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.

Junk by Design

The health care plan that is wending its way through Congress is junk. It will do nothing to stop the ungodly ascent of health care prices. In fact, it is likely to to accelerate this upward trend. The reason is simple. It contains virtually no incentives for exercising downward pressure on costs.

As soon as it passes, we will be showered with the predictable apologetics from the Obama camp and its generally mindless minions. "You've got to start somewhere" "Change is incremental, we can make it better later", "There you go again, rigidly insisting on your own (read: wildly and out of touch and ultra- liberal) version of good in what is inevitably a messy legislative process". Every other democrat interviewed, will repeat some version of the phrase allegedly uttered by the now-departed Ted Kennedy "We must not let the perfect become the enemy of the possible".

This would all great except for one salient fact: the perfect (single payer) was never given the opportunity to be the enemy of the possible. It was taken off the table before the entire process of negotiation began. And this was done as a result of cold calculations taken at the very highest policy-making levels of the White House. They got into bed with the insurance industry and big Pharma way back in the late winter and assured them that the money machine they currently operate would not be substantially affected by Obama's "reform" plans. In return, the White House gained the tacit assurance that a) industry money would continue flowing to the Democrats and b) Harry and Louise would not be brought out of mothballs to frighten and befog the minds of the "low information" voters in the general populace.

Should you have any doubts about the ironclad, ""til death do us part" nature of the deal, consider the following. Until late last week the congressional version of the bill which passed on Saturday contained an amendment that would have shielded those states interested in setting up single-payer programs of their own from anti-trust lawsuits brought by insurance companies. The provision was stricken from the bill at the last moment after heavy lobbying pressure from .....none other than the White House itself.

When this White House makes pledges to big industry its word is truly its bond. That a bunch so evidently craven in its dedication to corporate interests is often successfully labeled as "socialist" speaks to the truly delusional nature of much of our public discourse.

This is not an isolated incident. Rather, this way of operating is deeply encoded in the D.N.A. of the post-Clinton Democratic party in general, and the Obama White House in particular. These are the Placebo Politics of a Placebo Presidency. The unquestioned master of all this is Rahm Emanuel. For Rahm and his proteges practicing what the media consistently, if wholly fallaciously, portrays as the school of "sharp-elbowed partisan politics", winning elections is the only thing that matters. Actually doing something substantial about the balance of social and economic powers that so heavily determine the rhythms and stark realities of day-to-day life for millions of Americans once in office is absolutely beside the point. Indeed, he and gang know quite well that actually doing so will threaten the pipeline of campaign donations they see, rightly or wrongly, as being the key to winning more elections.

This is why they give us legislative "Junk by Design". Why we accept it as readily as we do, I do not understand.

NSA Announces the Launch of New Personal Transcription Program (PTP)

Responding to Congressional pressures to develop new revenue streams for an increasingly debt-ridden Federal Government, the NSA (National Security Administration) yesterday launched its Personal Transcription Program (PTP). The program is designed to provide US consumers, for a fee, with on-demand transcriptions of any and all of their personal phone conversations within 48 hours of their occurrence. According to the NSA spokesman Don Weber, “Our target demographic for the program is the 45-65 age group, people with active lives and nothing to hide who find that their ability to recall important interactions just isn’t what it used to be”.

He went on to explain that the Agency believed it was time to make better use of the vast stores of data they currently have on the personal lives of ordinary Americans. “In the wake of the recently released Inspector General’s report on President Bush’s (and now President Obama’s) Surveillance program http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/psp.pdf, showing that this massive data gathering effort could not be linked to the interruption any terrorist plots against the Homeland, we thought it was time to begin re-branding the program. In the long-run, we know the American people will not stand for seeing billions of dollars of their own money spent to provide Washington insiders with the ability gather dirt on their opponents or to have the TSA (Transportation Safety Administration) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) put millions of completely innocent people on ‘no fly’ and terrorist ‘watch’ lists”. Weber would not speculate on just how much revenue the agency hoped to recoup from the program. “That is strictly classified information”. he said.

When asked her opinion of the new program, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Diane Feinstein called it a “Neat idea.”. She continued, “We came to realize that in budgetary times like these, we need to look into every possible source of revenue. This is information about the personal lives of American citizens. They should have every right to buy it back from the government at the right price. We view it as a win-win situation” She would not, however, comment on whether she favored selling the same transcripts to third party marketing firms.

Slap on the Cuffs!

As Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, and subsequently, President Obama have made clear, there can be no denying the unfair and frequently brutal treatment men of color have long faced in the realm of “law enforcement” in the U.S. It would be a shame, however, if this very necessary discussion of police actions and race were to short circuit what is arguably an even larger and more universal problem: America’s (or at least prosperous America’s) increasing acquiescence to a “slap on the cuffs first, ask questions later” brand of authoritarianism.

