It was nearly 30 years ago - in a cold but dry February, 1975 - that I hitch-hiked my way across Spain. Generalísimo Franco was still in charge, but the winds of change were decidedly blowing. Or so it seemed to me, as practically every car-bound conversation I had soon turned to politics, writes Anthony Glavin
Take, for example, the young soldier motoring at high speed towards Vitória, where he hoped both to meet his girlfriend and make half-eleven Mass. We reached Vitória safely, but not before my uniformed chauffeur had complained about how little the Spanish press was saying about the ongoing revolution in neighbouring Portugal - an uprising sparked by junior Portuguese Army officers - and told me how he hoped to be demobbed, rid of the Spanish army, by the time Spain was rid of an increasingly frail Franco.
It wasn't just Spanish politics that came up. "No way, José!" - or words to that effect - is what I told another driver who asked if the recently disgraced ex-President Nixon hailed from my native Massachusetts. Later that week, en route to Pamplona, a young, left-wing lawyer, told me, with all due respect, how many Spaniards considered most Americans to be "poco profundo" - that is, not very profound in their analysis of current affairs and world events.
Of course, the talk wasn't always of politics. Not on the Sunday I spent with Victor, a Madrid civil servant, and his wife, Rosie, from Galicia, who gave me a lift into Burgos, then insisted I see its 12th-century cathedral, which houses the remains of El Cid. After Burgos we stopped for lunch, paella con pollo, before going on to Madrid where that night we sampled what seemed like all the wine bars, las cuevas, beneath La Plaza Mayor. Enough cuevas anyhow, to have Victor and I shouting "Viva Fidel!" out of the car window after closing time. When reminded by Rosie that Franco still ran the place, we switched to shouting "Viva San Isidro!" - Madrid's patron saint - instead.
Further south, near Córdoba, I got a lift with Pedro who, when the chat turned polemical, remarked how "the average American was like un gran niño". "A big kid,", as we'd say back in Boston or, as Pedro put it, "a 45-year-old who thinks like a child". A generalisation, of course, but Pedro, a thoughtful man, seemed to speak from his own complexities, his father having been killed by the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War - "los rojos, the Reds". Nonetheless Pedro himself was no rabid anti-Communist, rather a democrat who decried the US involvement in Vietnam.
I know I first plumbed my own profundity deficit some years earlier on my initial visit to Ireland in 1967. The locale was the An Óige hostel across the sound from Achill Island, the occasion a fireside chat with a gaggle of Germans, Irish, French, English, and one fellow whose name I can still recall - Slim, a former Israeli soldier who was studying philosophy in Stockholm. The confab lasted long past midnight, and sent me to bed reeling from the knowledge of history and politics that my peers and fellow travellers had brought to the discussion. I couldn't sleep for hours, and next morning was still unsettled by the alternative, and decidedly non-US-centric, world view that had been thrashed out over countless cups of tea.
It wasn't until 1979, however, when a second-rate actor and two-bit governor of California emerged as a viable US presidential candidate, that the poco profundo penny truly dropped. That Ronald Reagan turned out a two-term president marked, moreover, a turning point in US presidential politics, establishing beyond doubt the ascendancy of the medium - television - over the message, the primacy of the sound bite over any discussion of issues, the triumph of style over substance.
It's not as if there was a lot of gravitas, never mind profundity, to the recent Californian recall election either. However, the reality (surreality?) of Governor Schwarzenegger suggests there's more (or is it less?) to American politics and civil discourse than shallowness alone. Testosterone plays its part too, not just the "Bring 'em on!" arrogance and flight-jacketed swagger of President Bush, auditioning for a walk-on part in his very own Hot Shots movie on an aircraft carrier off the California coast last spring, but also the vitriolic macho braggadocio that overflows from US radio talk shows, like verbal suppuration from the terrible and senseless wound 9/11 dealt America.
Nor does there appear to have been anything sagacious about the selection of a second-rate businessman, two-bit governor of Texas, first elected US President (or so the Supreme Court claimed) three years ago this week. Still, one of the nice things about democracy is that it does offer a second chance. Which is to say, a year from this Tuesday, my fellow Americans and I will get to vote for president again. A year seems like an awfully long time, I know, but I find it helps to take the long view of things.
Look at Spain, I remind myself. Nearly 40 years under Franco, but a full-fledged democracy now. OK, the right-wing prime minister José Aznar may not look like a profound choice to some of us, but be it Spain, the US, or here at home in Ireland, another election, another choice, always rolls around.