On Sunday, 22 June, Toledo had its biggest festival of the year. Well, that is to say, it had the climax of its biggest festival of the year. Corpus Christi has been going on for God knows how long (and He really does know); at least since a week before I arrived here. The culmination of Corpus Christi week is a parade chock-full of priests, nuns, the military, local officials, the governor of Castilla-La Mancha (like the governor of Ohio), seminary students, old women, young women, old men, older men, and a seven-foot tall (2.13 m) gold and silver shrine that is the Corpus Christi; that is, the shrine contains the body of Christ.

It´s a sight to behold after an hour of parade to see the people´s reactions to the Corpus Christi. They throw rose petals from above, the clap and cheer, the tourists take photos, and the Archbishop of Toledo gives a speech about how the Corpus represents loving our fellow men, being like brothers and sisters, and generally treating each other nice. It sure beats the hell out of the Macy´s parade. How old is that mechanical turkey? Is it 500 years old? I didn´t think so.

Thankfully, TV sustains me when I´m not in class. I happened to flip through the channels and saw The A Team dubbed into Spanish. I can tell you with certainty that Mr. T transcends cultural boundaries, and that B.A. Barakus is a bad-ass in any language. I also caught Futurama and The Simpsons, as well as an episode of Cowboy Bebop that was dubbed into German for some reason.

In Madrid the other day, I had an interesting experience. While waiting in line at the ice cream stand (although in truth, there´s no line; whoever can get to the front first gets to order. Pushy Americans? How about pushy Europeans!), a large woman walked up to the counter and ordered one chocolate and one vanilla, in English. Imagine if you will a large woman going up there and assuming that the vendor speaks English. "Well of course he speaks English," she thinks to herself. "Who doesn´t?" I felt offended by her blatant disregard for the fact that she is a foreigner. The least she could do is ask if he spoke English (and truthfully, if you´re a vendor of anything in Madrid, you speak some English) instead of waltzing right in and thinking in that typical American way, "Of course everyone speaks the same langauge as I do. I´m American, and the world works at the pleasure of Americans." It may not have consciously gone through her mind, but that about sums up the attitude. They hate us for our freedom? No, they hate us because while we may have the world´s most powerful military and economy, we lack tact, something that seems to be inversely proportional to our power.

Posted by Mark at 5:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We took an "excursion" to Madrid today, which was pretty cool. Madrid, unlike Toledo, is a very new city. Most of the buildings there date back to the 18th century, when the Bourbon kings ruled Spain. The architecture of the buildings in Madrid is decidedly Baroque.

Unfortunately, we didn't get to see El Prado, the national art gallery, probably second to the Louvre in importance throughout Europe. We did get to see La Reina Sofia (Queen Sophia's museum), which has an almost equally impressive collection of art. But what everyone comes for here is Picasso's mural, La guernica, commemorating the Spanish Civil War. It also contains an array of Dali pieces. And that's about it for importance.

The Good Lord Picard has smiled upon us and seen fit to schedule Corpus Christi for one of the weeks that we're here. Corpus Christi is the most important Toledan festival, one that dates back to the 17th century. This coming Sunday, at 11 AM, a large golden tower will be paraded around the city, one that ostensibly contains the "corpus Christi," or body of Christ. This festival is a big deal, and people come from all over the world to see this procession. I'm told that usually Corpus Christi doesn't coincide with the Fundacion's summer quarter; curiously, though, it does this year.

Madrid was okay, but I felt that it was too much of a big city: too many large roads, and too much to see in the few hours we had free. Coming back to Toledo after a day in Madrid felt like coming home after spending the day in (in my case) Cleveland or Cincinnati. It's a good thing that it feels like this -- it means that I'm slowly but surely adjusting to living here. Toledo is small enough to be able to navigate easily, despite its winding, labirynthine streets.

One thing that bothers me about this whole experience is that the experience of an American traveling abroad is very different from any other kind of person of any other nationality traveling abroad. For one thing, an American is always certain to find someone that speaks English when traveling abroad: the experience of not being able to communicate is only to be encountering is places far off the beaten path. Second, Americans see their culture everywhere they go. There is no place in the world that an American might go (this is hyperbole, by the way) where he won't see McDonald's, Ford cars, Coca-Cola, or Nike clothing. Being an American abroad is almost like cheating at the experience. Whereas people of other nationalities must throw themselves into a totally different culture where little is familiar, the American (or the German or the Japanese) is always sure to find some piece of his culture in another country and be able to sigh and say, "I'm home!" He never has the alienation or shock that accompanies living in a totally alien land, where nothing is familiar. He can look around and always see something familiar, and most likely, can get by without having to learn anyone else's language; he is sure that everyone already knows his language. Perhaps this is why Americans are so blind to the rest of the world: they expect the world to come to them, never thinking one day that they may have to go out into the world.

