Losing And Finding Their Religion

Should it come as any great surprise that the youth in the Balearics are less religious than their parents or grandparents? It would surely be a surprise if they were more religious. How much can one read into the fact that a Gadeso survey has revealed that half of those aged between 16 and 29 say they don't believe in any religion and that almost 80% of Catholics between these ages admit they don't practise the religion? This compares with 70% of 30 to 44 year-olds who reckon that they are believers or 91% of the over-65s.

The Gadeso survey discovers, again no surprise, that 90% of the youthful sector favour abortion and that the percentages are lower among the older groups. There is almost unanimous agreement among the young that the system of financing of the Catholic Church, one that the last Zapatero government was going to get tough on but backed down on, is wrong. The oldsters think it is ok, though only by a small majority.

Youthful rebellion and all that, but is there more to this apparent irreligiousness than simply refusing to go to church or to the fact, as was shown in 2010, that the numbers who take religious education in secondary schools has declined significantly - a mere 15%?

Doubtless there will be hand wringing and head shaking by church supporters at what will be perceived as a moral and religious decline among the youth. It will be interpreted as a manifestation of the corrupting influence of secularism, and there will probably be some fundamentalists who try and twist the government's arm into introducing laws to herd the young into church on a Sunday morning. But they would of course be totally wrong to try and do so. I have no disagreement with those who are religious and no desire to cause any offence, but a personal conviction of deep irreligiousness places me firmly on the side of the Balearics youth.

This religious rejection comes against the background of the election of the new pope, coverage of which seemed to be just as obligatory in non-Catholic Britain as it was in Spain. Quite why an ancient Argentinian who has landed himself a decent sinecure in his old age should command so many column inches or so many TV images is beyond me. Incidentally, does anyone know how much the pope earns? Again, no disrespect meant, but why was the coverage so important other than for highlighting the various issues that Pope Francis should be tackling, like making the church rather more in tune with the twenty-first century, or the twentieth, come to that?

You may construe from all this that I don't have a great deal of time for the church. In fact, I do. For some of it what it does, notably its charity work. Caritas is a noble and honourable organisation. It, along with the Spanish Red Cross, does vastly more than the government does to help the disadvantaged. I have all the time in the world for it. And it no doubt is of help to the disadvantaged young that are being tossed onto the economic rubbish dump. If Caritas benefits from the church's state funding or from the very small percentage of tax on incomes (0.7%) that taxpayers have opted to divert directly to the church's charitable works, then so be it.

I am also not totally against the favourable tax arrangements that the church has, as in it tends not to pay any property taxes when the earthly do. But so long as it is clear that this is a tax advantage that goes towards the upkeep of wonderful churches that demand being preserved as part of cultural heritage. That the church has proved to be obstructive in entering into discussions with the government over its paying at least some more tax does it no great favours. As Spain's second largest landowner, it's not exactly short of a bob or two.

But to come back to the youth and their religious beliefs or lack of them, the latest survey shows little change to one that was conducted in 2010. When there is another one in 2016, the result will probably be roughly the same again. It is a natural youth thing, one that is subject to changing; there are no doubt some potential career-advancement opportunities by being associated with the church as they get older. What the survey shows, in all likelihood, is a pretty much normal situation. The youth can lose their religion when they are young, but when it becomes useful, they can just as easily find it again.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Taking Grapes From A Blind Man

There is a Spanish tale about a poor child who is the servant to a blind man. It is a tale about how the child, Lazaro, learns cunning and how to cheat the cheaters. In the tale he is eating grapes with the blind man. They share them one at a time. The man then starts to take two, so Lazaro takes three. When the grapes are finished, the man calls Lazaro a cheat. Lazaro asks him why. The man says that if he cheats and if the boy says nothing, he will assume that the boy is cheating as well. The moral of the story (such as it is) is that everyone tries to cheat everyone else.

I have paraphrased this outline of what is in fact a famous Spanish tale. I have taken it from an article* on Smart Planet by the American, Barcelona-based writer Jennifer Riggins. It is unsurprising that the tale is as apparently famous as it is, as it is a fable for Spanish culture; success comes to those not who work hard and take risks but to those who are crafty and cunning - those who are cheats or, if you prefer, crooks.

