Monday, December 28, 2009

The New York Times on TRAVEL






THE NEW YORK TIMES
December 6, 2009
Holiday Travel Books
By JOSHUA HAMMER

This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue. From prostitution, thievery and violence in Bangkok and Johannesburg to the classical antiquities and literary treasures of the Greek islands and Oxford, they explore both the dark and sunny sides of human nature. Which is more fun? It’s an open question.

In the wickedly enjoyable BANGKOK DAYS (North Point, $25), Lawrence Osborne, a down-and-out British writer living in New York, flies to Bangkok for a round of cheap dental work — and embarks on a romp through a city whose prime commodity is sex. Many of Osborne’s nocturnal rambles through the Thai capital’s bars, brothels and hotels are carried out in the company of other expats, including an Australian watercolorist named Dennis, “an elderly man with skin as white as fine library dust, with a fop of dyed blond hair falling between his eyes,” and McGinnis, a sinister air-conditioner salesman with a shaved head and a face “like that of a pleasant hoodlum who has just shot down a kite.” Osborne himself knows no shame: at one point, the cash-strapped writer picks up a middle-aged Japanese woman at the bar of the Peninsula Hotel and rips her off while she’s taking a shower: “I lifted my hand and pried into the handbag, knowing there must be money there. . . . I pulled out two thousand-baht notes, which felt like they had been extracted from the warm rollers of an A.T.M. only minutes earlier.”

Osborne also savors the city’s non-libidinous pleasures: gaudy Buddhist temples, exotic fruit and noodle stands, and the handful of tucked-away canals that have survived the asphalting of the old Bangkok. But it’s his descriptions of bar girls and their fellow travelers, of desperate couplings to ward off loneliness, that resonate. At one point, severely ill with a throat infection, Osborne finds himself in a hospital restaurant with a fellow patient who has just told him he’s dying: “Women on crutches with face masks flirted openly with men suffering from epileptic fits and sciatica. Hobbling, limping, squinting, this injured mass proved that the sex drive is the supreme of all instincts and cannot be suppressed even by terminal cancer. We lust till we die, we concluded with some relief, and ordered Tuscan white bean soup.”


In THE LAST RESORT: A Memoir of Zimbabwe (Harmony, $24.99), Douglas Rogers, a white Zimbabwean expatriate, tells of his wrenching return to the backpackers’ hotel his parents built and still operate in that country’s fertile eastern highlands. Swept up in Robert Mugabe’s farm seizures and Zimbabwe’s economic implosion, the elderly couple watch as the tourists flee, then struggle to hang on financially, scheming to keep the property from falling into the hands of Mugabe’s cronies.






Rogers’s tale is reminiscent of Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” which described Godwin’s parents’ ruination in the capital, Harare. There are similar riffs on algae-infested swimming pools, break-ins, -hyperinflated Zim dollars and rampages by thuggish “war veterans.” But Rogers skirts the bigger political picture and instead homes in on the hotel as a microcosm of a collapsed country. His mother starts writing a cookbook called “Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State.” His father rents out the property’s abandoned guest houses to a sleazy entrepreneur who turns them into a brothel. Eventually, the hotel fills with dispossessed white farmers, a whole new source of eye-witness accounts of the country’s devastation.


Rogers chronicles his parents’ encounters with a boisterous black-market currency trader nicknamed Miss Moneypenny and with a Mugabe loyalist who appoints himself the family’s protector. And always there are the maneuverings of a sinister — and never identified — figure known only as Top Man, a high-ranking official who covets the hotel and its land. Throughout, Rogers’s father battles to outwit Mugabe’s henchmen: “He thought back to all the schemes he had adopted over the years to ward off the war veterans, the settlers, the Top Man, the Commissar. He’d hauled out the shotgun. Grown the bush wild. Erected an electric fence around the house. Shot at baboons and the poachers’ dogs just to let the settlers know that he had a gun.” This vibrant, tragic and surprisingly funny book is the best account yet of ordinary life — for blacks and whites — under Mugabe’s dictatorship.Ivan Vladislavic’s PORTRAIT WITH KEYS: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (Norton, paper, $14.95) is an unsettling portrait of Zimbabwe’s southern neighbor. Written as a series of snapshots of life during the first years after apartheid, this memoir-cum-prose poem from the South African-born son of Polish immigrants describes a city overwhelmed by poverty and crime. Among the emblematic details he shares with readers are the manholes Johannesburg’s growing homeless population uses as personal storage spaces, the ubiquitous “Gorillas” (expandable steel bars) employed by car owners to immobilize their steering wheels, and his own bulging key ring, filled with keys for burglar alarms, security doors and other barriers against thieves and marauders. Vladi¬slavic also follows the bizarre story of a real-life gorilla, Max, a denizen of the Johannesburg Zoo who is shot during a scuffle with an escaping robber and survives his wounds to become a local hero.





