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THOUGHTS, RANTS AND A

TRAVELOGUE
FOR THOSE SLEEPLESS, INSOMNIAC NIGHTS WHEN YOU´RE JUST MOOCHING AROUND AND YOU
DON´T MIND CHECKING OUT SOMEONE ELSE´S THOUGHTS AGAINST YOUR OWN...

SUNDAY, MARCH 08, 2009 ABOUT ME

I never thought I'd quote Michael Portillo! C ER R O N EV AD O

VI EW MY CO M PL ET E
"Even if all the economists in the world agreed that more spending PRO F I LE

offered the best hope, the overwhelming need to fund the debt is
catching up with us. We are partying on the Titanic. "
LINKS

Michael Portillo, today, in TimesOnline of the UK. Google News

Edit-Me
And I'm a fervent admirer of FDR! Edit-Me

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 9: 51 A M

PREVIOUS POSTS

FRIDAY, AUGUST 29, 2008 I never thought I'd quote Michael

Portillo!
Tomatina - ¡por desgracia!
Tomatina - ¡por desgracia!
The Sur in English (August 29th to September 4th 2008 reported on America is the final word in History?
the front page on the Tomatina festival in the towl on Buñuol in POEMS_ Me and a Sparrow
Comunidad Valenciana region. Apparently some 40,000 people Is there any alternative?
gathered and chucked tomatoes at each other. 113 tons of tomatoes "Then the chilly winds blew down
went down the drain - literally - that day. This further example of across the desert...
quaint and entertaining Spanish customs attracted, we are told,
"They paved paradise And put up a
attracted tourists from as far away as Japan and Australia. parking lot" - J...
Further Quote
Indeed, it must have been a wonderful spectacle and greatly
A Rant against Consumerism,
entertaining, for all to watch - until you think of the millions around
Capitalism and Globali...
the world who are dying of hunger. Then it seems suddenly a great
Ladakh, a travelogue
slap in the face to the poor, a spectacularly wasteful disregard for the
sufferings of the majority of humans unequalled perhaps anywhere
else. Of course waste of food and beverages is endemic in the rich
ARCHIVES
countries of the North but that´s not the same as wastefulness being
celebrated. January 2005
June 2007
The Tomatina is probably the one of the most lucrative festivals in July 2007
the orld. According the Tomatina website, which you can find on January 2008

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http://www.latomatina.es/, it costs the local town hall barely 90,000 February 2008
€ to advertise it. Most of it advertised on all the important television June 2008
and satellite TV networks around the world. Several million visitors July 2008
go to see it, and participate, every year! And presumably, none of August 2008
them care to comment on the waste of food. Such is the world we live
March 2009
in today.

In India, where I was born, the Hindus have a festival called Holi.
The birth of spring is celebrated with people chucking colours at each
other. Everyone goes around in old clothes spattered with colours.
It's a brilliant spectacle. Of course, some people always abuse public
celebrations. Hooligans run about chucking water bombs at people
and cars, or harrass women. But the majority do so in a good spirit.
And no food is wasted! The colours are made from mineral dyes. In
India, conspicuous wastage of food is a crime, legally and morally.
And of course, with so much poverty, that's not surprising.

The Spaniards are not noted for being a sensitive people. Read VS
Pritchett, or even Gerald Brenan. Lovers of Spanish culture and
romantics from Washington Irving and John Ford to Laurie Lee and
Ted Walker wax lyrical about food, climate and history, but hardly
about manners. The Spanish stereotype abroad is either the
"swaggering señorito" of Elizabethan times or the greedy and
bloodthirsty conquistador. At the core of most prejudices, however
exaggerated and insufficient, is often a grain of truth.

So we should not, perhaps, expect Spaniards to be sensitive to the

moral significance of food wastage in their own celebrations. After all,
this is the only country in Europe which still celebrates a blood sport
(bullfighting) as a central tradition and a high note of national
culture. And routine cruelty to animals, from the running of the bulls
in Pamplona to the kicking of cows and goats off cliffs in local fiestas,
remains a time-honoured gem of national culture. It's not that in
other countries there isn't cruelty to animals, obviously there is, but
in few cultures is such cruelty so centrally enshrined in national
customs and celebrations. A good comparison is, perhap, in Far
Eastern countries where they eat cats and dogs and subject them to
incredible cruelty in the process.

