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.