I know a businessman and a pillar of society. Actually, I don't know him personally. I know of him and I know who he is. I also know what he is. I see him from time to time. He drives an ostentatiously large vehicle, the size of which is matched only by the gargantuan cigar which is permanently in his mouth. I am not someone prone to spite or to malevolence, but I would happily shove that cigar right down his fat neck. Why? Because of what I know about him.

I would like to believe that there are businesspeople who have achieved what they have through hard work and risk-taking and through these alone. I can think of some of whom I would be sorry to learn that they had achieved what they have by less than totally honourable means. But I wonder how many have followed this virtuous path to success. Jennifer Riggins says: "Spanish history and culture don't teach the philosophy of success by hard work and risk-taking but to have respect for those who have gained success through acting craftily and cunningly". Amen.

A preference for the spoils of graft as opposed to graft (the word graft has two very different meanings) is one that elicits the not untypical response of "ah yes, but this is Spain", a response by both Spaniards and non-Spaniards. This is Spain. Yes, so it is. And look where it is. Cheating of all types is one reason for the country being where it is and one reason why getting away from where it is will be so damn difficult. It is a response that has to stop.

Spain has a national government that currently faces the embarrassment of being accused of harbouring some cheats of its own. Shrugging off this embarrassment, it seeks to find a way out of the ruddy great hole that the country is in by suggesting that it will make incentives available to entrepreneurs, young ones at that. The government has recently discovered a new political toy, one called entrepreneurialism and one, so the government hopes, that will lead Spain to a promised land of economic salvation. The government's hopes are misplaced. It is playing with its toy in a country not prone to being entrepreneurial or to honouring business risk-takers. Instead, it is a country that honours the dishonourable. It will argue that it doesn't and that it empowers judges and prosecutors to bring the dishonourable to book. Sometimes they are, but for the most part, "this is Spain" means that they aren't and so the wheel of honouring the cheats turns yet again.

The young, these mythical young entrepreneurs of which the government speaks, look on and see that cheating, taking more grapes than the blind man, is the way to succeed. They can see greater success from one form of graft over another, because this is how it is. This is Spain. They have no entrepreneurial streak because the education system prevents it, because parental attitudes are still fixed in times when education mattered only for its menial or dissatisfying consequence, because the banks prevent it, because the preferred option is for a life of non-productive, non-value-added civil service work (and if not this, then being a bar worker or some summer beach bum).

Yes, this is Spain. Spain of such tradition. Like the twelve grapes at New Year. Or thirteen, if you are with a blind man.

* http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/global-observer/why-the-spanish-arent-entrepreneurs/9312


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Ill Manors - The Majorca Re-mix

Let's all go on a summer holiday
The telly makes us less than ignorant
So we know it's true
That means off-face pissed and violent
She's got business for more than a hug
On second thoughts you don't wanna get mugged
Oh shit, too drunk that was simply dumb
Whose idea was that balcony
He's lost his life, haven't we all
Be a diver, act the fool
What's holidays all in all
Inclusive gaff, sex rituals
Not all year round, not at all
Fewer months before the Fall
Get away with thieving in town halls
Four figure bungs the minimum rule
We're all liars, piss takers
Every single one expat's not what they say
Keep on believing what you read in the papers
Airhead, air-heeled "girls", sloshed blokes all day
Think you know how life on a paradise island is
From everything you've ever read about it or heard
Well it's all true, but not truth that's nicest
There's no need to set foot on the strip
Truth is here, Stacey lets it rip
The cheats and lies, we've lost our grip
Feed the fear that's what we've found
Crisis reigns, we all fall down

Oi! I said oi!
What you thinking of, you stupid Raj-oy!
We're poor round here, run home and lock our doors
But there's no homes no more, we're getting robbed for
Real (yeah) makes my manors ill
My manners ill
For real
Yeah you know we've taken ill, crisis ill!

