The Eagle, the Helmsman, the Red Neck, the Exile, and September 11

https://youtu.be/0YVHMUJZKGg

The Eagle, the Helmsman, the Red Neck, the Exile, and September 11

José María Naharro-Calderón

In memoriam  of Lauretta Clough, who was kind enough to chat with me about these  …

The Summer of 2023 has been filled with a plethora of  trivial or everyday Spain’s nationalism spots (Billig & Edensor).  Therefore, I refer to  what   Billig, in line with  Benedict Anderson’s subjectivities for   imagining  a national community,  describes as an unconscious historical habitus,   coined by Pierre Bourdieu, and Edensor’s studies through the  display of the British sports’ original national superiority and moral manliness to rule in the colonies and beyond,  and  stereotypes about self-identity and otherness that emerge from internal  or external  clashing cultural contexts through  daily  and sporting styles.

Therefore, we read about  the  obituaries of Federico Martín Bahamontes, the first Spanish winner of the Tour de France in 1959;  of Guillerno Timoner’s, six-time middle-distance world champion on bicycle after motorcycle between 1955 and 1965; the victory in the world championship of the Spanish women’s football (soccer) team on August 20 of this year, with the subsequent Rubiales soap-opera; a statement on September 5 about an amnesty for the Catalan Independence Processof Carles Puigdemont, always described by his supporters and by the former vice president of Pedro Sánchez’s government, Pablo Iglesias, as an exile; as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the Augusto Pinochet US sponsored coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, against the Popular Unity  coalition which symbolically ended with the suicide of  president Salvador Allende.  In all these cases, as we shall observe, many onomastic signifiers point toward  the signified,  as Cratylus  would had    wished   in this Socratic-Platonic dialogue with Hermogenes, who, on the contrary,   defended an arbitrary and not naturally motivated sign.

This  dialogue where Socrates eventually seems to favor the  conventionalist argument  would also  point toward another ongoing   linguistic-political  controversy in Spain, now that  three other official    languages  (Basque, Catalan and its derivatives   and Galician) co-officially used  in the  Autonomous Communities of Euskadi, Catalonia, Valencia and Balearic Islands and Galicia – not to mention future claims by    Andalusian, Arabic, Aragonese o fabla, Asturian-Leonese (Bable or Asturian, Montainous or Cantabrian, Extremadurian or Castuan, Leonese), Caló or Romaní, Canarian, Fala or Northern Caceres lingua, French, Panocha or Murcian, Portuguese and  Rif lingua – shall  employ translators and interpreters, I suspect, soon replaced by Artificial Intelligence, in the Spanish parliamentary chambers. Incidentally, I have never understood the reason for the political  rejection, particularly  in Catalonia, about  the increase  of shared  public education of  Spanish, as  if  due to its dominant position it  could  be learned by osmosis,  and did not require the  careful study of its syntax,   history or literature, a curriculum mostly implemented  in private  schools attended by the students of the regional elites, such as Artur Mas, one of the politicians responsible for the present  mess. Another similar petition on the use of Catalan, Basque and Galician in the European Union institutions seems  to  have opened the fear gates for  a weakening and sparse European  regionalization in view of the Russian threats, and an  increasingly lack of cohesion within the 27 member states, where Brexit already sent a first set of panic waves, and   Spanish is still not an official language, compared to English as lingua franca, French and German. The house by the roof?

Nevertheless, in  the six nations European Market of   the 1950s and 60s, when French cyclists such as Anquetil, Bovet, Darrigade, Geminiani, Poulidor, Rivière … won almost everything, Bahamontes emerged as the hero for many kids still on our four wheeled Orbeas. We worshiped   his effigy on our soda caps,  on our clay or crystal marbles, on our plastic made riders harboring the national team colors – soon to be   wiped out  by the commercial sponsors —  through which we used to mime the Tour of France riders and races on any ad hoc street, sandy park or beach  surfaces. A dynamic and modern  French pilgrimage road industrially identified with the bicycle, in the path  St James of Compostela’s,  revitalized at the turn of the XX C.,   the  landscapes,  customs and wonders that today’s pilgrims retrace,  as highlighted in the first known tourist guide: XII C Aimeric Picaud’s  Codex Callistinus.

 Anquetil, Rivière, Bahamontes, Tour 1959

The  new French Bicycle Road was already more than a Tour, when the Toledo native, Bahamontes,  was nicknamed in 1957, the year of the Treaty of Rome,  by one of the organizers of the 1903 old  legendary race, the journalist Jacques Goddet, as the Eagle of Toledo that would glide over the high peaks.  It sent climbing the national memory  of objects  represented by the Carolingian emblem that presides over the Double  Gate (Bisagra) of the Imperial city of the Tagus. But Bahamontes must have deeply disappointed  mostly the  Western-European Communitarian  cycling sport fans of the time, and many of the Spanish patriotic followers of the rapacious Toledo native, by collapsing as if hit on his   wings, and with his fall, digging again during that 1957 Tour, new trenches among  two political and cycling Spains. In that year of his Aquiline baptism, he withdrew from the race after witnessing the schism in the Spanish team between Bahamontistas and Loroñistas, (in reference to another rider in the Spanish team, the 1957 winner of the Vuelta a España, Jesús Loroño Artega), amidst a phenomenal tantrum, covered up by an  alleged health problem.

