Render unto Caesar

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at an endemic wrong. An ongoing robbery from the people that now looks like it's only going to get worse. Click over to read the original article in Spanish published in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I’ve always had an inherent respect for the taxman. Irrespective of the country that I was living in, from my native Canada to the United States to semi-lawless countries like Azerbaijan, Libya and Yemen, I’ve always had a keen awareness of their presence.

After all it was Eliot Ness and not the police that took down someone like Al Capone. He went to jail for tax evasion and not for murder. In the end it probably won’t be his inciting insurrection and crimes against democracy that imprisons Donald Trump, but he just might don an orange jumpsuit to match his hair and makeup for cheating on his taxes.

Each country has its own quirks when it comes to tax time and imagine my surprise the first time I filed my taxes here in Spain. The complex language itself was complicated enough to wade through, but then I got to a series of boxes that I simply did not understand. It was something I had not seen before in other countries.

There on the form were two boxes to tick, 105 and 106. They confused me. One was for if I wanted to give 0.7 percent of my taxes to what is in effect a foreign power and the other was to give the same to unspecified NGOs. That or a combination of both, in which each get 0.7%. And if you marked neither, that money would then return to the state’s coffers.

The stark choice made it suspiciously seem like the Catholic Church was the state sponsored religion when it is in fact just another belief amid the myriad of creeds and faiths out there. Evangelists, Orthodox, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahai’s, Gnostics, Jupiter and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster members it seemed need not apply.

But this anomaly looks like it might soon change with the recently created Direccion General de Libertad Religiosa, upgrading its former status from subdirectorate to directorate. Apparently one of its main aims will be the fiscal equalization of all religions. All religions recognized by the state that is. It seems that not all imaginary beings are considered equal in the eyes of the law.

With this move, rather than closing these yawning tax loopholes, more creeds would be able to take advantage of the ludicrous tax exemptions that the Catholic Church now enjoys. Exemptions which allow it to not only be exempt from paying taxes on its buildings where worship takes place, but more pertinently on the enormous sums it makes from the rental of its vast holdings of real estate.

The Government seems to have confused strengthening the necessary secularism of a modern, democratic State with a move towards a fuzzy, gutmensch multi-confessionalism. Instead of suppressing the unbridled prerogatives of the Catholic Church, especially the IBI, and the reversion of more than 100,000 properties unlawfully immatriculated by the Catholic Church since 1948, it is going to increase the privileges of other religious confessions of "well-known roots".

As Mark Twain once wrote, “(Where) No church property is taxed, and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit in the public income thus caused."

Release the ...Bees?!

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at the agricultural protests that have been taking place across Spain and indeed Europe. Swayed by the siren song of the ultra right, farmers just may be delivering themselves into the hands of the very people who support the neoliberal policies that make their lives difficult. Click over to read the original piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

This wasn’t Mr. Burns from the Simpsons snickering and telling Smithers to release the hounds. Its vibe was more like something straight out of a 70’s James Bond movie. Except this evil mastermind wasn’t sitting above a tank full of circling sharks wearing a baby blue polyester leisure suit in front of a world map.

This would-be-mastermind had the slicked back longish hair of a bullfighter, black horned rimmed glasses, the checkered shirt of a secondary school math teacher and wasn’t necessarily looking for world domination. This headman had more regional designs in mind.

Rather than threatening to use his new orbiting satellite death ray if his outrageous demands weren’t met, what this man was menacing the world with was something much more ordinary: bees. And not killer African bees either, but just your average honeybee.

In a rather surreal press conference the president of Asaja Extremadura threatened to open up the hives that they had trucked in from the countryside if the riot police were used to block them in their ongoing agricultural protests against the government and the EU. It was as if they had been trained to attack after he gave a secret signal. Words so utterly bizarre that I was convinced they were from the parody website El Mundo Today until I realized that they were in fact true.

But the deeper you dig into these ongoing protests, the more incongruities and outright contradictions you begin to unearth. Attack bees end up being simply anecdotal in the heady brew of fake news and globalist conspiracy theories that surround the protests.

In a rural milieu that is by nature conservative, the ultra-right have seen a large section of disgruntled voters ripe for the picking. They’ve doubled their efforts to harness this discontent and have tried to incite them further, using their dubious explanations for some of the real and justified demands of the farmers.

It’s fertile ground for their antienvironmental stances, creating strawman arguments against their loathed 2030 Agenda. All the while placing the blame an overreaching EU for the problems farmers face. Another of the organizations that the far right also deeply distrusts and is suspicious of.

