Malaga, Spain — I have been tooling around the south of Spain
in search of anti-Americanism and the perfect bullfight. The
anti-Americanism does not seem to be much in evidence. There was an
homunculus waiter in Seville who became unpleasantly abrupt when my
tip did not live up to his expectations — expectations that
perhaps become a bit elevated when a Yank swaggers in. Yet, that is
about it. Of course, I have been in the company of ordinary
Spaniards, not university professors or parlor intellectuals, and
those are the types that incubate such brilliant ideas as
anti-Americanism.
In a very interesting article in this summer’s issue of the
Public Interest, James W. Ceaser, a professor of politics
at the University of Virginia, reminds us that anti-Americanism
began in the Eighteenth Century from the musings of such eggheads
as the aptly named Count de Buffon, the leading biologist of his
day and I presume a Frenchman. According to Buffon and his
associates, America was a dank continent where all life degenerated
owing to the climate, particularly its humidity. Well, anyone
living as I do in Washington would have to agree with the
simple-minded Count that the humidity in Washington is killing. Yet
even in the Count’s day, intelligent life simply vacated Washington
for more clement regions during the humid season. The only
degenerate forms of life that remained were probably French spies
and European freeloaders.
Nonetheless what Professor Ceaser calls the “degeneracy thesis”
of America became as important to many European intellectuals in
the Eighteenth Century as balmy Marxism became for their successors
in the Twentieth Century. European intellectuals (and for that
matter many of their American equivalents) are easily enraptured by
academic daydreams about reality. The superior intellectuals
(European and American alike) seek to explain reality by empirical
investigations, and three of America’s best known empiricists, A.
Hamilton, T. Jefferson, and B. Franklin, slaughtered the
“degeneracy thesis” with cool reason.
According to the Buffon theory, as Hamilton explained it in
The Federalist Papers, “all animals, and with them the
human species, degenerate in America…even dogs cease to bark
after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere.” Well, it was no
problem for the three Americans to summon up whole neighborhoods
filled with barking dogs, and in Jefferson’s Notes on the State
of Virginia the master of Monticello pointed out other
thriving American phenomena that put the laugh to Buffon the
buffoon. Franklin went beyond barking dogs and America’s obviously
vigorous commerce to demonstrate his own stupendous vigor in the
very salons of Paris and London. Nonetheless anti-Americanism
merely picked up steam, claiming at first that the Founding
Fathers’ notion of universal rights would lead to weak government,
that American entrepreneurship would lead to bacchanal, and that
commerce made people stupid. Today a review of the constituent
elements of the anti-American rant reveals it as nothing more than
a sour mixture of jealousy, stupidity, and fear of tomorrow. Here
in Spain I have encountered little of it.
Yet, as I say, I have been with normal everyday Spaniards. They
are a dignified people. Their language is elegant. They are honest
and have a famous code of honor. Frankly, I, as an admirer of
Italy, do not know why I did not come upon Spain sooner. The Costa
del Sol, Spain’s southwest Mediterranean coast, certainly puts me
in mind of Italy’s sunny coasts, and if the food is not quite up to
Italian standards it is good enough. Yes, the Spaniard is more
restrained than the Italian, but given the Italian’s incomparable
exuberance what else could one expect? The Spanish character is
sufficiently lively for me. The artifacts seen throughout Spain
testify to its grandeur and momentous history.
As I said in the vestibule of this column, I have been pursuing
the perfect bullfight. Actually that was a flight of rhetoric, for
I would not recognize a perfect bullfight any more than I would
recognize a perfect matzo ball, and I have read Papa Hemingway’s
Death in the Afternoon twice. It is a study of Spanish
bullfighting, but sitting here in the bullrings of Spain I am still
not really sure what makes the crowds applaud. The applause is not
rowdy or bloodthirsty. In fact, compared to the crowds at a New
York City baseball game, the Spanish bullfight aficionados are
downright demure.
Many Americans are in attendance at these bullfights, a
surprisingly large number of them young women. At least three of
the types of participants in the fight are very gifted athletes,
the banderilleros, the cuadrillas, and of course
the matadors. The fat picadores sitting on their embattled
horses and poking lances into the bull are to my mind repulsive,
and Hemingway felt that of all the participants the ones most
deserving of pity were the horses. The bulls are very handsome,
have enormous strength, and accelerate like huge Mercedes sedans
across the ring. I would not want to be in one’s path. Most end up
on someone’s dinner table, often, I am told, at a shelter for the
homeless.
Possibly this is just public relations fluff, provided by
aficionados of the bullring but I have fallen for it. Now I too am
an aficionado and I am returning to America to begin the
Humanitarian Association for the Advancement of Bullfighting in
Beverly Hills, California. It is time the Hollywood stars do
something more for the homeless than merely harass Republican
presidents.