A further interesting point mentioned by the Sur in English is that

according to local legend, the Tomatina started in the 1940s
following an incident in which a battle broke out between local
youths who hurled vegetables at each other. There are other stories
about the how it originated locally but it was, according to an article
in Wikipedia, banned under Franco on the grounds that it had no
religious value.

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What would be interesting to find out is how it is that such a festival

was regarded as acceptable by local people during the Años del
Hambre, the years in the 1940s and 1950s when Spain's economy
was in a disastrous state, millions emigrated in search of work, and
some peasants starved to death in the countryside.

Methinks there are some political lessons to be learnt from all this if
it were to be thoroughly investigated. However, this line of thought
leads us deeper and deeper into forbidden territory. Some readers
may know that after Franco died in 1975, during the difficult and
dangerous period called La Transición between 1975 and 1978, all
sides working together in the transition to democracy agreed not to
rake up the past, i.e. the conflicts of the Franco era. This period was
so terrible that nothing like it was seen anywhere else in Western
Europe after the war. Franco pursued, tortured, imprisoned and
executed former supporters of the Republicans and their relatives
and friends for decades after the end of the Second World War. While
Western Europe was moving forward under the EC, Spain was
continuing under a regime not dissimilar in some respects, to the
Nazis on the one hand, and the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe
on the other. After 1978, the entire Spanish nation took a vow of
silence, known to historians as the Pacto del Olvido, meaning the
agreement of forgetting. Historical amnesia became actually a
national policy adopted by both the majority of politicians on both
left and right, as well as the majority of the Spanish people, in order
to end the bitterness of the Spanish Civil War and establish the
stability of a democracy under a constitutional monarchy. Given this
policy, the deliberate destruction of public records during the Franco
era at all levels of government can be reasonably assumed to have
taken place on a large scale. And given the national reluctance to
investigate the recent past at all, it would be no easy task to uncover
any links. Indeed, the recent past of Spain is almost uniquely
difficultto investigate. Even the Soviet regime is probably a little
easier to investigate in some respects now than Spain under Franco
and Spain during World War Two.

I am implying that it is possible that in the fight that started the

whole tradition in that little village of Buñuol in the 1940s, there
could be a political element. But it will be very hard to
prove. Indeed, it is possibly a little easier for historians to investigate
some aspects of life in Soviet Russia now that the Kremlin has
released some documentation, than it is to investigate Spain under
Franco, both during World War Two as well as after that.

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 2: 54 P M

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THURSDAY, JULY 31, 2008

America is the final word in History?

"Economic development produces increases in living standards that
are universally desirable. The proof of this, in my opinion, is simply
the way people "vote with their feet." Every year millions of people in
poor, less-developed societies seek to move to western Europe, to the
United States, to Japan, or to other developed countries, because they
see that the possibilities for human happiness are much greater in a
wealthy society than in a poor one. Despite a number of Rousseauian
(sic) dreamers who imagine that they would be happier living in a
hunter-gatherer or agrarian society than in, say, contemporary Los
Angeles, there are scarcely a handful of people who actually decide to
do so."

This quote is from the famous contempary intellectual Francis

Fukuyama who proclaimed the "end of history" with the new
hegemony of the United States as the only world super-power after
winning the battle against the Soviets by 1991.

You can see the full article by Fukuyama at the Open Democracy
debating website at:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-
fukuyama/revisited_3496.jsp

Of course I must disagree. This is the usual sweeping over-

simplification by American political romantics. People flee poverty
towards richer societies to get away from poverty, and therefore to
meet their basic need to ensure their survival. Once in these societies
and they encounter the full complex reality of the United States, the
lives of first-generation immigrants are shot through with angst and
confusion, as they confront the hideous realities of affluent societies
beyond the basic economic aspects: rampant consumerism affronts
their traditional values that put community and responsibility before
individualism and consumption, the gap between rich and poor in
affluent societies, the anomie and violence, the racial discrimination,
the loneliness, the wage-slavery and "greyness" of post-industrial life,
and the rejection of immigrants from other cultures. People come to
America and see a country which has 20% of the world´s wealth and
a primitive social security system, where poor people without health
insurance are dumped on the doorsteps of hospitals and left to die.
They see a society fuelled by drugs and guns. They see megapolises
taken over by gang culture. They see democracy taken over by
corporates and politicians as puppets of big business. They see a

