The zeitgeist had a recipe for us in July. It’s a dish served cold. It includes sports, polarization, and tension (good and bad). Add a grain of salt to it —and a bit of pepper if you like.
It’s been over two years since we moved to the United States from Europe, where Kirsten and I (she, a Californian, and I, a Catalonian) lived and raised our kids until recently. It’s a timely moment to talk about a few things from an insider-outsider perspective.
The last few days have been an emotional rollercoaster for Americans as the country copes with yet another attempt at the assassination of a presidential candidate. This is not new, and I wish the leftovers of the often-inspiring frontier mentality of my country of adoption materialized in other fields, like the proactive (and productive) traits that I’ve found so many times among my California relations, as well as those from the country as a whole.
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It is disturbing for anybody to see how such events come back as a curse, and nobody seems to link it to mental health or the guns per population ratio. It’s only the “rhetorical escalation.” Nothing is more disturbingly solipsistic than believing that the way to deal with confrontation is by killing the opponent. No opponent, no problem, this rationale goes.
As a middle-aged skeptic—a skeptic of the “humanist” type, like Michel de Montaigne, and not of the more abundant 50 shades of “cynic”—of anything skilfully appealing to our core lizard brain by using a siege mentality to inflate the collective sense of belonging and nationalism, I take national-level professional sports with a grain of salt.
The role of sports to deescalate (or escalate) tensions
I come from a part of the world where nationalism is so ingrained in people’s perspectives that I tried to complement my official education with active self-learning about the world to avoid thinking in chauvinistic terms about the Catalonia-Spain relationship. Mind you, sometimes Spanish is looked down on in cultivated places around Catalonia, so it’s not the first time that I have lived somewhere where the language of Cervantes, of Borges, of Alejo Carpentier, of Gabriel García Márquez, or Roberto Bolaño—a Spaniard, an Argentinian, a Cuban, a Colombian, a Chilean—doesn’t get you social clout but rather the opposite.
As an on-and-off soccer fan growing up outside Barcelona, my upbringing meant playing lots of highly technical futsal—I’m a lefty—in an area with national champions and a great tradition for soccer and futsal but also basketball—the Gasols grew up nearby, whereas Juan Carlos Navarro, an NBA player, was two years my junior at the same high school—, handball, water polo, tennis, you name it. Almost everybody I knew growing up rooted for FC Barcelona but a few contrarians, having RCD Espanyol, the other team of the city, as their team of choice, and a few heretics silently rooting for archrival Real Madrid. Which came with connotations: being a madridista and not a culé meant that one belonged to a family with a particular idea of “fitting in” within Catalonia.
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At the national level, Catalonia and other peripheral regions of Spain with a strong identity, especially the Basque Country, didn’t show a natural, gregarious connection with the big clubs; almost everyone wanted them to win, but showing exultant enthusiasm didn’t come easy or at all, despite contributing with a reasonable number of players to the success of teams at the national level. To put it mildly, Spain won the 2010 South Africa World Cup thanks to Catalan and/or Barça players: a header by Puyol against Germany—the best opponent by far—in the semifinals and Xavi or Busquets as pillars of that golden generation. However, you could barely hear the joy in Barcelona during the semifinal or the final. Everyone was happy, but not Barça-victory-level happy. And it was okay for me.
So it was surprising to see the golden generation go, and the tiki-taka style became somehow predictable for rivals, if not dull, to watch once the maestros Xavi and Iniesta were out. Real Madrid made the Champions League its personal trophy—holding more titles on their own than any other country with an important league in aggregate—and the magic of Barça faded; we moved, and I even forgot the players’ names. I lost track of the sport and barely enjoyed the few match recaps I watched here and there, with some exceptions. But, if you favor team play over individualities and the buzz of Instagram-friendly mega-stars, you were at a loss these last years.
The plays that bring innocence back
My interest in the sport clicked again when I saw how the women’s Spanish national team played together during the latest—and first— World Cup they played and won. Like the Proustian madeleine, they reminded me of the time when my teenage self-learned not only to play the game and enjoy doing so but to enjoy watching how the soccer school kickstarted in Spain by Dutch player Johann Cruyff—an important figure for the Dutch national team as the main symbol of the Dutch golden generation (aka “The Clockwork Orange,” and for FC Barcelona, first as a player in the ’70s and as a coach years later—, who had grown up in the soccer school of Ajax of Amsterdam. In a way, the playful, skillful, Swiss-clock precise, team-oriented way of playing that took off in Spain in the last decades has one of its origins in the Netherlands.