Bisagra Gate, Toledo

I don’t know if Goddet remembered that behind the emblematic appellation to the rancid Carolingian empire, the Franco regime had  fluttered as a faint-hearted facilitator of the efforts of the Nazi-Fascist Axis during the Second World War in exchange for a substantial but denied Northern French-African colonial piece of the  pie, which was  about to become independent in  Algeria (1962).  The Spanish exiles of 1939 had suffered over there, as well as in  the metropolis, multiple concentration camp hardships, without respect until 1945 for their  right for political asylum that France had already recognized as one of the five nations signers  of the 1933 Geneva Convention for Refugees. Toledo also represented a most decisive  myth of heroism for the lacking representation justifying the Franco dictatorship, through the evocation of the heroes of Charles the Fifth’s Alcázar, a space for supposedly true Spain founding resistance and courage, illuminated by the divinity in favor of the coup plotters of 1936, who had held in  the fortress from July 21 to September 27, 1936. Franco quickly understood its symbolic value, and therefore halted an imminent entry into  Madrid in the Fall of 1936, in exchange for  a propaganda picture that would make him undisputed Rebel Spain Generalissimo and eternal head of  the government [and] of the state, thanks to his Super Brother’s alteration with the  innocent copulative marker [and] before the partitive genitive  preposition [of] on the October 1, 1936 nomination decree (Cabanellas).

In Franco’s National Catholic  Holy Crusade Spain,  rebaptized by cardinal Pla y Deniel, the logocentric transparency of names, surnames, emblems and symbols could be interpreted as a doubly holy  sign to show that the nation of such supposedly  divine ancestry was forever united by the matchmaking virtue of those  very Catholic late medieval monarchs (Ferdinand of Aragon and Elisabeth of Castille)  who had  also built  their  mausoleum, never used for that purpose,  in Toledo Saint John of the Kings monastery. Thus,   Francoist  Spain could only be the one chosen by the right hand of the Father in order to return to the lost earthly paradise of unity, – With the Empire towards God was another  of its emblems- and thus establish itself and exemplify the triadic synthesis described by   Levinger and Lytle   about  the foundations of national  myths. They are based on the origins of a golden age, the subsequent decline and the glorious promise and recovery of the homeland. Does  Make  America Great Again ring a bell,  springing from the 1845  Manifest Destiny?

But if the diminished, underdeveloped and autarkic Spain of the frankness of its Caudillo Franco did not achieve its imperial objectives economically or politically, at least it could display them from the high peaks from which it descended like a triumphant Hispanic Trajan, certainly quite clumsily because that  certain Ba(j)ha-montes (Sp.  the one that descends from the mountains) used to fear the downhills. On the other hand, Timoner (Cat. helmsman) satisfied the conquering myth that Jaime de Andrade, alias Franco, spread in his 1941 film script  Raza, filmed by the Phalangist Party Founder  José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s brother in law, José Luis Saenz de Heredia in 1942.    As a   chant to Spain’s staunch traditionalism based  on  the former Golden Age  Catholicism of  empire and     military valor,   Timoner represented one  of those Almogavars (almogávares) who had sailed the Mediterranean in command of the Aragonese fleet, reconquering the cyclist’s native Mallorca, before  claiming the Mare Nostrum  for Aragon which would later deliver  its flows at the Castilian Hercules Columns in order to spread Plus Ultra  the Hispanic  Atlantic and Pacific  first  globalization.

Another  mythical triad could be  exemplified by a less heroic  reading for the deterministic Frankness of the dictatorship. In the same year in which the Toledo cycling zenith seemed to confirm  the imperial recovery and exemplification  of the myth, Franco who had auto proclaimed himself as the Cold War  Sentinel of the West, left no room for doubt about the Spanish decadence that his regime of persecution and mass graves had brought forth.  Upon inaugurating  on April 1, 1959, on the remains of the Cuelgamuros concentration camp,  the ominous mausoleum  paradoxically named Valley of the Fallen, he highlighted twenty years later that  the Spanish Civil War  had not ended: “The anti-Spain was defeated, but it is not dead […] attempting to revert our Victory   […] Make sure  that […] that you prevent the enemy, always lurking, from infiltrating your ranks.” And as Fernando Olmeda pointed out,  “with this speech, the idea of winners and losers was petrified […] on the mountain of Cuelgamuros [while] Franco once again played with the deception of reconciliation [absent from] his speech, [without mention] of the fallen Spanish loyalist Republicans, nor of reaching out to the defeated.”

