Benito Perez Galdos is a 19th-century Spanish novelist who’s like Dickens or Balzac but better. And the reason you’ve never heard of him is Spain’s peculiar position vis-a-vis the “real” Europe. But please, please believe me: he is out of this world good.  

Galdos wrote a bunch of amazing (and very long) realist novels, and I read and loved them all. But aside from these novels, Galdos worked on an enormous life-long project of writing historical fiction. The project was called National Episodes, and it’s nation-building at its best. And to think that I had never had time to read any but the very first novel in the project.

There are 46 novels in the project, and the series begins with the battle of Trafalgar and then goes on to cover the entire 1st half of the 19th century, that is, precisely the time when nation-states were being consolidated. 

History is the most ideological of human sciences, and history textbooks are as fictional as any novel. Which is why it makes more sense to use Galdos’s novels to learn about Spain’s history than actual textbooks. 

The Court of Carlos IV is the second novel in the project. It’s not Galdos’s best writing but it’s still so good that I was reading maniacally, on every device in sight, unable to put the book down. The novel shows Spain on the eve of Napoleon’s invasion. It’s full of delightful 19th century gossip but the best part is watching the author manipulating history to suit his nation-building purposes. 

2 novels down, 44 more to go. I’m in paradise. 

Hey, remember those two rich freaks at Yale who made a spectacle out of themselves wailing “You are hurting my fee-fees! You are fucking disgusting! I’m mortally wounded!” at a professor whose wife had written an email about Halloween costumes? 

This is the funniest news ever, so prepare yourselves. Yale responded by throwing the e-mail’s author off campus and giving the rich brats. . . an award! The award goes to “two graduating seniors who, while maintaining high academic achievement, have provided exemplary leadership in enhancing race and/or ethnic relations at Yale College.” 

Of course, if you don’t constantly praise every rich little bunny on that campus, the parents might get sore and not endow any more buildings but I wish the consolation prize given to these particular wounded darlings were at least worded differently. 

By the way, the parliament of Catalonia just passed a bill guaranteeing a UBI of about €600 a month to everybody, including illegal immigrants. 

Until now, Spain has had no far-right parties and no anti-immigrant sentiment. Clearly, Catalonia’s law-makers decided to change this.  

And by the way, all of these exclamations about how “nothing can be done, we will all be automated away, the liquid capital has won already” is nothing but a socially acceptable form of capitulating to capital, so to speak. I wish people just honestly said, “I’m doing well and everybody else should go screw themselves” instead. 

Finally, I found something I haven’t been able to get a hold of for decades: garlic scapes. The young farmer at the farmer’s market who was selling them was stunned that I could identify them. They taste amazing in garden salads. I used to pick them at my first husband’s dacha back in Ukraine. I hated that darn place (although it was a beautiful huge house with a real fireplace and a big garden), and the garlic scapes were the only thing to reconcile me with being there.

A big bunch cost me a strange price of one dollar seventy six cents.

That’s what the new economy should look like according to Zuckerberg and Co: 

You and I should work more and never retire to sponsor the existence of a disaffected underclass that will spend its life on Facebook and opiates paid for by your and my money. The underclass will be manipulated through Facebook and such to vote for people who will make this setup possible. 

Mind you, this doesn’t have to happen. We can set things up differently if that’s what we want. 

Zuckerberg supports UBI because it’s the best way for him to siphon off public funds into his own bank account. 

What will people on UBI do all day? Sit in Facebook and buy $3 bras and the rest of the crap off its ads. UBI is the best way to guarantee that taxpayers keep sponsoring the billionaires’ lifestyles. 

A profound transformation of our very state-form is occurring. A new form of global capitalism is being created. The Liberals (progressives, the left wing, whatever) studiously pretend nothing is happening and everything is peachy gooey. I like Hillary, I supported her, but let’s not pretend like it wasn’t the most out of touch campaign in the world. (After Bernie’s, I mean).

People intuit, however, that something is not right. Their anxiety is exploited by a cunning and immoral billionaire who is propelled to power by simply acknowledging that something is going on and the people’s anxiety is real. 

The Liberals (progressives, the left wing, whatever) look at all this and decide that the way to deal with the situation is to mask the symptom and pretend there is no disease. Remove Trump and we can all go on pretending that more and more people will need disability or some other form of UBI simply because they are eager to “try out new ideas” and not because the new form of capitalism has turned them into human waste. We can all go on pretending that toilet signage is our greatest social justice cause and big business is supporting it because it suddenly became super progressive.
Kushner, schmushner, the most enormous planetary transformation we are to witness in our lifetimes is underway, and this is what we are on about? 

What’s especially cute is that all of these revelations about Kushner come from anonymous sources in the Trump campaign. 

What a royal waste of time all this is. 

And before anybody objects, when was the last time I was wrong on anything that had to do with Russia?