Seizing on unexpected details, Vladislavic describes the blurring lines between white and black Johannesburg. “The township is made of cardboard and hardboard,” he writes of the slapdash signs for painters, builders and other service providers that begin appearing across formerly whites-only enclaves: “Handpainted on unprimed plaster, scribbled on the undersides of things. . . . Tied to a fence with string, leaning against a yield sign, propped up by a brick, secured with a twist of wire, nailed to a tree trunk.”


Yet too many of Vladislavic’s mini-chapters consist of pointless anecdotes: allusions to friends and lovers who show up once or twice and never appear again, mystifying descriptions of construction sites and storage bins, monotonous encounters with inebriated beggars, parking attendants and other hustlers. However, his descriptions of a long-privileged, long-sheltered tribe, grappling with new realities, can be painfully effective. Gazing at his fellow white South Africans in an airport terminal, he writes: “In a brush cut’s yellow nap, the drawstring of a Woolworths track suit, a splay-heeled foot in a rubber slipslop, a way of lounging against one another like seals, we recognize our kind. Relieved and repulsed, we slip back into the brown water of South African speech.”


Justin Cartwright’s OXFORD REVISITED (Bloomsbury, $18) is a loving tribute to a different sort of cityscape. A South African-born novelist who graduated from Oxford University in the 1960s, Cartwright returns to the medieval campus nearly four decades later on a combination nostalgic tour and journalistic inquiry. Seeking to define the university’s greatness, Cartwright offers erudite meditations on everything from the solidity of its buildings (the color of their limestone is “a washed-out russet, like the skin of an obsolete apple”) to the fiercely individualistic lives of its students. These include the German Rhodes scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz, drawn home before World War II and executed for his part in the 1944 bomb plot against Hitler.


Cartwright visits the New Bodleian Library, where he inspects an original edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio and finds in the library’s “outward-looking, interested, open-minded” atmosphere a metaphor for Oxford itself. He offers sharply observed homages to the thinkers and writers — Isaiah Berlin, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Dodgson — who shaped Oxford’s discourse, and maps out the university’s peculiar mix of silly rituals and sublime intellectual life. In addition, the book retraces Cartwright’s own journey from callow teenager to confident young scholar-athlete. “That first October,” he writes of his early days on campus, “the shadows lengthening and then fading on the Front Quad, the bells pealing all over Oxford, figures cycling . . . through the thickening gloom, the soft halation of lights on walls, I had the overwhelming feeling that life had just begun.”In TRAVELING WITH POMEGRANATES: A Mother-¬Daughter Story (Viking, $25.95), Sue Monk Kidd (author of the novel “The Secret Life of Bees”) and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, embark on a series of European journeys to heal a rift in their relationship. The story unfolds between 1998 and 2000, when Kidd, then in her early 50s, was experiencing both menopause and writer’s block and her daughter was coping with depression after a failed romance and a graduate school rejection. Mother and daughter take turns narrating this sometimes overwrought tale, which evokes the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone to explore themes of death and rebirth, and the complex relationship between mother and daughter.Kidd’s passages have some lovely turns of phrase. Of a visit to a ruined Greek temple dedicated to the sorceress Hecate she writes: “A flight of steps leads up to a rectangular terrace where prickly cacti grow wild in the stone crevices like an incarnation of the crone Goddess herself — vexing, unbridled, subversive, tough and vibrantly green.” Kidd is brutally honest about her conflicted feelings toward Ann: “Perhaps all mothers of daughters possess a secret talking mirror that announces when their young womanhood begins to fade and their daughters’ begin to blossom.” The experience “can unleash a lacerating jealousy” or “usher in fears that I’ve sworn I’d never have. Of invisibility, anonymity, irrelevance. And deeper down, fears of decline and death.”



