A trip home

I love those moments that instantly and unexpectedly sweep me "home".


Like being told to wait,"just 30 seconds, love", when I called my mother at 630 am this morning.

Punsxatawney Phil was about to walk out of his winter home. There are things so American not even a call from an exotic foreign land (okay, okay, Salamanca) can interrupt them.


He saw his shadow, by the way. Phil's loyal fans, my Rhode Islander mother included, are in for a long winter.

That decided, the weekly catch-up began.

Wise words...from a politician?

"If you know who you are, if you know what you believe in, if you know what you are fighting for, then you can afford to listen to folks who don't agree with you.....It won't hurt you."

-Barack Obama


Okay, he was talking about reaching across the aisle in American politics, but read it again. Damn good advice, across the board, don't you think? The knowing and the listening.

Why, yes, he is my senator from the great state of Illinois, and yes, he is impressing the expat heck out of me. You might say he's given me hope, and it's anything but false.

Ah, that perfect combination of "that" home and "this" home

Snow in Salamanca!

Ok, a dusting. But I woke to snow in Salamanca!
Now if I pass a busking blues guitarist and a hot dog vendor on the way to the Plaza, the magical meshing shall be complete.

May I mention my golden city looks great in white?

Hope your personal good luck dust is falling round you as well.

Ah, the wonders of reverse translation

As I typed out my sad tale of Thanksgiving tunafish, I suddenly had a thought about how the Spanish describe this American-only holiday we call Thanksgiving:

Día de Acción de Gracias

Day of Action - yeh, ACTION - of thanks.

Oh, I think there's an opportunity in that reverse translation. What if Thanksgiving were a day to ACT on how darn thankful you felt?

Just a thought.

If I've left you inspired but not quite sure where to act, may I suggest Kiva?

On living far from your favorite holiday

It's not missing Thanksgiving Day I mind.

It's the day after.

Oh, what I wouldn't give for a leftover turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwich. And maybe just a little piece of whatever that is you had for dessert?

So I ate tunafish and worked a full day.
I was very thankful, and that's what counts, right?

The times they are a-changing

Funny how even a newcomer like me finds it easy to cling to Salamanca as I know her despite the fact that she is changing, daily.

I picked up a brochure titled "Foreign Transfers" in the bank yesterday. Under the headline "your family, much closer to you", I found this list of countries to which Banco Popular will be happy to cheaply transfer part of your paycheck: Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Bulgaria, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Phillipines, Morocco, Moldavia, Peru, Poland, Dominican Republic, Romania.

That sign of change brought a smile to this immigrant's great great grandaughter.

The next change thrilled me less. As I left the Plaza, I find myself traversing a thick forest of planted Salmantinos. They filled the plazuela outside the Plaza Mayor, eyes up, mouths open. I joined them, and we watched a very skilled construction worker tear done Salamanca's Gran Hotel, stone by stone. Condominiums will take its place; we'll hope the design is worthy of its prestigious position, smack dab in the center of old Salamanca, facing the Plaza Mayor.

As I passed the Plaza de los Bandos, workmen were putting the finishing touches on the newly rebuilt plaza surface. A controversial underground parking garage is planned for the Plaza de los Bandos, one of my favorites. Yesterday's reconstruction tells me the required archaeological investigation has been completed. If I owned even a shard of Roman pottery, I'd have buried it in Los Bandos weeks ago. I cling to the hope that someone with a better antiquities collection than mine came up with the same idea.

The last change is one I would have welcomed when I arrived three years ago, but now face with mixed feelings. After 70 years in business, El Corte Ingles, the Spanish department store of department stores, is coming to Salamanca. A friend from North Dakota taught me long ago that a Midwestern small town "arrives" with the opening of a Dairy Queen within its city limits; a Spanish city may well become a City once she boasts a Corte Ingles. Despite my love of El Cortes Ingles, which I'll chalk up to a Chicagoan's appreciation of a good old fashioned department store where you can buy everything and anything and enjoy good service while you're at it, the naysayers' warnings about the threat to the small businesses located close to the new superstore dampen my excitement at the thought of choices (an American's Holy Grail: choices!) in sheets, and towels and clothing and...