The somewhat ironically green party has also done a complete about-face regarding government subsidies and grants. They are now calling for increased grants for things like helping to palliate the effects of the long-standing drought in some parts of the country. A natural catastrophe caused by something they don’t even believe in, climate change.

Then there are the protective measures they are now in favor of. They wave their made in China national flags and now insist on protectionist measures they normally abhor to help guarantee food sovereignty, perhaps more because it is a Muslim majority country that they want protection against rather than their preferred vulture capital funds listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Real, complex problems exist in the agricultural sector but much of these have to do with the neoliberal policies that the extreme right favor rather than their fallacious arguments against the 2030 Agenda. Farmers need to be cautious who they hitch their wagons to or in the end may end up even worse.

Swift for President

A surprising Pop Star twist in this week's Camino a Ítaca. Taylor Swift now rules the world. I'm only wondering if her message will settle among everyone. Click over to read the originally published article in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

There are few things that Americans do better than sell themselves. Substance and quality aren’t necessarily what concerns them. In their case, size does matter. From wild west snake oil salesmen to former presidents, they’ll guarantee what they have to offer is bigger and better than anything else.

Their particular carnival last Sunday was no different. In a country known for navel-gazing, they proudly tout their Super Bowl as the world’s largest sporting event. Granted, it is watched by more than 100 million Americans, but it’s an event that barely registers a blip on people’s radars outside of North America.

But this year was different. There was something new in the mix of barely concealed violence and slow-paced boredom that usually make up the game. It was even showing up on the leading pages of El Pais. Something that had nothing to do with the game itself was drawing more interest and attention to the match than ever. The woman whose recent tour grossed more than a billion dollars in ticket sales was added to the mix. America’s sweetheart, Taylor Swift was dating one of the players.

This wouldn’t have been strange had she just been a wallflower hanging off the arm of a popular sports personality. In fact, it would have seemed as stereotypically American as proms and cowboy movies.

But the case is that Taylor Swift isn’t your average shrinking violet, but instead a strongly independent businesswoman with a global army of fanatical followers unmatched by anyone else. And she’s someone who isn’t afraid of expressing her progressive views on LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, racial justice and climate change.

And this had the right in panic.

In the twisted carnival of American politics, where reality and absurdity collide like runaway rollercoasters, one might not expect to find the ethereal presence of a pop sensation. Yet, in this tumultuous era, the enigmatic force known as Taylor Swift has emerged as an unexpected puppeteer, pulling strings in the shadows of Washington like a maestro orchestrating a symphony of chaos.

In the hallucinogenic landscape of contemporary politics, where truth is elusive and conspiracy theories flourish like wildflowers in a fever dream, Swift has become an unwitting symbol of influence. One whose voice can sway hundreds of millions of voters and one that could influence an election.

Terrified speakers on the right prophesized worst-case scenarios of her boyfriend proposing to her during peak viewing time and then her announcing her support for Biden in the upcoming election. It was a potentially progressive silver bullet in the penurious heart of the conservative world of professional sports. It was their worst nightmare.

The reptilian retrogressive right greatly fear the power of those who imagine, those who create. It contrasts dramatically with their instinct to deconstruct. They will sing along to their songs but when it comes time to politics, insist on them staying inside their lane. As if the world of culture was somehow divested from everyday life.

From the Grammys to the Goyas, artists have been speaking out. Now I just hope that Taylor’s Swifties translate and adapt her speech and stem the tide of the ultras amongst the youth here in Spain.

Lest We Forget

Elvis (or Franco) is not dead

The growth of forgetfulness, or willingly not remembering, in this week's Camino a Ìtaca. Revisionism on the right of some of the past's worst atrocities and what they may lead to. Click over to read the originally published version in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

What hit me most wasn’t the room filled with shoes or the shorn hair of the victims piled up in the next. Nor was it the infamous sign above the entrance cynically stating that work will set you free. What I remember having an impact on me most was the sheer size of the place.

It was enormous.

The lone railway line that led to the guard tower gave it the impression of a city and in fact that’s what it was, a city of death. The work camp at Auschwitz was brutal and brought on a sense of tremendous sadness, but it was the dimensions of the extermination camp down the road at Birkenau that actually made me feel nauseous.

It also raised doubts and questions within me. Why was this place still here? Why had they chosen to create a museum around a place where more than a million people were killed, a place of such desolation and grief.

