Letter From Pamplona

While many of my friends and acquaintances are undergoing sensitivity training, attending diversity awareness seminars, performing selfless acts of mandatory volunteerism and suffering other forms of counseling-induced madness masquerading as political correctness, I’ve been going through my own personal version of what Nietzsche called “Die Umwertung aller Werte”–the transvaluation of all values.

I left the United States fourteen months ago, because I’m an insensitive, selfish bastard who couldn’t take any more of the lockstep PC mentality being shoved down the American public’s throat.  I longed for a life without intrusive spokespeople, pundits, self-help gurus, lifestyle Nazis, [fill-in-the-blank] advocates, angry feminists and clueless academics polluting my mind with gold-medal winning performances rarely achieved in the ongoing Olympics of human stupidity.

After six months of rediscovering the joys of fascism in Switzerland, I spent three months living in a 15th century palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice–and then settled down in Paris, in a fifth floor walkup at the north end of the 11th arrondissement, just off Rue Oberkampf in the triangle between Bastille, Republique and the up-and-coming multiethnic melange of Mènilmontant.

This was the Paris of the working class and the bohemian artists who attach themselves to this lifestyle.  It’s a fairly predictable pattern: poverty and cheap rents attract artists, which attract the branchè trendies who wanted to be seen as cutting-edge and hip, which attract the gentrification of trendy bars, cafes, galleries and renovated buildings, driving the poor even farther east as the area becomes safe for tourists to explore.  Then the artists move on and the pattern repeats itself.

But until that happened, areas like Mènilmontant have an amazing sense of energy to go along with the dirt and the downtrodden and the graffiti.  The mix of people walking down Rue Oberkampf–Africans in colorful tribal garb, Asians, Turks, Arabs and the occasional white artistic type–represent a true mix of diversity brought about by need and circumstance that made the American mania for government-enforced multiculturalism and political correctness look like the joke it is.   Not that there wasn’t tension…but the tension only added to the overall sense of energy.

The perfect place, then, to write and reevaluate what drove me into expatriate exile in the first place.  And now that the money has finally run out and I’m preparing to return to the United States, it’s time to take stock of my Nietzschean odyssey.

In Europe I’ve been spared the Monica/Bill scandal hype, the Phantom Menace hype, the death of America’s Prince hype, the media election of George W. a year and a half before the election hype and pretty much the entire re-education camp once known as the Land of Freedom.

In Europe, there are no advocates hammering away at you (okay, there are the few lunatics on the Paris metro or the occasional communist demonstration through the streets of Bologna or the clockwork Swiss Fascists who’ve outlawed flushing the toilet after 10pm) 24/7 on radio, TV and silver screen, in the boardroom and in the bedroom, self-appointed experts whose opinions are invariable and unfailingly wrong–but then again, being right isn’t the point.  Power over your freedom to choose is the point; the power to deny you your right to experience the world for yourself.

And so I’ve chosen to accept the great lesson of Western Civilization: embrace the healthy pleasure of enjoying life.  Which is increasingly harder to do in America, since so many others are employed trying to make your life as miserable as theirs.

Take food, for example.  There are no fat-free, high calorie, reduced cholesterol chemical recreations of nature’s gifts in the markets here.  In fact, I haven’t thought of calories or fat grams or cholesterol or eating disorders or drinking abuse in months.  I eat butter–regularly.  I drink wine–daily.  I consume fois gras with relish and really don’t give a damn whether or not they nail the goose’s feet down and force feed it grain through a tube–this is a goose, not my Aunt Mabel.  Yesterday, I drank a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and a bottle of Haut Medoc–and no one lectured me about my impending need for rehab.  Instead, a friend recommended a nice Sauterne for dessert.

And I haven’t watched television in a year.

I’ve visited monuments and museums, spent hours looking at cathedrals and campaniles, Tintorettos and Titians, Manets and Monets, Pissaros and Picassos–but nowhere in Europe did the difference between the mass stupidity of contemporary American political correctness and the beauty of traditional European culture hit me like it did at the Fiesta of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain.

Now before you think “oh, Christ, another macho miscreant pedaling the hype of the Hemingway centennial,” this really isn’t another How-I-Ran-With-Papa-At-Pamplona story.  And it’s not a heartwarming, sensitive Billy Crystal-City-Slickers-Midlife-Crisis-Story, either.  My purpose here is to show you what happens beyond the ESPN camera perspective of the 890 yard dash to the Pamplona corrida and the daily injury report in your local newspaper (Friday, 9 July: “Bulls 6, People 0”).  The Fiesta is a truly shocking spectacle of excess to American inhibitions.  And I loved every minute of it.