Spanish Republican Forced Laborers in the Cuelgamuros Concentration Camp, from where Manuel Lamana and Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz managed to escape in 1946.

https://blog.umd.edu/mondinaire/2023/04/04/los-post-seniors/

Meanwhile, part of that anti-Spain, which had managed to preserve a wick of  intelligence, perseverance and care for the res publica, clear of  prisons and exile,  was trying  to avoid  a national financial Despeñaperros (a mountain range between Castille and Andalusia meaning the cliff where dogs fall over).  A small group of economists, coordinated  by  Fabià Estapé, was attempting to invert the eschatological meaning of that mausoleum where supposedly the  good  overcame  evil, virtue vanquished  vice or light shone over  darkness.   Along with  Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, later second democratic Spain’s president and a signer  of the 1977 stabilizing Moncloa Pacts, (Bustelo in Calvo-Sotelo), they were aware of  José María Naharro Mora’s seminars divulging the modernity of a certain John Maynard Keynes, and among other recipes,   the necessity  of devaluating the overinflated Spanish peseta  exchange rate from 10.95 to 60 pesetas to the US $, as an alternative  to the  renewal of rationing cards (1937-1952) and shortages that had desolated most of Spain during the long years of war, hunger  and black market (1936-1952).This was the  standard  belt tightening recipe   eternally advocated from  the Flickering  Light of El Pardo Palace (in reference to Franco’s official residence where his light supposedly would never be off).Therefore,  Joan Sardá, a member of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, had  concluded  that  Franco’s dismal autarchic policies could only stem from his  Supreme  Reading Abilities. Sardá was another anti-Spanish exile returned from Venezuela who was able to join  Estapé’s team in order to   shore up and stabilize  the battered  1959 Spanish economy, despite Franco’s fierce opposition.

Coincidentally, it started redressing itself  symbolically  on   July 18, 1959, date of Bahamontes’ Aquiline triumph in Paris, or  the pro Franco manipulated   anniversary  memento for the beginning of the Fascist coup d’état that began really  in the Spanish held Rif on July 17, 1936, and  which lead to the War in Spain.   Two decades and a day later,  Fabià Estapé was anxiously waiting at Joan Sardá’s apartment  for a key announcement in the official radio news censored like an army report (El Parte).  After the inexhaustible proclamation of Bahamontes’ s cycling victory on  Napoleonic lands still hosting 1939 anti pure Spain enemies and exiles,   the announcement finally  came about  the admittance of Spain to the OEEC (Organization for the European Economic Co-operation and Development – OCDE), and eventually the Monetary Fund and   the tapping of USA  capital loans, in order  to navigate  out of the morass close to inflationary bankruptcy to which Paco la culona (Francisco [Paco] Franco’s large sitting area) had subjected Spain. This was another of the  Generalissimo’s motoes,   used  by the   freemason and  conservative Republican  general Miguel Cabanellas Ferrer, a temporary head for  the plotting generals’ junta (July-October 1936) to signify  that once in command (October 1, 1936) Franco’s grip would be eternal, as implied and reflected by Alejandro Amenábar 2019 film,  While the War is still On.  Meanwhile, the  doubtful,  calculating and late future Generalissimo,     had previously secured himself  a golden exile,   as guaranteed   by a finance Almogávar, the plotting Majorca  banker Juan March, just in case of a completely   failed coup which eventually turned into  a  dismal civil and international conflict. In the opposite trenches was Guillermo Cabanellas Jr., a socialist and a participant in the 1930 Republican  Jaca uprising, and finally an  exile to Argentina in 1937.

In  an eternal cycle of Nietzsche’s repetitions or Mark Twain’s rhymes, it was on August 20, 2023, when trivial nods to that Spanish tragic  history were once again tied. A few still attempt to de/re-construct  Spain while   unearthing Franco’s phantoms, or what I term as “To Take out  the Saint on a tour for any purpose” (Sacar a pasear el santo para un roto y un descosido) despite the fact that more than two Spanish born generations and a sizeable group of immigrants and their descendants  never lived under the dictatorship, and as proven by the July 23 General Elections, when the majority of the ballots  have signaled  non confrontational policies. Evidently,  this déjà vu of a stained past is present in other nations supposedly virgin of any  blemish in their democratic origins such as France, the United Kingdom or the United States, without being affected significantly on the international arena by such       past stains. On the contrary, France still rides on 1789 revolutionary mementos despite Terror or Napoleon,  still commemorated, no matter what, in its  Paris Pantheon. The United Kingdom washes out its colonial past through The Crown,  where 1714  Treaty of Utrecht claims by Spain are diluted by Churchill’s au/ocularization as the   WWII statesman, and not the Gallipoli colonialist,  when  facing  fascist symbolic images from Franco’s times without mentioning their source. And  the United States balances a controversial  project about its origins such as 1619 while holding unto an undemocratic slave times Electoral College  that still supersedes US presidential elections, regarded world wide,  as fully democratic.