And then I realized, as unpleasant as the experience can be, it was essential that it remained visible so that we don’t forget. Memory is crucial in order not to repeat the atrocities of the past. Without it we are damned to repeat errors gone by, a frightening prospect indeed.

What is even more terrifying than forgetting though is when attempts are actively made to whitewash and even deny the horrors of the past. Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and fascist sympathizers are no longer a small, fringe slice of the population, but a growing international phenomenon.

From the Trump supporters claiming that slavery wasn’t such an awful thing, to Milei challenging the reality of state terrorism under the fascist dictatorship in Argentina, to Meloni supporters openly displaying busts of Mussolini and Abascal’s fondness for the national catholic dictatorship here in Spain, these new political neofascist archetypes aspire to destroy democracy from within democratic institutions.

These new strains of populism differ slightly from country to country, but they also share many of the same traits. They are marked by attacks on the checks and balances, intolerance of a free press, disbelief in science and a cult of personality. These new far-right populists make intolerance the center of their politics and an ideological legitimation of dictatorships.

In the communities that the ultraright have been welcomed into coalitions with the PP, one of their first moves is invariably to try and overturn the historical memory laws, laws that were precisely set in place in order not to forget.

Extremadura is no different. At the behest of their extreme right coalition partners, the PP is promoting a new law of concordance that will dilute and whitewash the coup d’etat and ensuing crimes of the dictatorship.

Fascist ideology is grounded on the notion that some people in society are better than others. At its core is the belief that there is a select group, or race that sits above the rest. In Nazi Germany it was the Aryans while here their adherents glorify a mythical Hispanic race.

Left unchallenged, this whitewashing and normalization of fascist ideas becomes terribly dangerous. Those who rode down that lone train track in that camp scream at us to never forget.

Jurramachos Carnival in Montanchez, Spain

@Jorge Armestar

Think Venetian masks and then turn it into a B-rate horror film and you've got the fiercely independent Carnival in Montanchez, Extremadura, Spain. Writing for the Calgary Herald, click over for the deep dive into the fun.

Useful Dupes

In this week's Camino a Ítaca that time I stumbled into a war in Yemen. The Houthis are now playing into the hands of the Iranians and making their population suffer even more. Click over to read the original version in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The disembodied voice on the other end of the crackly line was definitely nervous. “Troy, I need to know where you are right now.” It was my boss and while we had a good relationship, the question seemed a bit intrusive, seeing as I was on holiday during a semester break.

“I’m up in Sa’dah, near the border with Saudi Arabia,” I reluctantly replied. “That’s what I was afraid of,” he quickly answered. “You need to get the hell out of there as soon as possible and return here to the capital, Sana’a. A war has just broken out between the government and a rebel group. Get on the road as fast as you can before it is closed or gets bombed!”

Living and working in Yemen always had its surprises. It’s a country that is almost as heavily armed as the United States per capita. Men openly carry taped up, battered machine guns in the streets and everyone wears a long dagger in their belt, but a full-blown war was taking things to a completely new level.

Just the day before we had visited the region’s largest open-air arms market. It was filled with men trying out Kalashnikovs, bazookas, Spanish handguns, heavy artillery and even tanks. It was one stop shopping for the rebellion that was taking place around us.

That phone call was just over 20 years ago in 2003. A small group of Zaydi fundamentalists, Ansar Allah or as they are more commonly known, the Houthis, took up arms against the longstanding strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Fighting never ceased and they continued to seize more territory until, in 2015, they captured the capital, Sana'a, and deposed Saleh's successor, Abdrabbo Mansur Hadi, who ended up in exile in Saudi Arabia.

A year later, Riyadh lead oan international coalition, which included neighboring states like the United Arab Emirates, to restore Hadi to power. Since then, this Saudi coalition and the Iranian-backed Houthis have been waging a proxy war between the regional superpowers.

But all this was until October 7^th and the Hamas war crimes in Israel and the subsequent genocidal invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. Seizing on the overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause locally, the Houthis began attacking Israeli-linked shipping vessels in the Bab al-Mandab strait and the Red Sea seaway that leads to the Suez Canal, thus threatening a substantial percentage of global ocean transport.

And then the tomahawk missiles began to rain down.

In retaliation to these attacks, US and British forces began hitting the Houthi forces with airstrikes and it’s the Yemeni people who once again suffer at the hands of outside forces.

Before the war in Gaza, Yemen was considered one of, if not the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. According to the UN, 4.5 million people have been displaced, while 24.1 million people, 80% of the population, are in need of humanitarian aid.

