This trip as a whole has been basically a salvage operation- initial shock, kicked while down, and arduous comeback. Maybe I was unfair to Africa, with unrealistic expectations. After all Thailand has its share of unsolicited guides and scammers, too. I’ve just long learned how to deal with them. But nothing was what it was supposed to be, just the opposite usually. Africa being dirt poor, it should have been dirt cheap, right? Not quite. That lack of development means that any development will be very expensive. What kind of role model is France anyway, with its monopolies and protections and labor strikes? Paris is retail incarnate, a boutique country for those with time and money. Ironically and conversely Marseille is very reasonable, as if the industrial revolution never really arrived in the southern ‘old’ Europe. Rome certainly has none, but it makes up for that with millions of tourists. Others aren’t so lucky, or unlucky, depending on your point of view. The industrial revolution was not pretty, probably the reason it caught on first in Britain and only later on the continent. Artisans working in their workshops are certainly more romantic than sweat shop assembly lines.
In another example of misplaced expectations the picturesque villages I expected to see in Africa seemed even more so in rural Spain, especially between Madrid and Zaragoza, almost even more African in fact. Those spires look less like Christian steeples than Islamic minarets, and villages seem to be perched high on hills for protection in a futile feudal world. The houses themselves are mud inspired, like negative space, something carved out of block rather than something erected from components, something more feminine than masculine. This would seem to be the connection between the adobe pueblos of northern New Mexico and western Africa including Morocco. The word ‘adobe’ after all comes from the Egyptian via Arabic and Spanish; so did the building techniques I think. The original Indians had to use rock or we would hardly even know of them after five hundred years, like the dirt ‘Indian mounds’ of the Mississippi Culture. Mud’s good but not that good. I suspect the true adobe pueblos of the northern Rio Grande were of later design. Of course the buses all pass these places by, just like they do in Mali and Morocco, so one is left largely to one’s imagination.
In the wildest science fiction scenarios, if the countryside were ignored, it could conceivably cease to exist. Once we’re accustomed to boarding the plane, closing our eyes, then waking up in some strange place, then how do we know that we really traversed all the distance between? One account of Australian aborigines relates how every piece of the landscape has a story associated with it. The researcher was overwhelmed when driving across that some landscape, as the speech was too fast to follow! What if the world were vertical, not horizontal? How would you know if you didn’t physically experience the distances and relationships between your points of measurement? Such scenarios seem absurd, but form the premises of many Hollywood movies of the past decade, The Matrix trilogy possibly being the best example. Like the best conspiracy theories, none of it can be disproved, and that’s the beauty of it, and the danger. By the same token, the most successful scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, is totally foreign to common sense, and it has been proven over and over and over. Prime time on TV was once devoted to a theory that the moon landing was a hoax, and those people are not stupid, however misguided. I got sucked into the notion myself, for a day or two. But the transition from reality to fantasy is rarely shown in the movies, nor is the act of conspiracy ever revealed in real life. Both depend on a leap of logic to retrofit the past to fit present circumstances. I’ve lost friends to the warm fuzzy logic of Conspiracy. You can’t rescue them. You can only maintain communication and an arm outstretched. It’s up to them to grab hold, or not. They tend to think that we’re the ones who need help. Moral of the story: maybe common sense can’t always be trusted, but solid evidence and double-blind-controlled testing can; and don’t get so lost in a buzz-box that you forget to experience the world for yourself.
But the reason I stopped in Spain anyway was so that I could speak the language in case I needed emergency medical care. Well in Barcelona everybody knows Castellano, but only grudgingly use it, if they’re local. Welcome to Quebec. Catalan is the big deal, and you could get lost if you can’t read it. Appropriately it falls somewhere between standard Spanish and standard French in the spectrum of Romance languages, so it’s not impossible, at least to read. If a local makes you for a tourist, though, he could refuse your Castellano. If some trinket vendor’s got a language erection and wants to stick it in your face, then he’ll do that, to gain the upper hand so to speak. Welcome to psycholinguistcs and ESL, the empire as a second language. So much for Spain feeling like home because of the language; home is more complicated than that. Still I’d rate Spain as probably the coolest place to be in Europe right now, experiencing a renacimiento after decades of Franco’s strong-hand darkness. A cheap country doesn’t necessarily mean a good country, though, right? Right, Mr. Prez? Still, Spain is not too expensive, about like the US. Hostales will even give you the full set of keys, so you can come and go as you please. In Marseilles they lock the doors before midnight. In Spain, the party’s just starting at midnight.
I didn’t see many Gypsies in Europe this time, just one group camped with all their belongings at the Barcelona bus station, giving new meaning to the word ‘furtive’. What’s Europe without Gypsies? In Spain they toss the word around a lot, mostly in connection with Flamenco music, a la ‘Gypsy Kings’. Those guys obviously speak a dialect of Spanish, not Roma, though Iberian gypsies are apparently of Roma ancestry, originally at least. Flamenco music and dance has obvious connections with Arab culture and song; they did have significant cultural inter-mixing over the course of seven hundred years. In Spain flamenco bands are a dime a dozen, but the Gypsy Kings had a hit. That’s the difference. In Senegal a Gypsy Kings video on TV was titled ‘salsa’ music. That sounds like a line item cultural mutation. In East Europe Gypsies are not so highly prized culturally. There are lots of them, and for the most part unassimilated. They’re despised. Music could possibly be a selling point for them, as it is for many cultural minorities. This is one good thing about world music. It might just save the world, if it can save itself. Global warming and over-population can ultimately be solved; it’s just a question of time. Racism is the one problem that can’t be solved by controlling emissions, exhaust or otherwise. It can only be solved by intermixing, culturally if not otherwise. This is the role of America, both north and south, a test tube for societies and environments in turbulence. Europe doesn’t know the half of it. When is the last time Chinese New Year and Carnaval fell in the same week? It should have been a riot. It wasn’t. It was quiet. The parties were elsewhere. Where would be a good place to experience both Chinese New Year and Carnaval? I’d vote for San Francisco.
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