How Many Horsemen were there?

 It's hot...well, it's always hot in Spain during the summer but this week has been particularly hot. This week's Camino a Ítaca circles the globe and looks at why some have such a problem with the axiom of Climate Change. Click over to read the original article in Spanish in el Hoy or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Imagine drawing a straight line that circles the globe, crossing such diverse places as Lille in France, Mainz in Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and the extraordinarily restored Krakow in Poland. Then continue the line east through the land of my paternal grandfather in Lviv, Ukraine and then across the arid steppes of Kazakhstan and Mongolia before you cut the enigmatic Russian Island of Sakhalin roughly in half before finally reaching the open Pacific. Cross the ocean and you make landfall just north of the beautiful port city of Vancouver before crossing the Rocky Mountains that give on to the great Canadian plains. Under those never-ending, enormous skies, you then pass through the delightfully named, yet slightly stodgy, Winnipeg before running out into the ocean again. The line you would have drawn is approximately the 50^th parallel.

The cities that connect those dots, each with their own identity, all conjure up images of birch tree forests, thick brown breads, heavy cuisine with lots of butter and pickled everything. What doesn’t necessarily come to mind are sunburns and scorching temperatures, but that is just what has happened. This summer we have seen temperatures hit fifty degrees on the fiftieth parallel. Entire towns burned in places near where I spent my summers as a child in British Colombia, Canada. Temperatures that I would have then only associated with things like toaster ovens and car engines. Just over the pole in Siberia, the Russian one that is, temperatures have also been reaching the forties, melting the permafrost that has held its secrets in stasis for millennia. These aren’t cyclical events as some might claim; this is the planet sending us a very sharply worded message that needs no translation.

It’s not only the far north. Half of California is on fire once again and a good part of the classical world in Greece and Turkey is also ablaze. As you read this, temperatures are also soaring to record highs on this side of the Mediterranean. True, high temperatures are not abnormal here in Spain, but what about the frighteningly low levels of the reservoirs. Reservoirs, I might add that not only provide us with drinking water but also help power our prohibitively expensive fans and air conditioners.

On the other extreme of the climate spectrum, devastating floods have ravaged India while torrential rain, the likes of which hasn’t been seen in a thousand years, has devastated central China. Japan is suffering a similar fate. Much closer to home here in Europe, Germany and Belgium have seen tragic losses of life during the flash floods that recently swept through the area. 

And it’s only the ides of August.

What is it about climate change that gives those who ‘have their doubts’ hives and nervous ticks? Do those who flat out deny its existence have a longer, more insightful view of the history of the planet than the rest of us? Is it the sheer cost that it’s going to entail to try and at least palliate the coming armageddon that drives them to refute such obvious signs? Or is it something less tangible, something less rational, something more divine? The bushes are indeed burning. What is needed are prophets brave enough to take concrete actions to divert the coming apocalypse that some so desire.

Remember Yellow Fever?

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to when I first started traveling. Remember those Yellow Fever passorts they used to give out? I imagine they still do? Looking back and looking forward. You can click over and read the original article in Spanish en el Hoy, or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

If memory serves me correct, it was a little yellow booklet. Similar in size to those that banks used to give out when you opened an account with them. I used to carry it in the same ‘secret’ place with my passport when I travelled, which now that I think about it really wasn’t so secret at all. The first time I got one, I was so excited. Each little stamp that I got meant that I was one step closer to experiencing places I had only dreamt about. Each needle I had to endure meant that I was about to get on a plane to somewhere seriously ‘exotic’.

I think the first one that I got was for Yellow Fever. Then I remember there was one for Hepatitis A and another for Hepatitis B, but there was also talk about one that was going to be released that combined them both and maybe even added Hepatitis C. I think there was one for typhoid and I may have even got one for Japanese encephalitis. For me, I couldn’t have cared less. I’d go to the infectious disease specialist, we would look at a wonderful world map and I would tell her where I was going. She would then tell me what I needed and if there was a chance of malaria, dengue and diseases like this that weren’t covered by vaccines. That was it, end of story.

