Joan Barril, the rather unintelligent and unattractive columnist for local rag El Periodico, wrote last week about John Irving, who was in town promoting his latest dull novel about Vienna, incest, abortion, genital mutilation, bears, and wrestling:

...He allows himself an irony. "I always thought that writing a story about a mediocre actor who became governor of California and was then elected president of the United States was something no one would believe. I was wrong, because Ronald Reagan was elected. Then, I thought that the United States would never have a president worse than Reagan. I was wrong again: now we have Bush."

Irving forms part of that good America which allows us to conserve a few distant hopes that it will again lead a part of the world. Within a few days, Bruce Springsteen and John Irving have come here in order to leave testimony of their works. The scarcer they are, the more valuable they are. They live in a contradictory country and tell us about their personal lives...(Irving) is too universal to be just American. He is, without a doubt, one of ours.

Comments: 1) You can keep him. 2) Note that Mr. Barril distinguishes between a Good America and a Bad America. 3) Good Americans are scarce, says Mr. Barril. What ignorant arrogance. 4) I've never figured out what Old Europeans mean when they say the United States is "contradictory." It's not as if there isn't a contrast between, say, wealth and poverty, or between official multicultural twaddle and widespread popular racism, here in Barcelona. 5) Mr. Irving's little anecdote is by no means original; I've heard it repeated several times. 6) I suppose I must be a Bad American. Well, thank the Lord I am what I am, and not one of those John Kerry-Paul Auster-Tim Robbins mealy-mouthed pussies. 

Hey, if anybody from the CIA is reading this, how about kidnapping Mr. Barril and taking him to one of those secret prisons in Romania or Ukraine? He could stand to lose a few kilos. I bet a couple of months on army rations would do him good. Maybe he'd even go on hunger strike.

Here's Carlos Nadal in last Sunday's La Vanguardia:

The American military intervention in Iraq was conceived by its planners and executors as the occasion to indelibly situate and confirm the world supremacy of the United States, perhaps the peak of the "American Era."

Gee, I thought that American world supremacy was confirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the purpose of the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq was to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

...the opportunity for the United States to open the area of the Caucasian states born out of the disintegration of the USSR to its political influence and petroleum interests. Which was this way to a large part.

Geopolitical conspiracy-theory crap. The Americans always have some hidden motivation, don't they?

A short and easy military operation would convert the country of the Tigris and the Euphrates to a platform from which the power of the only superpower in the world would irradiate.

No, no, the place we're going to irradiate is Teheran, not Baghdad.

Washington acted as if a new democratizing order in the Middle East had begun, and, of course, security and reasonable prices for the petroleum supply.

No matter how many times you repeat it, Mr. Nadal, the Iraq invasion had nothing to do with Iraqi oil. Oil is a commodity traded on the world market, and oil costs the same price no matter where it comes from. Besides, oil makes up only about one percent of the world's trade anyway, and is merely one of some 25 necessary mined resources (ranging from zinc to cobalt to gravel and cement). It would be insane to go to war for oil. Bush isn't that dumb.

The interventionistic and indoctrinating attitude by Bush and his government awaken defensive reactions.

Oh, yeah, like we're really going to invade Spain.

Nadal goes on to explain how Iran and Russia and China are somehow going to take over world leadership from the Americans. He does not say that this would undoubtedly be a very bad thing should it come to pass, which it won't.