There are other important styles and schools in Spain, and Paco Gento’s Real Madrid was arguably unbeatable back when Franco was in his prime, whereas the “Quinta del Buitre,” called after Emilio Butragueño, showed that Real Madrid’s school was one of the top places to learn the sport, with one big caveat, however: in the late eighties and early nineties, if one wanted to enjoy watching top European soccer, the league to watch was the Italian Calcio, and the team to beat (because it was essentially unbeatable, having invented modern football) was Arrigo Sacchi’s (then Fabio Capello’s) AC Milan.
Watching Sacchi’s Milan against one’s own team of choice (no matter which) was painful; they were that superior and fun to watch. Their defense, midfield, and forward played together like a finely tuned, yet not-at-all boring or predictable, machine. The Dutch connection between Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten, and Frank Rijkaard was beautiful. Heck, their defenders were among the finest ever, both in Italy and Europe. (Fun fact: Sacchi’s physical resemblance with Spain’s coach Luis de la Fuente is remarkable).
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Those preferring the drama and epic of exceptional players carrying their teams on their backs thanks could also watch Maradona’s Napoli. There were equivalents of Italy’s main teams, and the Spanish, English, and German leagues were intense and exciting; even The Netherlands, benefiting from the quality of their youth programs, had Ajax and PSV up top, fighting for the European Cup (precursor of the Champions League) with the mighty.
Yet, in Spain, there was already another way of enjoying the sport, which connected with a purer, more amateur way of understanding soccer: in the Spanish Basque region, clubs Athletic de Bilbao and Real Sociedad recruited their players from their exceptional youth teams, and Athletic did so consistently, famously having only players from the area. Their soccer was more physical and, like English teams, generated gifted players not only in how they saw the game as a whole and could connect with teammates but also profited from corners and free kicks by scrambling to get the perfect header in the net.
Emergentism of a young team
Inheriting several of the souls the sport bred in Iberian Peninsula, the current Mens Spanish National Team had the difficult task to return the team to lost highs: It had consistently lost knockouts of any big competition since they won their second UEFA European Championship, and the impasse from the former golden generation to today’s soccer had them in limbo: Considered a technically good team, nobody thought much of them, deemed as too young, inexperienced and unreliant on another golden generation from either Barça or Madrid. Then, UEFA Euro 2024 happened.
Anyone interested in the sport will read better things about how Spain performed in the competition and who it confronted, winning all games and playing consistently better than the opponents. But something else happened: As fans unrelated to the team watched how they played, who they were, and how young and inexperienced some of the teammates were, the attention grew to the point that it reached our kids without me having anything to do with the matter.
I bring this up because the Spanish team had many qualities that made the sport shine this time. There were no big names, and everyone sensed that the whole was much more than the mere addition of its players. It was diverse—more diverse and representative of the reality of Spain than previously—; all players had earned their place, despite their age or origin, because they’re darn good, not because of being representative of anything. It’s not about being diverse for the sake of it; it’s about letting the best in, no matter their origin. Not the same.
We’ve heard so many times lately that diversity equals weakness and identity loss; one could argue the opposite —if well understood and integrated, it shows the success of dynamic and thriving societies capable of gaining strength and reinforcing their identity as it can sum up instead of otherizing differences.
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Interestingly, the combative, cohesive glue of the team (an assemble that plays in different leagues across Europe) had a strong representation of the Basque, Catalan, and Madrid-area schools, with unknown players raised in Athletic de Bilbao or Real Sociedad at the core. And here’s the thing: different schools, from the center and the strong periphery, of Spanish or foreign origin, were capable of playing excellent symphonies in the field as an emergent entity, growing stronger by harmonizing different styles and types of players, welcoming unpredictable, genius-level talent and blending it with the discipline and game vision of less spectacular teammates.
In philosophy of mind and natural sciences, “emergentism” refers to the phenomenon in which a given system has an outcome that is superior to the sum of its lower-level entities; it works for systems created by humankind, but also in biology: an ant colony is more “intelligent” than the aggregate of all individual ants; or, we wouldn’t be able to measure the temperature of one room by measuring the molecules within the room adding them together.
Early July 2024
During the Eurocup, the only team that could claim to be emergentist in this sense, at least at a higher level of magnitude than the rest, was young, unexperienced Spain, to the point of realizing that one could take one, two, three, five key players out of a given game, and people coming from the bench would accommodate to the team without feeling there was any fundamental change in the level or play whatsoever. This is called having or cultivating a “culture” in something. Spain may be a discordant country with permanent unsolved tensions between its periphery and center, a phenomenon analyzed as the eternal Iberian collision between centrifugal and centripetal forces, or the “two Spains” described by the—worthy—poet Antonio Machado.