I think that the only time that I had a healthcare professional tell me that it was up to me to decide was when there was an experimental cholera pill that had come out, but as I wasn’t planning on visiting an area that had experienced a recent outbreak, it wasn’t necessary and she said it was up to me if I wanted to spend the money on it. It would have never occurred to me to ask which pharmaceutical company produced the vaccine. I simply knew that I was used to the sunburnt red color that I always turn in tropical countries and that I wasn’t particularly anxious to turn yellow with some terrible fever and got the needle, case closed.

This was long before the advent of Facebook and the millions of homegrown specialists that now spread their idiocy across the world at the click of a button. Illuminati that have emerged from their parents’ basements, convinced that Bill Gates was somehow going to implant them with a tracking device that was more powerful than the one they text on and carry in their pockets everywhere they go.

Of course people who are vaccinated are going to catch the virus, some may even get sick and a few may even die. This is what statistically happens when you are talking about vaccinating an entire planet. These aren’t the numbers that your cousin found on a blog and insists are true, these are empirical facts. Vaccinated people suffer a lot less from the illness, period.

I’m desperate to get on a plane again, to feel that sensation and excitement I have always felt when traveling to somewhere new. If it means one, two or even three shots, bring it on.

Flights of Fancy to Nowhere

Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashy

This week's Camino a Ítaca brings us to the vast steppes of Central Asia and then back again in search of the more ridiculous flights of fancy imposed upon us all by our Dear Leaders. Click over to read the original version published in Spanish in the regional newspaper, el Hoy or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

An Italian friend of mine was once sitting in her hotel room in Ashgabat. She was in the capital of Turkmenistan on official UN business and called her mother. While she was being connected through the hotel’s Soviet-era reception, she noticed some deep heavy breathing on the other end of the line that was obviously not coming from her mom. As her mom was filling her in on the latest gossip from Venice, a sharp, accented voice suddenly broke into the conversation and insisted, “Speak English, please!”

This was during the reign of Saparmurat Niyazov, the country’s first dictator after the fall of the USSR. Turkenbashy, or head of all Turkmen as fancied himself, had had himself crowned as President for Life and brooked no dissent to his rule. So, it’s not surprising that he would have officials from the UN spied upon, even if his spooks were not multi-lingual.

When he wasn’t cracking down on the opposition, Niyazov also had a penchant for making odd decrees. Things like banning news reporters and presenters from wearing make-up because he found it difficult to distinguish between the male and female presenters or prohibiting lip synching at public concerts were a near constant during his regime. One day the Turkmens would wake up to find he had abolished the Turkmen word for bread and named it after his mother and another that he had decreed that the months would be named after him and his family.

Strange laws however aren’t reserved for Central Asian strongmen. Deep down in Florida you can get in a prickly situation if caught fornicating with porcupines, or any other animal for that matter. If you’re caught driving without a shirt in Thailand or, heaven forbid, criticize the monarchy, expect trouble. And it’s not only the Thais that revere their Dear Leaders so. The same behavior will get you into hot water in Morocco and as recently as 2012 in neighboring France it was illegal to be rude to the President or to name a pig after the head of state for that matter.

Here in Spain we’re not immune to ludicrous laws and regulations either. Naming your pig after the king probably won’t land you in jail but you might wind up in court for insinuating that the monarchy, and in particular the ex-monarch, has secrets in Switzerland.

A deeper problem however isn’t these atavistic attempts to defend the head of state’s honor or to protect the feelings of those who believe in supernatural powers. The real dilemma is simply the sheer number of laws and regulations on the books here in Spain. Many of which are obvious anachronisms that get lost in this legislative swamp. Mislaid or perhaps, like acts of good intentions rather than laws that are meant to be enforced, they end up forsaken like decaying moribund graymonoliths in the middle of roundabouts.

I propose a challenge to our legislators, one that has its roots in the country of my birth, Canada, where they recently passed the one-for-one law. A law which states that for every new federal regulation created, the government must eliminate an equal regulatory burden.

This challenge would not only reduce the number of out-of-date laws, but force legislators to seriously reflect before enacting a new fancy. If not, soon we too may find ourselves with another word for bread. 