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robber society, one that destroyed the Native American and took over
the land in the name of God and Manifest Destiny, and called it
righteous, a holocaust of history wiped clean by the myths of the
victors. They see Black and White locked in a bitter conflict from
which there seems to be no escape, rooted now in the very bones of
American society, a society built on the slave trade as much on the
"pursuit of happiness" and from the ghost of which it has failed to
exorcise itself. This is a society that fought a bitter civil war in the
name of that very issue, and a century later, was still keeping the
Black Man down. They see white, middle-class America living as
much with the fear of being a victim of all these dangers as in pursuit
of material wealth as the equivalent of happiness. THey see 50
million poor people in the richest nation on Earth who can't afford
healthcare and get dumped outside the gates of hospitals. They see
fatcats sailing by in limousines and bums on street-corners. They see
the Stars and Stripes flying in the wind and Vietnam Vets return
home shattered and forgotten, dumped by the same nation that sent
them to fight a distant enemy by politicians playing power games
with the lives of their citizens and families overflowing with
righteousness and national pride, sending their sons to fight and die
in the jungles of an enemy fighting for their own freedom who had
never quarreled with the Americans in the first place. They see a
nation imbued with an inborm sense of superiority, rooted in its very
history, satisfying but blinkering for those who can assimilate, and
spiritual death for those who cannot. They see this same nation so
convinced that America was right in all things that no other cultures
of values needed to be examined. This, in fact, cost them Vietnam
more than any other factor, but America still fails to learn its lessons,
for America turned its back on Vietnam just as it turned its back on
the boys who returned home, just as all nations who send their sons
to war for the sake of national pride rather than the most basic
defence of national liberty forget those soldiers who return destroyed,
or remain interred in foreign fields. They see a sink-or-swim society,
and they ask themselves, is this the best that technological
advancement, overwhelming material power and massive wealth can
do? People come to these societies with pride in their own values and
cultures and find themselves totally negated on grounds of their
poverty alone. A bleak assimilationism faces them on the gun-ridden
streets and in the bland protocol of office culture and shopping malls.
The citizens of these exotic societies, facing these cultural
inadequacies in the midst of all this affluence, seek ever more
sophisticated ways to escape the banality and spiritual poverty of
their lives: plastic surgery, designer goods, the virtual world of
computer games, video and mass consumption cinema.
Entertainment is god in such a society, and intensifies the drive for
ever-increasing consumption.

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Fukuyama´s affluent society is not an answer but a drug.

Many of these economic migrants come to hate the societies that

accept them, usually grudgingly, and then ignore them. Others are
political refugees and come to appreciate, in many cases, that while
they cannot return home their place of exile is a purgatory even more
than a refuge. The political refugee, survivor of a hundred ordeals in
the nightmare journey from stricken homeland to America, ironically
dies in America, knifed by a gang youth or passing armed robber,
behind the cash till of his little shop, or in the launderette of the mean
street in which he lives. A generation or two down the line, the
original significance of the clash of cultural values of first-generation
immigrants are forgotten and the younger generations become bland,
brain-washed, vaguely second-class clones of their peers in the host
culture. The original culture from where they came being forgotten,
or largely forgotten, these later generations become a sort of flotsam.
They retain a kind of persistent angst, like a malady of the soul, of
whose history and anatomy they may be more or less aware,
depending on how successful the individual is at investigating it and
tracing it back on an adventure of the soul. But assimiliation is a kind
of enforced amnesia, the life of the first-generation immigrant a
horror that is to be forgotten by his "well-adjusted" descendants, as
part of the natural process of becoming American. The only American
history acceptable is WASP history, and only Black history cannot be
erased but rises up through three centuries of blood and suffering to
confront middle class America with its angry face.

