Spanish views from a small town

This morning, as I was perusing Facebook, I discovered a nugget of history hithereto unknown to me. Much as Catalunya declared independence in 1934, unhappy that the government in Madrid was becoming too conservative, (It only lasted a few hours and ended with the detention and imprisonment of Lluis Companys, regional president, who later fled to France and was eventually handed to Franco by the collaborators. He was then shot.) Galicia also declared independence in 1931. Our problem was the railroad to Zamora, work on which had just been cancelled, and around twelve thousand men sentenced to unemployment.  The Second Republic had recently been proclaimed in April, 1931, with parliamentary elections to follow at the end of June. The new Republic, trying to make do with little money, decided that finishing the railroad line from Zamora to A Coruña was too expensive due to the geography of the area. It cancelled the funding, which it then dedicated to the port of Bilbao, considered...

The deed has been done, on both sides. Independence was declared yesterday by Catalunya, at around three thirty in the afternoon. About five hours later, the Senate voted in a measure based on a constitutional article to intervene the regional autonomy, and the Prime Minister declared the suspension of the entire Catalan government and the regional police, and regional elections on the 21st of December.  How are things going to go now? If cool heads prevail, nothing will happen until people go to the polls in December and usher in a new regional government. Otherwise, things are up in the air. Last night, a crowd of several thousand people remained in the Plaza Sant Jaume outside the building that houses the Govern in Barcelona, celebrating the independence. About half the Catalan population were in heaven yesterday. But it was an independence no one recognized. There was not one government in power that recognized an independent Catalunya. Everyone recognized Madrid's sovereig...

It's been a hundred years and the state still hasn't withered away. Instead, it's become a stumbling behemoth crashing into all aspects of our lives. Some of its functions have even been passed to large, private institutions which also effectively control our lives. Yet, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the ideas of Marx and Engels, through the filters of Lenin and Stalin, still touch us, and helped to shape the tumultuous twentieth century. The original premise was laudable. Both Marx and Engels believed that the search for unlimited profits by industrialists brought about the economic slavery of the poorest. Their intention was that the working poor should have a share of the profits by eliminating the private ownership of the companies. In our days, this means that companies give employees certain shares in the company they work in. If the company does well, their shares are worth more, and they eventually earn more money. Some small companies have even become total...

Grumble, rumble, yaaaawwwn. I look at the clock and see that I've overslept, despite having the talk show blaring into my ear disparate views of the day's political themes. I stumble through washing and dressing and wander downstairs, feeling like Dolly Parton's song, 9 to 5, "Tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen,/Pour myself a cup of ambition/yawnin', stretchin, tryin' to come to life." In the kitchen, first I feed the cats, then I get the coffeemaker ready to sing out the morning and turn on the computer and get my breakfast. After sitting a few minutes at the computer, eating my yoghurt and nuts, something is off. It's too quiet. I look around. It's the coffeemaker; it's not making any noise. Uh. Oh. I turn it off and I turn it on. Nothing, zero, zilch. The hotplate remains cold and the gurgling of water is non-existent. I've lost another coffeemaker. Ever since my yellow Moulinex gave up the ghost some years ago, I've gon...

In the years before I was born, my parents built this old house and the barn. They also planted a small row of trees at the then edge of their property. Two apple trees flanking the back gate, an orange tree, and a persimmon tree. The apples, of which one tree still survives, are of an old variety that are good for cooking. The original orange tree is gone, but its offshoots have grown into another one, and still has plenty of oranges in the winter. The persimmon was planted by my mother. She loved the fruit, and hoped to be able to eat her own crop of persimmons one day. But we left for another country before it started to give fruit. The few times we came back on vacation, it was summer, and even if the tree had fruit, it was still forming. When we moved here, my mother discovered the tree wasn't bearing any persimmons, and never really had. Disappointed, she told my father to cut it, because she wanted to plant another orange tree, and the persimmon would cover the sunlight to...

Twenty-one years ago this morning, my husband and I went to Santiago on a foggy morning. I remember a car accident that occurred because of lack of visibility on our way, in Milladoiro, just outside Santiago. But the sun was trying to break through, and it did, later. We went to the Sanatorium La Esperanza, where I had an appointment. My pregnancy had been programmed to be brought to a conclusion that day, because my due date had come and gone, and the baby was very comfy. So, on October 21, 1996, the doctors decided it was time for that baby to see the world that awaited it. When I was brought upstairs, still groggy from the anesthesia of the caesarian, I couldn't connect the tinny cries with a daughter, yet there she was, waiting for me. That day my world changed completely. I acquired a daughter and became a mother. At first, it was strange and time consuming; this child required feeding almost continuously, including during the sacred night. But she learned to sleep at night,...