Eventually the pair reconcile and overcome their self-doubt — Sue through the burst of inspiration that led to her best-selling novel, Ann through a loving new boyfriend and a fledgling career as a writer. But too much of the book consists of pedestrian jaunts through all-too-familiar tourist locales — the Acropolis, the Louvre, even a bateau-mouche on the Seine. Kidd’s ruminations on aging grow tiresome, as does her daughter’s wallowing in misery. Eventually you wish they’d just lighten up.


In his introduction to the 2009 edition of THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, paper, $14), this year’s guest editor, Simon Winchester, laments the sorry state of American globe-trotting. Constrained by isolation and a historical lack of empire as well as a dismissive attitude toward foreign places, Americans, he argues, have never developed the wanderlust that characterizes their British cousins. (In United States high schools, Winchester points out, the word geography “is buried in a shallow grave . . . known as the social studies and humanities programs.”) Still, the contributions in this book prove that a restless, intrepid spirit isn’t unwelcome to American readers.


In “The Generals in Their Labyrinth,” which originally appeared in Outside magazine, the indefatigable Patrick Symmes travels to Myanmar on the eve of the 2008 cyclone that claimed more than 100,000 lives. As the weather worsens, Symmes makes his way to Naypyidaw, the Burmese junta’s newly built capital in the bush, “an open-air prison where functionaries twirl their fingers at make-work jobs and generals loot the budget.” Symmes — who wisely gives up on a plan to sneak into the house-prison of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in Yangon — vividly captures the paranoia and callousness of one of the world’s most appalling dictatorships.


Roger Cohen, a former foreign correspondent who is now a columnist for The International Herald Tribune, meets dissidents, revolutionaries and ordinary Cubans in his clear-eyed Times Magazine article “The End of the End of the Revolution,” and finds a population trapped in the grip of a senseless economic system, desperately awaiting the end of the American embargo.




Also memorable are Caroline Alexander’s “Tigerland,” about her trip to the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve, at the mouth of the Ganges River, for a look at one of the world’s rarest creatures, and Eric Weiner’s brief essay “My Servant,” about his relationship through the years with his Indian houseboy. Perhaps the most disturbing contribution is Paul Salopek’s “Lost in the Sahel,” which recounts this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s arrest and detention in Darfur. “He was built square as a butcher’s block, and at age 30 his hair was leached of color,” Salopek writes of Corporal Salah, the “chief whip man” at the prison in the town of El Fasher, where Salopek is detained on charges of being a spy. A brute who dreams of being a doctor, Corporal Salah “spoke to his victims tenderly, urging them not to be afraid, even as he scourged the hide on their backs.”


If that kind of scene quashes your urge to hit the road, you needn’t give up on new — even foreign — experiences. In fact, many of the most pleasant adventures can be found without traveling very far from home. The latest evidence appears in NEW YORK’S UNIQUE and UNEXPECTED ¬PLACES (Universe, $24.95), by Judith Stonehill and Alexandra Stonehill, and NEW YORK: The Big City and Its Little Neighborhoods (Universe, paper, $25), by Naomi Fertitta. The Stonehills’ delightful book is a guide to lesser-known but worthwhile museums, markets, shops, gardens and even a wilderness refuge. Among the highlights: the Map Room at the New York Public Library (a geography buff’s dream, packed with nautical charts, frontier-expedition maps and Dutch-colonial drawings that expose Manhattan’s “hilly topography”) and the garden at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, a hidden oasis of crab apple trees, roses and magnolias.