I'm tempted to wish Salamanca would freeze right where she is. I shop in the historic center of town, which I suspect will easily survive El Cortes Ingles. I cherish my weekly walk through town pulling my purple plaid carrito, with scheduled stops in the panadería, carnecería, fruteria, zapatería, ferretería, pescadería and often the central market. An expert for every purchase, and always a conversation.

My butcher gave me a short course on Spanish cuts of lamb at Christmas when I used "chuleta" for a cut he absolutely could not consider a "chop". My fruit man felt obliged to review every detail of the proper preparation of membrillo when I bought my quince in fall, despite the fact that I arrived at his stand clutching the handwritten recipe of a friend's very Spanish mother.

The small shops surrounding the new El Cortes Ingles, which will be located outside of the historic center of Salamanca, may not survive. I find that sad, as I find Carrefour a nightmare and most of the urbanizations surrounding Salamanca an eyesore.

Yet, I come from a place with superstores, suburban strip malls and all the conveniences of Carrefour, don't I?

As much as I'd love to keep Salamanca just as she is, I settle for hoping (we) her citizens pay attention and develop her well.

As I raced toward the door a neighbor was patiently holding for me yesterday afternoon, I earned a scolding. Hurrying is a disease, he told me.

"We are lucky to live in Salamanca, Erin, with the river flowing by and not a single thing we need to hurry about."

Wise neighbor.

Who says miracles don't happen?

My mother's line, that title.

She sent me that brief message by email, after settling in with her coffee and a photo of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley sitting side by side on the front page of the morning paper one day last week.

I suspect one of the reasons Campesinas moved me so deeply today is this: I've had my great great grandmother on my mind.

My great great grandmother's name was Johannah Lowney. I've never seen a photo of her. I know her from old bound notebooks: marriage records, baptism records, Civil War rosters, a letter announcing a widow's pension, an obituary. Johannah emigrated to New Bedford, Massachusetts from Ireland in the late 1850s with her parents. There she met another newly arrived Irishman, a lad named Corcoran. She soon found herself pregnant and shortly thereafter, married.

I have baptism records for 4 children: 3 boys and a girl. I have a copy of a page from the roll call of an Irish Regiment in the American Civil War with her husband marked present and accounted for every day until the day perfectly formed penmanship declares him absent: "killed in action".

My fascination with Johannah Lowney has always centered on that one perfectly written line. What happens to a 20-something immigrant when she loses her 33 year old husband to a tiny skirmish in the horrible, bloody war dividing her newly adopted country? What did Johannah do between that day and the day she next appears in my paper trail, 8 or 9 years later, the day she remarries and moves to RI with her new husband?

My father loved the story of Timothy, Johannah's husband, as he loved the story of Johannah's two young sons, who went west to find their fortunes building a railroad. He loved to describe the tintype he'd seen in his grandparents' home: a pale Irish face in Union blue, on his way to fight a war. My cousins are still hard at work digging up Timothy's brief life story. My brother asked me to take him on a long detour through Timothy's native County Leitrim during our wander through Ireland last summer.

Me? I've always been fascinated by Johannah.
How did she raise 4 children? Bury two husbands? Live a life that spanned 2 continents and 91 years?

Years ago I dug through microfiche files at the Providence Public Library for hours until I found Johannah's obituary. She died in the 1920s at the age of 91.

I forget the details of her obituary. Truth is I forget the exact date. What I remember is the front page that preceded it: a photo of Eamon de Valera taking his oath as the first president of an independent Ireland. (Note: if you know Irish history you know Ireland's transition to a 26 county Republic - with Northern Ireland ceded to Britain - was a long, complicated and bloody affair. I don't have my genealogy notes in Salamanca, so I hope you'll forgive my historical looseness; I don't remember just which de Valera presidential swearing-in occurred the day Johannah died.)

I know nothing about Johannah's reasons for leaving Ireland; I can assume they included poverty. I don't know how closely she followed the war going on in her homeland in the years before her death.

But I have always loved the front page of the newpaper that includes her obituary.

I secretly hope she decided she could go, once something she had likely thought would never happen had happened.

I thought of Johannah when I looked at my El País last week, with Adams and Paisley stiffly smiling side by side. I don't pretend all is solved or that anything will now be easy in Northern Ireland. But I see pragmatism and a people's exhaustion with war. I see the results of years of painfully hard work. I see hope.

And I think Johannah Lowney is smiling.