Meanwhile, Chile’s tense evocation  of the 1973 Augusto Pinochet US backed coup that toppled Salvador Allende’s democratic elected coalition – please note the paradoxical Cratylic onomastic references to the Roman Emperor symbolic executioner  and the  Savior as victim –  has been met by  staunch memory battles between versions of a future of desire and one of destiny as coined by Desmond Bernal and recently quoted by David Rieff. It could be analogous to  Spain  so called Regime of 1978, a ruinous building bound to be demolished  by the Podemos  and   Sumar coalitions and supporters,  opposed to the consensual  Transition, but defended by most of  all of  its alive protagonists. Therefore we are  living  through  a hodgepodge obsession where recent history   appears incapacitated and suspicious, trapped between all kinds of past and future paradoxes, and lost in the thick fog of the present, cut off by the imperatives of redemption from a past sought by   youngish acting  generations  deprived of time but obsessed by it, while other youth ignore completely the past and do not even ascertain the present beyond the most recent trendy tweet on any subject. I have already written  extensively about all this in my  Entre alambradas y exilios. Sangrías de las Españas y terapias de Vichy (2017).

In contrast  with this understandable morass, my generation believed it could anticipate a future of change and overcoming the dictatorships that devastated European societies such as the Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, those of the Iron Curtain and the U.S.S.R., or so many Latin American, African or Asian, among bloody conflicts like those in Indochina, against which I participated in the US as a student opponent. Thus, Pinochet’s Chilean coup represented a multiple painful regression for   Spaniards like me  who were waiting for the end of our endless dictatorship, who had studied  the democratic tradition of Chile,   the poetry of Pablo Neruda through his Spanish verses I explain a few things written in his Madrid apartment at the House of Flowers, and who as Chile’s Paris Consul who facilitated the 1,900  Spanish Republicans Exiles Winnipeg  expedition to Valparaiso in 1939. Tears come to mind when contemplating in 2011 the grateful fortitude exhibited by those exiles behind  the memory plaque placed in his Isla Negra  residency, where he is buried after his mysterious death, a few days after the coup. I had the privilege of  visiting Neruda’s Pacific Ocean residence   with my baby daughter and her mother, a scholar at a  José Donoso’s symposium, as another  participant,  José Saramago, was awaiting news about the  Literature Nobel Prize Award which did not come in September  of 1994. And again, I made a point of stopping  at  Isla Negra  in  January  2011 with my   daughter  and my current spouse, whose grand parents and uncles had been less fortunate  1939 exiles in France.

They all went entering the ship…  and my poetry in their struggle had managed to find a homeland for them

Pablo Neruda

The  Spaniards from the Winnipeg 1939-1997

Therefore, images keep   creeping away to founding moments for  my civic consciousness when one afternoon in May  1970 I went to the Film  Series of the French Institute in Madrid on Marqués de la Ensenada Street to find out  that the programmed film, Z  by the Franco-Hellenic director Constantin Costa-Gavras, had been banned by the  Franco dictatorship. A few, knowledgeable among the baffled public, commented that the  film certified how the deep state  could lead to the political involution of a nation symbolically as decisive for democratic ideas like Greece. I will point out that there was no such thing at the time as the internet, and that in addition,  press and printing  censorship were alive and kicking.   As  a privileged reader, I could circumvent them  in the periodical  section of the  French Institute  Library,   where I could read Le Monde, and the chronicles about Spain by  Ramón Chao.

Then I finally managed to view Z in the United States, at the arthouse cinema, Theater of the Living Arts on South Street in Philadelphia, along with other films like State of Siege or The Confession (L’aveu), interpreted by  one of my favorite actors, Yves Montand. But I did not anticipate that Costa-Gavras’s cinema would be permanently linked to my own intellectual itinerary. Indeed, it   had been framed  by Jorge Semprún’s scripts, a multifaceted Spanish intellectual from exile, author of a stylized biography about Montand  and his abject relationship with Simone Signoret, and a determined autobiographical reflection on his own militancy against Franco, in Alain Resnais’s La guerre est finie.  That  cinema  displayed  the multiplicity of angles, contradictions and threats for  progressive politically motivated  individuals and groups.   I would later deal  at length with  some of Semprún’s  cinematographic and concentration experiences, and his presence in Z explained many things about that Franco’s government ban of 1970. His multifaceted gaze thus freely crossed the contradictions that he had extracted from his own experience as an anti-fascist survivor in the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp, and as a communist militant in the Central Committee of the Spanish party until his expulsion in 1964, along with Fernando Claudín’s, due to his perception of a country that was moving beyond the war and exile, despite Franco.

