Of muslims and men

Ok, this is not fresh news, but I haven´t had much time to blog about it, so...
A couple of weeks ago I read this news on BBC about the three muslims that were killed in North Carolina. The headline went something like "Three muslims killed in North Carolina". Other news websites had similar headlines too. The news talked about some three muslim students that had been killed, supposedly after a fight over a parking place, though there was a possibility that it would have been a hate crime.
Well, here is something that would not have annoyed me two years ago. Even more, I wouldn´t even have noticed it. But the headlines did say "Three muslims". "Three muslims", or "Three muslim students", or "Three young muslims", everywhere I checked. Also in the NY Times.
Quoting directly from the latter: "The victims’ families described it as a hate crime. The police said that the shooting appeared to have been motivated by “an ongoing neighbor dispute over parking,” but that they were investigating whether religious hatred had contributed to the killings."
So, as I was saying, two years ago I wouldn´t even have noticed they were saying "Three muslims", instead of "Three people". In Spain, for some reason, we always specify if the person we´re talking about is south american, or black, or asian (and actually, we use "chinese" for asian). But now it sounds weird to me. The headlines should have read three "people", and then the text should have mentioned that a hate crime was suspected because these three people happened to be muslims and the killer happened not to be. Otherwise, we´re making assumptions we shouldn´t make. We´re actually turning a crime into a hate crime.

Speaking about hate crimes... This whole thing is getting crazy. The day after the killings in France, I survived a fake bomb alert when I was trying to go back home after work. It was about 7pm and I took the Metro to Chamartín station, where I would transfer to the RENFE train. When I got to the station, they were shutting down all RENFE lines running to Atocha, which happens to be my last stop. They were announcing trains wouldn´t run because of government orders.
After the previous day events, people were nervous. Even I was nervous. Of course I imagined something like a bomb alert, and I didn´t want to stay in a big station like Chamartín. I thought of an alternative route to get home, but then they announced some Metro lines were being shut down too. Finally, I decided it would be easier to avoid the main train and metro lines, and go to my parents´ house instead. On my way, I got a message about the bomb alert in Nuevos Ministerios station, and I texted  my family not to go there.
At the end, of course, it was a fake alert. Someone had forgotten a package with the word "STORM" at the station. But I have to admit it, I was scared. And I felt stupid after.
The last few weeks, when I got off the train in Chamartín every morning, there were three cops at the entrance, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying a huge machine gun. Actually, I´m not sure if I can say "huge", because I don´t know how big a regular machine gun is, but it does look huge to me. The cops stood there and did nothing. Sometimes they took a few steps to the left, a few to the right... I wondered why they were there.
Last week the cops disappeared, and I wondered why they were gone.
And today, I saw four of them in Atocha station. Dispersed, this time. Standing with their vests and their machine guns and taking a few steps from time to time. And I wonder why they are here. They look pretty intimidating, sure, but they won´t stop me if I carry a bomb in my backpack. I could kill all these hundreds of little ants heading to work if I wanted to. And their sole presence there makes me feel insecure.

It would all be so much easier if we realized how unimportant it is whatever each one of us thinks comes after... We all are nothing but (bio)chemistry.

Disrupted

Ok, this posting has nothing to do with me feeling disrupted, or with disruption, or with anything starting with "disrupt-" or remotely related. But, because it´s my blog and I can do as I please, I want to use the title to inform you that yes, I feel disrupted, and that word, in English, just like that, popped up in my mind on my way to work this morning, and the only reason why I´m telling you about how disrupted I feel is to notice that I haven´t been able to find a word that better expresses how I feel in Spanish. Weird?

And now, let´s move on to the real subject of this posting which is, again, Catch-22. Let me give you the real title for the posting: "A stupid masterpiece".
As I keep reading, I wander about how incredibly stupidly brilliant the book is. From page 62 now, I still doubt that I will be able to finish it, but every single paragraph I read, I want to share in the blog. Even whole pages I want to share. It´s amazing. The language is absolutely not correct, neither it is the content of it, and no general plot has really started to unfold so far. It´s all about some Col. Something, Lt. Someone, names and more names and nicknames and short anecdotes and more anecdotes that lead one to the next and so on, in the middle of a war that puts the most insane of people together and makes them even more insane.
I will try to be very, very picky and restrictive about the fragments I share, but here´s a few of them that I hope you enjoy.