Fertitta’s book serves up mini-profiles of 20 ethnic enclaves across New York City, from Flatbush’s Little West Indies and Astoria’s Little Egypt to Little Senegal in Harlem. Her colorful juxtaposition of faces, foods and architecture is a bracing reminder of the city’s diversity. “In the course of exploring 20 neighborhoods, I was humbled,” Fertitta confesses, “by the fact that not only had I been unfamiliar with the ‘outer’ boroughs but, in fact, hardly knew these areas of Manhattan that were often only a short subway ride from my home. My great realization was that in my quest for sophistication, I had become just a provincial New Yorker who thought that the city began and ended at my front door.”


Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEWS WONDERFULLY

December 6, 2009


Holiday Books  -  Fans’ Notes


By JASON ZENGERLE


THE BOOK OF BASKETBALL


The NBA According to the Sports Guy
By Bill Simmons
Illustrated. 715 pp. Ballantine Books. $30


THE ART OF A BEAUTIFUL GAME


The Thinking Fan’s Tour of the NBA
By Chris Ballard
Illustrated. 228 pp. Sports Illustrated/Simon & Schuster. $26


Pity the sportswriter. Like the fletcher and the wheelwright, he seems fated to become that most tragic of figures — the craftsman rendered obsolete by technology. His predicament was ably summed up by one sports fan a few years ago: “Unlike the old days, we can watch every minute of every game on TV. We can watch the postgame press conferences. We can watch highlights and sound bites on ESPN. We can argue about the team with other fans on message boards and blogs. By the time most newspaper stories are published, the news always feels a little dated.”




The fan who offered these thoughts is actually a sportswriter himself: Bill Simmons, who writes the Sports Guy column for ESPN.com. But notice the “we.” Simmons writes about sports from the fan’s perspective. He avoids the press box, instead watching games from the stands or, more typically, on TV in his “man cave.” He prefers quoting his drinking buddies to quoting athletes. And his cultural references run more toward Paris Hilton than Paris in the ’20s. In other words, Simmons writes about sports the way fans — especially 20- and 30-something white guys who are in three fantasy leagues and dream of having their bachelor parties in Las Vegas — talk about them. And in the 12 years he’s been writing as the Sports Guy, he’s become, arguably, the most popular sportswriter in America, now scoring about 1.4 million page views a month. In the process, he’s pioneered a new (and, perhaps, the only currently vital) genre of sportswriting: the fan as scrivener.


Now Simmons has written “The Book of Basketball,” a 700-page best seller about his favorite sport that showcases the strengths — and, alas, the fundamental weakness — of this genre. On the plus side of the stat sheet are Simmons’s passion for and knowledge of the National Basketball Association. When he was just 4, his father, a Celtics season-ticket holder, began taking him to Boston Garden, where he watched a procession of basketball legends, most importantly Larry Bird. “I spent my formative years studying the game of basketball with Professor Bird,” Simmons writes. Over time, he supplemented what he learned from Bird by marinating himself in hoops media: in his bibliography he says he consulted nearly 100 books and about 400 game tapes, along with “every relevant N.B.A. feature from 1954 through 2000 in Sports Illustrated.” YouTube is singled out for its “unbelievable help.”


 All this research has given Simmons an unusually keen eye for the game, which he uses to try to resolve some of basketball’s thorniest debates — from judging Wilt versus Russell to ranking the top players of all time. (He stops at No. 96, leaving room to add four younger players over the next few years.) Simmons knows his “Money­ball” and isn’t averse to statistics, but he’s not in awe of them, either. “Basketball isn’t baseball,” he writes. “Basketball is an objective sport and a subjective sport, dammit.”





So, for instance, when justifying his ranking of Moses Malone as the 12th-best player in history, Simmons doesn’t just point out that Malone is “the greatest offensive rebounder ever by any calculation”; he explains how an undersize center with hands so small “he could barely palm a basketball” achieved that statistical feat. Malone “figured out a loophole in the rebounding system”: rather than trying to go around or over his man to crash the boards, he would lurk along the baseline, so that “when he felt like a shot was coming up, he’d slyly sneak under the backboard, start backing up, slam his butt into his opponent to create the extra foot of space he needed, then jump right to where the rebound was headed.”