Not long ago, matters among peers were solved in some areas of Northern Spain “a bastonazos,” or a fight with cudgels, as Francisco de Goya famously painted. Things have often gone awry in Iberia. Skepticism can be healthy when regional passions are a part of people’s identities. And what the soccer team achieved in a few days isn’t something to disregard —it made people of all ages smile and think that sometimes, working together pays off. Sometimes, the best team wins, no matter if it’s the most inexperienced among the favorites, no matter if one of its players is sixteen and is undergoing exams to get his high school diploma. No wonder my kids see more than soccer in the way he played during the tournament —the goal against France, the precise passes with thread effect.
Youth, a celebration of diversity by creating a choral style, and the unrelenting hunger of young players eager to shake the status quo. I could see why our kids knew the players’ names and were mesmerized by their style, freshness, and nonchalance. At their best, national sports should achieve this: inspiring the possibility of finding cohesion towards a common good from the differences.
A 16-year-old who had turned 17 on the eve of the game in the final and a 21-year-old who had just turned 22 had entered the collective unconscious of Gen Z but also won over all of us with their plays, innocence, and ways of celebrating. They shared their freshness with everybody by earning their way in with irreverence.
How to calm down a polarized society
As all this was happening, and much more for Spanish sports (sorry all), my country of adoption was undergoing yet another traumatic event associated with politics. An attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and ex-president, no less. The event is telling in many ways and underlines what this country has been going through for years now. The effects of polarization are eroding people’s confidence in the collective and a sense of being a part of a cohesive society.
Unlike European nations, built on top of the identity, alliances, and legacy of their past, the United States is an experiment with its foundation in the ideals of the Enlightenment, much like a New World particular version of the French Revolution, which welcomed, protected, and put merit before heritage. As the country welcomed immigrants from all over Europe and its identity diluted, it built a new cohesion based on its democratic values, frontier exploration, and communal volunteering and celebration, from barnraising and protection of freedom of religion to a celebration of sports events.
By clumsily writing about how a team can carry much more than eleven players on one field, I wanted to highlight the risk that the United States faces if it continues drifting and keeps investing big sums of money funding polarization and ideas that aren’t inclusive or potentially welcoming by all by their very partisan or pseudo-identitarian nature. The country that can lead by example in how to become emergentist (better as a whole than the sum of its individual parts) has reached a point of toxicity in its public debate that should concern all.
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Perhaps a way to de-escalate is to want to do so. The proximity of elections and the last events are doing the opposite.
There’s a poem by Antonio Machado sung by Joan Manuel Serrat decades later that sums up what happened to the hyper-partisanship that destroyed the II Spanish Republic and wide opened the doors to fascism, communism, and the Civil War:
There is a Spaniard today, who wants
to live and is starting to live,
between one Spain dying
and another Spain yawning.
Little Spaniard just now coming
into the world, may God keep you.
One of those two Spains
will freeze your heart.Ya hay un español que quiere
vivir y a vivir empieza,
entre una España que muere
y otra España que bosteza.Españolito que vienes
Españolito, poem LIII from Proverbios y cantares (Campos de Castilla, 1912); by Antonio Machado
al mundo, te guarde Dios.
Una de las dos Españas
ha de helarte el corazón.
Those were Antonio Machado’s—who died alone and in exile—two cents of what would happen to his country. He could see it, but couldn’t prevent it. Americans today can see it, and CAN still prevent it; it’s not a matter of voting for one or another candidate; it’s a matter of regenerating a system that has become as inbred and hemophilic as the most inbred European monarchies of yesteryear, a gerontocracy (or gerontocraZy): a society governed by old people clung to their seats to secure their legacy.
Sports and völkisch sentiment
It happens in both parties, and the phenomenon, which seems structural and difficult to shake off (one has just to look at the Senate or the Supreme Court), that the situation is ripe again for nationalist and confrontational messages to take over for good —and, the same way that good values can be transmitted or symbolized with sports or non-confrontational politics, a justified siege mentality is as irresistible and contagious, if not more. Instead of trusting or hoping to trust your neighbor, you just decide to buy a gun to protect yourself and visit forums that talk about self-organizing militias, falling for the misguiding parallelisms with the history of revolutionary America.
Sports are often an opportunity for people to release some accumulated grudges, and diverse teams that lose are deemed incohesive, whereas minority players are harassed; when a team plays well, all is brighter during and after the fact (would I be writing this article if Spain had played the same way but not won?). National sports are also an opportunity for people to raise their nationalist tendencies and resort to bragging.