As far as contemporary Bacchanalian orgies go, the Fiesta of San Fermin is one of the better ones.  A byproduct of thousands of years of Mediterranean bull worship cults, Hemingway aficionados and the human desire to drink oneself into physical and moral paralysis, the Basque mountain city of Pamplona plays host to over a hundred thousand tourists during the week of July 6-14th.  This being the year of the Hemingway Centennial and the anniversary of my having survived a year of living in Europe, I decided to do a little celebrating myself.

That’s how I found myself surrounded by water bottles filled with cheap Rioja wine, cans of Danish beer, hashish-laced cigarettes, rum, whiskey, songs and sex–and I was still on the bus making my way through the round green hills dotted with herds of sheep and cattle to the west of Pamplona.

I’d spent the day in Bilbao, the recently renovated capital of Basque country, visiting the Guggenheim, one of the new museums designed to be more interesting than the collections of art they house.  This kind of architectural philosophy reminds me of the academic nonsense that criticism is more important than the original work of art. But unlike academic criticism, Frank O. Geary’s museum is a masterpiece–as I stood looking up at its skewed, titanium  armor, I wondered why bother filling it with art at all?  The museum of the future: no art, just the building itself.  Postmodernism triumphs.

Now I found myself jammed among a busload of Spanish revelers and renegados, all dressed in white khakis, t-shirt and red bandanna–wine-drunk, beer-soaked, hash-addled, groping anything resembling the opposite sex–the only American other than two young college girls who pointed firmly but frantically at the no-smoking stickers pasted in the center of each bus window every time someone lit up a Chesterfield or Lucky Strike.  Finally, one of the Spaniards acknowledged their concern and peeled one of the no-smoking stickers off with a hash-darkened fingernail.  The girls sulked and fumed but their resistance wilted under the European determination to smoke anywhere and anytime.

But these were not just second-hand carcinogens these girls were reluctantly inhaling.  My seatmate, a tall, thin Spanish youth with shaved head, billy goat tuft and twin silver earrings pulled a putty-like stick of hash the size of his thumb out of a shirt pocket and proceeded to hand roll a few less-than-legal cigarettes.  He lit up, the smell not unlike that of burning crayolas, took a deep drag, then offered me the nefarious weed.  I declined–but politely accepted the bottle of wine passed over the seat to me by a Spanish girl–black haired, pony-tailed, her sharp features a dead-ringer for Laura Flynn Boyle.  She accepted the hash cigarette offered by my seatmate.  What a mansion have those vices got, I thought, which for their habitation chose out thee.

We arrived in Pamplona a little after ten pm, as the sun dropped behind the hills and fireworks started to explode across the sky.  The walled center of town had been transformed into a giant carnival and so I jumped off the bus and headed into the crowd, in search of the perfect red bandanna.

After procuring said bandanna and transforming myself into an extra for a new production of The Sun Also Rises, I stopped at one of the dozens of food booths.  Since I hadn’t eaten in several hours, paella and jamon Serrano were truly gifts from the gods, the jamon sliced directly from the air-cured thigh of a Spanish hog, the hoof still attached.  Where was the FDA and the PETA-files when you needed them?  But I didn’t need them.  Ah, the unregulated life.  Another glass of sangria, por favor.

By one-thirty the carnival action had died down and the crowd started moving down the hill into the old city, whose cobbled streets were lined with an Eldorado of bars and cafes.

It’s two am outside the Malemba bar–a street band playing, people drinking, chanting and dancing, an impromptu soccer goal set up in the street, youths trying to score on an old goalie who roars out his challenge in drunken Spanish.  Each time one of the youths manages to kick the ball past him, the band plays, the crowd chants even louder and the wine and beer flow even more freely.

As does the urine.  There are plenty of public port-a-potties set up around the town, but most of the men insist on urinating in public: against building entrances, walls, the wooden fences set up for the running of the bulls, each other, even in the streets themselves.  Right now, for example, a guy is standing in the middle of the street, his dick in hand, happily pissing away, surrounded by several girls who clap in rhythm and taunt him with obscene chants.  He smiles, then wags his dick at them, spraying urine around their shoes.  They giggle, then move on.  I cannot imagine this scene in the States…at least not without someone filing a large-dollar lawsuit for irreparable emotional damages, or an invasion of grief counselors prepared to start the healing process.

