved to Baku, Azerbaijan to teach that I encountered people who instantly knew where it came from. I would write my name up on the board for my mostly Russian speaking Azeri students and they would immediately say, ‘Were you born in the Ukraine?’

I would tell them that I hadn’t, my paternal grandfather was, but it was called Poland and the time. He had escaped the Ukraine somehow in the thirties and for a reason unknown to us, like many of his compatriots, ended up in Canada. The Canadians welcomed him to the country, if only briefly, and then asked him to join a different queue. One that involved enlisting in the Canadian army and heading back across the Atlantic to a Europe he had just escaped to fight in the Second World War.

Because of this family history, you would think that the recent tragic events might have affected me more than the normal news cycle. But I can’t say it has. Even if you add to the fact that my only brother lives in Poland, someone who is constantly checking the available flights and trains west the following day, I can’t say that this war is somehow different, somehow special.

What it is, is war.

My roots may run deep in the Ukraine, but in all of my travels, it’s a place that I have yet to see, one that I have yet to experience. I know no one there. That said, I have traveled, lived and worked in places like Yemen, Syria, Colombia, Ethiopia and Libya. I have former students, friends and colleagues who have also had to flee their homes, often at a moment’s notice in equally terrifying conditions.

Yet for some, this latest war is somehow more profound. For some reason it means more than others. The Russian aggressor is somehow more insidious and the cruelty somehow more evil than the others being fought in ‘barbarous’ lands.

And here is where the inherent racism lies. War is war and each one creates refugees. It’s equally as heinous in Libya as it is in Lviv and makes me realize more and more that a surname doesn’t matter. People do.