Posted by Mark at 3:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I arrived in Spain on Sunday, June 15. Now it?s the 19th and I think I?m getting the hang of this place.

Toledo, first of all, is a beautiful city. It?s over a thousand years old, having been organized into its current incarnation by the Muslims who took over in 711 AD. It has windy streets and crazy names that only the Muslims could bring (the place to be in Toledo is la Plaza de Zocodover. "Zocodover" comes from an Arabic word that means "marketplace," and a marketplace it is). This is no Madrid - it?s the Spanish equivalent of a small, sleepy town. It?s quiet, clean, and safe (unlike Madrid).

But everywhere you go there?s someone selling something, whether it?s a pescaderia (fish market), panaderia (bread shop), or a place that sells mazapan (marzipan; there are lots of these for some reason).

Now it?s time to go see the cool architecture of Toledo. I shall be using this wonderful blog to chronicle this sojourn for anyone who cares to read it.

Posted by Mark at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The question that should have been foremost in the minds of everyone in the United States is one that has only been asked once: why now? Suddenly, six months ago, Iraq suddenly became the most immediate threat to America, seemingly overnight. One night, we all went to sleep, and Iraq loomed in the distance -- an irritation, but nothing that was of pressing urgency. When we woke up the next morning, the situation had changed: Iraq needed to be dealt with now, and it was imperative that Saddam's program of building chemical and biological weapons be stopped -- now.

Why now? Saddam kicked weapons inspectors out of Iraq in 1998. Then-president Clinton did some bombing, but nothing much came of the situation since then, except repeated insistence that Saddam let the inspectors back in. We had been living very comfortably even with the shadow of Iraq over us for five years when, suddenly, Iraq had to be dealt with immediately, or the American people could be in grave danger. Is this to say that they were not in danger for five previous years? If so, what prompted this sudden increase in danger? If not, why didn't we attack him five years ago to the extent that we attacked him now? Last Fall, intelligence revealed that Saddam was making weapons of mass destruction. Was this a new development? Certainly not; the reason why Saddam kicked the inspectors out in 1998, it is believed, is that he didn't want them to find his WMDs.

One day, Saddam didn't pose enough of a threat to merit full-scale invasion. The next day, he does. Why did it suddenly become imperative to overthrow his regime? This question was actually asked by a member of the press during a press conference -- one of the few press conferences hosted by Bush and not Ari Fleischer. A pressman identified as "Dave" asked, "If all these nations, all of them our normal allies, have access to the same intelligence information, why is it that they are reluctant to think that the threat is so real, so imminent that we need to move to the brink of war now?"

President Bush responds: "You asked about sharing of intelligence, and I appreciate that because we do share a lot of intelligence with nations which may or may not agree with us in the Security Council as to how to deal with Saddam Hussein and his threats.

"We have got roughly 90 countries engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom chasing down the terrorists. We do communicate a lot and we will continue to communicate a lot. We must communicate. We must share intelligence. We must share -- we must cut off money together. We must smoke these al Qaeda types out one at a time.

"It's in our national interest as well that we deal with Saddam Hussein.

"But America is not alone in this sentiment. There are a lot of countries who fully understand the threat of Saddam Hussein. A lot of countries realize that the credibility of the Security Council is at stake. A lot of countries like America who hope that he would have disarmed, and a lot of countries which realize that it may require force -- may require force -- to disarm him."

Most of this press conference ("Press Conference with George W. Bush," Federal News Service, 6 March 2003) consisted of reporters asking Bush serious questions and him dodging them completely and responding with, "I believe Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people. I believe he's a threat to the neighborhood in which he lives, and I've got good evidence to believe that. He has weapons of mass destruction, and he has used weapons of mass destruction in his neighborhood and on his own people. He's invaded countries in his neighborhood. He tortures his own people. He's a murderer. He has trained and financed al Qaeda-type organizations before -- al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. I take the threat seriously, and I'll deal with the threat. I hope it can be done peacefully." The question that merited that response was about scenarios advisers had come up with about costs in terms of lives, the economy, and retaliatory strikes. This is why Ari Fleischer does most of the talking.

And so the question remains unanswered: why did Bush pick now to go to war? Where was the escalation? Why so sudden? Why did he know that we didn't, and why didn't he tell us? Or, was this war more or less fabricated, its justification nothing more than artificial pretenses? As we discover more and more about how the administration misused intelligence (and the British government fabricated a dossier about Iraq's WMDs), the tendency is to think that this war was created by the administration.