The last thing the country needs is to be drawn into an increasingly volatile conflict in the region. The first and immediate step that needs to be taken before the whole region is drawn into a wider scale war is a lasting cease fire 2000kms away in Gaza.

Lifting the Veil

The long Christmas season here in Spain is finally over and this week's Camino a Ítaca looks at stories and myth, the differences between them and who believes what. Click over to read the original artcile in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Some Africans say that God made man because he liked to hear a story. And like God, we all like to hear them. But just when does a story make the mysterious journey and turn into myth?

People will believe something if they want to and will readily grab onto stories other people are telling if they like what they hear and it fits in with their worldview.

Take what just about everyone in Spain is celebrating today, the Three Wise Men. The myth is well known but the origin of the story is quite a bit more opaque. After all, they are only mentioned in one of the four gospels and Matthew doesn’t even reference how many there were, nor were any names given. The story ends there with the gold, frankincense and myrrh, with subsequent traditions embellishing the narrative.

It wasn’t sometime until around the 8^th century that they were assigned a number because of the presents they brought to the party, given names and subsequently birth places and therefore race. Their supposed relics were taken from Constantinople to Milan to where they have been since the 12^th century in their bling gold box in the ominous cathedral in Cologne.

But what happens when that myth is altered or even challenged? How does that change the narrative? A sterile polemic arose in Caceres the other day when the PSOE denounced that the town hall’s Christmas card had literally been whitewashed, with the removal of Balthazar.

It was imagined that the PP’s reliance on the ultra right was to blame for the removal. The polemic, however, was short lived when it was revealed that the very same image had been used the previous year when they were in power. By then it didn’t matter, the controversy was served.

But was the story so hard to believe?

The convenient alliances between myth and authority unravel the often delicate balance between enlightenment and indoctrination. Was it a message of intention?

The president of Extremadura herself once said that the neofacsist party dehumanized immigrants, of course that was moments before completely going against her sworn word and forming a coalition with them. Perhaps the openly xenophobic party that insists on the Christian roots of Europe was trying to Europeanize the roots of Christianity.

It has been the modus operandi of far-right movements across the world to take stories, manipulate them and turn them into myth. Then their takes are flogged to a conservative base that has been scientifically proven to hold more misperceptions and to be less able than others to distinguish (political) truths from falsehoods.

Take the violent assault on the American Capitol building. The world watched it live on TV, yet the right have now taken the story and turned in into a myth that it was just an exuberant crowd wanting a guided tour of the building. Or the even more disquieting attempts in places as diverse as Argentina and here in Spain to mythologize their bloody, criminal dictators as misunderstood benefactors.

Myths can serve a purpose and can be reinvented. This as long as they are understood as children eventually learn about the kings, that it’s just that a myth, not reality.

What's that Sound?

The newest results of the international PISA test in the Camino a Ítaca this week. Once again, excuses are made but the root cause is once again avoided. Click over to read the original article published in Spanish in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

The programmed ritual self-flagellation has once again begun. The echoes of lashes reverberate throughout the country, from the smallest of teacher’s rooms to the editorial pages of newspapers to the highest offices of the Ministry of Education, as this devotional practice of self-criticism runs its course.

The results of the PISA test have been released and show that Spain has achieved its worse results since testing began back in 2000. In this eighth edition of the global test, 690,000 students from 81 countries aged 15 and 16 participated, 30,800 of them Spanish. The tests were conducted, with a one-year delay due to the pandemic, in the spring of 2022 so the newest of the never-ending string of education laws hadn’t fully come into effect.

Once again the flawed Spanish education system demonstrated that the window dressing changes that have been implemented towards a more competence based education system haven’t made a difference. The law may have changed and will certainly change again, but what is happening in classrooms across the country hasn’t.

The results have provoked a mad rush to uncover reasons and to assign blame. In Catalonia they even went so far as to release a xenophobic excuse that immigrants were overrepresented in their case.

In this edition the format of the math test changed again to become even more competency-based, one that requires students to make a greater effort in reasoning and relating knowledge in order to apply it to solving real life problems, which also certainly took its toll on the results.

Reading comprehension is one of the most basic skills, not because the OECD says so, but because it is the essential stepping stone for other learning. It is a key competence for educational inclusion, for the academic success of all students. This means working with competences rather than simple mechanical practice in class and the overwhelming load of homework Spanish kids receive is the way forward. The excessive focus on rote learning and memorization so common in Spanish classrooms is far past its sell by date.