Deuteronomy

Lady of Elche statue

In this week's Camino a Ítaca we walk back to the fifth book of the Jewish torah, back to deuteronomy. Well, if not exactly back to this religious text, back to something equally atavistic: Oposiciones. The medieval method they use here in Spain to choose their public school teachers (and other public servants). That biblical plague that everyone in the country seems to think is immutable, inevitable and impossible to change. Click over to read the original version published in Spanish in the regional newspaper, el Hoy, or read the English version below. (pdf en castellano abajo)

Today is an auspicious day, for some that is. These fortunate few will begin the day as normal human beings, nervously eating breakfast while reviewing their notes in some bar, trying to avoid eye contact with nearby colleagues who are doing the same. The chosen few will then join the masses of despondent people flooding into their designated buildings, only to emerge a few hours later as demigods in waiting. The vast majority of those who aren’t so fortunate will then be thrown back on the sacrificial pyre of the interinos (temporary government workers) until the oracles prophesize that the planets have once again aligned and another round of oposiciones (public exams) is convoked. These ill-omened souls will be sentenced to once again go back to the topics they will have to study, which at least in the case of language teachers, are only vaguely related to what they actually do, and waste vital energy memorizing useless information. Energy that could be put to much better use by receiving on-the-job training.

These human sacrifices aren’t new. The classical Greek historian Strabo wrote of the Lusitanians inspecting the vitals of their victims well before the arrival of Deuteronomy and Leviticus to the peninsula. What is surprising, is that this extremely ineffectual, baffling divination still exists.

How is it possible that a tribunal can decide whether the querent in front of them is really right for a job after merely having taken an exam? Do they use some sort of necromantic sorcery to distinguish between whether the candidate really understands their profession or if they simply have a good memory and had a better night’s sleep than the previous contestant? Are they, in fact, oracles that can foresee the future and predict that this person will be a competent colleague? A colleague, I might add, that will be harder to get rid of than pagan beliefs if they turn out to not be right for the job? It is true that, technically, there is a one year trial period before someone becomes a fully-fledged civil servant, but have you ever heard of anyone not passing? I for one haven’t.

Yet the institution and, worst yet, manner of acceding to it, still exists. An enigma more puzzling than the look on the face of Lady of Elche statue, whose blank stare rivals any civil servant about to take their break. Not only is it an extremely ineffective way of vetting candidates for jobs, but it is also one of the main factors that contributes to the temporality culture of the Spanish labor market. Many blame the country’s heavy reliance on the agriculture and service sectors for this problem, and they are somewhat right, but what they overlook is that the public administration is in fact more to blame than the private sector.

You can ban bullfights, repeal the bandos de silencio (edict banning excessive noise during siesta hours), prohibit paellas, bankrupt Real Madrid and forbid vacations in August and you would still have a country with a recognizable identity. But drag the medieval oposiciones and figure of the funcionario (civil servant), kicking and screaming, into the 20^th century, let alone the 21^st, and I wonder what we would find? Surely something even better than what we have now. 

Are We There Yet?

In this week's Camino a Ítaca I'm reminded of the perseverance of some of my brave, female students in Yemen. If they could, I can. Click over to read the original in Spanish or the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo). 

Standing in front of a new class is always somewhat nerve-wracking, especially if it’s in a new country. Looking out over a class and seeing fifty percent of your students with curved daggers tucked in their belts and Kalashnikovs carelessly slung on their shoulders like handbags, while the other half are swathed head to toe in black with their faces completely covered, with only their kohl-outlined eyes to latch on to, means taking this disquiet to an entirely new level. This was my day-to-day experience while teaching English in the only coed school in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a.

The sight was also an explicit metaphor. Even if many of the machine guns were held together with duct tape, the message they conveyed was clear. Power dictates who wears the mask and who doesn’t. There was no explicit law stating that women had to cover their faces in public and, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia, there wasn’t a law mandating that women had to cover their hair in public. Yet the majority still do. This message of subjugation was more a cultural phenomenon than political or even religious, even if exegetical attempts are made to justify it using the latter.

