Notes from Granada
08:06 on Wednesday, November 03, 2004 • Comment
I’m currently typing at you from an internet cafe in Granada, Spain. Forgive chickenscratches and heavy accents. I’m using a keyboard designed for people who purposefully speak with a lithp.
An eerie realization came upon me a few days ago. When Gore conceded the 2000 election, I was also in Spain. In Andalucia, even. The laws of causality are hard to deny. Never again will I travel to Spain in November of an election year.
The absence of all-things-political on etherfarm has been intentional. While a political utterance has been known to bubble to the surface of this website from time to time, in the last year or so the signal-to-noise ratio of political discourse on weblogs has dropped considerably, and I find the kind of off-the-cuff vitriolic ranting in posts and comments on most sites, including this one, does nothing to attenuate my cynicism.
One of the reasons I’ve embarked on epic roadtrips, particularly since I moved to Santa Cruz, is to get some perspective on a hyper-American America which doesn’t make sense in the abstract. Santa Cruz is arguably the most left-leaning town in the U.S.A., and I find it entirely impossible to gauge political and ideological reality through the marijuana-and-patchouli scented haze of amplified idealism and arbitrary activism found in the place I’ve reluctantly called home for the last five years. So I putter about the nation, finding myself in what’s commonly referred to as ‘the heartland’, realizing that the headiness of liberal idealism doesn’t—and perhaps can’t—diffuse the tangibility of the conservative landmarks which dot the landscape. The churches and bibles and cornfields and Fourth-of-July celebrations.
The other day, in Marbella, someone was describing to me her idea of the average American: fat, boisterous, cliche-spouting, hand-on-heart while watching an all-American laser show at Stone Mountain, Georgia. I did my best to assure her that Americans aren’t really like that, and that all countries sadly possess their own collection of patriots who are really just caricatures of themselves. A few days later, and I have to concede. Perhaps its those of us who insist that such caricatures are a minority are, in fact, the caricatures. If Bush does walk away with this one, I’ll tell you one thing—it’ll be that much harder to convince anyone outside the States that the average American has half a brain.
Anyway, just a few murmurs from a somber Grenada. I think I’ll go bury my face in a mountain of tapas. Again.
p.s. weblog spam has gotten out of hand, and I’m just not going to fight it anymore. Please put up with it until I return back to the States next week.