As memory kept flowing, I fell upon another tingle at the screening of  Missing, and subsequent colloquium with Costa-Gavras himself, at the Annenberg Center of the University of Pennsylvania during the spring of 1982, accompanied by the poet of the Chilean exile, Raúl Barrientos, – I then shared many discussions and friendship with some of those exiles, who had followed the footsteps  of the Spanish Republicans of 1939 in the Spanish departments of US universities -.With Barrientos, a renewing verse interpreter of American urban degradation, we read Pablo de Rocka and his polemic with Neruda, we chatted about the artificial paradises in modernism and Walter  Benjamin’s view, or modernity in La Araucana, in which Alonso de Ercilla   already gave a voice to the victims against the victimizers: Chile (…) the people it produces are so grandiose,/ so arrogant, gallant and bellicose,/ that they have never been ruled by a king/ nor subjected to foreign dominion. I  had the good fortune to ask the director of Missing about the symbolism behind the image of that threatening black horse that opened  the film. And he talked  about the need to universalize the bestiality that underlays that story, in which he sought to convey particularly to US viewers,  despite the  distance from  events, a process of self-knowledge and recognition of the abject interests behind  the United States foreign policies,  through the personal itinerary of the assassination  of an  American  journalist and son of one of those conservative decent men. Furthermore, the interpretation that escalates with an increasing auto-contained   irritation by a Hollywood acting icon from the times of Willy Wilder, Jack Lemmon, added a powerful aura of verisimilitude to the ins and outs of how the United States had moved its planetary interests in favor of dictatorial processes such as the Chilean, and as they may also hide their game when facing the unacceptable Russian aggression in the current conflict in Ukraine. Nowadays, the  North American arms complex and all its adjacent industry and services benefit from this blood bath, after expanding its NATO hegemony beyond the promises of territorial restriction made to Glasnost  Russia, which does not imply whitewashing Putin’s unjustifiable invasion. For those of us who have studied  non-intervention in the conflict of the Spanish War of 1936-39 and the subsequent American collusion with the Franco dictatorship, a series of unanswered questions arise after this policy of intervention in what are also the consequences of area cleansing, as described in Blood Landsby Timothy Snyder.

During a recent re-viewing of the Chilean film by Costa-Gavras, analogies returned  about the Franco’s Chilean Junta  cloned dictatorship –  along  USA vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, the Philippines’s Imelda Marcos,  Jordan King Hussein, and Monaco Prince Rainier,  Pinochet was the only head of state present at Franco’s obituary in November of 1975.  Therefore he used the  same weapon  of censorship  when banning in Chile the Franco-Hellenic director’s powerful and universal message. Furthermore, it  was Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón who sought in 1997 the extradition of the Chilean dictator from London to Spain, and activated the principle of universal justice that had been put in place thanks to the seeds of the penal doctrine of Luis Jiménez de Asúa and his discisple  Manuel de Rivacoba from   their   Buenos Aires exile. The former was also the  main proponent of the Spanish Republican Constitution of 1931,  the penultimate president of the Spanish Republic in exile (1961-1970),  and a professor at the Matritense School of Higher Studies at 29 Calle de la Luna in Madrid, devastated by the  conflict of 1936, and directed until 1935 by  Isidro Naharro López, my paternal grandfather.

Overall, even if Chilean deniers or others wish to  try to erase or hide the disasters of the dictatorship, the basement spots where torture was carried out,   the  unclarified cases of missing persons, or   the implied  failures of a post-Pinochet unapproved constitution,  art will prevail: in the cinema of Costa-Gavras, based on a journey of anagnorisis for the unconscious frames of life, liberty  and the pursuit  of  happiness; through Patricio Guzmán’s documentaries that suture  archives to capture the extensive fresco of The Battle of Chile; or thanks to   Pablo Larraín’s   sarcasm in   The Count.  All these  films  display how evil exists,  vested interests prevent ordinary people, even within  the USA democratic panacea, from obtaining justice,   while  our species is capable of discriminating between truths and lies thanks to our revolutionary cognitive identity in a permanent process of cultural creativity.

Meanwhile, August 20, 2023 should have represented the globally modernizing triumph of the plural Spanish   women football (soccer)  team over, for some Spanish nationalists,  a despised English female team associated to that   Gibraltar old contention stemming from the 1714 Treaty of Utrecht. The date  also coincided with the long awaited  first exhumation from the Francoist ossuary of Cuelgamuros, and delivery to their relatives of the remains of victims of the Franco’s conflict and repression stemming from  1936. Meanwhile it was  a football (soccer) team  with  names  with a significant Cratylic transparency which  displayed  Spain’s renewed national modernity: Bonmatí (Good Morning), Paredes (The Walls) or Hermoso (the Beautiful), the latter, furthermore, squeezed out from her  supposed aura in  the nomenclator by the arrogance of  an  anti-Rubiales president of Spain’s Royal Football (soccer) Federation: neither blonde, nor young, nor protocolarily adequate through  his rude gestures displaying his  endogenous testosterone,   enhanced by  some exogenous substance? He displayed what  some attorneys qualify as an unjust vexation, which has now been eroded from  the new Article 178 on the Spanish Penal Code which only addresses sexual aggression as a whole.    Comme c’est curieux, comme c’est bizarre et quelle coincidence!/How curious, and how strange, and what a coincidence! This is how the Martins  would have expressed it in the Franco-Romanian expatriate, Eugène Ionesco’s, The Bald Soprano.

But a brief perusal of the USA press these days, such as the New York Times, the most influential publication in a country where women’s soccer and other sports, – compared to American impact  football are practiced massively by girls and women, in all female and coed teams – leaves no room for debate from its headlines about the negative commonplaces that unfortunately  may color negatively  successes from Spain. By Plural Spain (las España), I refer to the  nomenclature  in the Statute of Bayonne of July 7, 1808,  and the pioneering 1812 Cadiz Constitution,   in order to signify an  incontrovertible  diverse cultural geography, without impairment of the political entity of the nation called Spain, recognized for more than two centuries, and referred to for the first time in the royal title of Joseph Bonaparte (1809-1814), King of Spain, in international treaties, and of course in the Constitution of June 17, 1837, where Queen Elizabeth II was  sovereign of another type of Plural Spain (las Españas as what  remained also of the overseas colonies) while article 1 spoke of the territory of Spain.

