Sangre! Sangre! (La becerrada de Cami)

On Saturday I went to a bullfight. I have been to Spain on several occasions, and the idea of going to a bullfight has always arisen, but I've never actually gone through with it. I mean, watching an animal being tortured and then killed as entertainment... I've never quite seen the attraction.

But Saturday was not a strict bullfight as such, but a "becerrada". A becerro is a young bull, much smaller than the fully-grown model, I was told. And it is not actually killed, the sword is plastic, it is just a bit of fun. OK, I thought. Doesn't sound too bad. Also, Cami (Panda's brother) was to partake: it was one of the highlights of his year, apparently. It seemed like good form to go and support him.

It is organised by Cami's school. Each year, they rent a few bulls and a mini bullring at the polo club (you can see what kind of school it is), and the boys in the upper few years (15-18) get to partake. When we arrived, there were quite a lot of scruffy-posh boys in white shirts and jeans, with coloured cummerbunds, preparing for the fight by drinking plenty of aguardiente. I didn't blame them. I asked someone how many times they had practised before the event. "Oh, a few times during the year." Not many, I thought. "Yes, they charge a wheelbarrow with plastic horns on it towards each other." Hang on: so this is the first time in front of an actual bull? "Oh yes, for lots of them, hahaha!" Gulp.

We had some food and then made our way to a ring-side spot where we basked in the sun for a bit. The atmosphere built, a band played, and finally the boys swarmed into the ring and sung the national anthem in a deep-voiced show of testosterone. They cleared the ring, and the first team (blue cummerbunds) came into the ring and hid behind sort of wooden fences around the ring. The bull was released, and came running in, and then stood wagging its tail and looking around enthusiastically. Eventually a boy broke cover, and, curtain aloft, ran into the ring. He waved it a bit, and the bull charged, running right through the curtain. Applause! The bull's horns were rounded-off at the ends, but given the force of the head-butt I imagine it would be comparable to having a fence-post stabbed into your throat or thorax, rather than a knife. Some comfort.

The boy fell in the sand. The crowd roared. The sun beat down. The boy made a hasty exit back to his wooden fence, and another boy, in a daze of aguardiente, teenage male pride, and some vestige of the hunter's instinct, came forward. "Sangre! Sangre!" the crowd began to chant in glee. "Blood! Blood!" It was hard to know if the boys were scared. Their fear blurred right into aggressiveness. The bull charged back and forth. The boy didn't really look like he knew what he was doing, but held out bravely for a few charges.

By this time my own adrenaline level was running wild. I thought the spectacle pretty disgusting, a barbaric celebration of the basest of human instincts, that kind of maleness which leads our species into wars and plenty of other atrocities. The game seemed a sort of male right of passage comparable to teenagers playing chicken by driving their cars at each other until one of them steers away, losing face. I have to admit, Colombia's bloody and violent history came to mind too: that made me feel even less comfortable in a crowd happily celebrating fear-induced male aggression. When the crowd cheered and clapped, I found myself shouting "Barbarians!" The parents in front of me half-turned in distaste. Who was this upstart, with anything other than pure admiration for their brave young hooligans? How dare he!

Now another boy was in the ring. He was holding some kind of tinsel-covered sticks, in the colours of the flag of Colombia. "Is he going to stick those in the bull??" I asked Panda. "Yes, but they don't really hurt, don't worry!" she said. The boy ran toward the animal, and leapt over its back, stabbing down with all his might into the bullock's neck and back, ramming the spikes home. The animal started, and became more agitated. One fell loose, but the other stayed in place, with the bull twisting around trying to work out what was ailing it. In any case, it had had the desired effect. The bull was now angry.

Another boy came out with similar sticks, longer this time. Another cheer, another roar of approval, more shouts of "sangre! sangre!", and another pair of sticks stabbed into the animal. The boy looked very proud of his vicious achievement, and the crowd supported him 100%. As they applauded and cheered his bravery, I couldn't stop myself, and found myself shouting, "Yeah, well done, you tortured a defenseless animal!" The parents in front really didn't like that. Panda turned to me angrily: "Do you want to ruin the whole thing?!", she asked. "No," I said. "I want to leave". And I did. I couldn't bear to watch any more.

