It’s a confusing experience, to be sure.
The experience of waking up, and seeing that every single one of the top stories on Spain’s biggest news sites are disparaging my country – by which I mean my birth country, the USA.
I got up yesterday morning, an hour before dawn as usual, made some coffee, and opened El País on my laptop. And there it was: pages and pages of angry anti-American sentiment.
About a week ago, the US army Delta Force went in and removed Nicolás Maduro from his palace in Caracas. This sounded like a good thing if I ever heard one: the “Chavista” regime in Venezuela is both brutal and incompetent, and as a result Spain has around 700,000 Venezuelans living here.
Many of them arrived as asylum-seekers.
In a country that’s so pro-refugee, you’d think the government and media would be anti-dictator as well.
But you’d be wrong. Pedro Sánchez condemned the capture of Maduro as soon as it happened. And yesterday I learned that the real danger to the world is the United States of America.
Anti-American feeling in the Spanish media
“Trump, the Rampant Imperialist”.
“Imperialist Brutality”.
“A New Type of Fascism that Affects the Whole World”.
Those were just three of the headlines in El País on Sunday, January 11.
Although technically I read La Vanguardia more than El País these days – La Vanguardia is based in Barcelona, so it has more relevant local news.
Let’s see what it says over there…
“Three Scenarios for Trump’s Imperialism”.
“Denmark, a country in shock” (that one’s about Trump’s supposed plan to take over Greenland).
“The US Carries the Annexationist Gene.”
Sigh. I’ve never hear the word “annexationist” before, but that one’s about the history of the US purchasing land or otherwise expanding its territory from a small strip on the Eastern seaboard to the current setup in which Americans live in a continent-spanning superpower.
It has the obligatory claim that Americans don’t know much geography, as well as a reference to the Spanish-American War, in which the US got Puerto Rico and Guam.
One article has a headline that briefly gives me hope for La Vanguardia: “No-one Misses Maduro in Caracas”. But that one starts with a line about Trump “ignoring every principle of international law” and is mostly negative about the whole thing.
Life on the “Wrong Side of History”
This was not the first time I’ve woken up on the wrong side of history.
You may remember Nov 9th, 2016, but you probably didn’t have the same experience I did. That was the day the entire US media decided that white males without a college degree were the main problem in society.
On November 9th and over the following days, I read dozens of articles about the topic.
White males without a college degree, angry about issues only they were stupid enough to contemplate, had voted en masse for Donald Trump – and as a result, American democracy was over.
I’d voted for Hillary Clinton, personally. But I was a white male with no college degree, and it was not lost on me that the normally smug elites of my country had overnight become rage-filled clowns, and that most of their hate was now directed at people like me.
Or at least, at their caricatured version of people like me.
It didn’t help that I’m from Arizona. It never helps, actually. Being from Arizona just enrages them more.
I felt like there was a price on my head. People from “flyover states” were suddenly suspect. And the left didn’t calm down in the months after the election. Quite the contrary.
Soon, they dropped the “no college degree” bit, and the problem became “straight white males”. Or, more ambiguously, something they called “whiteness”.
This went on for years. It’s still going on, actually.
I soon found that if I don’t start every utterance with all the requisite apologies, with a land acknowledgement, and with a renunciation of everything and everyone I grew up with out in the desert, I’m persona non grata among most Americans in Europe.
As a result, I usually just keep my opinions to myself. They spew their bile, and I smile and shrug, and try change the subject.
But let me go on the record here: Nicolás Maduro is a bad guy, and I’m glad we got him out of power.
All the “smart” people hate themselves
Here’s a line from a book that’s worth contemplating:
“Rousseau … made the hatred of one’s own culture the stance of the cultivated person.”
The quote is from Frank M Turner, and he’s talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French philosopher. Apparently Rousseau decided that his mission in life was to be a critic of society. Today he would be some troll with a YouTube channel, mostly followed by incels.
But his intellectual legacy is that “smart” people in Western countries mostly think their own country sucks.
And, of course, anti-Americanism abroad is nothing new. Anyone who pretends to be an intellectual – in Europe at least – has to start by condemning the US.
Unfortunately – and it didn’t used to be like this – the US is now the same. Almost all of our quote-unquote smart people have to sit around hating America.
I mean the media types: journalists, and actors, and public intellectuals of all kinds. (The flipping of some of the tech bros to the right before the last election seems to be the exception.)
When Morena and I were in New York a few months ago, I tried to explain this to her.
We were walking through Grand Central Station, after seeing an original hand-written copy of the Bill of Rights at the New York Public Library. and Morena asked me if Americans realize how lucky they are.
It was her first time in the US. So innocent.
I had to tell her that some probably do, but if you actually say that “America is a great country” or anything similar, there’s a good chance that you’re the relative who’s making things really awkward at Thanksgiving dinner.
The intolerance crowd roars its disapproval
I’ve been avoiding writing this article for (*checks watch*) almost 10 years now.
Because I’m the relative who’s making things really awkward at Thanksgiving dinner. I’m just going to say it. America is a great country. And I’ve gotten enough hate over the past decade just for being who I am that I no longer respect the opinions of the “we’re the resistance” people.