Of course, if Simmons brought only passion and knowledge to the table, he wouldn’t be any different from one of the countless superfans calling in to their local sports radio shows. What makes him such a successful sportswriter, after all, is that he can flat out write. “The Book of Basketball” is a few hundred pages too long, but it’s never boring. Because practically every page features Simmons performing feats like perfectly encapsulating the career of Patrick Ewing (“a second banana masquerading as a first banana”) or vividly psychoanalyzing Kevin McHale’s habit of raising his arms in victory after Celtic road wins (“the one N.B.A. legend who felt obligated to rub his armpits in the collective faces of 18,000 fans”), the book is guaranteed to hold a reader’s interest.


But that ultimately is what’s so frustrating about it. Simmons has the writing chops to transcend the genre he’s established and maybe even turn out something that approaches his (and pretty much every sentient basketball fan’s) favorite hoops book, David Halberstam’s “Breaks of the Game,” but he doesn’t seem to want to. Thus, at various points in the book, he’ll arrive at some remarkable but overlooked chapter in N.B.A. history — like the episode in which the players selected for the 1964 All-Star Game threatened to sit it out two hours before tipoff unless the league agreed to a pension plan — and simply express his disbelief that no one has made an Emmy-winning documentary about it, instead of going to the trouble of telling the story himself. Similarly, his reliance on pop culture references, one of the hallmarks of the fan-as-scrivener genre, has become a crutch. He spends three pages on a pointless analogy between Kobe Bryant and the cheesy ’80s movie “Teen Wolf” and compares the Suns’ desperate efforts to trade Amare Stoudemire to Spencer and Heidi’s shopping “their fake wedding pictures,” as if anyone reading his book in five years will know who Spencer and Heidi are (something Simmons himself acknowledges in a jokey footnote).




Indeed, despite its doorstop-worthy heft, “The Book of Basketball” is very ephemeral, so much so that in an epilogue, Simmons admits that the Lakers’ winning the N.B.A. championship in June “sent my book into a tailspin,” since he’d finished his manuscript before the playoffs and had thus ranked Bryant too low (No. 15) on his list. In writing a book that seeks to mimic the conversations and arguments that take place among fans, rather than, like Halberstam, telling stories that fans might use to make and inform those arguments, Simmons has produced something that already feels a little dated.


Chris Ballard admirably reaches for timelessness with “The Art of a Beautiful Game.” Although he makes a few requisite head fakes in the direction of the new para­digm — subtitling the book “The Thinking Fan’s Tour of the NBA” and relating an odd anecdote about LeBron James’s flatulence — thisis a conventional work of sportswriting. Ballard, who writes about the N.B.A. for Sports Illustrated, sets out to explain and deconstruct various facets of the game, like blocking shots and running the point, and he turns to the players he covers for help.





Sometimes this leads to moments of insight. His chapter on the “killer instinct” delves into the psyche of Kobe Bryant, “the most competitive life-form on the planet.” Forget any labored “Teen Wolf”analogies; Ballard tells us everything we need to know about Bryant — why he’s so successful and why so many people hate him — with the story of Rob Schwartz, an undersize bench warmer on Bryant’s high school team whom Kobe forced into playing one-on-one games after practices and then routinely throttled, sometimes 80-0. Amazingly, Bryant still does this sort of thing. “If you scored on him in practice,” one of his former Lakers teammates tells Ballard, “he would just keep on challenging you and challenging you until you stayed after and played him so he could put his will on you and dominate you.”


Meanwhile, Ballard’s chapter on free-throw shooting reveals the mental toll it can take on a player with the sad tale of Nick Anderson, the Orlando Magic guard who notoriously blew Game 1 of the 1995 N.B.A. finals by missing four straight foul shots in the final seconds of regulation. For the rest of his career, Anderson, who had been a 70 percent free-throw shooter before choking, was a nervous wreck at the foul line. This ultimately caused him to become less aggressive on the court (for fear of winding up at the line) and eventually led to his early retirement. The missed free throws, Anderson tells Ballard, were “like a song that got in my head, playing over and over and over.”