My challenge as a teacher was to recognize and differentiate between my masked students. The dehumanizing mask and veil is meant to render women invisible, but even under these difficult circumstances, they were able to pronounce their individuality, albeit subtly. These courageous women saw this rare crack in the stratified social conventions of the region as a possible outlet towards a better future and if it meant covering up to appease social conventions, then so be it.

At first it was near impossible to tell them apart but after time I began to notice the smallest of signs beyond the outline of the kohl around their eyes. Subtle, yet powerful statements that silently cried out, ‘this is me.’ It might have been an inconspicuous arabesque on the hem of their abaya or an almost imperceptible design on the edge of their niqab, but it was just enough to distinguish themselves amongst the rest. The mask may have covered them from view but it couldn’t erase who they were.

I had often thought of these women over the years. I will always remember their determination to learn and their certainty that learning was the key to their future. They have also come to mind whenever attempts around Europe arise to ban burkas in the public sphere. It’s only recently though that I have thought about them almost every day.

I think of them as I pant my way up hills, gasping for air as I near the top. I’m reminded of them as I pass by people that I know in the street without recognizing them and saying hello. Each time my glasses fog up and I have to stop to clean them before looking out at a class where everyone is now wearing a mask, they come to mind.

I relive their determination and their resoluteness, no matter the obstacles in front of them. And then I put my mask back on, keep climbing the hill and think, just a little while longer now.

Go and ...Return?

Crossing the Tagus River enroute to Plasencia by bus.

This week's Camino a Ítaca looks back on a recent event where I was ... stranded, 80kms from home because there were no connections. Click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. 

Eighty kilometres really isn’t far, but after six-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, Caceres seemed as far away from Plasencia as the moon. There was simply no way to get home. What made it more frustrating was that from the heights of The Pearl of the Valley I felt that I could almost see my destination in the distance. There it lie, somewhere beyond the swinging sabers of the wind giants that help power the city. But it’s a three day walk along the Ruta de la Plata and my only option was to wait for the next train.

Sunday was quiet on the streets of Plasencia, but the midday train platform buzzed in comparison. Sleepy-eyed university students leaned on enormous suitcases stuffed with freshly ironed clothes and tupperware filled with their mother’s cooking. Professionals with much more portable luggage stared at their phones, seemingly willing the train to be on time. Parents and grandparents looked on and remembered how the train had once been the key that opened the door to the world beyond these valleys.

The rails run south from the city and then wind their way through the singular landscape that is the dehesa until they reach the barrier of the jagged sierra that marks where Monfragüe begins. The train, which had left Atocha at ten o’clock that morning, then skirted the range until it squeezed through a couloir between steep cliffs hung with garlands of rock roses. Vultures, taking advantage of the updrafts that these narrow valleys produce, circled overhead as the train cautiously picked its way across the sierra. When it finally emerged out on the other side, a treeless, undulating carpet of green unfurled itself towards Caceres and the distant Montanchez on the horizons of the vast spaces of Extremadura.

As the train approaches Cañaveral, the old railway slips under the future. Overhead, a gleaming, blue-fenced electrified track shoots off like an illusory promise over an impressive series of viaducts that give the impression that the track is floating over the furrowed terrain below. Then in a fleeting moment, it’s gone. Lost behind the hilly thickets as the train instead creeps crept further down along the sinuous curves of the 1960’s track that borders the Alcantara/Oriol reservoir.

Decades of broken promises ring in your ears as the train crawls through a series of tenebrous tunnels so narrow that the pressure makes them pop as you roll through. This essential link to the future clings precariously to the banks of the reservoir and, in the same way, to the past. The chimerical promise of a future on equal footing with the rest of the country continues to run just out of sight.

After the queasy twists and turns that zig zag the train out of the confines of this inland sea, you once again catch a glimpse of that blue promise as it beelines towards its destination, only to see it disappear yet again. Another promise unkept, another appeal to be patient.

Trains have always been about freedom. They allow you to chase your dreams and experience other worlds. Ideally, they also allow you to come home, if given the chance.

