Nothing a good bottle of wine can't fix

Following up on My B-day post (please keep commenting on other articles) I can now reveal the birthday present from A. It was something thrilling, truly spectacular: She got two tickets for Depeche Mode!! (In a European city not to be disclosed here.)

I know I already talked about my idol, most inspiring figure and my guru, Keith Richards. But hey, what kind of people are not fans of the Stones? My truly biggest band ever, ever, is of course Depeche Mode. There's something dark, depressive and twisted about Depeche Mode. Their lyrics are poetic and gloomy, and their Dark-Lord and glamorous image blends in perfectly with music and lyrics, creating an electryfying atmosphere. Each song is deep. Even disturbing. But above all, after you descend into the utterly grim mood of their music, there's something incredibly powerfulm sunny and uplifting.

I cherish each one of their albums, and all of them are reminiscent not only of my teenage years, but also of different stages of my adulthood. Getting tickets for them on my 32nd b-day was a really thoughtful present. Today I listen to classics like Policy of Truth (a song about homosexuality) and I can see myself on the grey streets of Santiago in autumn, going to school, with my 'personal stereo', as we used to call them in Chile back in those years. The introspective songs are not quite everyone's cup of tea, but they do touch so many souls ith their sounds and lyrics, and have done so for so long.

My first trip to Paris was to see Dave Gahan, Depeche Mode lead singer, in his solo tour, and it was with A. We went to his gig at the Olympia, back in 2003. We were starting our relationship and it was a truly wonderful memory. We saw them again in Manchester a few years later, actually again on my very birthday. I tried to get them so sing Hapy Birthday but, astonishingly, I didn't suceed. Now the band is touring and we're going to see them...again!

Some have criticised me for writing about personal stuff in this blog. I have written personal posts and I will keep doing so in the future. Take it this way: see it for yourself now that I'm not demented, and no, I don't need a shrink, I'm a normal type of guy. So no, I don't enjoy killing babies, and if you think I'm part of the 'culture of death' then it's probably you the one who need a lot of therapy.

I could really go on and on about DM, but I reckon it's plenty for now. I invite you all to watch their latest video, 'Wrong'. My reaction to watching now this clip was: OK, things are wrong, but nothing a good bottle of wine can't fix. Incidentally, I am at this very moment having a few glasses of French wine.

I was born with the wrong sign
In the wrong house
With the wrong ascendancy
I took the wrong road
That led to the wrong tendencies
I was in the wrong place at the wrong time
For the wrong reason and the wrong rhyme
On the wrong day of the wrong week
I used the wrong method with the wrong technique

Wrong, wrong

There's something wrong with me chemically
Something wrong with me inherently
The wrong mix in the wrong genes
I reached the wrong ends by the wrong means
It was the wrong plan
In the wrong hands
With the wrong theory for the wrong man
The wrong lies, on the wrong vibes
The wrong questions with the wrong replies

Wrong, wrong

I was marching to the wrong drum
With the wrong scum
Pissing out the wrong energy
Using all the wrong lines
And the wrong signs
With the wrong intensity
I was on the wrong page of the wrong book
With the wrong rendition of the wrong hook
Made the wrong move, every wrong night
With the wrong tune played till it sounded right yeah

Wrong, wrong

So, are we Latin Americans part of the 'West'?

Emilia has written a very interesting essay on Latin America, named 'Is Latin America Truly Western?' (also posted on her website Cynics Unlimited). This is quite a controversial subject in Latin American countries, or at least in Chile. Same way that the 'n-word' can only be used by Afro Americans, not many Chileans are prepared to readily accept the label 'Third World' given by someone from the West proper (nobody's ever heard of Canada bombing or invading other countries, so they're spared acid criticism). So classing Chile as not quite part of the West only means it's the Third World, and I think that's where the problem is rooted: the West is associated with wealthy industrialised nations, while Latin America is -at the most- an emerging area. The term 'West' means rich countries, but in fariness, we should realise that it's applicable to The Americas (ie North, Central and South) , despite the sad reality: the southern part has lagged behind the northern part for far too long.