But while the sounds of flagellation still reverberate, they refuse to acknowledge the real root of the problem. It’s almost like the Filipino Catholics or the Shiite Muslims in Iraq who continue to practice self-flagelation woke up one day and began whipping themselves only to realize that they had the wrong day marked on their calendar. They’re completely missing the point.

You can make as many changes as you want to the law but if you don’t change one of the fundamental pillars of Spanish society, real change will never happen.

The elephant in the room remains the opocisiones, the way that public employees are chosen. There is nothing more medieval and anti-competence based than the public exam system here in Spain and its presence can be felt in all levels of education, from primary all the way up through University.

Consciously or subconsciously, what teachers are preparing are opositores.

Teachers can’t be expected to believe in and apply competence-based education when their very careers came about due to an exam where they simply had to memorize and vomit a series of topics.

Until this system changes the whipping will never cease.

Looking for the End of the World

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at the mad men (and women) who hope and pray for the end of the world. Religious zealots who pine for the apocalypse and who actively try to bring it about through genocide. Click over and read the originally published piece in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (pdf en castellano abajo)

The photo was devastating. It was the complete and total opposite of what was normally expected, disorienting and confusing the viewer while making you look twice to make sure what you had seen was in fact real.

There, nestled amidst the rubble of what looked like the aftermath of an explosion, lay a gleaming white baby.

However this one wasn’t real. It wasn’t one of the thousands of horrifying images of children being dug out of the rubble that have been shown on TV (depending on the channel you watch) since the beginning of the current war in Gaza. It was less traumatizing yet more poignant, something deeper than the senseless daily massacre taking place in the so-called Holyland.

It was clearly a nativity scene, but one like you’ve never seen before. There in the middle of all that destruction lie a figurine of Christ wrapped in a Palestinian keffiyeh.

It was a message that the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem wanted to show the world. Orthodox Catholics, Armenian Assyrians, Melkites and Lutherans have all come together and announced that Christmas celebrations in the land where Jesus is said to have been born were cancelled.

This cancellation had nothing to do with the fictitious war on Christmas that the hysterical right claims takes place every year, nor Soros inspired wokeism that they say is ruining the backbone of Judeo-Christian society. This cancellation came about in protest against the ongoing genocidal bombing campaign that has killed more than 15,000 civilians and displaced almost 2 million people taking place less than 100kms away in Gaza.

But while the churches in the Holyland denounce this televised genocide, the religious right, and in particular their leaders in the west, have shown nothing but blind support for the radical right Israeli government’s non-proportional response and collective punishment to the war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7th.

In fact, one of the few western leaders to call for a permanent ceasefire has been Pedro Sanchez. But his bold move was immediately criticized and branded anti-Semitic by the right for doing so. Feijoo went against his own party’s electoral program and backtracked against a two-state solution saying that his party could not support the President’s stance.

The fascists have gone even further with Abascal touring kibbutzes in Israel decrying “the embarrassment that most Spaniards have felt at the statements made by Pedro Sanchez”. Even if the national Catholics have anti-Semitism in their DNA, its seems their pro-Zionism and hatred against Arabs is even stronger.

But bronze-aged biblical prophesy isn’t the most effective foreign policy tool, especially when based on the Rapture. The strand of evangelical theology which holds that the return of Jews to the region starts the clock ticking on Armageddon, after which Christ will return. Their interpretation of Scripture requires Israel, a war, and a Temple, before the conversion or destruction of the Jewish people. 

The push by evangelical Christian leaders to make this part of their Apocalypse is not really about supporting Israel. What they are trying to do is make their own religious desires real, desires that demand violence, blood and sacrifice of others, so that they, from the comfort of their homes, can achieve their deluded vision of a happy ending.

Foreshadowing

In this week's Camino a Ìtaca I use a word that I never thought I would in the newspaper. Click over to read the originally published piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo).

I often wonder just how many times Maria Guardiola plays that crucial time in her life over and over in her mind. That moment where overnight she went from being a small fringe figure on the national political scene to becoming headline national news for speaking, at least what we believed at the time, her mind.

Do those vigorously communicated words that supposedly demonstrated her values and what she believed in play on a continuous loop in her dreams. Or does she need to recur to the help of a pharmacist just to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep? This after she was so unceremoniously forced to swallow her words and go against everything she had promised and accept the line mandated from Madrid? Did getting into bed with the new blue shirts make for difficult nights?