I grew up in an America where there was still a healthy skepticism about the motives of people who chose to spend their life in blue uniforms. We knew and acknowledged there were a lot of good and law-abiding cops. But we also knew that there was a considerable number of them for whom wearing the badge was mostly about belonging to a fraternity that gives them the right to capriciously lord their will over others.

This skepticism has largely disappeared in the wake of 9-11, supplanted by a media-fueled idolatry of all things having to do with the military and law enforcement (“our brave men and women in uniform”). Emblematic of this new civic religion is the practice of wearing of NYPD and FBI caps and t-shirts.

This public cult of cop worship has had the effect of further emboldening the cohort of power-trippers in uniform as they go about their daily business. They know a public weaned on a steady diet of their supposedly universal virtuousness (and with it, the supposed omnipresence of readily identifiable “bad guys”) will almost always give them the benefit of the doubt. So why hold back?

A middle-aged black guy in Cambridge gives you more rhetoric and vocabulary than you feel like hearing on call, “Slap on the cuffs!” and write a police report painting him as “unreasonable”. A kid videotapes the police roughly arresting one his classmates in the school cafeteria after a completely non-violent senior prank (as happened not long ago in these parts), confiscate his camera, “Slap on the cuffs!” and press charges on him that prevent him from graduating and that imperil his college career. Protesting citizens making politicians and patricians of business feel uncomfortable by gathering outside the site of a board meeting or convention? Trump up a pretext about a “security perimeter” (don’t recall seeing any mention of such a thing in the Constitution) and “Slap on the cuffs!”. A few people wearing anti-Bush t-shirts at a presidential speech in 2004? Follow the directives of White House operatives and “Slap on the cuffs!”. And on and on…

The problem police mistreatment of minorities, especially males of color, is all-too-real in today’s America. It must, however, be seen in the broader context of our consumption of simple moralizing storylines, and the enormous sense of license these narratives give to the fallible and often power hungry people (in this sense, they are no different than the rest of us) we have charged with the patently unattainable goal of “insuring our safety”.

The Not So Magic Realism of the Bush Years

During the 1960s and 70s a literary sensibility known as “Magic Realism” emerged in Latin America. Its most illustrious practitioner was the 1982 Nobel Prize winner for literature, and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. To read the Colombian author’s capital work is a literary experience like no other, especially for readers from the so-called First World where, since birth, we have been taught that there is a clear and essentially non-negotiable line between the realms of reality and fantasy in our lives. One of the keys to the success Garcia Marquez’s novel can be found in its clever use of situational irony, that is, the way in which he employs a deadpan narrative style to explain “incredible” occurrences.
When critics gather to discuss the grandeur of Garcia Marquez’s writing, they talk about many things, his descriptive might, his politics, and his keen sense of history.

What they seldom mention, however, are his readers. Without them, or perhaps more precisely, without their deeply internalized sense of what constitutes social normality, his literary project would be considerably less compelling. He delights us, or at least those of us raised in the so-called developed world, precisely because he breaks our expectation of how one should react before ostensibly abnormal events.

Over the last eight years, the Bush Administration has executed series of policies that, when viewed in the context of our nation’s core ideals, are nothing short of deviant. These include, among many other things, a belief in the government’s right to wage pre-emptive war (something that certainly exercised us greatly when Hitler and Hirohito invoked it!), imprison citizens without charge, spy widely and with virtually no oversight on American lives, kidnap and torture anyone the president deems dangerous, and withhold from the congress and the general citizenry any information the president himself considers proprietary.

Taking a page from García Márquez, the American political press, deeply indoctrinated with the belief that being “objective” means treating all claims to morality and truth as equally compelling, narrated these abridgements of liberty in wholly non-plussed tones. And their brothers and sisters in the commentariat, who had long since internalized the idea (propagated expertly by the Right in the wake of the sixties and seventies) that expressing anger and outrage are antithetical to being intellectually serious, followed suit, writing article after soberly anguished article about the competing claims of liberty and security in the “new” age of terror. (As if “security” had not been a concern in the decades when these constitutional freedoms were first hammered out, times when, for example, the White House itself was burned down by foreign "terrorists").

Faced with the clear disconnect between the gravity of these constitutional infractions and the ever-equanimous tone of the reportage, American newspaper readers, like those of the great Colombian novelist, have sat back in their easy chairs and learned to laugh and dream with the wryly ironic literature now being served up to them as news in the daily press. Right?

Well, actually, for the most part, they have not. Indeed, the prestige of institutions such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN remains pretty much intact, largely unaffected by their recent off-Broadway run as situational ironists. The question then becomes, Why? While one can never be sure when meditating complex issues such as these, the time may have come to confront a logical, if highly disturbing, explanation: the majority of the readership no longer has an internalized precinct of constitutional normality from which to gaze upon the crimes of the Bush administration and their poker-faced treatment by the media.