From a messianic history laden with promises of a better future, we have moved to a view of history as grievance; concurrently, the focus is on the victims of history, and no longer on the heroic figure of the warrior.

Ángel Loureiro, “Pathetic Grievances.”

Loureiro is a famous Hispanist but please don’t think I was alluding to him in the previous post. I just wanted to share this great quote and ask what you think about it. Loureiro is a great guy and, in my experience, very respectful towards non-Hispanic Hispanists.

Quite a few Hispanic Hispanists are stuck in the rut of endlessly and sanctimoniously reminding the non-Hispanic Hispanists that we don’t have personal experience of what we are researching. Of course, if we make personal experience a requirement for a scholarly career, then Medievalists and Shakespearean scholars should all just go jump off a cliff.

What such people don’t understand is that there is no compliment greater than dedicating one’s one and only life to studying, teaching, and promoting their culture. Latin America is gaining prominence and even – maybe, possibly, almost – clout, but Spain is a small, comparatively poor country that is about to fall apart into tiny little pieces. We should treasure every bit of evidence that it is still relevant to people. And if those people were not born in Spain, that’s a good sign.

Seriously, if all you can offer the field is having been born somewhere, then that’s not a whole lot. We all experienced being born and growing up, so big whoop. A new reader of this blog is a historian who specializes in Soviet history. Would I ever suggest that his research is garbage because he isn’t from the USSR? Of course not because I’m not insane. Quite the opposite, I’m thrilled that he is doing the important work of filling in lacunae in the knowledge about my country. Why would I want to get into a pissing contest with a person like that?

P.S. I’m noticing that among Spanish Hispanists this is a habit of people in their 50s and 60s. Among Latin American Hispanists, however, this is very common in the 30-40-year-old range. That’s just a personal statistic, though.

So today, at my sister’s instance, I went to a spinning class. All I can say about the class is: can you spell torture? And can you spell bloody freaking torture?

I’m totally going again.

Anyways, after I left the gym, I discovered that a torrential downpour had started. I’d heard it was supposed to rain heavily all day long but it slipped my mind completely. I’m useless when I have to wake up before 10 am.

So I was standing there, without an umbrella and in a coat that is not supposed to get wet. It isn’t fur, but it still shouldn’t get wet. As I was preparing for a mad dash towards the bus stop (which is located about half a mile away), a car stopped and a kindly driver offered to drive me where I needed.

Of course, the driver turned out to be a minister. Here in Southern Illinois, you meet two ministers for every non-minister. Which is just as well because ministers have no choice but help people.

The minister who rescued me and drove me home told me that God shows her things. For instance, God showed her that I was going to school and soon I would get the kind of a raise that will keep me at school forever. To me, this sounds like I’m getting tenure.

This is not the first time I got rescued by a driver. I still need to share the story of my being snowed in and rescued by several nice people in Detroit. When I get my license, I will totally be on the lookout for people to rescue on the road.

Spanish government announced today that it will keep investing millions euro into “helping” people buy cars. A fashionably progressive explanation is attached to this program: buying more cars is good for the environment. Nobody is mentioning that an already good system of public transportation could be improved with this money if the environment were really a concern.

This is exactly what I was saying the other day when I talked about the origins of the crisis. This is the bubble economy that fakes growth by enticing people to buy mountains of useless junk. And when buying slows down, governments fake buying. Then we all stare at fake reports of economic growth and feel good. There is no growth, though. These are just mountains of air being shifted around.