Castles made of sand

“And so castles made of sand slips into the sea, eventually” Jimi Hendrix

Saturday morning I met a man who makes sand castles for a living. His name was Mark and I saw him when he was setting up the perimeter of his latest creation on Huntington Beach. He’d been hired by the hotel that we were staying at, and he told me that in the summer he was out there almost every weekend. He asked if we were from California and when I told him that we weren’t, that we were visiting from Montreal, he said that we could help him if we wanted. He gave both my daughter and my son a plastic chisel and he put them to work carving a passageway into one of the four towers of the perimeter.

Sand castle

Mark was very serious about his job but extremely patient and gentle when it came to explaining the finer points of his art. We were the first people there that morning and he said that he liked the way my kids worked. “You know,” he told me, “with the economic problems we’re having now we get a lot more foreign tourists than Americans at the hotel and I’ve noticed that the foreign kids are more independent and not as aggressive as the Americans.”

I tried to make light of the situation and told him that my children were far from being little angels, but he insisted and said “I don’t know, maybe we’re doing something wrong.”

I didn’t know what to tell him. I could only speak for my own children. I hadn’t lived in the U.S. since 1985, but I suspected that he was probably right. Aggression has become an American trademark. We are the hoodlums of the planet and I asked him what the people in Huntington Beach thought about the war in Iraq. He said that he and his friends were against it and looking at him I could tell that he felt the same way that I did. That we were both helpless to change anything, and that voting for one candidate or the other in the next election wouldn’t stop the war or our country’s imperial arrogance. The system was rigged and anyone in favor of peace and creating a different world would never get close to the presidency. It was a fact and you didn’t have to be a genius to see how far our democracy had deteriorated. With our “war on terror” and the hundreds of thousands that we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, we had permanently disgraced ourselves. The American Empire would have to fall, as all empires eventually do, before we could even begin to make up for the damage that we’d done.

The only consolation, I thought to myself, was that not everyone had fallen for the regime’s propaganda and that creative people like Mark would be there to pick up the pieces when the time came.

The Undefeated

Ernest Hemingway was a complicated man and so whenever someone asks me what I think of his enduring macho image or what he himself might have thought about the world today and its problems, I usually say that there were many different “Papas.” He was certainly a man’s man, un vero hombre, who liked to fish and to hunt and to womanize, but he was also the author of the gender bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden” and many other works where he examined his lifelong fascination with androgyny.

Likewise, it’s hard to pin him down politically. When a journalist in Pamplona asked me what I thought my grandfather would think about Guantanamo and its torture scandal, I said that these were crimes against humanity and that, obviously, Ernest, were he still alive, would speak out against them. My grandfather, I reminded the journalist, supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. He was a democrat in the sense that he believed in democracy and the right of the Spanish people to have a Republic, if that was what they wanted.

Of course, his support wasn’t limited to his bylines or his novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In addition to raising money in the United States to buy ambulances for the Republican Army, he also did the narration for the Republican propaganda film “The Spanish Earth.” Without a doubt, what he experienced in Madrid during the war affected him deeply, and when the Fascists won he said that he would never return so long as they were in power.

It was a promise he kept until 1953 when he returned to Spain with his wife Mary. By that time, even though he was only 54, he was ageing fast and he wanted to see the corridas again before he died and to be a part of that world of toreros, bulls and muletas.


His return was widely criticized by many on the Left, who said that it was a betrayal of his ideals and everything that he had written about during the Civil War. Certainly, having the author of “The Sun Also Rises” back in Spain must have been a PR coup for the Franco regime. It was the kind of publicity that money could never buy, but Ernest had already fought his battle, and had lost, and there was nothing he could do about the political situation. Franco ruled the country with an iron fist and would outlive my grandfather by fourteen years.

The irony of all this is that while he was in Spain as a special guest of the regime his own government continued to spy on him. He had long been considered a leftist and a potential subversive by the FBI and its chief, J. Edgar Hoover (in part because of his support of the Spanish Republican cause), and the file that they kept on him grew and grew over the years until it numbered over 19,000 pages.

Yet, in spite of what anyone may say about him and his decision to return to Spain, perhaps Ernest wasn’t so wrong in having an ambivalent attitude towards politics. Looking over the political landscape of the USA today and the absolute disregard that both Republican and Democratic politicians have for the will of the people, I’d say that not much has changed since the 1950’s. We may have voted in 2006 to end the war in Iraq, but the political elite continues to do what it wants, to wage its wars and spy on us regardless of what we think. None of them can be trusted and perhaps the only thing that matters in the end is living your life as best you can. As my grandfather did, ignoring the bastards in power.