The  Rubiales soap-opera images   became planetary, within  high political tensions in Spain on all sort of touchy  issues about gender and territorial nationalities,   and contributed to fill in blunt covers of the summer and yellow press, to crow about trash television programs and others, and to confront even more Spain’s brothers-in-law  quarrels  throughout the  vacation  family and collective gatherings. The NYT headlined very significantly the chronicle on Spain’s women  football win by Rory Smith, a journalist based in England as: For Spain, a World Cup Title Built on Talent, Not Harmony. And thus the collective effort and success of these women players in the  Spanish team was immediately diminished, although, I  suppose they practice, despite all problems, a team sport currently governed by FIFA, the  acronym for  the Fédération Internationale de Football Association [my emphasis]. This headline could be further parodied in  the midst  of an obsessing manosphere, as pointing out to a group of talented Quixotic actresses  who would have paraded around   their football  spears  in order to undo the wrongs to harmed needy maidens, oppressed by the abusive male giants.

In the  NYT chronicle, there were implicit statements that once again replaced the apparent seny (poise) style of the other teams with a rauxa (rush)  so stereotypically Catalan, as elaborated by Jaume Vicens Vives dialogically with Josep Ferrater Mora. It was sort of a note struck by chance in the style of Tomás de Iriarte’s XVIII C. tale, The Flute Donkey, glued  above all by the unmatched talent of a player like the Catalan Aitana Bonmatí, the best in the tournament:

To win a World Cup, everything usually has to be perfect. The manager and the players have to exist in harmony. The squad has to be in delicate balance: between talent and tenacity, youth and experience, self-belief and self-control. A team needs momentum, and good fortune, and unity. Spain, in the year preceding this year’s Women’s World Cup, had none of those things […] It is not possible to obtain one [world cup]  unless everything is just right. Unless, as Spain proved, you have the talent — bright and clear and irresistible — to make sure nothing can go wrong.

Therefore, a spontaneous,  natural and  arbitrary alignment of stars justified the astonishing Spanish improvisation win – I assume a Catalan fluke  included, as that region’s nationalist rushed to point out the noted presence  of local players –   compared to the expected orderly standardized and  stereotypical  cultural and stylistic displays from the moral rectitude in the English sport’s birthplace.  And to  chance,   we must add the coarseness, the rudeness, the machismo, the truculence, the arrogance coming from the Rubiales male lead surroundings of  the Spanish women’s locker, which has confronted the courageous and resisting players and the Federation, certainly as a clear sign of un-Francoist changing times.  It filled up the International headlines of the NYT, not its Sports section, on September 5, more than two weeks later, with the dismissal of the women’s soccer coach and finally, the resignation of Rubiales on Sept 10 and so on and so forth,   as a sort of  Spain’s Me Too  movement.  Again and again, the chronicle   referred to the gap between the tradition of machismo (a global etymologically Spanish word)  and a rights vanguard  modernity: a spotlight on a divide between traditions of machismo and   more recent progressivism that placed   Spain in the European Vanguard of feminism and equality. A reference to the avant-garde  with a  subtle paradox for the use of the concept of modern  tradition that the exile to the United States in 1936, Juan Ramón Jiménez, had already discussed through his concept of modernism, of course, distant  from these cacophonous wording rallies.

I estimate that to the  Spanish authorities’ regret,  the image of Spain has  never enjoyed a more steady  stream of  headlines in the NYT, if we except the time of the Cuban-Spanish-American War of 1898, and the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.  I have never understood that popular saying,                – maybe  a reflection of the histrionic exhibitionist digital  vanity of our day -,  that speaking ill of one is preferable to silence. Although the order of the factors does not alter the product mathematically,   syntactic hierarchies  may  certainly  hide or reveal cultural prejudices and/or favoritisms. Clearly,  the symbolic and overwhelmingly sexist gestures of this sporting red neck  and his accomplices has prolonged  Spain’s negative image. Meanwhile,  frequent achievements, not only in women sports, but through so many female Spanish artists, humanists, scientists, NGO volunteers, for example, the one recently  killed in the war in Ukraine, etc.,  and their corresponding male examples,  do not ever reach the headlines of any global paper such as the NYT.

