De Perdidos al Río

En el HOY

El río y todo lo que corre con él. El Tajo, sus afluentes y el arte prehistórico que lo salpica. La tercera de mi serie de seis partes sobre viajes por la provincia de Cáceres publicada por el HOY.
The river and all that runs with it. The Tagus, its affluents and the prehistoric art that is splattered around it. The third in my six-part series on travel throughout the province of Caceres published by el HOY.

La Tradicíon de lo Nuevo

 

Recorrido por los pueblos de la Sierra de Gata, Las Hurdes y el Valle del Alagón. La segunda de mi serie de seis partes sobre viajes por la provincia de Cáceres publicada para el HOY.

A trip through the Sierra de Gata, Las Hurdes and the Valle del Alagon in the second of my six-part series of travel pieces for el HOY in Spain. 

Don't Be Afraid of the ... Light!

Scared of the dark nuthin'!

It's regression therapy in this week's Camino a Ítaca. An age-old fear has returned as our pockets are being openly picked. Click over to read the original article in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

As a young boy on the vast stretches of the northern Canadian prairies, I remember being afraid of the dark. As my mother tucked me into bed at night, I would insist on having a nightlight reassuringly glowing somewhere in the room to keep the howling coyotes at bay, both real and imagined. If I felt my mother was feeling particularly generous, I would even ask her to leave a light on in the hallway. These were during the long winter nights of northern Canada when the sun sunk below the horizon from its lazy arc around four o’clock in the afternoon and didn’t return again until I had already been in school for an hour or two the next day. It’s a fear that eventually disappeared as I grew older but has recently come back to haunt me.

Age regression occurs when someone reverts to a younger state of mind. This retreat may be only a few years younger than the person’s physical age but in my case it seems to jumped several decades, and in the process seems to have become warped and somewhat inverse.

My fear is no longer turning the lights off, it’s turning them on.

I now question almost every mundane household task and chore. It might be when I’m about to turn on the kettle to boil some water, throw some clothes into the wash or try and figure out exactly is the best time to turn on the dishwasher so that my family has enough plates for dinner. It’s an ongoing neurosis that has become like a tense taxi ride in a foreign country where you are trying not to be too conspicuous as you watch the meter tick out of the corner of your eye, hoping it hasn’t been rigged.

At first I tried to adapt to the puente, valle andllano system, surely to the dismay of my neighbors as the spin cycle accompanied them in their dreams. But now, the ongoing energy crisis has even seen this system become obsolete with increasing violent fluctuations that no longer always coincide with the traffic light system that had been introduced with so much fanfare. Thus forcing the consumer to have to consult the webpage of the Red Eléctrica Española every day if they want to know exactly when the electricity that powers their lives will be cheapest.

Imagine that you walk into a bar at midday and have a caña (little beer). Satisfied with the service and the tapa of Spanish omlette you receive, you return the next day to that very same bar and order the same thing. When you finish, you lay your money out on the bar only to have the barman tell you that the price has doubled. In your astonishment you remind him that you had been there yesterday and paid half and he tells you, "That was yesterday, today is today." You then reach for the menu and see that the price listed doesn’t even coincide with what you had paid the day before and again ask the barman and he tells you, "That was the price when they printed the menu." 

That was then, this is now. 

Las Puertas del Oeste

Las Puertas del Oeste en el Hoy

Un viaje por el Campo Arañuelo y el Geoparque de las Villuercas mientras las aguas del Tajo están tan bajas (ehem, gracias Iberdrola). Mi primera doble página en un periódico español. El primero de una serie de seis artículos sobre viajes por la provincia de Cáceres.

A journey through the Campo Arañuelo and the Villuercas Geopark while the waters of the Tagus are so low. My first double page spread in a Spanish newspaper. The first in a six-part travel series around the province of Caceres in Extremadura, Spain.

Live and Let Live (a Halloween Tale)

It's the Halloween special here on the Camino a Ítaca. My latest looks at the false rage at a harmless 'tradition'. Click over to read the original in Spanish or have a look at the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo).

Sacrilege comes in many forms, though I’m not sure that putting pineapple on pizza can be categorized as such. True, it may not be your favorite type of pizza, it may even make your stomach turn somewhat, but is it really worth losing sleep over?

In today’s social media world, where people relate with each other in their echoing online bubbles, the smallest things get blown up way beyond their origins. The easily offended suddenly proclaim themselves victims and words lose their meanings overnight.