(Turns out, the “tolerance” crowd is actually pretty angry and intolerant when you refuse to parrot the slogans of their social class. They despise you if you question their luxury beliefs, or tip over their sacred cows. Weird how that works, isn’t it?)
But (I repeat) America is a great country, and one small piece of that greatness is that you – humble American citizen – can say literally anything you want about it without ending up in prison, or dead.
Try that in one of the world’s many dictatorships… for example, Venezuela.
Or even try it in Spain. Here you can go to prison for insulting the king. Being American is a pretty good deal.
(I should add, at this point, that the average Spanish person doesn’t obsess over international news, and probably doesn’t have a strong feeling about Americans one way or another. I wrote about that in a previous article. So if you’re visiting, or planning a move, don’t worry too much about anti-American sentiment.)
Be pro-, not anti-
I’ve talked before about why I think it’s important to be pro- and not anti-.
There are a few reasons for this. One is that I suspect that our whole culture and civilization was built by optimists, while their pessimistic friends from back home stewed in their own misery.
People who believe in something positive can create things – if you’re pro-beauty you can write a symphony, or build a cathedral, or paint The Birth of Venus. But if you’re anti-ugliness, you might just sit and complain about how grey and depressing everything’s gotten.
Another reason is that if you’re anti-whatever, all the time, you just end up being defined by the thing you don’t like. And that’s a miserable way to live.
“One of the sad signs of our times”, according to Thomas Sowell, “is that we have demonized those who produce… and canonized those who complain.”
He also says that “activism is a way for useless people to feel important” – even if they’re actually damaging society as a whole. And I agree. There are a lot of useless people out there who want to feel important.
They want so badly to feel important that they’re willing to support some really stupid ideas – as long as they can turn it into a protest against “the other side”.
My two countries, for better or worse
In case you haven’t been following along here, I recently became Spanish.
So I’m less comfortable criticising Spain than I once was. I think that if a country gives you citizenship, you should pay that country back with respect, and work hard to be a productive member of society – not some useless whiner.
But Spain is another place where sophisticated urbanites are sort of embarrassed by the whole idea of Spanishness.
I wrote about this in my article on symbols of Spain – a lot of the so-called smart people are critics, rather than patriots.
It’s shockingly easy come up with a list of someone else’s faults. And if we’re talking about whole countries, it’s even easier.
But I love both my countries – the US and Spain – despite their several problems.
At times like these, I’m glad I’m not one of the smart people.
Yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. If you’re angry about something I said in this article, and thinking about calling me a “fascist” down in the comments, please consider that if being called a fascist was going to change my mind, it would have done so already. Being further insulted will not make me “see the light”, I promise. Have a nice day, though.
P.P.S. If you’d like to support this blog, or the Spain to Go podcast, you can send me a donation. I appreciate it! I’ll give you a shoutout on my next episode. (Follow the podcast on Apple, or on Spotify.)
Thank you for that bit of news that Spain elites and oligarchs are getting on the antiAmerican bandwagon, I especially liked that "Trump inperialism" thing (seriously? from a country run by bankers who are run by the bank of england, no imperialism there, right?) Today I heard that Chatham House says (they seem to make all kind of world rules and laws and accuse Mr. Trump of not following them) that Mr. Trump is destroying the west, perhaps they mean their version of the west). There are a couple of old ladies here "Promethean Action" who are chronicling the whole bank of england oligarch stranglehold on the planet, maybe might explain why you woke up to all the headlines saying the same things. Of course its a trick. All of the news outlets here do the same thing. Thats why America voted for Mr. Trump.
Setting aside the rhetoric and saying that I don't believe anybody thinks Maduro is a good guy, the motivation wasn't about making Venezuela a better place for Venezuelans. If it was Delcy Rodríguez wouldn't be in charge now. Same dog, different collar. The main motivation, and Trump has said this himself repeatedly, is Venezuela's oil reserves. I doubt very much that Venezuela is going to see much of any of that value the U.S. oil companies are going to extract from their ground. Regardless, Maduro was a problem that Venezuelans needed to solve and not some outside power. The same as Díaz-Canel is Cuban's problem to deal with if they so choose.
Also, the U.S. has a piss poor history of "nation building" going back to at least the early postwar years. The postwar Marshall Plan was an exception to that but generally U.S. intervention has made life worse for the folks they are supposedly helping. There's plenty to read on that topic both online and in book form (e.g. "The Brothers Dulles" is a good place to start). The U.S. has a habit of supporting dictators and autocrats so long as it is beneficial to U.S. business so that whole "freedom and democracy" schtick is only on the sales glossy. The U.S. has been invading and taking over countries and territories since at least the 1890s when Hawaii was a sovereign country, at the behest of fruit growers. I can't think of any that have come to any good end.
Am I saying that other countries, including Spain, are havens of altruism? No. But few have the military and financial might to upturn the world like the U.S. does and so with that comes some special responsibility. Or better yet, simply staying the hell home for a change and concentrating on the problems inside of the border.
FWIW the opposition, such that it is, in the U.S. drives me nuts as well with all of their "so-and-so just DESTROYED so-and-so's narrative" or whatever. That doesn't help anything other than perhaps driving clicks by offering ego masturbation. I don't care who destroyed whose narrative but rather how does the country pull itself out of the mess it is currently in? Because it is a first class shit show.