Empty Promises, Empty Shelves

This week's Camino a Ítaca travels back to the 1970's and some of the parrallels we see happening today. Populist, right wing sociopaths are marching once great nations into the abyss of a #me-me, all for me world. Click over to the original piece published in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The recent images coming out of the United Kingdom take me back to the fuzzy TV images of my 1970’s childhood. Cars stretching for miles all lined up to try and fill up their tanks with gas that just wasn’t there. Back then, the cause of the crisis was external. It took place when the OPEC member states, led by Saudi Arabia, proclaimed an oil embargo on countries that were perceived as supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur war. Prices soared over 300% in North America but in the end, the embargo failed and ended up being self-defeating. Israeli forces did not withdraw, the countries that were targeted by the embargo refused to change their positions and perhaps the most longstanding consequences were that the crisis sparked increased oil exploration, alternative energy research and initiated a move towards energy conservation.

This conservation can be seen in the smaller cars that form the long queues in the U.K. They are certainly no longer the enormous land boats of my North American childhood, but what really marks the difference between these two crises is the root cause. While the 70s oil crisis was a multilateral affair involving many different actors from different continents, the crisis the U.K is currently facing is entirely self-inflicted. Try as they might to shift the blame elsewhere, there is no one to blame but themselves.

Brexit was not the result of foreign interference. While the Trump administration, knowing full well it would debilitate the U.K and weaken the EU, threw their support behind the slow-motion suicide, it can’t be said that they or any other foreign state forced the British to shoot themselves in the foot. They did it to themselves at the polls. The end result is that a once great nation, the 6^th biggest economy of the world and permanent member of the UN Security Council now finds itself with bare supermarkets shelves and shuttered up petrol stations.

Brexit was the direct result of a dangerous ideology. One that exploits the fear of the ‘other’, scapegoating immigrants and those who do not think like them as the cause of everyone’s problems. All the while diverting the attention away from their neoliberal aims of dismantling the social nets across the West and transferring public wealth into increasingly smaller yet richer hands. It’s a jingoistic right-wing populism that is eating away at the rotting traditional core of conservatism across the western world. One which may have lost its poster boy in power in the U.S, but that is still firmly represented in the U.K by someone who combs his hair with a balloon, and which has many representatives here in Spain in the House of Parliament.

This siren song that leads people to think that their problems are soley caused by someone else may lull one into a gentle sleep but it certainly won’t fix anything. The British can try and blame the EU for their misfortunes, the Catalans can accuse the rest of Spain of robbing them, Extremadura can allege that the fault lies in Madrid and xenophobes can claim that migrants are stealing nonexistent jobs but the result always turns out the same. The sooner we stop listening, the better. 

The Dark Side of Surprise

This week's Camino a Ítaca reminds me that after so many years, Spain can still be a mystery to me. September is in full swing and education is on many people's radars and it is definitely on mine. Combine that with the ongoing pandemia and then throw in a few negationists and you have a potent cocktail. Click over to read the original published in el HOY in Spanish or the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

After living here for so many years, Spain can still surprise me. Time and time again I find myself scratching my head and thinking, ‘Amazing that was completely unexpected.’ Whether this frequent state of bewilderment is a good thing or not, I’m not so sure. It’s wonderful when I come across a new dish in an undiscovered (for me) region, or when I stumble upon wonderfully creepy Romanic capitals on the other side of the Tagus. The sheer depth of uncharted territory for me here offers me several lifetimes’ worth of exploring. The darker side of this disorientation though comes when I’m struck with an occurrence that takes me completely by surprise.

This happened the other week when I heard about the poor little girls that were being used as politicized weapons by their malevolent parents in their infantile battle against reason. The images from abroad of misinformed lunatics injecting themselves with bleach and gargling with iodine in their deluded fight against a disease many claim doesn’t even exist had until then seemed completely foreign.

Spain’s response to the pandemic has been exemplary. The Spanish understand that vaccines work. They are the best line of defense against the disease and the fastest route available to us to be able to return to some sense of normalcy. Draconian lockdowns and the quasilegal imprisonment of our children aside, the measures adopted have been effective. Mask wearing has been taken to an extreme with people having to wear them while walking out in the countryside, but absolutely no one disagrees with the fact that they are the simplest, most effective measure that we can take against contagion indoors. No one at least who has the least minimum notion regarding how viruses are transmitted. My eight-year-old gets it.

But my surprise wasn’t that a few negationist nutcases were trying to impose their selfish whims on the wider community. In fact, until then my surprise was that the extreme right had yet to import and adopt, as they have done with so many other foreign positions, this anti science lunacy. My shock came about when I saw the Junta’s initial reaction and poisonous bile spilt by a large section of the general public towards the teachers, claiming they were lazy and simply did not want to work.

At a time when you can’t even conceive of stepping foot into a public administration building without a previous appointment, the Junta’s initial order to not only allow this family to flaunt the rules, rules that the teachers had been rigorously teaching and implementing for the past two years, and insist that the teachers place themselves and the entire school at risk, simply due to an unfounded caprice, was madness. Just imagine if you try to walk into a court building without a mask. How far would you get in before you are stopped by security guards or the police? But hey, these are just teachers.

Where does this deep contempt for teachers, and what they do, come from? Is it some sort of unconscious hostility that arises from suffering endured at the hands of callous and cruel nuns when they were in school? Or is this disdain based on the fact that many simply consider teachers overpaid babysitters? Whatever it is, it will never cease to perplex me. 