Am I an expat?

At the risk of getting myself thrown out of every blog ring that links to me, I'm not so sure.

Loaded word, expat. At least for me, as I recently discovered.

One afternoon a few weeks back, an “expat” site expressed interest in my writing. That same afternoon, I lunched with two self-proclaimed expats in Salamanca. I was surprised to find myself cringing on my way to the lunch. The reason? Well, I was meeting "expats" - and preparing to have lunch in English. My lunch companions, who both live in Salamanca, turned out to be lovely women. The newest arrival was dutifully studying Spanish and earnestly trying to meet Salmantinos, although she will likely live here for only one year.

When I returned from lunch, I found an e-mail from the expat site offering to publish some of my blogs, which they described as "Spanish life, seen from the outside." I cringed again: seen from the what?

The description sent me running to a dictionary.

expatriate: noun /ekspatri t/ a person who lives outside their native country.

verb: to leave one's native country to live elsewhere.

Ok, well, yes, that's true.
But look what comes next:

also: to renounce allegiance to one's native country

Well, now wait a minute.....

I moved on to Wikipedia: where things got worse:

The difference between an expatriate and an immigrant is that immigrants (for the most part) commit themselves to becoming a part of their country of residence, whereas expatriates are usually only temporarily placed in the host country and most of the time plan on returning to their home country, so they never adopt the culture in the host country - though some may end up never actually returning, with the distinction then becoming more a matter of their own viewpoint.

I comforted myself with the "most of the time", the "usually" and that warm little "for the most part".

So am I an expat?

I didn't move to Spain to escape from the US.
I didn't move to make a political statement.
I believe I still have a responsibility to vote in the US, and take my share of the heat for our role in the world.

Most importantly, I didn't move to Spain to live on the "outside" of anything. And aside from our shared belly laughs at a gaffed word, a missed r, or a pathetic attempt at a sevillana, my friends and neighbors have never made me feel like an outsider.

So maybe I'm a "less than usual" expat: the kind that shows up "less of the time" and "for the least part". Or maybe I am an immigrant.

I think of myself as a woman living in Spain, amongst the Spanish. As I was a woman living amongst Californians, long after I lived amongst St Louisans and shortly after boldly declaring myself an adopted Chicagoan.

I know that after three years in Salamanca, I feel more like an outsider strolling through LA then I do paseando through Salamanca. It's a funny thing, this "otherness".

Somewhere in all this pondering I joyfully realized that I will be something "other" than usual just about anywhere I go from here on out. I'm excited about that; it'll be my responsibility to make sure my "otherness" is always more of a bridge than a wall.

In the end, I told the site I'd be thrilled if they published my posts.

And I set my mind to thinking less about labels, and more about what to order next time I meet charming people for lunch. In any language.

Ah, the sweet universality of it all....

Extracted from a letter to the editor in El País last week:

There's a deaf man worse than the one who simply doesn't want to hear: the one who keeps shouting at the top of his lungs that nothing can be heard so that the rest of us can't hear anything, either.

The writer was commenting on the current climate in Spanish politics, but somehow I had no trouble applying his very wise words to all kinds of countries and conversations...

Top o' the morning to you

And, as my dutiful mother responded when I woke her with an energetic "top o' the morning" at 545 AM east coast US, "the rest of the day to yourself!"

Through the wonders of youtube, I offer up a set of reels by the Chieftains and friends, almost live, from Matt Molloy's in Westport, County Mayo.

Happy Saint Pat's Day from Salamanca!

Good news

Who are really the richest people in the USA?

Motto magazine led me to a cool project put together by Tim Richardson, a speaker and author based in San Francisco. Hot on the heels of Forbes' richest lists, he's launched a project to celebrate people who are rich for what they give, whether or not they have a Forbes' worthy financial picture:

The REAL Richest People in America is about people making a difference. This inaugural list focuses on richness in giving with the aim of inspiring businesses and individuals to give their profits and their time.

Recipients will be selected not because of what they have or profit but because of what they give or what they do. “True richness comes from the love of giving back to society, and happens whether you make $10,000 or $10 million a year” says list founder Tim Richardson.

These nominees reflect the best about the joy of giving back; using their time and resources to make a difference in the world.

The list of nominees is a fun, inspiring read.


Kiva keeps growing


In other good news, my first Kiva loan has been paid off!

