jundanu

I sit in my pretended favorite bar

and nervous drink too fast

the blended scotch

stupid drunk at 4 pm

I stumble out into the hideous sunlight

where the rest of my life

waits for me patiently

I thank our Fuhrer for allowing us to again say Merry Christmas without fear of persecution from secular progressive jihadists. Our sacred leader has made it possible for Americans to again revel in the delightful insincerity of this holy marketing season, while watching wretched holiday programming (unless you have Netflix, he, he). So let us all gather under the Germanic Tannenbaum of pagan antiquity while going into debt to buy the wrong expensive gift. Suicide rates soar to the heavens as we fail once again to give a shit about infants and mangers.

Believe it or not, I was a Republican in my twenties. Sure, that party had its right wing extremists, war mongers, racists; but it also had centrist progressives like John Lindsey, Nelson Rockefeller. We even had principled conservatives like William Buckley, who famously chased the crazies out of the party. Then came Nixon’s cynical “southern strategy”,where he sold the party to the racist Dixiecrats to get elected and its been downhill ever since. Now the party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump, Roy Moore, and a bunch of sniveling moral idiots in Congress. A few years’  ago, I left the Democrats too, fed up with their hypocrisy in supporting civil rights while continuing to involve America in useless wars and terrible anti-drug policies, so I have no skin in this game. Washington warned us against the divisive nature of political parties, and his predictions have come true with our outdated two-party system. Hey voters you get to choose between the huckster racist or the morally compromised Neocon!

Another baneful sign that America has become the new Rome is the suspiciously similar alternation of “good emperors” (Obama) with “bad emperors” (Trump). Marcus Aurelius came as close as any human can to the ideal of philosopher-king: he actually wrote a book on stoicism and lived it. Then he was followed by his son, Commodus, the classical version of the modern frat boy, who enjoyed fighting in the arena with gladiators, who naturally had to lose to the prince. By the third century, the emperors were all pretty much awful. The question is, how close are we to third century Rome?

Well, I’m back home from three months in Spain and trying to figure out what to think about my experience. This is the longest consecutive time I’ve spent outside the U.S. since that year I studied the delightful spectacle of two cultures corrupting each other in Vietnam. First, Spain was beautiful and the people warm, the food and drink intoxicating, but I had trouble adjusting to the rhythm of life there: the morning for shopping, then siesta, then things pick up in the evening. I found that I missed the freedom of shopping anytime. I missed my bad sports teams. Mostly, I realized that I still loved my native city, even though my neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen has gone from a rough and tumble working class boiling pot to a tame poodle of young hipsters in skinny jeans and topknots(sigh). Guess I’ll stay a while.

In two days I fly back to a United States that resembles a parody of a third world country: anti-intellectualism, hypocritical religiosity, racism, sexism, tribalism. The bitter predictions of visitors like de Toquevillle, Dickens, Oscar Wilde now seem to have come horribly true: a once hopeful experiment in freedom has been all but destroyed by a lack of spiritual values, empty consumer materialism, a love of wealth and money, and the shadow of slavery that still poisons our air.

The rough, hilly area of Sierra Tabernas, some two hours’ drive south of Granada looks very much like the American Southwest, which is why Sergio Leone and other Italian film directors used it repeatedly to film their so-called Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960’s and 70’s. That and, I suppose, the much lower costs of making them than in Italy. Many of these films began or revived the careers of American actors, like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson, and even Henry Fonda. There are also little western ghost towns scattered around, where you can belly up to the same bar used in Once Upon A Time In The West, or ascend a scaffold and try out a very deadly-looking noose.

Well, well, looks like the gig is just about up for the predatory male. Thank you, Harvey Weinstein, thank you, Bill Cosby: your arrogant assumption that fame, power and a carefully crafted fake image could let you do whatever you wanted with young, naive women finally ripped the scab off this rotten system and the pus is flowing out. And cheers for those brave ones who called them out, even when they put their own reputations in danger. Oh yeah, for my liberal friends who rightly condemn Roy Moore, but then twist themselves into a knot defending Bill Clinton or Al Franken, aren’t you reacting in a similar tribal way as those you despise on the right? Karma, baby.

Even, here, in the center of Granada, where the best food is just around the next corner, America waddles up with its signature gassy charm and settles down for a nap. I even found a Pizza Hut in Budapest. You don’t need an army to conquer the world.

Despite my best intentions to become a Spanish speaker, plus two and a half months living in Spain, I still can’t speak Spanish. Despite several language apps that all but guarantee mastery in several weeks, I still only know a handful of potted phrases, such as the one above, as well as isolated words, such as “caballo” and “blanco”. My excuse is that I mostly hang out in a house that is filled with French speakers: even the TV Channels are all from Paris. And I am lazy.