Back to the Future or Back to the Past?

Back to this?

As our children head back to school, this week's Camino a Ítaca looks back to the future and the eduaction that awaits them. What will this academic year year? Click over to read the original in Spain in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The long Spanish summer has come to an end, at least on paper. The temperatures might still soar into the high thirties and the rains may yet to fall, but yesterday the nine o’clock traffic jams have returned to the streets. The kids are back in school.

They do so under a cloud of uncertainty regarding how the pandemic will evolve in the coming months. With the much more contagious delta variant now being the most common type in the country, it remains to be seen how the school year will develop, even with the extremely high level of vaccinations across the country.

In most cases, the measures from the previous academic year remain in effect. The general protocol remains in place for the so-called “stable coexistence groups” or “bubble groups” in nursery and primary school in a continued attempt to avoid contact with other students, even if specialist teachers move from group to group. Granted, the minimum distance between desks has been reduced to 1,2 from the previous 1,5 meters, but the importance placed on this seems to be about as incongruous as many of the other restrictions that have been imposed outside of class. These are kids that may have ridden for hours on packed buses and airplanes over the summer, sitting just centimeters from people they don’t know. But even still, schools are once again supposed to minimize the movement of groups of students throughout the center and avoid assemblies or face-to-face meetings and, where possible, avoid all activities that involve mixing different groups or classes. This socialization factor of schooling, ever so important at these ages, must once again be put on pause.

We all want the best for our kids and of course want teachers to enjoy a workspace where they feel safe, of these things there can be not doubt. But there are such things as calculated or measured risks, activities that are worth undertaking because the benefits outweigh the acceptable risks. Last year, in many schools across the region, group work in class was forbidden by certain school committees even if the Junta’s general directive clearly stated that it was permissible if the minimum distances were respected. The pandemic served up the perfect opportunity for those in the educational community who do not believe in community learning theories to drag their students back into the black and white classrooms of old with straight rows of desks and with rote learning at its core.

Working in small groups provides learners with opportunities to articulate ideas, uncover misconceptions, and negotiate with others to create projects or reach consensus, even during the first stages of education. Group activities allow students to discover deeper meaning in the content and improve critical thinking skills. Effective use of group work engages students with higher-level content that is thought-provoking and that can have multiple interpretations. But this kind of teaching doesn’t neatly fit into exam-driven teaching, it takes hard work and planning.

I appreciate the concern that the authorities have shown when faced with getting out kids back into school safely. I only wish that half of that concern was spent on what actually happens once they are there.

The Salt Market

Lapiz Luzuli

The terrible tragedy unfolding in slow motion in Afghanistan reminded me of gems on sale in the open air markets of Yemen. In this week's Camino a Ítaca, I look back at the Afghan stones that were so valuable and the near hysteria of right-wing conservatives, desperate to declare their deity somehow more reasonable than others. Click over to the original version published in Spanish in El Hoy or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The souk al-Milh, or Salt market, is one of the biggest and perhaps oldest open-air markets in the old city of Sanaa, Yemen. Here time isn’t marked by passing centuries but instead in millennia in what is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on earth. The massive doors to the walled city are still shut every evening and until relatively recently you could find the severed hands of thieves nailed to the wood, underscoring the Old Testament vision of law observed here. Under the shadows of these tapia tower houses, the adjective ‘biblical’ outplays ‘medieval’ in any attempt to describe the sights, sounds and smells. Images that evoke the thousand and one nights more vividly than any sterilized Hollywood production could ever hope to.

Traders offer everything from cardamom from the highlands of Kerala across the Arabian Sea in India, to Iranian saffron from across the Persian Gulf to highly coveted handguns from the Basque Country. Frankincense and myrrh are still commonly traded day to day commodities. If you delve deeper into the market, you come to the jewelers selling gold, silver, ceremonial daggers, ambergris and Red Sea corals.

But what always fascinated me among all the traditional jewelry were the prized royal blue gems that looked like they had somehow been extracted from folds of cloth in paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli. These were some of the most expensive items for sale and when I asked the traders why they would quote a proverb, “If you do not wish to die, avoid the Valley of the Kokcha River, the valley where Lapis Lazuli is mined.” And just where is this valley? In one of the most remote, difficult to reach areas of the planet, the Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan, the cemetery of empires, has been back in the headlines as tribal leaders from all sides gave the Americans and their allies a history lesson that is bound to be repeated (China?). Attitudes have shifted wildly since the Taliban waltzed out of the mountains and into the capital. Many pacifists have now changed their tune with a renewed interest in protecting the women who have experienced a modicum of freedom, at least in Kabul, for the past 20 years. Precisely, thanks to the military intervention they had always been against.

But the most confounding takes on the debacle have come from conservative western commentators observing this slow-motion tragedy with such zealous schadenfreude. They can’t seem to contain their delight in underscoring the barbarity that comes with the reimplementation of Sharia law and the backwardness of basing a country’s laws on iron-age texts created by men without any notion of something as basic as germ theory.

And here they are completely right.

A country’s laws must be based on reason, not faith. Laws must be argued, questioned and adapted. Religious scrolls are, by their very nature, immutable. They are dictates from a celestial dictator that cannot be questioned and perhaps, only with time and social pressure, can be ‘interpreted’. I only hope that, out of such a tragedy, they realize that the flaw isn’t a matter of which religious text is chosen to base laws, but the fact they are chosen at all.

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.