A new education law promoted by the conservative Partido Popular (PP) has been gradually going into effect. It's another intent by the conservatives to educate non-thinking workers. There's a lot of incorporation of new technologies, etc, but also the disappearance of a humanities point of view. Rather than educate the citizen, they now want to educate the worker. One of the ways is by making philosophy an optional subject rather than the obligatory one it had been until now.  Granted that in most schools it was probably poorly taught, concentrating on memorizing names, dates, schools of thought, and little else. I doubt many classes were actually debating ideas. Still, it was an exposure to different ways of thinking and looking at the world. It was a way of trying to get bored adolescents to at least recognize that their questions have been asked before. But since it doesn't interest those in power to create thinking citizens, it was scrapped. Probably because the one s...

We're in a long period of drought. This month of October has been abnormally warm. Everything is dry. Even though it drizzled a bit last month, the soil beneath the surface is dry as paper. Warnings about climate change have abounded for some years now. Yet Galicia has not changed its forestry policies. At the beginning of every summer the regional government hires a certain number of firefighters, and in October their contract comes to an end and they go home. This past Thursday, despite fires raging in the provinces of Ourense and Lugo, five hundred firefighters were sent home at the end of their contracts. At no point in time is anyone hired to clean out the enormous undergrowth in woods close to villages and towns. Local property owners have an obligation to do so, but it's not always feasible. Many are older folk who can't get out a scythe like they used to, nor a modern-day brush cutter. Younger folk may not have the time to do so, and there are some who don't...

Many, many years ago, about three years after getting married, my parents built this little house. Back then it was pretty much each house for itself in terms of services, so they had to dig their own well. They did so, a well about three meters deep, lined with the rock of the area, a soft sarsen which let the water through easily. There was no need to go deeper; in winter the well would spill over, and the water would run to the fields behind. In summer the water never disappeared. But water never disappeared anywhere in summer here. There is a reason we are a part of the "green Spain." Galicia is on the receiving end of North Atlantic storm systems, much like western Ireland. My husband says that during his childhood it would rain from September to May, with scattered showers in the remaining months. When we first arrived in 1991, we arrived to a year of drought. I remember well the advisories on the nightly news, especially affecting southern Spain, yet we also experien...

The other night I was taken back in time. I found myself watching a Spanish program of old murders in the area of Zaragoza, told by the (now) retired police officers who ran the investigations, and actors who did a reenactment. The actual program wasn't very interesting. What was interesting was the trip back in time to those years in which I was a teenager. Seeing how some of the actors were dressed reminded me of those halcyon days. 1987, the year I turned eighteen. The Cold War was still going strong, yet it seemed to be cracking open with Gorbachev's perestroika , or restructuring, which later turned into the openness of glasnost . It seemed at the time the Soviets had heard Sting's song, Russians , especially the stanza, "We share the same biology, regardless of ideology./Believe me when I say to you,/I hope the Russians love their children, too."  In Spain, the Socialists were finishing their construction of the Estado de Bienestar , or Welfare State, th...

A long time ago, I read Joan Didion's collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem . They were written in the 1960's and were a comment on the tearing, shifting, changing society of that time. The title of the main essay comes from a poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming , and it is an allegory of the enormous change in society after World War I. The old is gone, a strange, new, menacing future is arriving. The first stanza goes: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. In Spain today the centre is beginning to fail. Increasingly, people are becoming polarized. Either they are ranting against the "Spanish oppressor...

Yesterday was the decisive day. It was the day Catalunya held a referendum on independence. The referendum had been declared null and illegal by the central government in Madrid, led by the conservative heirs of Franco and his stultifying regime. They declared it illegal because in the Constitution of 1978 Spain is said to be "indissoluble," therefore, no region can declare independence legally. As if a declaration of independence is ever legal and welcome by the ruling government of any nation. Scotland was allowed to hold a referendum because it was clear to Parliament in London that the majority of voters would vote against it. In Catalunya earlier this year, it was clear that most residents were fine with being Spanish. If the referendum had been allowed to go on with little fanfare, the NO vote would have won, this would have gone away, and cool heads prevailed. But, the ruling PP (Partido Popular), with the inimitable Mariano Rajoy at its head as the Prime Minister ...