[“It was a godsend,” Doc Daneeka confessed solemnly. “Most of the other doctors were soon in the service, and things picked up overnight. The corner location really started paying off, and I soon found myself handling more patients than I could handle competently. I upped my kickback fee with those two drugstores. The beauty parlors were good for two, three abortions a week. Things couldn’t have been better, and then look what happened. They had to send a guy from the draft board around to look me over. I was Four-F. I had examined myself pretty thoroughly and discovered that I was unfit for military service. You’d think my word would be enough, wouldn’t you, since I was a doctor in good standing with my county medical society and with my local Better Business Bureau. But no, it wasn’t, and they sent this guy around just to make sure I really did have one leg amputated at the hip and was helplessly bedridden with incurable rheumatoid arthritis. Yossarian, we live in an age of distrust and deteriorating spiritual values. It’s a terrible thing,” Doc Daneeka protested in a voice quavering with strong emotion. “It’s a terrible thing when even the word of a licensed physician is suspected by the country he loves.”]

[“Every time another White Halfoat was born,” he continued, “the stock market turned bullish. Soon whole drilling crews were following us around with all their equipment just to get the jump on each other. Companies began to merge just so they could cut down on the number of people they had to assign to us. But the crowd in back of us kept growing. We never got a good night’s sleep. When we stopped, they stopped. When we moved, they moved, chuckwagons, bulldozers, derricks, generators. We were a walking business boom, and we began to receive invitations from some of the best hotels just for the amount of business we would drag into town with us. Some of those invitations were might generous, but we couldn’t accept any because we were Indians and all the best hotels that were inviting us wouldn’t accept Indians as guests. Racial prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian. It really is. It’s a terrible thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.” Chief White Halfoat nodded slowly with conviction.]

[The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality every single night he spent in the squadron throughout the whole harrowing ordeal when he was not flying combat missions and was waiting once again for the orders sending him home that never came. Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds.]

[It was a night of surprises for Appleby, who was as large as Yossarian and as strong and who swung at Yossarian as hard as he could with a punch that flooded Chief White Halfoat with such joyous excitement that he turned and busted Colonel Moodus in the nose with a punch that filled General Dreedle with such mellow gratification that he had Colonel Cathcart throw the chaplain out of the officers’ club and ordered Chief White Halfoat moved into Doc Daneeka’s tent, where he could be under a doctor’s care twenty-four hours a day and be kept in good enough physical condition to bust Colonel Moodus in the nose again whenever General Dreedle wanted him to. Sometimes General Dreedle made special trips down from Wing Headquarters with Colonel Moodus and his nurse just to have Chief White Halfoat bust his son-in-law in the nose.]


Now, to finish, a brief reflection that occured to me while I was waiting for the train this morning, and after I shook the word "disrupted" off my mind: Why do I keep saying "One day I will write something good" but that day never seems to come? I could come up with a lot of fair excuses, all of which could be contained in the very reasonable and honest statement "I don´t have the time right now". But the truth (the other truth) is, I might just not be a good witer after all. It might happen that I start writing and I turn to be a bad (even a crappy) writer. Whereas, as long as I haven´t tried yet, I´m a potential good writer.
So at the end it´s all about cats in boxes.

Caught!

I'm reading a new book. New for me, I mean. And I want to share something.
I usually don't share parts of a book before finishing it, but with this one, Catch-22, I don't know... I'm liking it a lot, some paragraphs are just amazing, but it's not easy reading for me and I hate it but I'm afraid I might not finish it. And I'm telling you from page 36..., so yes, there's a real chance!
But I want to make this clear, if I don't finish it, it won't be because the book is not good enough, but because the reader isn't.

And now, the excerpts.


"In a way the C.I.D. man was pretty lucky, because outside the hospital the war was still going on. Men went mad and were rewarded with medals. All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives."

"Actually, there were many officers' clubs that Yossarian had not helped build, but he was proudest of the one on Pianosa. It was a sturdy and complex monument to his powers of determination. Yossarian never went there to help until it was finished; then he went there often, so pleased was he with the large, fine, rambling shingled building. It was truly a splendid structure, and Yossarian throbbed with a mighty sense of accomplishment each time he gazed at it and reflected that none of the work that had gone into it was his."

"But there was no enthusiasm in Yossarian's group. In Yossarian's group there was only a mounting number of enlisted men and officers who found their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the orders sending them home had come in. They were men who had finished their fifty missions. There were more of them now than when Yossarian had gone into the hospital, and they were still waiting. They worried and bit their nails. They were grostesque, like useless young men in a depression. They moved sideways, like crabs. They were waiting for the orders sending them home to safety to return from Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters in Italy, and while they waited they had nothing to do but worry and bite their nails and find their way solemnly to Sergeant Towser several times a day to ask if the order sending them home to safety had come."

I must say, not too often have I found so brilliant lines condensed in so very few pages!
So I really, really hope to have the strength, time and patience to finish it. I will let you know how it goes...