Beware the Tour Bus!
Lessons from an olive farmer in Jaén
"Double-decker tour bus at The Grove, Los Angeles" by LA Wad is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
One of the smartest commentators on Spain is an olive farmer from Jaén. His name is Charles Butler and you can find his Twitter feed here. Follow him! Charles has punctured the pretensions of many well-paid but clueless commentators from the British and American media with a very simple concept: The tour bus.
Imagine some big, predictable milestone, like a general election or an illegal secesssion referendum. A mainstream newspaper - often, but not always, the New York Times - will send a “big name” journalist, who doesn’t speak Spanish at a high level (let alone Catalan or any other local languages) and has barely spent any time in Spain beforehand or developed a deep relationships with any of the locals.
Instead, the big-name newbie will probably have re-read one of Ernest Hemingway’s books on the plane over. These are fine works, spanning fiction and non-fiction; and the author’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 was richly deserved. However, the books were mostly written in the 1920s and 1930s and Spain might have changed a little since then.
A Spanish-speaker can easily find good information to orientate himself or herself on arrival. Spain has some excellent newspapers and there are plenty of smart commentators. For example, Mario Vargas Llosa - another winner of the Nobel Prize for literature - can be found defending economic liberalism and battling left-wing populism in El País in Spanish most Sundays. Needless to say, this is not the most obvious position for a Latin American novelist to take, but his observations are always worth reading, even if not everyone will agree with every point.
Without speaking good Spanish (or Catalan), it can be much harder to hit the ground running. The Spanish government’s handling of foreign correspondents has been fairly pitiful under both the left and the right. Just getting a spokesperson to send an email with a a measly “no comment” can often take a week or two instead of a couple of hours you might expect in a more professional environment.
Spain’s various populists have realized that there is a gap to be filled. When they gain control of a regional government, they fall over themselves at the chance to spead their nonsense to naive newcomers. Luckily, it can be easy to spot the tainted articles. Expect multiple references to Francisco Franco, the Catholic church and bullfighters. When you see clichés that refer more to the 1930s than the 2020s, it is always worth heading over Charles’ Twitter feed to see if there is a take-down.
You can also spot the tour bus by taking note of what its members never write about. Expect a serious lack of insight into the success of Spanish democratic institutions since the 1970s. The implosion of liberal party Citizens is unlikey to feature in these articles, except if the naive commentators repeat populist lies that only fascists oppose Catalan nationalism.
Members of the tour bus will rarely mention the fact that although more than 60% of Spaniards self-identify as Catholic, only a minority ever go to church. Meanwhile, they are also unlikely to tell you that 150,000 gitanos (the local name for members of the Romani community) have joined a Pentecostal church that is run entirely by members of the same ethnic group.
Bullfighting is a fascinating subject, but did you know that the number of bullfights in Spain has been declining for years? There were only 279 corridas in 2021, with just 54 due to the pandemic in 2020, compared to 349 in 2019 and 369 in 2018. Young Spaniards are mostly uninterested in the ritual slaughter of bulls.
You can bet against commentators getting off the tour bus and discussing themes that actually do excite young Spaniards, such as how Rosalia and C Tangana are revolutionizing Latin music. Or how their producer Alizzz has railed against the “stiff and boring” Catalan cultural establishment for ignoring Spanish-language artists, in an anthem sung in Catalan.
Definitely don’t expect any discussion on how Latin American immigration has transformed Spain in the last 30 to 40 years. Artists like Chanel, who was born in Havana, represent modern Spain and Catalonia much more effectively than the dreadful folk singers that the national populists want to promote. If scantily clad pop singers are too down-market for your tastes, it is worth mentioning that Nobel Prize-wining novelist Vargas Llosa, who was born in Peru, has had Spanish nationality since 1993 and lives in Madrid.
Tour-bus commentators are unlikely to pay much attention to cutting-edge novels by the late, lamented Carlos Ruiz Zafón (a Catalan who wrote in Spanish) or the top Netflix series Money Heist. Certainly don’t expect people to get off the tour bus and tell you about Champions, a lovely 2018 film from Javier Fesser, which tells you much more about the challenges of living in modern Spain than old-fashioned tropes from previous generations. Talking of films, I can’t be the only one who would have loved to read Hemingway’s reaction to the films of Pedro Almodóvar. The author died in 1961, while the director didn’t make his first film until 1980.
Everyone knows about the Spanish obsession with sport, but how about food? The tour-bus commentators will never tell you about the 228 restaurants in Spain with Michelin stars; let alone how British chef Jamie Oliver was mobbed on Twitter by angry Spaniards for weeks for foolishly describing a rice dish with chorizo sausage as a paella.
You will never see tour-bus commentators discussing how Spanish energy company Iberdrola committed to cleantech long before it was fashionable; or about up-and-coming unicorns like Wallbox that are doing good work in the space. You won’t see anything about how Barcelona has quietly become a startup hub, with Madrid and Lisbon in Portugal providing fierce competition; or about foreign tech talent flocking to the three cities in search of a better quality of life.
A large part of the Sharpen Your Axe project is based on defending the mainstream media against sloppy work by conspiracy theorists. Sadly, uninspiring work by tour-bus commentators makes this defence much harder. Although, as I have mentioned before, the mainstream media tends to be much better at hard news than at commentary.
As usual when I discuss populist Catalan separatism, the comments are closed for the week. Populists hate fact-checkers and life is too short to deal with axe-grinders, particularly those who want to tell you that liberal democracy is really fascism in disguise. See you next week!
Further Reading
If you want to follow Spanish current affairs in English, I recommend Matthew Bennett’s Substack
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Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.