Fukuyama makes the standard simplistic mistake of thinking, like so

many traditional Americans, that "liberty" (capitalist individualism
and liberal economics) produces massive prosperity for many, and
that´s the sum of the cultural argument. But in fact, people who
emigrate to affluent societies (of which the Unied States is only one),
are attempting to escape only their poverty, not their values or
culture. It is this confusion which is leading to the ethnic violence on
the streets between "host" communities and immigrants in many
affluent countries: on the streets of Britain, for instance. The
prosperous American, thinking, like Fukuyama, that history has
proved the superiority of the 'American Way ', is dismayed. Why does
the dog bite the hand that feeds it?

Fukuyama seems to equate prosperity with values and culture. A

successful economy means a better culture: period. But history is
plentifully supplied with evidence that happiness, cultural values and
identity are not reducible to levels of consumption as the litmus test,
important as freedom from poverty undoubtedly is.

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Remember, the Romans were puzzled why the Jews rejected the
prosperity and (second-class) citizenship that could come with full
assimilation into Roman culture. But reject it they did and - the rest
is history.

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 9: 24 P M

SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2008

POEMS_ Me and a Sparrow

So strong are we to fly in fighter planes
A hundred miles above the fleecy clouds
The world below is surely lost to sight
We turn the metal engine of our might
And bank into the sun at dizzy speed
Above us all is blank and heavenly blue
Victorious, soaring, man exults anew
With each sortie through the airy deep
Yet cannot we launch blithely from the ground
With wingèd arms outstretched above the grass
And veer across the gilded meadow green
A hundred feet above the crumbly ground
As does a dappled sparrow in the hedge
This I dreamed when I was just a child
And this is still my futile dream today
To be as like a sparrow on the wing
To be released from all of our invention
Simply fly as does the little bird
And seek a worm upon the sunlit ground

29 June 2008. Aged 52.

COMMENT
It´s been a very long time since I last wrote any poetry. Now I´ve
reached middle age I can´t think of any connection, really, just a
coincidence. I think this is the first poem I´ve tried to write in about
ten years. It is reasonably in iambic pentameter. I also use well-worn
expressions because I think they work and I don´t share the fashion
for compulsive innovation in expression that is almost insisted upon
today. When something is good and works, why throw it out for a new
model just because it´s new? Originality, if any exists in my little
piece, lies not in the choice of words or in the phrasing (in said iambic
pentameter which I happen to admire) but the whole thing taken as a
single piece. I don´t believe that the ideas expressed in this poem are

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very new, on the contrary, they too are widely felt. By writing this
little poem I am simply supporting and underlining in my own way a
widespread spiritual dissatisfaction felt by many, many people in
many different places, in many different ways. If there are other
poems that also read like this and feel like this, as indeed there must
be many, I wish to stand in line with them and add voice to the
growing chorus of discontent with the spiritual bankruptcy of our
modern world.

I do not subscribe to a popular desire to return to an earlier period of

time, a "golden age" when things were allegedly better. As a life-long
student of history, such a view would be naive indeed. The history of
human civilisation is a long, massive and bloody catalogue of
inventive misdeeds among which are some interesting insights, such
as advances in the sciences and the arts, most of which have been
trapped by the "Masters of War" (Dylan) and used for more bloody
misdeeds and profiteering. I´d prefer a more polemically
anthropological approach, studying simpler societies and learning
from them about values and how to handle the natural world we live
in. It´s not a romantic denial of the fruits of science I am after, or a
belief that simpler societies have all the answers. But it is certainly
true that civilised societies have tried to destroy older, and simpler
societies, and their knowledge, rather than add them to the corpus of
human knowledge, experience and use. Civilisation remains terribly
more destructive than it is creative.

As a History teacher, I am occasionally asked searching questions by

students (not very often, I admit, usually they just want to get
through exams!). What´s the point of History? They ask. I´m not
required, as a mere school teacher, to philosophise, but to leave that
sort of thing to the mandarins of academia. My job is to help students
get through their exams and I do attend to this as diligently as I am
able!