If you've somehow missed my previous soap box posts about Kiva, I never had more fun opening an email than I did every time I received a payment update from the Kiva businesses in my portfolio, until yesterday, when the e-mail announced that a loan had been completely repaid. My tiny investment popped back into my Kiva account, for me to withdraw, donate to Kiva, or reinvest in another business. I reinvested.

Kiva lets you loan as little as $25 to an entrepreneur in the developing world safely, directly, effortlessly and online, with a credit card or paypal account. I can't think of an easier way to make a direct, bureacracy-free difference to one person determined to find his own way out of poverty. Every penny you loan goes to the business owner in whom you invest, and every penny comes back to you, when the loan has been fully repaid. Best of all, you get to follow the entrepreneur's progress. Every Kiva update e-mails I receive about one of my businesses gives me a nice wide-eyed dose of perspective.

So far, I've loaned to a young man making a go of his deceased father's shoestore in Honduras, a young woman launching her own cloth stand at a market in Cambodia, an immigrant Turk's café in Bulgaria, a women's co-op raising steers in Kenya, a wedding decoration firm in Tanzania, a hardware store in Ecuador, and widely scattered soft drink vendors and general store owners.

If you've ever wondered what you could "do" to make a hands-on difference with little money and little time, Kiva's a great place to start.

A sure sign of spring, or: why did the Salmantina cross the road?

After three years, I expect the debate.

Every year right around this time I spot the storks collecting twigs for nest repair. I pack my winter coats away and dance round Salamanca announcing the arrival of spring.

And every year my friends assure me we are nowhere near spring. Nowhere, they hiss, while we stand talking in jean jackets. The other day a neighbor sternly warned me not to jinx the weather for all of us by daring to utter the "s" work (p, primavera, en español) before its time.

Today I gathered my strongest piece of evidence yet.

As I was climbing up toward la Rua, I watched the chica in front of make a sudden sharp left turn, followed by a quick 90 degree right once she'd placed herself firmly in the center of a shaded path. A shaded path, I tell you! I observed a precise, deliberate Spanish move to avoid walking in the sun.

Now everybody knows nothing gives away a tourist in Spain more than walking in the sun during summer or the shade in winter. Multiple street crossings and two point turns are perfectly acceptable; we all do what we must to stay cool or warm.

She sought the shade, I tell you! The shade! I consider the walking paths of my fellow Salmantinos far more reliable indicators of the season than the shadow of some drowsy groundhog in rural Pennsylvania.

A Salmantina sought the shade!

I hereby proclaim the arrival of spring.

Tagged: Why do I blog?

Eek.

I've been tagged.
Laura passed me this question: why do you blog?

My first answer, considering how little time I've spent at this blog lately, was sad and sheepish: ummm..lately? I don't.

But as always, Laura set my pen to scribbling, even at 2 AM. I'd climbed out of bed and booted up the laptop, a jetlagged stupor and legendarily bad eyesight conspiring to convince me it was 6:45 AM and time to start my day. Good time for a good question. Perfect time for this question, since I've been hankering to get here more often and more than hankering to give this blog a long overdue makeover.

Why do I blog? The tag asked for 5 reasons. I'll give you 6:

1. Blogging helps me pay attention.

I look at life like a writer when I blog. I notice what's around me, find myself catching things I would have missed in my bazillion mile per hour past. Just knowing I'll be heading here pricks the ears, opens the eyes...keeps me awake and scribbling.

Internally, the effect's just as dramatic. Posts, comments, the blogs I visit through the comment box...blogging stirs up things I doubt I'd run across any other way.


2. There are some truly cool people hanging out on the other side of this keyboard.

See them there? I can't count the fabulous people I've met through this blog, many in person. Can't count the pincho tours during Salamanca visits, the friends this blog has brought me, the cool things I've been asked to do. I just plain like the people who visit this blog.

I have a certain way of looking at the world; I've learned what I've learned navigating the waters of expat life in Spain. If any of that can spark something in somebody else, answer a question, forward a resource, or inspire a good hearty laugh, all the better. Sometimes I think blogging is the ultimate way to pay it forward.

3. Some days I surprise myself.

Amazing what an empty text box can coax out of me. Some days I blog just to see what I type.