The quickly triggered choose the strangest things to get upset about. For some, and here I’m not including Neapolitans, putting pineapple on pizza is the moral equivalent of poisoning an entire city’s water system. The sin of admitting that the Vikings had reached North America half a century before Columbus is akin for some here in Spain to setting the Spanish flag on fire. Not to mention the sight of two persons of the same sex touching lips, or acknowledge the mere fact that some might desire to, become harbingers of the coming of the apocalypse for some. These subjects can provoke without warning, either by flaring up suddenly or forming part of the cyclical moaning calendar we all suffer (next comes the so-called 'War on Xmas').

One of the most perplexing of these comes up every year around about this time; Halloween or as I have seen it delightfully spelt phonetically here in Spain, Jalogüín. A day on the calendar that sparks anger in certain circles. What’s even more curious about all of the false rage that surrounds All Saints Eve is that it drives the quickly offended on both extremes of the political spectrum equally mad.

The standard bearers of the progressive leftist moral compass vigorously protest that this age-old Celtic tradition is actually an imperialist American imposition led by the CIA, specifically designed to wipe out Sephardic buñelos and the roasting of chestnuts. It is true that most of this hashtag activism takes place on their iPhones over Twitter, Facebook or Google before having a hamburger while watching their favorite American series on Amazon Prime or Netflix and then falling asleep to their favorite British rock band. I’m sure that deep down they mean what they say.

Those on the right deeply fret over the unreligious symbolism of some of the costumes depicting heaven and hell and more importantly, yet at the same time somewhat ironically, fervently maintain that the dead cannot come back to life. It’s true, a quick look at the most popular Halloween costumes of the past few years lists witches as the most popular costume but these are closely followed by morally tainting dinosaurs, fairies, cowboys and clowns, not to mention those morally reprehensible bunny rabbits. It makes you wonder if the inhabitants of the peninsula complained with the same vigour when the church coopted Saturnalia.

Both sides seem to forget that culture and cultures are not permanent, fixed states. People learn from one another. Ideas travel. Jazz may have been born in America, but it would be absurd to say it can’t be played elsewhere by non-Americans.

But really, if someone has a serious problem with kids dressing up in costumes and eating candy on a special day of the year, there truly are monsters to worry about.

The Faith Trap

This week's Camino a Ítaca draws parallels between religious bigotry in two distinct places. The faith trap is lethal to inquiry and thought and is throw about with alarming regularity. Click over to the original article published in Spanish in el HOY, or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The world recently watched in horror as American forces abruptly pulled out of Afghanistan. Overnight the Afghan people were once again at the mercy of a tribalistic gang of mercenaries intent on restoring the brutal theocratic regime that the American coalition had overthrown in the wake of the September 11^th terrorist attacks. The Afghan army that had been trained and equipped by the coalition immediately folded and the heavily bearded zealots waltzed into the capital before the West could even evacuate their people.

They did so promising that they were no longer the Taliban of yore. This new 2.0 version was much more media savvy and gave their word that they would respect human rights and implement new laws that would bring peace and stability to the long-suffering land. Western commentators, desperate to paint a positive picture of such a dismal debacle, happily took them at their word or at least used them to try and spin the story away from the treasonous abandonment of the country.

The words that they didn’t spin though were the ominous phrases dropped like deadly bombs by Taliban spokesmen. These were phrases like ‘in accordance with Islamic values’ or ‘in concurrence with the Koran’ when talking about human rights and the laws that they planned to implement. In today’s politically correct world, to question these phrases, based on religious content, is seen as some sort of racism. The fact that they are faith based immediately allows them to be accepted as well intentioned.

Little stifles questioning and debate more than the concept of faith. It doesn’t matter if someone espouses the most outrageously illiberal ideas, or in the case of the Taliban, prevents half of the population from getting an education. If the word faith is mentioned it becomes an extremely effective talisman against investigation and debate. This includes faith-based ideas from Quranic literalists like the Taliban who avoid figurative interpretations of a text they believe to be the immutable word of a perfect god.

But it isn’t only these reactionary tribesmen who shelter behind this celestial shield. Here in Spain the concept of faith is also used to stifle debate around topics related to another religious text many believe to be the word of god. This week, in response to an appeal filed by the extreme right to declare the prohibition of public funding for schools that segregate boys and girls in separate classrooms unconstutional, the constitutional court emitted a draft ruling that stated that that the principle of freedom of education and the criteria of the parents are above the law. In effect, the parents’ beliefs were written in stone.

True, this isn’t quite demanding that a woman who was raped must be executed, because she didn’t cry out loud enough in order to prevent her attack, prescribing the death penalty for same-sex acts, or stoning non-virgin brides to death but the principle stems from the same source, a belief in an ancient text over the laws of the country.

Beliefs do matter and everyone has the right to hold them, but equally important is the right to question them, strip away supernatural shields and expose them to the light of reason.

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.