Special request, part two

As I sit down to resume typing after my nearly three weeks of hiatus, I can’t help but think that I might should’ve started this whole blog thing a long time ago. Way back, when everything was fresh and new, when the little differences between The Way Things Are Here and The Way Things Are Back Home seemed so poignant and so compelling, indeed, when those differences just screamed out to be noticed. But now that I’ve been here long enough to be more than just a little bit jaded with Barcelona and Spain (oops, I meant Cataluña) in general, it’s kind of hard to work up the motivation to go into the subject, even in a moment like the present, when I find myself looking back on my latest trip to la España profunda.

But as Dionne Warwick and Friends once said, “That’s what friends are for.” My friend and former roommate Kate McKinney (Ligon Middle School Guided Study class, represent!) expressed curiosity “about this girlfriend’s parents and what they think of you and your american-ness (tho I know you aren’t any sort of american prototype…) What do they think of us Yanks?”

Interesting question, with an interesting answer. I’m never one to pass up an opportunity to get pedantic. The short version: What do they think of us? They don’t think of us much actually.

The long version: To explain, first we’ll need to have a brief look at A) twentieth-century Spanish history and B) the geography of Andalucía.

A) As you are probably well aware, seventy-some-odd years ago (1936-39), Spain was immersed in a brutal civil war which pitted the government of the Second Republic and its various Socialist, Communist, and Anarcho-Syndicalist supporters against the instigators of the reactionary Nationalist coup d’etat, generals who were fearful of the prospect of a Spanish Communist state built on the Soviet model and upset with what they saw as the Republicans’ attacks against the Church and with various military cutbacks.

Andalucía was especially devastated during the war, and in the decades following the war the population lived in conditions of extreme poverty. My girlfriend’s folks were born right around that time. So while we in the US of the 1940s and 50s were flush with the war economy and post-war boom, people here had a hard row to hoe. Folks were poor. And in the isolated rural regions of the interior, far from the large cities, more so.

Factor in the repressive fascist regime put in place after the war under Gen. Francisco Franco, and what do you have? Well, what you don’t have are things like: resources for a good education (they didn’t have the money for it), or much contact (any contact, for that matter) with the world at large (the fascists weren’t too big on outside influences, apparently).

What am I getting at here? Well, in answer to Kate’s question, “What do they think of us Yanks?”, they honestly don’t know all that much about us. They know that the USA is a foreign country, that people there speak English and that it’s very, very far away. Other than that, they don’t show a whole lot more interest in the subject. They ain’t trying to hear about our bullshit, basically. It may seem somewhat condescending and wrong to say it like that, but it’s not, it’s the truth.

Instead of asking me about George Bush or Bowling for Columbine or the war in Iraq or whatever the hell else people almost always insist on asking me about, her mom sticks to the simple things: for example, questions about my family, what type of foods we typically eat, you know. Why? Because she’s curious, because she doesn’t know. That information hasn’t been supplied to her.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Uh…And…your point is…?” Well, the implication is that not everyone sees us Yanks through the prism of the “Ugly American” image that so many of us have interiorized. In the same way that not everyone is up to date on the most recent moves of the Obama campaign or the latest summer blockbuster release or whatever. Shocking as it seems, despite the seemingly inescapable hegemony of Hollywood, Coca-Cola, CNN, McDonald’s, insert-megalithic-media-outlet-slash-emblematic-brand-name-here, the US of A isn’t at the center of the every single living person’s world. Maybe almost every single living person, but not quite. Yeah, I know, right, major news flash. Thanks, Walter Cronkite, what the fuck.

I’m just now reminded of how surprised my girlfriend’s mom was when I told her that people in the US aren’t familiar with Manolo Escobar. I was like, Of course they don’t know who Manolo Escobar is, why would they? Then I stopped to think, shit, how many times have I been, like, super-surprised that someone from over here didn’t know about, say, Luther Vandross or Blue Oyster Cult or something? I’ll tell you how many: several. Really, what’s up with that?

More than the “being from the US” thing, it’s the “vegetarian” thing that really throws them off. “No comes carne, pero el jamón, sí, ¿no? ¿No? ¿Y el pescado? ¿Pescado tampoco comes? Vaya…”