4. The blog keeps track of the minutes.

You can't spend 5 weeks in the States and not notice what you don't have in your life: a house, bursting bank accounts, a car, a family and the SUV to cart it around in, you know, things you've built, stuff you've bought. When I moved to Spain, I bought myself a life of well-lived minutes. I don't earn what I used to; I may or may not get back to owning a house and collecting possessions. But I've got to tell you, I spend my time well. This blog lets me mark all those minutes and come back to celebrate them again.


5. I've got this funny thing about bridges.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live somewhere really different from the States. Then I talk to someone who's convinced all Americans are illiterate gun owners who eat nothing but McDonald's. Or open an email from an American who's not sure cell phones have reached Spain yet.

Every once in a while I watch this blog bridge - Spaniards to Americans, Spaniards to expats living in Spain, Americans to the world outside our borders, conservatives to liberals. Catalans to Castillians. People who speak Spanish to those who don't. I like when we disagree; I like when people who are absolutely convinced they know what Americans or Spaniards are like misunderstand me. I like being forced to question my own experience here. I love hosting the party where people who thought they had little in common find common ground.

And there is nothing I would rather do than encourage more of my paisanos to cross the Atlantic, or the Pacific or the border with Mexico or... Travel, people!

6. Writing about my wanders is the perfect excuse.

I must wander, I tell you! I must! I must turn this hard won vocational virtuality into solo travel and blog posts. You're all counting on me, aren't you?

Speaking of which: I'm booked for Tuscany in April. Recommendations, oh wise, well-travelled ones?

Anybody want to pick up this tag? I won't name names, but please, if you'd like to join the tag, leave a comment with a link to your post about why you blog. Here's a spin, nonbloggers - leave a comment about why you don't blog! I've just declared this an equal opportunity tag.

It's a long road to Madrid: Two stuffies and a bump

There's an old joke about New England. Maine to be exact. An crusty old New Englandah answers a tourist's plea for directions like this:

You can't get theayah (there) from heayah (here).

I'm beginning to believe you can't get from Providence to Madrid.

I've been bumped, now that I've checked in for my twice cancelled flight to Philly. On the other hand I have scored a free roundtrip ticket, discovered WIFI and plugged in my laptop, making me a happy thrice-cancelled wanderer.

I vividly remember walking out the back door of this airport and crossing the tarmac to my plane when I'd head back to college after summer and Christmas breaks. Twenty years later I'm spending the afternoon in Gate 6 (6! of 12 or 15!!), ecstatic to find that my hometown airport has added not only departure gates but WIFI. In true Rhode Island tradition (I once misdialed my father's phone number and reached someone who knew both him and his new number, I swear) I spent my first hour at the gate chatting with my very first employers - the former neighbors whose children I babysat until the day I walked across the tarmac to college.

I prepared for the day''s travel with one last taste of the Ocean State: a cup of chowder, a couple of deliciousstuffies and a well placed dash of Tabasco at O'Rourke's, the new pub in the old town where I grew up. There are clams in my belly and peanut butter in my suitcase. I'm ready to go home.

I stumbled across Quahog.org while searching for a stuffie photo. Everything you could want to know about little Rhode Island and then some.

Meet you back here soon, hopefully with tales of morcilla and patatas meneadas....
¡Hasta pronto, Salamanca!

Happiness is....

hearing 2 50-something Southern Californians passionately talk about politics -- and what can be done about Bush, and what appalls them about the Iraq war and this administration's policies. One of the two is clearly an immigrant, perhaps Israeli, if I guess the accent. They are preparing something - an article or a presentation - about their views.

This is a Barnes & Noble cybercafe in Westlake Village, California, just around the corner from the Sotheby´s International Realty office. I parked my borrowed Mercedes alongside Jaguars and Lexus 4x4s and more Mercedes than I can count. These folks would make natural Republicans, by the preBush definition of Republican. They likely are registered Republicans.

Yet here they are, talking about what they can do, now, to make the world look more like they'd like it to.

Who knows if they've even noticed the wandering expat sitting across the aisle, typing furiously while grinning ear to ear.

They're awake! My paisanos are talking about this stuff, whatever their opinion on it. And they're looking for what they can do to change things--even if change starts with a simple article or an OpEd.