However, a teacher is always reluctant to say "No" when a student

asks a question about something the student feels he, the teacher,
should have an opinion on. So I usually say that both teacher and
student are students, it´s just that the teacher has gone past the
preliminary stages of inquiry up to a certain point more than the
student but that by this very reason he may have more or less insight
than the student since information can be as much a trap as a tool for
understanding. Given these significant qualifications, I would suggest
that there are three functions of being a student of History:
investigation, reflection and action. The scholars investigate and
reflect and the rest of us reflect or act or both. Action is the hardest.
Mine consists of two aspects: to help build awareness in my students

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via the medium of the subject I discuss with them, and to support
causes I believe in within the limits of my resources and within the
bounds limited by my habitual levels of timidity and respectability to
which, in my stage of life, I am resigned to and accept as realistic,
sane and responsible.

If we act with some knowledge of what the scholars have reflected on,
we can advance our civilisation. If we cannot do this, not all the
technology in the world will save us. Since the scholars are as
prejudiced as we are, and often cannot agree, all History is opinion
and is imposed on everyone who approaches it from the humblest
student to the most erudite scholar.

So we learn from History that "Civilisation" has always been in the

hands of the "Masters of War," the leaders, kings, chief nobles,
politicians, dictators, class elites, caste elites, corrupt cadres,
corporate parasites and the like, and working with and for them,
millions of their minions. When we learn how they do this, and work
up a new vision of how Man should free himself from the bonds of his
own oppression (I hear Rousseau whispering in his grave) and
resolve to turn on them all, then and only then will we have a chance
to evolve into a new Spiritual Man.

First, the social revolution, methinks, then the spiritual one. But
we´ve had one social revolution after another and they have all be
hijacked by the Angels of Death (the said leaders, etc).

Or could it turn out the other way round? Is that possible? Hope
springs like a fragile sapling in the breast of the cynic and withers
once more on sober reflection - and then rises again like an urge that
will not be denied, so long as there is Life.

Everyone is entitled to read whatever they want into a poem. That´s

surely it´s ultimate worth - that each time someone reads a poem, if
they like it, they can make it their own through their own
interpretation, or reject it if it means nothing to them.

Still, I think it´s fair that the creator should have something to say
about it as well, if he so desires.

This poem is about freedom and simplicity. I´ve always wanted this, I
think, since I was very young. It´s a dream only, it doesn´t seem
possible to achieve true freedom and simplicity for ordinary people
like myself. To do it you have to have rare and unusual qualities, to be
a spiritual warrior. We all have to live this life in the environment in
which we find ourselves and to which, owing to our individual

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limitations, we are enmeshed. So freedom remains a dream for most.

That is the human condition.

The freedom I mean here is the freedom of being entirely natural,

without human artifice. In effect, it means being without any of the
creations and actions and thoughts of human civilisation. Ultimately,
it amounts to a negation, even an indictment, perhaps, of human
history. It expresses the feeling that given our immense talents and
imagination and gifts of invention and discovery, we have failed to
master ourselves. Consequently, there are so many different types of
freedom in the natural world. There is the freedom of the beetle, to
scuttle over the ground, and the freedom of the bird to fly. Birds are
symbolically linked with freedom since before historic memory, and
deep-rooted in the human psyche. Symbols of birds and freedom
occur in every culture in the world. Usually, the celebrated ones are
eagles, hawks and other magnificent creatures, since man can´t
readily appreciate the freedom of the bird in its simplest and
humblest forms, but must have power, must have splendour,
magnificence. I just thought I´d do one about the sparrow.

It´s not that I romanticise the life of the sparrow. My wife and I live
in a small house in southern Spain, on the side of a hill. Owing to a
stretch of hillside closed off from traffic, the area is full of mature
trees and bushes and covered in grass, it seethes with birds and other
wildlife: frogs, snakes, lizards, hedgehogs, even foxes (though I´ve
never seen them).

Once a male and female sparrow tried to build a nest in a hole in the
wall of our house. They would fly from a small tree nearby and then,
when they thought we weren´t looking, flutter across to the hole and
put in a small twig. Industriously, they built the little snug for their
babies to come over three months. They eventually got used to us and
would fly inches above our heads to enter their little hole.

Then one day, the happy family was destroyed. A set of blackbirds
came and attacked the hole. The father bird screeched and wheeled
and tore at the blackbirds. He was killed. His broken body was
mangled and flung onto the grass beneath an olive tree. The mother
bird flew away and never came back. It was all over in two minutes.
We couldn´t stop it happening.

