Jordi Pujol... and the Moral Misery of Barack Obama

Dear American Friends:

I spent last night in front of the screen, transfixed by an interview between Miquel Calzada (a local journalist of considerable renown) and the former president of Catalonia, Jordi Pujol on the occasion of the latter’s 80th birthday

I realize that most of you have never heard of him. That's okay because no one has ever led you to him.

He was the president (1980-2003) of a small country (Catalonia) trapped uneasily within a bigger country (Spain), a white man who wears ties and suits and will often sit down with businessmen in Europe and other parts of the Western world. Moreover, within the political spectrum of his country, he bears the label of center-right and is thus not likely to gain cache from much of the intelligentsia.

The world press, led by the big dailies in Madrid, long ago decided he was just another politician, one inspired by the usual motives: power, money and influence.

As so often is the case, they were, and are, dead wrong. Pujol is, and I say this as without the least fear of being hyperbolic, probably the greatest politician of his time (with the exception of the celestial Mandela) in the western world.

And the reason--which Catalans across the political spectrum understand with the intuitiveness that they understand and celebrate the special beauty of Barcelona--is simple; he is a man of unshakable convictions and an ever inquisitive intelligence who from the earliest moments of his performance in public life (the late 1950s in the midst of the Franco dictatorship) always put the love of his country and the pursuit of its well-being above everything else.

Tortured by Franco's secret police, ignored and disdained by the fashionable left of Catalonia in the first years of democracy, and hounded by the wholly frivolous legal challenges by the “progressive” central government of Spain in the 80s and 90s, Pujol simply, and here I quote from his own description from last night's interview of how he got through the torture at the hands of Franco's goons, “did what needed to be done".

And when he didn't do what needed to be done, he would go to the Catalan people and say he screwed up. But he would always remind them that he had made mistakes out of a love for his country and out a fierce desire to see it take its rightful place in the concert of civilized and moral nations.

Coming out of the mouth of almost any other politician, these words would rightly be seen as an act of cowardly sanctimony, an example of, as we like to say in the US, a scoundrel hiding behind the flag. But not with Pujol and not in Catalonia. Indeed, it would be difficult, even in the camp of his most deeply antagonistic long-term political enemies, anyone who doubts the essential truth of this assertion.

Why? Because the Catalans know Pujol and they know, more importantly, that he is, for all his human failings, the realest deal one could hope to ever see in public life.

In my scribblings, I often speak of the advantage of having points of reference that transcend the spectrum of “thinkable thought” in the US. My sense is that this is often seen as an attempt by man with an obscure area of academic and linguistic knowledge to play one-upsmanship with his countrymen.

But whether those that think this want to accept it or not, the experience of closely following the life and public performance of other people in other places facing social and moral problems very similar to our own, greatly enhances one's ability to place the "truths" delivered by a single media system (e.g. "Obama got the best health care deal he could under the circumstances", “They hate us for our freedoms”, Israel is acting in self-defense, “The US is spreading democracy”) in a broader perspective.

Put another way, to know and understand the flawed grandeur of Pujol is to truly begin to understand the moral misery of Barack Obama. With little more than faith in himself and his people and against a not inconsiderable array of hostile forces (the dictatorship, the central government, the Spanish media, and even many prominent Catalan exiles from the civil war) Pujol brought small nation that was near death not only back to life but into the "first division" of places with the highest quality of life in the world.

Conversely Obama, handed the keys of his hugely powerful country with an unquestionable mandate for change at an absolutely key moment of its historical trajectory, has spent his time cozying up to established interests and giving ever more farcically hollow speeches about his desire to make the world a better place.

As Pujol is never shy about reminding his interviewers and the Catalans all political stripes who have come to see him as the somewhat eccentric, but always-worth-listening to grandfather, "Courage matters".

It always has, and it always will.

At 48, poor Barry doesn't know this. A life of sucking up to powerful white men has eviscerated whatever notions of courage might ever have existed in his fatherless soul.

You will recall, Obama burst into the public consciousness with a much-celebrated search for an absent and erratic father. Pujol, in contrast, begins his autobiography, quite tellingly I think, with a simple but stirring affirmation. "I am the son of Florenci (father) and Maria (Mother), Florenci Pujol i Brugat, from Premià de Mar (town), i Maria Soley i Mas, from Premià de Dalt (neighboring town). In short, he is man from a family, a place and a lineage to which he feels a sense of deep honor and duty.

And it is not coincidental in my view that because he was the son of a father (whom he knew, worked with, and adored) he could become the father of a nation.

Because Barry was, as the title of his book tells us, the son of a dream, he grew up to become a dream. But as we know, dreams dissipate in the light of day when there is no conviction, no sense place or time, to carry them forward.

Mature Democracy

I was walking home from work today and ran into another demonstration, this one even bigger and more spirited then the one I reported on over the weekend. Here are some of the images of this second event, a march by government employers and labor unions against government “austerity” proposals.

Seeing the demonstration got me thinking about democracy and the way it is practiced in different countries.

As everyone knows, Spain is a young democracy where, as the New York Times likes to remind us, people have still not internalized the rules of civic comportment that inhere in other societies with long-standing parliamentary traditions.

The US is, of course, a mature democracy where people have long since understood the rules and fine points of citizenship.