I've got a dayful of work ahead of me here. I spent the week living with 2 Weimaraner pups and the shell shocked cat they recently moved in with. That menagerie explains my absence here...and all the work I'll be catching up on today. If you want to be sure you'll never do a bit a work at home, buy 2 young Weims! They are a wonderful, rewarding, exhausting full time job.

But now their owners have returned and I've escaped to the local cyber, where nobody threatens to consume the couch or the cat or my foot or the wall or the rug or.... whatever catches the puppy eye while I'm typing at the laptop.

I'll hope to be back here at the end of the day, once the rent paying stuff's done.

What a difference a day makes

Yes, in fact I DO feel good today!

Things I read in Spain

El País ran an opinion column titled "Liberales Contra Bush" the other day. The column was signed by a long list of liberal American academics.

The essay, which I found here in English, is a response to an essay in the London Review of Books, in which Tony Judt claims that American liberals have "acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy."

The following passages brought applause in my apartment(where, yes, in fact, I was alone):

Reason is indispensable to democratic self-government. This self-evident truth was a fundamental commitment of our Founding Fathers, who believed it was entirely compatible with every American's First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. When debating policy in the public square, our government should base its laws on grounds that can be accepted by people regardless of their religious beliefs.

We insist that America be defended vigorously against its real enemies --the radical Islamists who organize to attack us. But security does not require torture or the rejection of basic guarantees of due process. To the contrary, this administration's lawless conduct and its violations of the Geneva Conventions only damage our moral standing and our ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues. By defending torture, the Bush administration engages in precisely the kind of ethical relativism that it purports to condemn.

We love this country. But true patriotism does not consist of bravado or calumny. It resides in faithfulness to our great constitutional ideals. We are a republic, not a monarchy. We believe in the rule of law, not secret prisons. We insist on justice for all, not privilege for the few. In repudiating these American ideals, the Bush administration disgraces America and damages our claim to democratic leadership in the larger world.

OK, I am done now. As my corporate boss use to say every time I asked for more than 2 consecutive days off, "You'll do what you think is right." However you vote, please, please - just vote, paisanos!

Is this about politics? Or values?

A little followup, perhaps, to my previous post:

As a soldier and as a citizen, I worry about our values - liberty, justice, human rights in whatever circumstance - because they are not things to throw overboard in the middle of a storm, nor are they obligations that we can break when things get ugly. They are the basis of our strength. Those are the moments when we need them most. If this is a conflict of ideas and convictions, our values are part of our arsenal. If we abandon them, we disarm ourselves for the battle we have to fight long term.

Brian M. Jenkins, one of RAND Corporation's principal security analysts, in a compelling interview with El País in September.

Has Brian Jenkins been invited to express his views in American media? I read him in Spain, in Spanish.

Torture? Secret prisons? Capital trials in which key evidence is kept from the accused? That’s the stuff of Kafka, not Madison and Jefferson.

Bob Herbert, New York Times, September 18.

Defensive?

One of my very favorite humans posed an interesting question a few days ago.

This favorite reads my blog, but like most of the readers who knew me long before I moved to Spain, he chooses to comment in private e-mails.

After reading this post, he wrote:
-Wow! Getting a tad defensive living in Europe, aren't we?

Stunned, I asked him to elaborate. Here's his reply:

- I read your blog -- the belief on the part of the Europeans that most Americans were in disagreement over W's policies -- and the need to vote
to change direction. You seemed embarrassed / defensive over the
foreign policy of the USA. I guess I hadn't seen or heard you being so passionate about politics before -- and was surprised.

He got me to thinking.

Am I passionate about politics?
I hate politics. I am passionate about my values, values I acquired in the USA. Values I was raised to believe were the cornerstone of our legal system, our lives and, yes, our foreign policy.

Am I defensive?
I don't think so. Deflated, yes, and disappointed. Sad.

Am I embarrassed?
No, try ashamed. Alarmed. Appalled. Horrified, some days.

My country has decided it's okay to torture prisoners and send them off to secret prisons outside of our borders. Just this week, we've decided it's okay to deny people we label as enemy combatants the right to see key evidence against them in a capital trial.

We have 14,000 people in our war prisons. A handful have been charged.