Posted by Mark at 2:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been over a month since we won the war in Iraq, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction have yet to be found. They were one of the key reasons for going to war in the first place: Iraq, we asserted, had such weapons, and though we couldn't prove it, we're sure they were there. (On the 6 April 2003 Meet the Press, moderator Tim Russert asks Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, "And you have no doubt we'll find [WMDs] in substantial numbers." Wolfowitz replies, "I've never seen the intelligence community as unified and confident in their basic judgment here.") Or we didn't want to prove it and reveal just how much intelligence information we had. But as late as 1998, U.N. weapons inspectors found WMDs, which is the reason they were kicked out. Where have these weapons gone since then? In the unlikely event that Iraq actually complied with U.N. orders, the weapons may actually have been destroyed. Armed forces have found several probable mobile weapons laboratories, but no WMDs.

Or maybe there never were WMDs on the scale we imagined them. Well-known Republican pundit Rush Limbaugh, always the Republicans' faithful bloodhound (bringing them their slippers and fetching the paper whenever asked), has done the job of backtracking for the administration. He maintains that WMDs were in fact not an integral reason for going into Iraq, and that our failure to find them doesn't mean the war is suddenly unjustified. (On his website is a link to a CIA report about Iraq WMDs, published in October, 2002.) This is a personal vendetta of mine: Rush is really very incorrect when he says that WMDs were not an integral reason for going into Iraq. A LexisNexis search of "'weapons of mass destruction' and 'iraq' and 'war'" returns over 1,000 documents, even in the time span of six months, and even when the source list is constrained to just the New York Times.

Unless WMDs were made out to be the primary reason for going to war, while the Pentagon knew full well they didn't exist. In a Vanity Fair interview released 30 May 2003, Wolfowitz remarks, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason [. . .]" (I was suspicious about this quote when I originally read it in a Yellow Times release. Indeed, it exists, and Wolfowitz said it.) Later, in an interview with Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post, Wolfowitz clarifies: "There has been a tendency to emphasize the weapons of mass destruction issue. But, as I said in the fuller quote, the real thing that has concerned the President from the beginning and which I think is even the 'axis' that's referred to in the 'axis of evil' is the connection between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. So in a way, that's always been the main thing. But if you look at where the intelligence community tends to go, the issue about weapons of mass destruction has never been in controversy." So, according to Wolfowitz, the WMD issue was played up in an effect to get popular support for the war even though the intelligence community (whatever that is; maybe it's next door to the old folks' gated community) knew that WMDs were not as big an issue as they were trumped up to be.

Yellow Times also has also published an editorial written by guest editorialist Imad Khadduri, who worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 to 1998. "There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," he says. Khadduri asserts that most Iraq weapons were destroyed in 1995, and Iraq's nuclear weapons program "had already come to a halt on the first night of bombing in January 1991."

If the WMDs are there, let the weapons inspectors go in. What have you got to hide, U.S. intelligence?

Posted by Mark at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Glenn Beck Show, which airs every weekday from 9-11 AM on my home station, WTAM 1100, brings us a jolly piece of news that's sure to illicit groans (full story from CNN.com). For the fifth time since 1995, the House of Representatives passed a proposal for a flag-burning amendment. Fortunately, the Senate has never passed such a resolution. To be ratified, an amendment must pass by a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate and pass 38 of the 50 state legislatures.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. Johnson (491 U.S. 397, 1989) that laws against flag burning violated the First Amendment. Justice Brennan, writing the opinion of the court, equated flag-burning with other flag-related expressive conduct: "attaching a peace sign to the flag, refusing to salute the flag, and displaying a red flag, we have held, all may find shelter under the First Amendment." The issue in Texas v. Johnson was whether or not setting the flag alight could cause an immediate breach of the peace, as the Texas court conceded that flag-burning had value as expressive speech. The Supreme Court did not see that at all: "No reasonable onlooker would have regarded Johnson's generalized expression of dissatisfaction with the policies of the Federal Government as a direct personal insult or an invitation to exchange fisticuffs," writes Brennan. Johnson was convicted of "desecration of a venerated object," a Texas state law. In reasoning that the law was constitutional, the state of Texas argued that the government had a compelling interest in preserving the sanctity of the flag as a symbol; however, the Supreme Court has "never before have held that the Government may ensure that a symbol be used to express only one view of that symbol or its referents."

For more information, see United States v. O'Brien (391 U.S. 367, 1968).

Posted by Mark at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)