But this leads to a semantic problem then: what's the definition of the 'West'? Certainly, and following Emilia's analysis below, high technology and high standards of living are not exclusive to the West. We now see that we all use the term 'West' although nobody really knows what it means. In my view, the very essence of the West dates back to the Greco-Roman world. The cultural cornerstones of the West were crafted there: philosophy, democracy, science, and the Latin language, among many others, are some of the most distinctive fundamentals that today define 'the West' even until now. By extension, the Roman Empire's influence extended to North Europe, and then to The Americas., so we´re all part of the West. This may explain why we don't think of Russia as the West, or all Slavic countries for that matter. It may be a wishy-wahsy definition, for instance, Romania cannot be called a Western country, althoigh it certainly is a Latin one. To call a country truly Western we have two boxes to tick: in the past, it must have been heavily influenced by the Roman Empire; and more recently, it must have not been subjected to the Soviet Empire. So much for West Europe. What about Latin America?

The Continent does tick a number of other boxes: its culture does come from the foundations laid out by classical philosophy, its laws and language also come from the classical tradition, just like main components of its culture. OK, most countries have fledgling democracies, but all Latin Americans know is a good thing to vote for their political leaders. Even Cubans, although mainly in exile, want democracy and have always wanted it. So apart from not being industrialised and with precarious democracies, its culture is rooted in the Greco-Roman world. And that makes it Western.

A more practical definition of the West would be any country where the proper Westerners manage to carry on with their regular lifestyles without being shaken up by cultural differences - only feeling mildly irritated. Having said that, I'm not sure if your average Santiago guy could easily manage to live in La Paz or Quito, to name but a few. So I think that Latin America is part of the West, but some parts are more westernised than others.

Well, the above was my opinion. Here you have Emilia's thought-provoking essay:

Is Latin America Truly Western?

By Emilia Liz

While surfing the Net recently, I came across a website that posed an interesting question: is Latin America Western? Though the site did not give a definite “yes” or “no” to the question, it discussed some of the reasons why people might or might not consider Latin America a part of the West.

The term “West” is somewhat ambiguous these days. “West” and “Western” seem to have joined the ranks of words like “Creole,” “humanist,” and “liberal,” whose meaning varies according to where, when and by whom they are being pronounced. Most people would agree that Canada, the United States, Australia, and Western Europe are clearly part of the West. But they might disagree on where to place East Germany, for instance, which until the fall of the Berlin Wall belonged to the Communist Eastern bloc but which has strong linguistic, historical and cultural ties to Western Europe.

Latin America’s status as part of the so-called Occident is also shaky. On one hand, a writer for Canada’s National Post Magazine referred to Colombia as the “most dangerous country in the West.” An Ecuadorian friend similarly tells me that of course his country is Western; after all, it was colonized by Europeans long before many areas of the United States were. Others, though, would hesitate to include Latin America in the Western fold. Some leftists, seeking to create a sense of Third World solidarity, lump the region together with Africa, Asia and the Middle East rather than with Europe and North America. Ironically, many right-wingers too would place Latin America outside the Western pale, not only because the region is not industrialized but because the majority of its inhabitants are not “white” (that is, of unmixed European descent).

My answer to the website’s question is that yes, Latin America is Western. Saying that Latin America is not Western is to my mind a bit like saying that humans are not mammals. In other words, what else could it be? Just as humans possess all the physical features of mammals (hair, the ability to produce milk for their young, and so on), Latin American culture is largely based on that of Western Europe, more specifically Spain’s and, in the case of Brazil, Portugal’s.