These unfortunate shortcomings   may be  added to the supposedly  democratic deficits  which some also accuse the negated collective nation of Spain, while they  auto proclaim  themselves as  exiles and they boast about Catalonia’s Contributions to the Social and Political Progress of Europe Throughout its History, in an exhibition inaugurated in the European Parliament by Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín (etymologies, for  the one who climbs the mountain, and  the  cumin seed, — the latter, not highly  respected in the Spanish popular saying, he is hardly worth a cumin seed –). This exhibition highlights the Consolat de Mar, a pioneering institution in maritime and commercial legislation; the creation of the Remença Agrarian Union; the Court of Contrafaccions, considered a precursor of modern constitutional courts; and finally and most paradoxically, popularly  known as the Canadian  strike in  1919, performed also by a non-Catalan  working population, affiliated to the Anarchist  CNT,  and who  managed to obtain Spain 8hrs working days,   while facing  the Catalan management of the North-American founded  Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company, Limited.

The  stridency of the debate about  local nationalities and the  separatist and separating partisan  efforts have spread across the Spanish political aisle of the Herderian anti  or pro  Spanish nationalist parties,  as represented mostly by Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalist groups vs  the ultra right Spanish Vox,  a sector  in  the Popular Party (PP), as well as a few  militants in the Socialist PSOE.  Meanwhile,   the semantic rectitude of auto qualifying or calling an exile, Catalan Nationalist Carles Puigdemont (etymologically, also the one that heads to the  mountain – takes to the woods),  has long been defended by the pro referendum  Spanish Podemos  affiliated federalists such as Pablo Iglesias, who initiated a Popular Front  political strategy in 2014 which has fractured Spanish politics with alliances and discourses that evoke the Second Spanish Republic clashes, certainly, without the risk of a Civil War, as guaranteed by  the European Union framework.  Puigdemont may then be  viewed,  as reincarnating a saint  from the Mountain of Beatitudes, a   Christ figure  redeemer’s preaching a Sermon on the Mount to  his lost Catalan people, or as an  apocalyptic  anti Christ,  the devil that tempts the Spanish socialist Messiah, Pedro Sánchez,  on Mount Quruntul,  with all his meager but precious material riches (7 parliamentarians that may tip off in his favor the future Spanish government), while  luring the prime minister  into spiritual servitude by  conceding an amnesty to all Catalan 2014-17 prosecuted separatists. Meanwhile, thoughtful debates confront jurists touched by various flags and ideologies in order  to ruffle the loop of the post-electoral justifications for  an  amnesty for those  accused of embezzlement for the unilateral  2014 and  2017 referenda on independence.  But they are certainly politically responsible for the unilaterality of certain decisions taken  in Catalonia, which by the way can always provide fuel to themselves and their foes,   by confronting, among others, Catalans who are also Spanish velis/nolis in the said territory. While other voices  hold angry disputes  around the possibilities of further secession referenda and their various articulations. Curiously,  Javier Melero, a respected penal defense attorney for some of the Catalan Referendum 2017 politicians, has  quoted   Jiménez de Asúa’s cautious but  romantic 1931 constitutional point of view about amnesties.

Therefore, exile is a term whose terminological abuse, in this case, hides its relatively recent incorporation into the Spanish  lexicon, since its French  usage (from lat. Exilium) was only picked up   through the presence of  Spanish  emigrees or refugees  in Latin America  from 1936-39 on., where éxil  and  éxilé,   were much more frequent. The defenders of the term for independence in Catalonia  are right if we attribute to the term   the second meaning in the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language as expatriation, generally for political reasons, that is, motu proprio displacements. But we would be  inaccurate  if we were to consider expatriate as a synonym for exile, and we ignore the historical-political contexts that should color such ostracism, to which we must add ideological persecution for undemocratic reasons, due to the oppressive intolerance of a regime. Persecution, lack of fundamental rights that surround modern exiles, which only  became widespread with the surge  of liberal systems and constitutions which gradually guaranteed popular participation processes in the collective decisions of nations. Exiles became modern in nature from the 18th century on (in particular with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the French version of August 4, 1790 reads) or with article 120 of the French  Montagnarde Constitution of 1793, never approved, which states that France welcomes those fleeing tyranny and will  persecute those who promote  it, as the origin for  what would later become  the 20th century Geneva Convention on Refugees.

Some readers will point out that Mr. Puigdemont precisely defended the said popular participation with respect to what Charles Tilly describes as state-seeking nationalism. But for the United Nations, Spain, despite having been dubiously  admitted into that international body in  1955 during the Franco dictatorship, thanks to the Western-USA interests  of the Cold War, today is a full-fledged nation-state, and therefore exempt from possessing colonies with the right to self-determination; except for its  former  territory  in Western  Sahara, abandoned unilaterally  by  Mr.  Sánchez to Morocco’s occupying logic in  2022 in line with  the Israel-USA   interests.  This executive Spanish decision  therefore assumes  an Almanzor Syndrome (Mangas in Aragón) or a blackmail foreign  policy as displayed by Morocco  through its erratic  emigration safekeeping-open the gates tactics, particularly in Ceuta, Melilla and across the Canary Islands, while Brussels still  banks on burying its head in the sand about the Mediterranean immigration pandemia.