We found the hole empty. We stopped it up with cement as we did

not want it to happen again and witness the destruction of a sparrow
family´s hopes, though we know, of course, that it happens all the
time.

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The point being that it´s not that I believe that Mother Nature is
kindly: of course, Nature of red in tooth and claw. Survival of the
fittest and all that. There is no morality in nature, just life, ceaselessly
struggling to find a way to survive.

But the key to survival must be hope. Why, else, did the sparrows
bother to build the nest?

And therefore, what is the connection with my poem? Only that,

unlike the sparrow, I am human living in the Age of Disbelief. I think
a lot of people don´t quite understand how serious has been the
Death of God in our modern world. The Fall from Grace that we
humans have is to be cursed with foreknowledge. We alone, have no
real hope, because we know that in the end everything will fall apart.
There is, in a godless world, no salvation. And therefore, by that fact,
no redemption. This is the problem with the death of God, not the
death of religion. Religion, as anyone can tell from a quick resumen
of it´s bloodthirsty record, is a violent and anti-human form of
thought control. It´s politics at its worst. The few exceptions do not
unmake the rule. Humanity hasn´t done things on earth better after
realising that there will not be a better place in the After-Life. In fact,
more bloody deeds have been done in the twentieth century and in
our present century just started, in an age when we know that we
really do have the full responsibility, that it is entirely up to us
because there is just us. That´s the connection between the loss of
God and the insufficiency of ourselves, in so far as the concept of God
refers to redemption through spiritual elevation, a casting off of both
mortality and insufficiency, and the failure of man to produce
solutions on Earth because he has not yet surpassed himself
spiritually. The result is the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of the
modern world. As meaning and hope of redemption have gone out of
human life, so life is now just a party, for those of us who can party,
and a burden for those of us who cannot. Those of us who are doing
OK lose ourselves in ritualistic, habit-driven lifestyles and ever-
expanding consumption, while a large part of the world dies of
starvation, deadly politics and preventable diseases, and our natural
heritage of wilderness scorched out of existence by the fires of
development. Shopping is the god of the modern world.

Only lack of that terrible knowledge builds hope. And all life depends
on it. That´s the meaning of the story of the sparrow´s nest and the
meaning of my poem, to me. That freedom comes not out of
knowledge, but out of not knowing, and therefore, out of hope. The
sparrow flies, free from gravity by his ability to overcome it. He seeks
a worm today, and he builds a nest tomorrow, because he sees no
reason why he should not, if his luck holds out, live forever. It would

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be good to be like the sparrow, to not know. Man alone knows that as
he was born, so surely he must die, and that this fleeting moment is
all he really has, and sadly, he´s not up to the job of making the most
of it.

OK, too morbid? Well, things don´t necessarily have to suit our party
mood to be true. Meanwhile, let´s raise a glass to a new day on Planet
Earth. We´re in the driving seat, we´re rather drunk, we´re running
out of fuel, we´ve left many dead cats and dogs on the roadside as
we´ve crashed our way along, and some dead people too, but the sky
above us is still a heavenly blue.

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 2: 25 P M

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 09, 2008

Is there any alternative?

"Once I moved about like the wind. Now I have surrendered.

That is all."

- Gerónimo, last Chief of the Chiricahua Apache, on surrender to

General Nelson 'Bear Coat' Miles, Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, 14
September 1886.

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 2: 32 P M

SUNDAY, JANUARY 27, 2008

"Then the chilly winds blew down across the desert,

Through the canyons of the coast to the Malibu
Where the pretty people play hungry for power
To light their neon way and give them things to do.
Some rich man came and raped the land, nobody caught 'em,
Put up a bunch of ugly boxes and, Jesus, people bought 'em.
And they called it paradise, the place to be,
They watched the hazy sun sinking in the sea."
- The Eagles, "The Last Resort" lyrics

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 10 :5 6 A M

"They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot"
- Joni Mitchell

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 10 :5 2 A M

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WEDNESDAY, JULY 04, 2007

Further Quote
"If you dig it, do it. If you really dig it, do it twice." - Jim Croce, folk-
rock singer song-writer, died in plane crash 1970 aged 30.

PO S T ED BY CER RO N EV AD O A T 11 :1 8 A M

http://cerronevado.blogspot.com/ 19/04/2009