Long time without writing. It’s been a busy year, much of it spent in political shock overload — when I wasn’t hiding out from the nastiness of the Illinois winter on the beach on the Costa del Sol.
In the course of my dual hiding-out (from winter and from the feckless misadventures of President Milquetoast): (in no particular order)
Spain is a mess
Any interest in buying a vacation (or full-time) home on the Costa del Sol? For years Málaga has been my get-away Happy Place: home away from home where I could disappear into the happy-go-lucky world of mañana; smiling faces; gorgeous señores and señoritas. And an over-all sense of well being.
Today, not so much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lovely place to spend a few months. It’s an absolute delight to spend time with my loved ones there, and Málaga has more hours of sunshine per year than anywhere else in Europe and in the winter time, almost always the warmest temperatures. But the loveliness of it all is having a more difficult time masking the growing despair that’s eating away at the happy facade with the passing of very day.
Spain, on paper, has always looked ‘bad’ economically, with higher unemployment rates and lower per-capita incomes than its northern siblings. But Spain on paper and Spain in real life are two very different kinds of creatures. There are scores of reasons, but these two stand out in my mind:
- Spain has a ginormous black economy
- and a fierce spirit of personal autonomy
The proud and noble European tradition of tax evasion is practiced the most artfully in the Mediterranean states, and in none more enthusiastically than in Southern Spain. In transactions where there is some form of ‘strict’ government oversight (retail sales, home sales, professional services, etc.) 30% of the transaction amount is expected to disappear from the table. No ‘strict’ oversight? Report just enough to justify your having an income. No oversight at all? Straight to the mattress!
And I’m not kidding about the mattresses: I was in Spain in 2002 when the Euro replaced the peseta. At that time, I could have bought my apartment for around 10,000,000 pesetas: a king’s ransom in Spain, but only around $52,000 in U.S. money. But all that changed with the Euro. Spaniards had one year in which to spend all of their cash on hand. After that, the only thing to do with peseta currency was to take it to the bank and exchange it for euros. And, of course, all currency exchanges are reported to the government.
Solution? Empty out the mattress and buy real estate! Literally trillions of pesetas (billions of dollars) were pulled from under floorboards and out of trunks in the attic and poured into the real estate market. Between January of 2002 and the middle of 2007 when the market topped out, the ‘value’ of my apartment skyrocketed from $52,000 to ~$400,000. Today, I’d be very lucky to get what I paid back out of it, and even that is probably impossible right now.
But anyway, that’s the power of the Spanish mattress! And along with the black cash flow, there’s the black employment flow that’s every bit as big is its dark cash brother.
So any official stats regarding income and employment are grossly skewed by virtue of perhaps as much as 50-60% of the economy being extra-legal. Then, the government cooks the books further by paying the unemployed to attend school (already free) and counting them as ‘students.’
All of which is by way of saying that in a fairly decent economy, those ‘depressing’ numbers on paper don’t have much to do with the quality of life to your average working Andalucían, whose economy directly or indirectly relies upon tourism.
When I left there at the end of March, the official unemployment rate was somewhere around 23%. Economists outside the government estimated the real rate as being somewhere between 50 and 60%. And the tourists ain’t coming. Whoops.
Undesirable elements
I recently discovered that I had gotten one of my most favoritest quotations in the world WRONG. For years, Emma Goldman’s “The most dangerous element in any society is ignorance” has rotated in and out of my email .sig file. Turns out she actually called ignorance the most violent element. Thank you anonymous driver of the mom-mobille in the Springer Center parking lot whose (correct) bumper sticker inspired me to look it up.
My much-loved maternal grandmother was a Tribune-reading matron from Ford County who had the whole world divided into elements — desirable and un- (mostly un-). Dad (from Griggsville) had a little bit of this, too, but not nearly as much as Mom, whose family had pretensions.
I grew up hearing about elements: rough, dangerous, disruptive, violent, puerile, corrupting, and of course, the all-encompassing yet somehow superlative ‘undesirable’ sneered with a chin-slide implying a status lower than pond scum. I can’t say I ever did more than shrug off the whole idea of elementizing the world (the better to control it?) until I realized somewhere around middle school that the only sane behavior open to me was to become an Undesirable Element. (Not that my behavior was particularly sane!)
A good 20 years before Question Authority became a t-shirt slogan, I made Question Conventional Wisdom my life’s cause, and as a result was irreversibly imprinted with how absurd is the all too common human tendency when uncomfortable to label the source of our discomfort as somehow undesirable and dismissing it out of hand. Rather, of course, than dealing with it in an honorable way.
So when I first spied Emma’s ignorance quote, I grabbed onto it and took it to my heart. I still can’t figure out either where I copied it from or whether it was incorrect there or I miscopied it. but the beauty of Goldman’s statement is that whether you declare the element to be most violent or most dangerous or most corrupting or costly or disruptive or destructive…ignorance still fits the bill!