Meanwhile, Spain  presently respects  the fundamental rights of its citizens, and particularly of women, through free expression at the polls, or thanks to other progressive  laws, all constitutionally protected by a 1978 Magna Carta, which may  of course be improved, and also messed up  (as recently shown by legislation on  Sexual Rights   that had to be amended,  popularly known as the Yes is Yes Law which its Podemos legislators and Socialist acolytes approved,  despite its   flaws which shortened prison sentences for prior condemned  sexual offenders. Of course, this may  happen to  any legal text subverted by any supposedly Sapiens mind, as Hadrian expressed it in his fictional memoirs by Margarite Yourcenar when he points out that laws change less quickly than customs; that they are dangerous when they come  behind  the curve of social morality,   and even more so when they are ahead of their times (elles changent moins que les mœurs; dangereuses quand elles retardent sur celles-ci, les le sont davantage quand elles se mêlent de les précéder).

Let’s preserve ourselves against the manipulative abuse of naturalizable semantics surrounding a Herderian style earth and blood Catalan nationalism, represented by its September 11 Diadas, the date of their supposedly 1714 freedom loss, the Basque Aberri Eguna or Basque Homeland, Misty Galician Celtic origins, or Spanish Trajan and Hadrian Roman Empire sources, and even prehistoric ones at Atapuerca.  In Catalonia,   the 1714  defeat and exile  legitimization  tends to overshadow   its anti-Bourbon pro Austrian partisans’ exile  within   an   international absolutist monarchical  conflict and its economic hard liquor ties to the English trade.  Let’s rather focus on the  exiles suffered by XIX C.  liberals (a    Spanish political term from the 1812 Cádiz Constitutional Congress), still present in spirit in  Florida St. Agustin Spanish Constitutional monolith),   and  later on the foreign plights of   defenders of the First or the    Second Spanish  Republics, who had to flee Spain to avoid, as we know, in the latter case,  Franco’s mass graves. Finally, a  2022 Law of Democratic Memory may facilitate their overdue banishment to the trash heap of history.

Plaza de la Constitución, San Agustín Florida, USA

Utopian illusory types like me hope for the erasure of these various  semantic-territorial determinisms, or the pre-eminence of identity languages for new national states, compared to the obvious advantages for  the Iberian polyglots, including Portugal, like  the Asturian-Bable  space from which I am writing, – let’s welcome the richness and cultural respect for   the diversities of logos  from any   and everywhere, and the representation and/or political reform for the stability and accommodation for non Spanish minorities, (Basque, Catalan, Galician)  already quite widely guaranteed by the constitutionalstate of the autonomies, ratified today through the usage of plural languages   in the parliamentary Spanish debates. But let’s try to avoid  all underground wars  in order to deform national linguistic imaginaries, accommodate history and thus justify patriotic ruptures, particularly in Catalonia and Euskadi. Those  territories may have been  previously separated entities, but in   non democratic   moments distant from  the unitary plurality of the present. And let’s not forget  that the Spanish Magna Carta  and  laws ratified  by the Constitutional Court  do  not curtail the rights to defend a hypothetical self-determination, certainly based on complex mechanisms that guarantee the constitutional stability of nations in the European Union, and of course, regulated by and for the entire Spanish electorate, not just a few privileged ones  chosen by blood and earthy distinctions. War associated by  François François Mitterrand to  separating nationalisms has   not ceased to show its   marks in so many new nations (Tortella & Quiroga Valle) through  the dangers of their secularized former or newer  identity fleeces, and as rooted somehow  in   the Ukraine-Russian conflict.  Therefore, let’s utter  a ¿cynical? mantra about recyclables, anytime new nationalism nightmares creep up, or  what the American revolutionaries pragmatically stated in the preamble of the 1776 Philadelphia Declaration of Independence: Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. 

Nor should we think about catastrophic figures and exceptional cases, for example around the  supposedly longevity limits for certain  political moments in Spain’s history, as referred by   a disheartened  novelist such as Pío Baroja,  when he attributed a string of bad luck to the  liberal past until the Second Republic. Recently, Felipe González referred himself to the XIX C. Restoration, Franco’s Dictatorship or  the post-1978 constitutional period, as if they were the result of some repetitive Hispanic fluke. Let’s blur  the  vicious circle cycle of essentialist confrontations between various territorial  Spains that the present  egalitarian and proportionally distributive civic constitutionalism,  with noted fiscal exceptions for the Basque Country and Navarre, attempts to  regulate, certainly,  through a maze of yearly budgetary regional disputes: What about me? Could we regenerate forms of the habitus of the past, when a president like Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo frequently received in La Moncloa Palace, whom he understood would be his successor, Felipe González, not as a political enemy but as an adversary who would have to continue taking care of the res publica (Calvo-Sotelo, López de Celis). It may   teach us to stay clear of Olympian heroic discourses  and away from  any of the various trivial and essentialist nationalisms, including the Spanish one, in the face of the consistent and harmonious work and planning of so many citizens who, as mentioned earlier, even in moments of dictatorship and exile, have contributed to  Plural Spain’s improvements in a  country named Spain, where as claimed  by  a 1936 visitor to one of the  Anarchist  columns  on the  Aragon front, French thinker Simone Weil, human creativity seemed to focus  mostly on the camp of negativity  rather than  goodness.

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