You'll get found in a beach concrete jungle
New hotels keep ripping up our nature
Whichever road leads to a blinged-up Russian
Hoods in hoods rob blind and fracture
We've got an eco-friendly government
Waste imports help pay Endesa
Built an entire congress centre
Around where we live for sale for rent flats
Take away our money and keep raising tax
Island's health care, yes please many thanks
Petrol tax for health so less in the tanks
Nice knowing there's the FO when we get attacked
Don't give us all that
We're all losing our temper
When'll they close down the consulate centre?
Killing time in what used to be winter
Tourism's confined from May to September
Schools don't work, which language rules, let's get out
People hurting, I predict a riot
Year in year out
No one knows if things'll turn about
What does the King say? Stuff about the youth
Kids on the street no they'll never work, only looking for cheap
Street drinking at botellón proof
All go looting
No not Luton
Stacey, it's closer, cover your eyes
But if you see, you might realise
It'll make you wish you'd stayed outside
Here's what you get for corruption, all the lies
Do what Rajoy does ... smoke a cigar

Oi! I said oi!
What you thinking of, you stupid Raj-oy!
We're poor round here, run home and lock our doors
But there's no homes no more, we're getting robbed for
Real (yeah) makes my manors ill
My manners ill
For real
Yeah you know we've taken ill, crisis ill!

We've had it with corrupt politicians
The bloody rich kids always prosper
'Cos of papa's millions in broken Majorca
Everyone else broke in Majorca
What needs fixing is society
And that means all the impropriety
It's not Stacey's television
It's all the crooks who should be in prison

Oi! I said oi!
What you thinking of, you stupid Raj-oy!
We're poor round here, run home and lock our doors
But there's no homes no more, we're getting robbed for
Real (yeah) makes my manors ill
My manners ill
For real
Yeah you know we've taken ill, crisis ill!


* With full acknowledgement to Ben Drew (Plan B).



 


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Going Benalup: Unemployment and easy credit

There is a town in the province of Cádiz in Andalusia that has the worst unemployment rate in Europe. It is called Benalup (or Benalup-Casas Viejas, to give it its full name). In an article by Giles Tremlett in "The Observer" on Sunday, the collapse of what, for a brief time, had become a boom town is chronicled, and the story of Benalup tells you mostly all you need to know about why Spain is in such a mess and is going to have one hell of a struggle getting out of it.

Benalup is by no means unique, even if it can lay claim to that unwanted unemployment crown. Spain is full of Benalups, and Mallorca shares its problems. To summarise Tremlett's main points, the Benalup belly-up effect was founded on excessive credit and on a glut of construction jobs that paid well and took teenagers out of education.

It won't sit well with the La Caixa bank, known also for its Obra Social good works programmes, that it gets fingered as having triggered a lending war among the banks that flooded into the town in search of mortgage customers, many of them young and having turned their backs on school in the knowledge that they could earn handsome wages in the construction industry.

Construction was the first and most obvious victim of economic crisis, and it took its labour force down with it. In Benalup, those who had left school at sixteen and who had embarked on a side career of avaricious material grab are just part of the almost 50% of Spain's under-25s that are unemployed. This material grab has left Benalup, as Tremlett remarks, "plastered with 'for sale' signs", those of La Caixa's estate-agency arm, which has been forced to repossess.

Much of the construction was centred on the coastal area. The Benalup story, therefore, is a not unfamiliar one of the two heads of construction and tourism that is the economy of much of Spain, Mallorca included. But Benalup, some kilometres inland, doesn't have the luxury of the fallback position of tourism. Without the construction on the coast, it doesn't really have anything.

The dependence on construction and tourism in different parts of Spain is just one factor that has undermined Spain’s economy. Subject to the vagaries of economic cycles, both industries also contribute to a devaluing of the general skills base and of the education system. Easy money can be had, or could, and the state would provide some assistance in the winter for those less inclined to slog around a building site.

The education system is not that great anyway, and in Mallorca it is particularly poor. But through a combination of the system’s inadequacies, a lack of incentive to stay in education and the promise of riches from humping bricks about (now gone), general competitiveness is also undermined.

One solution to the unemployment in Benalup is a state­-funded training course, assuming you can get on it. Not that it necessarily opens up subsequent employment opportunities, as the course is for graphic design. In Mallorca, there are any number of young graphic designers. They are two a penny. Many are good, but where’s the work? Economies do not generate wealth or growth through graphic design. It is a pitiable non-­solution.

The Zapatero administration presided over the end-game of the great Spanish boom. It deserves to be criticised, but it is not alone. Successive governments have perpetuated an aspirational dream for a country that was in the economic dark ages only half a century ago. One mistake, aided by the banks, was to break with a traditional cash­-based society and replace it with one based on credit, and very easy and loose credit at that. The country’s richness, as evident from a lofty position in the IMF GDP league table, obscures a reality of over­dependence on certain industries and a lack of competitiveness.