Liberty or Communism

Chimeras of Communism or Liberty

In this week's Camino a Ítaca, I reflect back on my time in Baku while traveling along the false dichotomies that are leading populist right wing parties to power across the world. Click over to read the original Spanish version or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I spent some time living on the extreme fringes of Europe on a fingertip-like peninsula that juts out into the Caspian Sea. A country that sits on the blurry border between what we call the West and East. The Caucasus mountains rise at Azerbaijan’s back and the Iran of the Ayatollahs stews in front. This was just after the turn of the millennium and the ashes of the Soviet Union were still very present. Since the fall of the USSR, Azerbaijan and its neighboring ex-Soviet states had morphed into dystopian, neoliberal oligarchies under the guise of liberty and freedom. Ruled by 'strong' men who didn't shy away from boiling people alive if they disagreed with their style of freedom.

True, they no longer suffered the yoke of communism, but the only road that had been built and maintained in the previous 15 years was the highway that led out to BP’s oil refinery and pipeline. While the rest of the country crumbled, the oil that had once made Alfred Nobel rich was once again flowing west.

I had always been curious about the Soviet Union and what life had been like under communism. I had heard some firsthand descriptions from my classmates when they took a school trip to Moscow in the early 80’s, but they mostly talked about how much money they had made by selling all of their Levis jeans. The rest of my background knowledge came from Hollywood movies that amplified Reagan’s rhetoric of the evil empire.

So, when the topic came up in class, I would always take advantage of it to listen and learn from people’s stories. One that I particularly remember was when a student told me about what she missed most about the USSR. It was the news. “Back then there was never any bad news, everything was always good and if something bad did happen, it was someone else’s fault. Even if we knew it wasn’t true, at least it wasn’t depressing. Now, everything is about how awful things are and I just turn off.”

The right may have won the cold war but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t learn from their opponent. Think back to recent rightwing slogans from around the world. 'Make Brexit Happen' or its progenitor, ‘Make America great again’. In order to make it happen, ‘build the wall’. Trump didn’t say he was going to cut taxes that would mostly benefit billionaires, he just said cut taxes. He didn’t say that the American food industry would collapse overnight without illegal workers, he simply said that America needed to be great again. He never explained when or why it had stopped being great. It was somebody else’s fault.

This lesson from the Soviets and other totalitarian regimes has been forgotten by the moralizing left. People don’t want to hear about what they can’t do. They don’t want to hear that they can’t drive certain cars, hunt or go to bullfights. And they certainly don’t want to be publicly sacrificed on the pyres of political correctness for doing so.

'Libertad o comunismo' sounds a lot more attractive than paying more taxes for quality public services. This chimera of freedoms and facile slogans are as seductive as they are disingenuous. A chimera that will only grow if the left continues to forget its past.

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.

One of 'Ours'

Is he one of 'ours'?

This week's Camino a Ítaca takes me back on tour. Back to the days when I literally lived on the road and then zooms to the present and questions just how the regional government sees its citizen. Are you one of 'ours' or not? You can click over and read the original in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

When I think back to it, it must have been quite the sight. There, in the oil-stained corner of a gas station parking lot, were four long-haired fifteen-year-olds trying their best to play African American music from the 1950s. The Blues had originated 3,000kms away in Mississippi, but here were four young kids trying their best, playing for tips in northern Canada. The music might not have been the best, but something must have worked, because the owner asked us to come back and even gave us some money for doing it and I’ve been playing music professionally ever since.

Music has its ups and down. I’ve had the pleasure to play for thousands of people on some nights, only to play for two drunks the next in some small town in the middle of Nebraska. One day it’s encores and congratulations and the next is a beer bottle thrown at you because you don’t play any country music. It was thanks to my guitar that I first crossed the Atlantic and got my first taste of European life. It was with a band that I first came to Spain back in the early 90s and first realized that it was a place that I would one day like to settle. It’s also from behind my guitar that I have explored remoter corners of Extremadura, from Talarrubias to Pinofranqueado.

I’ve been lucky enough to play with some of those who helped create that music from Mississippi and am thankful to have had the chance to record in some of the great temples of music, like Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland deep in the bowels of the village in New York City. It was a fun ride until one day, the music died.