For example, when people in the United States vote for change, they know better than to expect a change in policy. And when the people who voted for "change" see that it is not forthcoming, they understand that it is their solemn civic responsibility to not only not believe their lying eyes but to make excuses for the people who took their votes and did not deliver.

Moreover, they have successfully internalized the notion that the ultimate arbiter of public life and social morality are those wonderful entrepreneurs who, as they have been told time and time again, “create the jobs” that make us all prosperous and happy.

This is why when the new President for Change (PFC) gives corporations nearly $1 trillion to resolve the problems they created out of their own arrogance, greed and carelessness, and asks them for nothing in return, the citizenry in general, and the people who voted him in particular, know that it is absolutely no time for serious questioning. They know that he and his aides are smart men and women who would never knowingly go against the interests of the vast majority of the people who elected them in favor of the moneyed classes that staff the Administration and that showered them with money during the campaign.

In a mature democracy, the press understands its proper role. At a time when newsrooms are being decimated by budget cuts dictated, in turn, by “entrepreneurial” investors who care little if anything about protecting the vital role that the press plays in a functioning democracy, they understand that it is their role to snarkily describe anyone who dares suggest that the country, and the enterprise they work for, are being led by people who are essentially amoral, as a dreamer ( as in "not interested in real grown-up solutions") or some kind of 60s left over.

In fact, I've even heard of cases of journalists working in newsrooms where union power has been smashed and where the fear of firing is thus constant who nonetheless rail against unions and the benefits that unions have conferred upon the rank-and-file in other areas of the economy. But, of course, that's what people are supposed to do in a mature democracy; it is the individual’s job to internalize the sense of fear, insecurity and distrust visited upon them by government and business, multiply its strength, and pass it on to their fellow citizens.

In immature democracies like Spain people are evidently much less responsible. For example, when the Spanish prime minister who was elected with the near unanimity of the left side of the political spectrum announces salary rollbacks for public employees and curtailment of medical benefits for all citizens, those same left-wing voters take to the street against him!

They organize rallies that put him on notice that the votes they gave him can and will be taken away. And in truly immature fashion, they refuse to make excuses for him, reminding him instead of him of his past and present connivances with big business as well as the international agencies that do its bidding.


(Translation of little green sign: “We must cut back on: Bank profits, Subsidies for rich friends, No show jobs, Inept consultants, Corrupt politicians)


And get this, they even go so far as to suggest, in direct contravention of the deeply meditated wisdom of the business press, that money is not lacking at all in Spain and that the key to maintaining the social services that separate civilized societies from those where the mentality of the frontier casino predominates can be recouped from doing silly things like raising taxes on the rich and cutting budgets for armaments!


(translation: "There isn't a shortage of money but rather an excess of crooks" The picture is of Emilio Botín the Spanish Head of megabank HSBC)

I sometimes wonder if Spaniards will ever learn the credulous docility and passivity that being citizens in a mature democracy really requires. Meanwhile, I am sure NPR and the New York Times will keep us informed about Spain’s struggle to grow up.


Cops busy intimidating the crowd.

Outside the Bubble

As I was walking through the center of Barcelona yesterday, I happened upon a pro-Palestinian and frankly anti-Israeli protest march. See the video I shot of the event here. As an American, I have to say I found this quite refreshing considering the Goebbels-style "big lie" idiocy that has been served in the US press concerning the Gaza Flotilla slaughter, and it appears, widely adopted by most of the movers and shakers in the US government.




But the content of the protest was not the only remarkable thing to these American eyes. There were a number of things that contrasted sharply with how such an event--that is if such an event could ever take place on the largest Avenue of a very large city on a Saturday afternoon without months of previous planning--would occur in today's USA.



The first of these was the near total absence of police presence. Yes, police were there, but they were there as passive onlookers, citizens looking at other citizens with neither fear nor a desire to intimidate. Remember how it used to be before the advent free speech zones and the wholesale recruitment of police into the business of suppressing dissident thought? Well that's what we had here.

The second was the fact that the crowd was largely Catalan, that is, made up of people from this city who were publicly demonstrating a concern for people very far away.

Remember before the press constantly told us that "all politics are local" and that people "always vote their pocketbooks"? I do.
Back then, people used to have a belief that the mistreatment of people far away was also their concern, especially if it involved monies from their own government. But here I was in the midst of a crowd from a country that is not generally implicated in the Middle Eastern mess that, on the face of it, still seemed to believe that politics could be or should be something more than a referendum on one's pocketbook or on one's parochial concerns.



Silly them. Don't they understand that being concerned with mistreated peoples in other places is so yesterday? Don't they understand that they are citizen are there merely to carry out the "missions" that the empire has mapped out for each and every one of them?

The third was the crowd's ability to, as our blessed press likes to say, connect the dots. Where we come from people are not real big on cause and effect. Rather, we prefer to wallow in a strange mixture of self-pity and historical ignorance. But here in Barcelona we had a protest leader screaming into the microphone, a man by the way from a labor union, who was chanting about the fact that Israel's impunity was made possible by the indulgence of the European Community and by Israel's overwhelming control of certain financial sectors, and from there, large swaths of the media landscape.

Well, there must be a lot of anti-Semites in Barcelona. Either that, or a lot of people with a very tenuous grasp of international political realities in the US. Take your pick.