But these — along with other, less interesting vignettes — only serve to illuminate basketball truths so blindingly obvious that anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the game already knows them. Do we really need Ballard to tell us that “sometimes a dunk is more than a dunk” or that “shooting is a matter of confidence”? Indeed, Ballard’s book helpfully reminds readers why the revolution in sportswriting that Simmons kick-­started was necessary in the first place. But it also highlights what’s missing from that genre. After reading “The Art of a Beautiful Game” and “The Book of Basketball,” I found myself wishing that Simmons, rather than merely holing up with a bunch of books and game tapes, had tagged along with Ballard on his reporting trips. After all, the strongest parts of “The Book of Basketball” are those that involved things Simmons experienced himself — whether as a youngster watching Bird at the Garden or as a journalist interviewing Bill Walton and Isiah Thomas. If these two books teach us anything, it’s that even the best newfangled sportswriter can learn something from a conventional one — namely, that it pays to get out of the man cave more often.


Jason Zengerle is a senior editor at The New Republic.



http://www.fcbarcelona.com/web/english/




                                                N  O     C  O  M  M  E  N  T

GAY MARRIAGE

Ricardo Mealha, 41, a Portuguese graphic designer and David Rodriguez, 28, were married
on Monday at a Lisbon disco in a symbolic ceremony that will soon be legal in Portugal.
The Socialist government gave the green light on Thursday to legalize gay marriages.
Portugal will join Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway in the list of European
nations that allow same-sex matrimony.
However, the Portuguese government’s proposal may not be hat easily accepted. The opposition
conservative party is pushing for the recommendation to be put to a vote in a national referendum.
Pedro Silva Pereira, chief of staff to Prime Minister José Sócrates, said that the bill will be
presented in January to the National Assembly. The proposed law is expected to be passed although
the Socialists lost their absolute majority in parliament
after this year’s general election. “It is a very positive step to construct a more just and tolerant
society,” Pereira said when announcing the measure onThursday. Sócrates and his Socialists
had promised same-sex marriage as part of their reelection campaign platform.

No adoption
However, unlike the law passed in 2005 in Spain, Portugal’s proposal won’t allow gay couples to
adopt. Sergio Vitorino, spokesman for the pro-gay rights group Panteras Rosa, criticized the government’s
decision not to allow gay couples to legally adopt. He said that the current adoption law prohibits individuals from adopting, regardless of their sexual persuasion. “Here nothing has been done to produce a cultural change, and now they’re beginning with a measure dictated from on high,” Vitorino complained. Still,
the idea of marriage for Mealha and his partner Rodrigues is something more than just exchanging
vows. “This is more than just celebrating our love. It is also a way of affirming our commitment to changing Portugal’s  mentality,” they said.

EL PAÍS (ENGLISH EDITION) with THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
December 19, 2009



MEN AND WOMEN (by Elvira Lindo)


  Drawing by Robert Crumb, a must-have indeed (but I didn'd dare show a naughtier one. Sorry )

Sometimes, when I was a little girl, I wanted to be a boy. Not out of penis envy, but just to be treated as boys were treated. I envied their liberty, the less rigid norms that applied to them, their freedom from domestic chores, the indulgence with which mothers viewed their defects. Later I discovered
that what I wanted was to have the same rights, and to be strengthened with the same degree of self-esteem.


There are children who have an innate talent for mathematics, or for sports; I quickly developed an implacable sense of equality and justice: I had no tolerance for being cold-shouldered. And here I am. I don’t want to be treated with the paternalism that infantilizes women until they collapse of old age, nor with the disdain that female public figures sometimes have to bear. Just as I felt uncomfortable in my girl’s role, there were boys for whom the degree of manhood demanded of them was too great. These men have welcomed feminism. They are men who listen to women, and detest the male complicity of hard-boiled laddie talk. They and we, who never liked the segregated world of our childhood (girls on one side, boys on the other)
are enjoying this other world where complicity is possible between the sexes.


I have read, of course, the now famous article by Enrique Lynch published last month in EL PAÍS, which
was unpleasing to many women readers, who seemed to think that something ought to be done to shut this
man up. The most striking thing about the article was the way it mixed sosensitive a matter as male violence (a crime) with certain misogynous habits that women have to put up with on a daily basis. But there is something barely apparent in Lynch’s article that stood out in the indignant letters from readers: the acceptance of a world dividein two. On this side we the women; on that side they the men. We are the innocent, they the guilty. Or, inversely, women are out for feminist revenge, and men are the victims of
this threatening wave. I refuse to accept these rules of the game, among others things because they do not reflect reality. Most of the men I know detest violence; most men have never struck a woman; many
young men have never harassed a girlfriend; men who rape their daughters are a social abnormality. So why not include male rejection of these things alongside our own? Why not play on the same team?