It happened almost overnight. As the pandemic set in, mini tours and festival bookings from France to the Algarve vanished. A few brave souls have tried to resuscitate our moribund cultural scene, but as you look out from the distant stage to see white masks sitting two meters apart, unable to get a drink, dance or even go to the bathroom, it just doesn’t feel the same. Besides, how can you plan an entire tour when you don’t even know if you’ll be able to leave your house?

Like others, I was glad to see that the Junta then offered a grant to try and help those who had seen their livelihoods disappear and I sent in my application too. In reply, I got a letter saying that I needed a certificate proving that indeed I was an artist. In today’s world where everything can be seen on Facebook, including each and every mistake you make on stage, this seemed a bit Kafkaesque. That said, I suppose it wasn’t as bad as those poor souls who are something declared dead by the administration when they are, in fact, very much alive and kicking. I then read the fine print a little closer and the story morphed into something more sinister, a story more akin to something by Mario Puzo. Not only did I have to prove that I was in fact a musician, but that proof had to be in relation to the regional administration. It didn’t matter if you had played two hundred gigs that year, if you hadn’t worked for them, better luck next time.

Since I began living here, I’d always heard that quien hizo la ley hizo la trampa (literally those who make the laws know how to break them) but I never knew that it was also quien hace la ley certifica la trampa (those who make the law, certify the way to get around them).

The Cilice of Education

In this week's Camino a Ítaca we return to the trail of education and the challenges the kids face here in Extremadura, Spain. A place where 'no pain, no gain' is the way forward in learning. You can click over and read the original published in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en Castellano abajo)

I grew up in a staunchly monolingual part of a country that is officially bilingual. Even though I’m from a lost city out on the Canadian prairies, 3,000 kilometers from French-speaking Quebec, every single package has to be in both languages. With this in mind, my mother sent my brother and I to one of the public immersion schools in the city where we spent our mornings enveloped in the language of Voltaire while the world the surrounded the school sounded more like Margaret Atwood.

I remember opening the doors to the school and being shifted into an alternative reality. A world that contrasted sharply from the generalized prudish austerity of the Canadian prairies. It was a place where smartly dressed teachers from distant Montreal and even further off Bordeaux melded methodologies from both sides of the Atlantic.

I can’t help but compare my childhood commute to school with the lovely walk I have with my kids every morning here in Caceres, Spain. Here we walk past renaissance palaces to the soundscape of storks or swifts, depending on the season. A sharp contrast from my memories of shoveling half a meter of snow in minus thirty weather just to get to the sidewalk.

The contrasts don’t end there though. Schooling is quite different here, even if the education laws are similar, at least on paper. I remember having exams every semester or so when I was in school, but here one of my daughters sometimes has two, three and even four a week. Being from a different culture, I began asking what other parents thought and was alarmed at what I heard. While most seemed to agree that this incessant testing was excessive, some commented on the fact that the children might as well get used to it now, because as they advanced through the system things would only get worse. Powerful words like horrendous, terrible and suffering resounded and were some of the most common that I heard as we talking about this. Keep in mind, all of this when referring to the education of our children. I then became frightened for a moment. Did so many share the idea that children were meant to suffer? Was there some sort of psychopathic COVID side effect running rampant in society? Was there really a widespread desire to see kids suffer?

I then thought about it further and then realized that there actually might be some truth in what they were saying. In a region where around 30% (low-balling) will face a public exam that will determine their future, being good at taking exams isn’t just another life skill, it is the life skill. Forget actual learning, disregard interiorizing information and revision and don’t even consider learning by doing. The game here is to memorize, spit and forget. That’s how you get ahead and the sooner you learn how, the better. The platitudes you hear about the need to 'make an effort' really has nothing to do with actual learning and in fact translates into a view that one needs to suffer in order to learn. The prevailing concept of education is that it equates with suffering and penance. The alarm I heard wasn’t really a question of sadism, but actually a grumble of discontent and a rattle of resignation and surrender.

 The Spanish government can change the education law ten times more, but until it is capable of actually implementing the modern methodologies, complete with the key competences found in it, this prevailing view of the need to suffer will be passed on to yet another generation.