Does seeing those who deny gender violence every day in her government make her a bit queasy, like riding on a ship on a stormy sea? When she thinks of the word ‘dehumanize’ does she think of all of those who have recently been settled in the region from the Canaries and the vile rhetoric the ultra-right party has slandered against them?

What about all those cultural battles that she swore had been overcome? Do they come to haunt her like Dicken’s ghost of Christmas past every time her partners open their mouths? Does she cringe on each occasion that her coalition partners give a press conference, worrying just how many of her damning words they make come true?

Then there are the rights that women have fought long and hard for that she once claimed were inalienable, like the right to abortion. Did she really mean what she said about red lines or are they too going to be placed on the table when she needs the fascists’ support?

A recent event in Caceres might shed some light on what could happen in the future. It all took place when the ultra-right party led by Eduardo Gutiérrez managed to push through a motion with an obvious ideological bias against abortion in a plenary session. As the mayor Rafa Mateos needs the green party’s support so that they will vote in favor of the 2024 budget, the PP chose not to abstain, but to actually vote in favor of a measure that looked as if it had been plucked from anti-abortionist publicity moldering in the entranceways to churches.

In the motion it called for “support for life through specific information provided by experts in the field, promoting a specific area of dissemination on the reality of abortion and its after-effects, with lectures and talks in high schools and focused on adolescents.”

Which begs the question if those who fervently believe that you’ll anger an all-powerful sky god by placing a latex sheath over a penis or that a Bedouin girl was miraculously impregnated by a pigeon so many years ago could actually be considered experts in the area of reproductive health.

 Thankfully the townhall has little if any control over education but this intrusion of such caveman-like ideology foreshadows what could happen at the regional level. Que Darwin nos coja confesados (Darwin have mercy!).

Already?

'Tis the season on the Camino a Ìtaca or at least the streets are starting to look like it and it comes earlier every year. Click over on the Christmas lights to read the original piece in Spanish published in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past it didn’t begin until after the megapuente in December. Then as Amazon insidiously wormed its way into all our homes, it started to appear with Black Friday. Which is in effect the secular harvest celebration of Thanksgiving in America, now converted into a global orgiastic carnival of consumerism.

But that wasn’t enough. Now it has moved up the calendar and appears after Halloween, the tuned-up Dia de Todos los Santos celebration that the ofendiditos so love to hate. Look up and you’ll see them strung between lampposts, the harbinger of the longest season here in Spain, Christmas lights.

Ah, Christmas lights. Those twinkling, gaudy, and garish displays that punctuate our long, dark winter nights, like the flashing neon signs of the seedy roadside houses of ill repute that line the motorways across the country. These ostentatious displays of luminosity, meant to invoke a sense of wonder and joy, have become a hallmark of the holiday season.

However, when one examines the origins of these illuminations, it becomes clear that their early iterations were more about extravagance and opulence than any genuine spirit of Christmas.

In the late 19th century, as the world was undergoing rapid industrialization, inventors and entrepreneurs saw an opportunity to harness the power of electricity for commercial gain. It is here that the story of Christmas lights begins, not in a manger, but in the drawing rooms of capitalists.

One must acknowledge the genius of those early pioneers like Thomas Edison and Edward Johnson, who, in the 1880s, strung the first known electric lights as decorations for the holiday season. Edison's display at his Menlo Park laboratory was indeed a spectacle to behold, with its 80 red, white, and blue bulbs, illuminating a giant Christmas tree. Yet, while these technological marvels were undoubtedly impressive, their humble origins soon took a back seat to the commercialization of Christmas.

The embrace of electric lights as a holiday tradition was not merely a symbol of ingenuity but also a reflection of a burgeoning consumer culture. The more lights one could afford, the more opulent their display would be. The Christmas lights of today resemble more of a carnival than a solemn commemoration of a religious holiday. It’s now a spectacle, a distraction, and a testament to the power of consumerism.

We now see an arms race of sorts, as cities around the country compete to outshine one another with the most extravagant light displays. The extravagance of Vigo for example makes the headlines every year.

The idea of modesty and the true spirit of Christmas seems to fade into the shadows, replaced by the glamour and grandiosity of electric light. Christmas has become not a time for reflection, charity, and goodwill but a time for excess, conspicuous consumption, and one-upmanship.

The early pioneers of Christmas lights may have marveled at the magic of electric illumination, but it is important to consider the trajectory of this tradition. What started as a testament to human ingenuity and a nod to the festive spirit of Christmas has, over time, morphed into a glaring testament to our excesses and our obsession with appearances and, of course, shopping.