All this is on account of a poster I saw lately for a campaign against gender violence, with the slogan, “no
woman will be less than me.” I am seldom satisfied with the government’s campaigns on social matters.
First I am tired of seeing the same faces of famous people from one campaign to the next. Nor do the slogans sound quite right. They are not subtle, when not all the dominance is always on the male side in the lives of couples, and any general statement about them all would have to be very subtle indeed.
I like to think that men, the sort who were never happy in the role of little man of the house that their mothers gave them, enjoy having women walking by their side. My dear Chekhov, so unjustly accused of misogyny
(how blind the critics can be) wrote to his brother: “Remember, it was despotism and lies that ruined our mother’s youth. The same despotism so mutilated our childhood, that it is sickly and fearful to even think of it. Remember the horror and disgust we felt those times when father made a fuss at dinner
because the soup was too salty, and shouted at mother that she was an idiot. There is just no way that father
can beg forgiveness now for all that.” He wrote this more than a century ago: even then, there were men who were on our side.

 EL PAÍS (ENGLISH EDITION) December 19, 2009



More law, less smoke.

The loopholes in the existing anti-tobacco law
and new attitudes make reform necessary

AFTER FOUR years of a widely flouted anti-tobacco law, it is high time for serious
discussion on its shortcomings and its necessary reform. This is the view of the health minister, Congress and a majoritty of the Spanish public: 70 percent of Spanish citizens are in favor of total prohibition of consumption of tobacco in all enclosed public places, a notable toughening of the norm.


The anti-tobacco law that entered into effect on January 1, 2006 allows smoking
in small bars (of less than 100 square meters). Certain regional governments
controlled by the Popular Party (PP) such as those of Valencia and Madrid,
have never prosecuted infractions, and have freed larger establishments of the
obligation to install physical barriers to separate smoking from non-smoking zones. The result,             favored by the various loopholes, is that there is no clear-cut norm that the citizen can utilize to demand
the observance of the law, and that in 90 percent of bars and restaurants,
either it is possible to smoke, or there are no reserved areas for smokers.


The existing law’s entry into effect saw only a modest reduction in tobacco sales, while the percentage of smokers is around 24 percent of people of 18 years of age. But, viewed in perspective, it is
seen to have produced positive results on the health side. In its first year of implementation
a lesser incidence of heart attacks was registered, and Spanish people smoke, in general, more moderately than they did before. The majority of workplaces (with the exception of service jobs
in the leisure industry) have been free of smoke, and fears of widespread tension
provoked by the law have proved groundless.


Between the extremes of those who clamored against what they termed a Draconian measure, and the anti-tobacco fundamentalists, an acceptable level of coexistence has emerged, as well as habits of respect that did not previously exist. Some definitive consequences of the law have been a change of mentalities
that favors a much calmer sort of debate than that which took place in 2005, and broad popular support for a reform that would promulgate a drastic prohibition, and a clean-cut one.


The Health Ministry has promised to undertake the reform during the first quarter of next year. The total prohibition of tobacco in all closed public establishments would bring Spanish legislation
into line with other European countries, and would implement the recommendations that came from Brussels
some time ago. Now that the tobacco sector, less active than in the past, has been neutralized, the major remaining obstacle is the bar and restaurant industry, which estimates its losses for 2010, on account of
the prohibition, at 11 billion. Some studies maintain that neither here nor in other countries have anti-tobacco measures substantially harmed this industry’s interests.


Their concerns are legitimate, but hardly acceptable in the face of due
protection of public health, and the will of the public and its representatives.
With this reform, the degree of harm will at least be equal for everyone, given that
now only the large bars and restaurants are concerned.

EL PAÍS English Edition, December 22, 2009

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Young Rajoy?

Mariano Rajoy