America through a Spanish lens

Every time I go to Spain, my country embarrasses me. My wife, Martha, and I were in Barcelona in the spring of 2004, when the prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison was front-page news. It was humiliating enough to see the photos and read the articles in the Spanish press; it was worse to be identified with it.

"They represent us," said an American general about the torturers. When people asked where I was from, I said Canada.

Except once, when a shopkeeper we were chatting with blamed President Bush for the atrocity. "I know he stole the election," he said, looking me in the eye. "Those things happen, and I understand. But if he gets re-elected, it's your fault."

Dropout rate

The second embarrassing moment, again in Barcelona, occurred in 2006. Martha and I had been invited for dinner at the home of a local family. The husband worked in municipal planning, and at one point in the conversation he shook his head at Spain's prospects because, he noted, its high-school dropout rate was then a staggering 20%. We told him that the prospects in our home city of Philadelphia must be far poorer, since the dropout rate was about 50%.

(We cited a study out of John Hopkins University, which actually put Philadelphia's figure at 54%. That statistic has been disputed— others put it at closer to 40% at that time. But still…)

Our host set down his dinner fork with a deliberateness I can still picture. He stared at us, seeming to think that he had either misheard our Spanish or that we'd misspoke. "Cinquenta por ciento?" he said.

"Si," Martha replied. "Cinquenta." For absolute clarity, she added, "Fifty per cent." We went on to talk about the dismal future of developed countries that can't improve on those numbers.

Argentine lament

So naturally I was apprehensive while preparing for our third trip, this past October. In fact, I inadvertently raised my level of anxiety by reading— along with Martha and two other gringos trying to improve our Spanish— Spain in the Diaries of My Old Age, by the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato.

Sabato visited Spain at the age of 91 in 2002, when his own country, rich in resources, was deep in economic distress— brought low, he wrote, by exploiters and corrupt politicians. Poverty and unemployment are so rampant in Argentina, Sabato observed, that schools can't afford chalk or maps and hospitals have run out of gauze pads and even the most basic medicines.

Yet this worst of times, Sabato argued, is an opportunity for Argentines to stand together, find a new commonality and, in the midst of the chaos, re-conceive their country's highest ideals.

I didn't read beyond the opening pages before I left on my trip, but they certainly reinforced the idea that Spain would refract current events in the U.S., which seem unfortunately close to Sabato's grim picture of Argentina.

And that happened— not because Spain is great and the U.S. is bad, but because Spain has made plenty of mistakes, and unfortunately we Americans don't seem capable of learning from the missteps of others.

Expulsion of the Jews

For instance, in a tour of the Jewish area of BesalÓº, a Catalonian town north of Barcelona, the guide noted that, after the Jews were officially driven from Spain in 1492, posts formerly relegated to Jews, such as tax collector and money-lender, would have been empty if the Catholic Church hadn't changed its stance against usury and permitted Christians to fill those jobs.

Spain would go on to a period of spectacular commercial and geographical growth through worldwide exploration, but with the expulsion of the Jews the state was crippled in a fundamentally moral way.

Something similar happened elsewhere in that country when Spain, also in 1492, drove out the Muslims (the Berbers, Arabs, and black Africans, commonly grouped as Moors), who were experts in irrigation systems and land use, especially in areas where the cultivation of crops is difficult.

It was no effort, of course, for me to reflect on the current venomous attitude of some Americans toward immigrants— and toward those who have lived in this country for some time (and may have been born here) who seem different for one reason or another— and on the kind of country we would have without their presence.

Socialists vs. conservatives

The Spanish press was preoccupied with the country's financial problems, particularly the possible collapse of the euro and the vulnerability of Spain's own economy. The overriding subject of the country's presidential campaign (to be decided November 20) was the economy. The give-and-take between the socialists and conservatives was less malicious than the debates in our country but no more enlightened; most of it was couched as a stark dilemma between social-service cuts or higher taxes.

People I met had already conceded the results to the conservative candidate, but not because he had better ideas. "The others have messed it all up," said the owner of the B&B where we stayed. I found myself wishing Obama had a staff person listening to our conversation.

How did Franco win?

The most unnerving comment about my own country occurred in the Palau Nacional, the Catalonian art museum. Its most interesting show was "The Mexican Suitcase," 126 rolls of film shot during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), chiefly by three photographers— Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour (better known as Chim).

Some of the photographs are well known, since they were published in magazines and newspapers at the time. Capa put the negatives in a suitcase that went missing until it turned up in Mexico nearly 60 years later. The film was accessed by the International Center of Photography in New York only in 2007.

One photo, by Gerda Taro, shows a dead child, perhaps 12 years old, spread out on rocks. It appeared in the April 1938 issue of The Fight, an American magazine opposed to Francisco Franco's Falangist coup, and the text concludes:

"But thinking how you can't do anything, maybe you will remember the Neutrality Act. That's the one which lets Franco kill this boy with an American bomb but keeps the Republic from protecting him with an American plane. Think it over, America."

Ah, there we Americans were, on the wrong side again. In the 1930s, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts that prohibited trade with belligerent nations— but not with sides involved in a civil war. Franco purchased the means to wage war from, among others, American companies, to whom he eventually owed more than $100 million. Indeed, a part of that weaponry may have found its way, in the form of a shell, into that child's body.

T'ai chi in a volcano

Now that I'm home and settling back into the routine of America's seemingly intransigent problems, I wonder if I dare to hope that I'm glimpsing the sort of opportunity Ernesto Sabato dreamed for his own country: that amid the chaos— in fact because of it— a diverse people might find new community just when a common identity seems impossible, enabling Americans to solve our problems and move on to better things.

Did I see anything in Spain that could justify such optimism? On one of our day trips, we visited the Catalonian town of Olot. Within the city limits, there's a park and, within the park, a volcano. It hasn't erupted for 100,000 years, but who's to say it's extinct? Inside its grassy crater, a man was practicing t'ai chi. His purposeful, focused movements— an exercise born in a martial art— appeared to bring to this once-violent place a peace and clarity that somehow suggested that all things are possible.♦


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