By two-thirty, several people are down for the count, passed out in the streets, some looking hospital-bound.  The Plaza Santa Ana, outside the Bar Goal, is a maelstrom of human depravity.  People are exhibiting stages of drunkeness even I’m unaware existed, as they jostle and push, stumble and dance, spilling drinks, hugging and kissing and fondling strangers, throwing up in the street–all the activities that have made alcohol the drug of choice for festive behavior throughout the centuries.  I’ve been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but this makes Bourbon Street look like a Baptist tea party.

In order to maintain some semblance of journalistic objectivity, I’ve been limiting my own intake, which is difficult since everyone around me insists I share in their pleasure.  By four am, I’ve managed to stay fairly sober and  have forced my way through the crowd to the small wooden pen at the bottom of the hill, where six bulls are resting up for the morning run.

In less than four and a half hours these bulls will have the pleasure of chasing a large number of hungover humans across the cobblestone streets and into the corrida, where amateur bullfighters will spend the morning further antagonizing them.  I’m standing less than six feet from a large gray specimen, his horns as menacing as a sexual harassment suit, and let me tell you, you would have to be completely out of your mind to let this two-ton animal chase you down the street–which most of the people around me are.

But I don’t want to give the impression that the bulls’ welfare is being ignored.  There are no-smoking stickers on the gates of the wooden pen.  At least the bulls won’t have to inhale potentially cancer-causing agents before they’re slaughtered later that afternoon. Perhaps this accounts for the lack of animal rights activists and PETA-file protesters.

But before the slaughter there will first be El Encierro, the running of the bulls.  The hardest time of all at the Fiesta is the period from four to eight am, as the crowd gathers above the streets for prime watching position.  We stand close-quartered, tired, drunk and dirty, waiting for the sun to rise, leaning against cold steel rails, seven feet above the bull route.

I’m packed into a group of drunken French hommes from Marsaille, two lads from Utah on a school-exchange program in Madrid, and three mulheres from Brazil.  The guys from Utah only want to speak Spanish, the guys from France only speak French, but the girls speak Portuguese and English.  We spend the next three hours huddled together in the cold, somehow managing to discuss the pros and cons of leaping over the rail and joining the slowly swelling hoard of men preparing to run with the bulls.

Nine people have already been gored at this year’s Fiesta, although so far there haven’t been any deaths.  By the time the sun rises, two of the French guys have decided to run.  The only weapon the runners are allowed to carry is a rolled-up newspaper, which they can use to tap the bull on the head as he closes in.  Because I’ve been trying to maintain my journalistic objectivity throughout the night, I haven’t had nearly enough to drink to make the choice to join them.

The sun rises, the heat starts to return and the crowd continues drinking.  The energy of anticipation flows through us–and finally at eight o’clock, a rocket screams across the Pamplona sky, the runners chant a song/prayer asking for protection and a good run, and a few seconds later the whole thing is over as the runners flee the charging, thundering bulls.

Two men are gored directly under us, one knocked unconscious, the other picking himself up off the cobblestones unsteadily, his face bruised the purple and green of one of Monet’s “Nympheas.”  The crowd is exhausted but pleased to have witnessed this sacrificial blood rite of passage and as we make our way back down into the streets, the celebration starts all over again.  No one really sleeps.  There’s too much drinking and dancing to do.

I say goodbye to my crowd-mates, then wind my way back down the hill, through streets sparkling with broken glass, to the bus station.  Outside the station a randy Spanish youth slaps a late-arriving American girl on the ass and she screams “my whole trip is now ruined!”  She throws a fit and starts to cry.  Random scenes from the night flash in my mind and I want to tell her, just wait…

On the train back to Paris I chatted with Lisa, a young woman who walked away from a job as a medical secretary at UCSF and was eight months into a year of traveling.  It turns out we lived less than four blocks from each other in the Haight in San Francisco, one of those coincidences which convince people there is a “reason” for their meeting and facilitate open conversation.

“I just grew tired of spending my time keeping up with the hype, the constant flow of useless trendiness,” she explained.  She was spending the night in Paris before heading off to explore Turkey, despite government warnings of an unsafe environment for tourists.  Or perhaps because of an unsafe environment for the packaged-tour crowd.

Good to know there are others who want to get away from the mediated, the managed life; a life run by self-appointed experts and self-help profiteers promoting the bland, balanced middle of correctness; a life excluding all that is threatening, uncertain, unstable and offensive; a life deemed acceptable or correct or right by other people with the power to dictate the way your experience of the world should be.

In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s great Paris-to-Pamplona novel, Jake Barnes explains to Robert Cohn the choice between living life as a bull or as a castrated steer.  The irony, of course, is that Jake has been castrated by the war and Cohn by a woman, so is it really a choice between being a bull or a steer?

Better to be the matador.