I felt sickened by the whole spectacle. More by the celebration of violence and machismo than by the actual damage to the animal, I think, but a bit of that too. I don't really think animals have souls, I don't mind if animals get hurt, but I think to celebrate that hurt is the height of barbarity. And watching it live struck me deeply. I sat in the club-house and drank a beer, waiting for my heart rate to return to normal. I thought that I probably should have tanked up before the thing: many unpleasant things are easier to bear with a bit of alcohol in the blood stream.

I felt bad that I had made such a scene. But I felt worse that the cream of Colombia's elite feel it appropriate to celebrate the most aggressive instincts of their young men. I didn't talk much in the car on the way home.

Cumpleando anos

http://picasaweb.google.com/pmg102/29thBirthday

Beautiful poverty

If you're like me, you will have at some point seen pictures of rural pre-Industrial Revolution Britain, the canonical shepherd or goatherd with flock, with perhaps rambling simple dwelling in the background, and yearned for a simpler yesteryear consisting of sun, grass, and hearth, and notably not containing rush-hour traffic, overflowing email inboxes, and shopping centres on a Saturday.

Last weekend, we took a trip into the Colombian countryside. Soon after leaving the city limits of Bogota, the road took us through "campesino country". Campesinos are the peasants of Colombia, eking out a marginal living from the land by cultivating basic crops on a scrap of land, and perhaps rearing a cow for milk. Their life is no doubt picturesque. I tried and failed many times to capture on camera their picturesque poverty -- the clothes laid out neatly on the grass to dry, the self-built tumbledown dwellings, the donkey with a load of sticks weighing heavy across its back.

Unlike Colombia's urban poor, living in shanty towns hastily assembled wherever the displaced population arrive (1.5 million in Bogota's southern suburbs alone), the rural poor are lucky enough to be photogenic. Not displaced by violence, they live in steady communities, and can count on neighbours and family for support. Their lives are a small distance above gruelling grinding horror and poverty. They have a family, a place to call home, possessions, a tradition. Children learn at grandpa's knee the ways of the land.

But in our eagerness to appreciate the beauty of the simple country-dweller, we are at great risk of seeing the positive in an essentially negative situation. What hope does an intelligent, diligent, bright young woman born into such a situation have of becoming the next president of Colombia? Or a lawyer, doctor or member of Congress? Essentially none. When we look at developed countries, we find that the number of people who choose, when given a range of opportunities, to live such a nominally bucolic idyll of a life, is effectively zero. We feel that it is right that some people should be living such a simple life, so close to the land and part of a close-knit community -- whilst we ourselves nonetheless choose to work in the City, earn a six-figure sum, and live comfortably in the Home Counties with two pedigree dogs and a plasma TV.

The peasant has disappeared from British society, thanks to the Industrial Revolution. After the fact, we often bemoan the Industrial Revolution, the ensuing urbanisation, and loss of innocence and closeness to Nature. Yet the raw truth is that given the choice, nearly everyone would choose, and did indeed choose, to live in smouldering cities with some hope of wealth and betterment for their family, than a so-called happy life tending livestock.

Whilst it is only right that we should not see the development model followed by our own country as the only valid such model, we are also in danger of over-romanticising certain social states, such that we allow -- or cause -- people in other countries to stay in this model despite their own inclination to leave it.

Until every single citizen of Colombian has an equal opportunity to obtain a quality education and a career, I will continue to consider the material wealth of those who few who have had this opportunty an unfair bounty, unfairly gained, and thus not to be respected. One's right to happily enjoy the fruits of one's labour is proportional to how much others in one's society have had an equal opportunity to obtain such fruits.

A Trifle

I was sitting next to a man with jelly in one ear and custard in the other, so I turned to him and said, "Are you a trifle deaf?" and he said, "No, I'm mentally ill as it happens."