The first objection to classifying the Latin American countries as Western is that they are not industrialized, at least not to the same degree as those of Europe and North America are. But industrialization is not the exclusive domain of the West. Japan is one of the most industrialized nations in the world, yet it certainly is not Western. The far less technologically developed Philippines is far more Westernized than Japan, due to its three hundred years under Spanish control. While the wish to promote solidarity between Latin America and other Third World areas is commendable, those who do so sometimes forget (or prefer to ignore) that culturally — even if not politically or technologically - the former resembles Europe more than it does Asia or Africa, for example.

Another reason often cited for not including Latin America in the West stems from the fact that most of its people are not “white.” However, Turks are genetically similar to Europeans, but few consider Turkey a Western country. Others might argue that large portions of Latin America, such as Bolivia and Guatemala, are inhabited by people with no European ancestry whatsoever. But the same thing could be said of Canada, where in the most northerly areas of the country the population is mostly Aboriginals and Inuit.

Moreover, most Latin Americans have at least some European ancestry. There are even some with no non-White background at all, such as a former boyfriend of mine who was born in Peru to a German-Northern Italian couple. Even setting Latin America’s “white” inhabitants aside, the average mestizo [1] or mulatto [2] has more in common with his or her European forbears than Indian and/or African ones. He or she in all likelihood speaks a European language — Spanish in most of the region and Portuguese in Brazil — as his or her mother tongue, practises a religion that while not originally from Europe took root on that continent more widely than on any other, and leads a lifestyle similar to that of Spain, Portugal and other Latin countries like Italy and France.

From this standpoint, it’s hard to claim that Latin America is any less Western than the United States or Australia. The difference is of course that the latter two places derive their culture from Britain whereas the former traces its culture to Spain or Portugal.
Undoubtedly Native American and African customs have influenced Latin America. And it’s understandable that countries like Mexico, which broke away forcefully from their “motherland,” Spain, are now stressing their Indian roots over their European ones. Other nations emphasize their “mestizaje” — the term for “racial mixture” in Spanish — in an attempt to recognize their dual (or in the case of places like Brazil with a strong African component, triple) heritages. But the reality is that for most mixed-race Latin Americans — who, by the way, form the majority of the area’s population — their European heritage has played a far greater role in shaping in their world views, social attitudes, and daily lives than has their non-“white” ancestry.

Indeed, the fact that miscegenation — generally involving Europeans and other “races,” though individuals of mixed African and Native American descent also exist — played such a major role in Latin American history is probably the principal reason for that region’s status as part of the West. It’s important to stress that not all Spanish and Portuguese colonies joined the ranks of the Western world. Spanish rule in the Philippines, for example, did not transform the islands into a Latin country. Though Spain did have considerable influence on the Philippines — in converting most of the people to Catholicism, in providing Spanish loan words to the local languages, and in giving the people Spanish first and/or last names — the Filipinos’ pre-colonial Asian culture remained largely intact even after three centuries of Spanish domination — roughly the same amount of time Spain controlled Latin America. Interestingly, miscegenation between Spaniards and Filipinos (or should we say Filipinas, because practically all such unions involved Spanish men and Filipina women) occurred on a fairly limited scale, as very few Spaniards settled in the islands. As historian John Phelan explains, the Philippines failed to become a Latin nation as Mexico did in part because the former lacked a mixed-race population to help Hispanicize the natives and by extension the country.

A friend from Colombia, a man of mixed Spanish and Native American descent who would never have passed for “white” in the United States, admitted to me that he felt “at home” on a visit to Italy because Italy is a Latin country, like Spain and Portugal. Obviously Latin America is not a carbon copy of Iberia. [3] But neither is the United States a replica of England. And just as no one would ever classify humans as fish, amphibians, reptiles or birds, Latin America cannot be anything but Western.

Notes
1. The term “mestizo,” though it literally means “mixed” in Spanish, in Latin America generally refers to people of mixed European and Native American ancestry.
2. A “mulatto” refers to a person of mixed European and African descent.
3. “Iberia” refers to Spain and Portugal.