We've decided it's okay to deny secret prisons and flights secretly refueled in our allies' sovereign territory - to deny them even to the government, citizens and press of those allies- until we are caught red-handed. In at least two countries - Italy and Canada - an internal scandal has erupted over collaboration with our secret service in the illegal kidnappings that sent suspected terrorists to our secret prisons. In Italy, agents and, as I recall, the former director of the secret service have been charged with crimes, for simply collaborating with this part of our war on terrorism. Ireland had a similar storm brewing when I was there in June.

Foreign policy? Did we really tell Musharraf we'd bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" if he didn't cooperate? Do you know what I am passionate about? The anger I feel when I realize it really wouldn't surprise me if we had.

We have created a world in which Hugo Chavez can rally a growing "axis" held together by one common obsession: fierce hatred of the USA. His alliance of the "unallied" has one openly stated purpose: oppose the USA. His best propoganda is our own track record over the last 6 years. Simple news stories.

I believe that torture, kangaroo courts and secret prisons are wrong when dictators and terrorists use them, and they are wrong when we do, too.

I am passionate about my belief that our enemies do not define us. That we best defend our values by living to them. That the worst way to secure liberty, justice and human rights is to make exceptions to them.

I am ashamed of our indifference and the lack of respect we show our allies. I am ashamed to see that we have replaced our values with arrogance.

I told another American friend a few months ago that something had fundamentally changed about our relationship with the world. I watched the world wait for us to do something to stop the senseless deaths of innocent Israeli and Lebanese civilians in a war in which it's now said both sides committed war crimes. We responded with stalls and spin - bad spin, at that. We announced that we didn't want a merely "temporary" peace - you know, the kind where nobody dies for a few days. We singlehandedly blocked a rapid end to civilian bloodshed. And I tell you, something changed.

But more than all of that, I am frustrated because I can see that none of this will work. I don't know how long it will take to regain our credibility, our image (and yes, it DOES matter), our relationships with other peoples and their respect and trust. How long will it take us just to reclaim our fundamental values?

When the (torture) bill Bush just signed was presented to Congress, Colin Powell warned that the world was coming to "doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism." He was being polite. I'd be hard pressed to tell you which part of the world sees any moral basis. I don't, do you?

I am ashamed to say I know no better recruitment poster for terrorists than a photo of an American solder or George Bush. Or perhaps a news story about Iraq, or Lebanon, or Abu Ghraib, or the changes we've made to our own laws in the last 6 years.

I was sincere when I said I am asked about Bush, often. Jimmy Carter said his recent travels abroad revealed "consternation, disappointment, sometimes animosity and embarrassment" toward the United States.

I am not defensive about those questions, that consternation or that disappointment because I share them. In a way I find my neighbors' disbelief comforting. Their questions remind me that there was another USA, once, as they reassure me that I didn't pull my values out of thin air.

It's an idea....

I don't talk politics much.

Still, every now and then, people ask me.

Every now and then some unassuming Salmantino just can't help himself and, finding me open, positive and friendly, feels compelled to go there.

You know, there. Bush.

The day I negotiated my rent with my landlady, we lingered a while over coffee. Pilar, who has never asked me about Bush, could control her curiosity no longer. "But what I don't understand, Erin, is the Americans, the people. They voted for him? Twice?"

Back before we had "voted for him, twice", I flew to Spain over the Thanksgiving holiday to interview for the job that brought me to Salamanca. I arranged a lunch with a friend who's a successful business executive in Madrid for the day before the interview. I'd hoped he'd prepare me well for my first interview in another language and culture. Instead I spent half an hour solemnly swearing on my lamb kebab that I would always vote in the US presidential elections - even if I moved to Spain.

Not long ago I had a Bush conversation that still intrigues me.

A good friend brought up Bush. She asked if he really had 2 years left to his term and I confirmed that he did. When I commented, as I often do, that we do not have a system for calling early elections in the US or the possibility of a no-confidence vote (not that Bush would lose one, frightening as that is to me) she showed me again how much better the Spanish know our history than your average American knows theirs.

"There's no way for us to make that change until his term is up", I assured her.

"Sure there's a way. Nixon resigned, didn't he?"

"Well, yeh", I started, "but that was...."

"So there's a way. All you have to do is make him so miserable he resigns."

"But tut ttt nngng..."

She interrupted my stutter with a firm wave of her finger.

"Don't tell me there's no way to bring a change. A President has resigned. Get him to quit."


Anybody got any ideas?