There is fortunately some realism coming from the newly elected government, an acceptance that Spain isn’t that rich and that the mechanisms for granting the population the trappings of aspirational wealth were largely built on sand. Within a framework of this new realism, how, though, can Rajoy set about realising his election promises, such as that to reduce unemployment?

I’ll have a look at that in a further article. But for now, and notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish electorate does appear to “get it” where the country’s parlous position is concerned, I’ll leave you with a piece of history. In 1933, Benalup was the centre of an anarchist uprising and a police massacre.

Thank God it's not 1933.


The original "Observer" article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/20/spain-benalup-unemployment-euro-crisis

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Coughing Blood: The bullfight

AnimaNaturalis is not popular. Animal rightists, it offends traditional animal abusers, other animal-rights groups and a fair chunk of what you might think would comprise its natural support, the youth. Its modus operandi of strident agitprop and public protest, be it against the correbou, the circus or the bullfight has failed to garner significant popular support.

Last year AnimaNaturalis staged a protest in advance of the bull-run correbou in the village of Fornalutx. It was most revealing that to the fore among those hurling insults in its direction were the young.

A curious and ill-formed philosophy, if one can use such a word, exists among Mallorcan youth, especially that in more rural areas. Catalanist, Luddite in a hankering for a return to the values of the land and in rejecting mass tourism, politically right-on in being eco-conscious, it is also largely politically incorrect in respect of animal welfare.

Whereas this youth philosophy coincides, to differing degrees, with the values of certain political parties and campaigning groups like the eco-warriors of GOB, it diverges on the matter of animals and animal tradition. It is cultural fundamentalism.

AnimaNaturalis is not popular because it poses difficult questions. In attacking traditions to do with animals, it also attacks an insularity of Mallorcan society by confronting it with issues that this society is ill-equipped to deal with; ill-equipped because a not untypical Mallorcan response to individual or collective attack is to adopt a haughty and petulant righteousness. Mallorcans are argumentative, but they are not great at argument or with dealing with confrontation.

The unpopularity of AnimaNaturalis extends to other animal rights groups who prefer, they say, greater diplomacy. A reason for these other groups distancing themselves from AnimaNaturalis in Fornalutx was that they believed their approach would have brought about greater concessions from the village mayor in amending the correbou. Instead, the mayor, though he did make some changes, was pushed into a corner in siding with those who lobbed the insults at AnimaNaturalis. Or so it was claimed.

There is another way of looking at this. AnimaNaturalis is not passive. As much as fierce defence, passivity is what symbolises attitudes towards animal rights and most obviously the bullfight. It was once explained to me that there would be greater public displays of protest against the bullfight were it not for the fact that people do not wish to be seen or cannot afford to be seen to be protesting. This is cultural fundamentalism of a different order; it is one with echoes of a style of Mallorcan feudalism, the passing of which was only relatively recent and which thus remains within society's consciousness as well as within some of its current-day mores.

Though opinion polling has shown that the popularity of the bullfight has declined in Spain as a whole, the lobby for its continuance is strong, as is the social dynamic which appears to neuter protest. In an uppity and liberal part of Spain such as Catalonia, the dynamic operates in reverse, so much so that legislation was driven by popular petition to ban the bullfight. Yet a Catalanist sympathy among some of Mallorca's youth does not extend to what has been nuanced as the real reason for Catalonia's bullfight ban - anti-Spanishness.

In Mallorca the numbers that have gathered to protest at the annual bullfights in Alcúdia, Muro and Inca have been small to the point of irrelevance. In Inca AnimaNaturalis couldn't have anticipated what might actually prove to be a turning-point in both its fortunes and the whole bullfight debate in Mallorca.

One of the bulls was on the rampage. No matador was to be seen. The bull was unscathed, it was being taunted from the safety of the wooden barrier and the terraces. Until, that is, the promoter of the event took it upon himself to act as matador, thus, so it is claimed, breaking a regulation that only those listed, i.e. the matadors, can participate.

There is a video on You Tube which has gone not exactly viral but which shows what happened. I have been to the bullfight and I have witnessed similar scenes, but I had a sharp intake of breath when I saw the bull cough blood and stumble having been struck with the sword by the promoter-matador. I am neither for nor against the bullfight, for the reason that it is not my argument, but this was sickening, and the power of the video might be to persuade those whose passivity has been the norm and those of a culturally fundamental bent to recognise that perhaps AnimaNaturalis has a point.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.