Coming from a place like Catalonia, I’m suspicious of any gregarious pseudo-völkisch collective sentiment. It gives me hope that our kids found the positive side of exploring their Spanish side by seeing themselves through the eyes of two smiling kids, one of Ghanaian origin and the other of Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean origin. It’s not the identity they see; it’s their attitude, skills, and cohort sense of belonging. They are the future, and we shouldn’t be telling them how to look at it.
What’s more, we shouldn’t be hoarding it by parking older people in all the decision-making centers. There was a time when Americans looked with contempt at European democracies; now, several European mandataries are solid Generation X and some younger. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal was born in 1989. Biden and Trump could be their grandfather. Luckily for him, they are not.
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When I talk to people in the Bay Area, there’s a sense of exhaustion regarding how polarization and the so-called culture wars are so entrenched in politics that there seems to be little room to look at the future with the uncomplexed optimism of younger cohorts. They know that, after the latest events, there’s a real chance of having a watershed moment in which formerly fringe ideas come to pass and affect people’s lives.
The gerontocrats are making it worse, and they won’t leave; they are so vested. It’s a very European sense of resignation. Seneca called it fatalism. Americans believed their country, young and vigorous, was inoculated against it.
Moving to the US: The good, the bad, and the ugly
So, after more than two years of living in the US, it’s time for me to come with the good, the bad, and the ugly. I hope my five cents help people understand that things change and gerontocracies give way to others, even when they seem to last forever.
First, the good: This country makes you feel at home at record speed, and it does so like no other place on earth, as it comprehends your cultural baggage and doesn’t try to impose another identity upon you but welcomes you to the inherent immigrant melting pot. There are big caveats on what I’m arguing here since one would be naïve or outright misleading people if he were not to disclose that not everybody is treated equally.
Some people with access—relatives, relations, an education, money, a passport issued by one developed country falling in the ESTA visa category, and the right looks (yes, let’s face it, there are implicit biases) can ease many things, from interpersonal relations to administrative interactions, both in person or done telematically. One example: I came to the US and waited for as long as I could to apply for a Green Card since I wanted to keep traveling outside the US, and I knew that once you begin your application process, it’s risky to travel internationally, and some people have needed to start this process over again because they traveled internationally during an emergency.
That meant I used two consecutive ESTA vistas of three months each, but reentering the second time, the customs agent smiled at me (never showing any tension or remorse) and suggested I apply for a Green Card. Though I got the feeling it wasn’t a big deal: I had a home in Europe, a passport from the European Union, an American wife, and binational kids (our children have two passports from the US and Span, showing the most convenient one to be on the right line depending on which sense of the Atlantic we are going).
American optimism and the microcosm of personal circumstances
The process was easy and smooth, so I started applying in mid-January 2023, and I had my green card mailed at home by early August 2023. It doesn’t go that smoothly for most people. It oftentimes never materializes, leaving law-abiding, productive taxpayers who usually are a positive force within their communities and to the country as a whole. I have no complaints about the way this country welcomed me, but I’m not naïve, and I heard very different accounts from people I have talked to personally. Somebody told me recently that my assumption was wrong regarding my hypothesis about the smooth process; I thought that, as a spouse and father of American citizens, I was in the sweet spot for getting residency fast. This isn’t always the case, he explained to me: If the applicant’s passport doesn’t belong to an OECD country, the process can be less smooth.
Let’s acknowledge the existence of friction where it exists. I’m not making this up, though I can’t prove it either. As somebody who benefited from the comprehensive and fairly efficient USCIS digital filing process, it’d feel good to believe that this administrative body applies the same rules to spouses and parents of all American citizens. It’s not intelligent for a young, dynamic country of immigrants to make things difficult for productive people in the prime of their lives. Ronald Reagan and George G.W. Bush understood this.
When I started to apply for my permanent residency in California over a year ago, I talked to some friends and acquaintances from Silicon Valley who, despite being brilliant professionals mostly working in tech, didn’t have a passport from a developed nation, most of them coming from the Indian subcontinent and holding Indian, Pakistan, or Bangladeshi nationalities. I quickly saw there were at least three self-perceived groups among those communities among us.
The first group consists of those lucky enough to have not only permanent residency outside their current job but also accumulated wealth (sometimes, real wealth) thanks to the opportunities for talent that the Bay Area has offered during the last thirty years of impressive innovation, which have also caused less positive externalities for everyone in the area that I don’t want to address on this post but do exist, like a chronic inability to meet housing demand with inventory, hence leading to excessive price increases (also related with poor policies voted by everyone in the State that favor owners over young people, like Proposition 13).
A second group, also self-perceived as very fortunate, is where most of our relations in and around Palo Alto fit. It consists of successful professionals who like what they do, work hard, and often have switched jobs easily before hitting middle age. They hold permanent residency and often own conventional homes that nonetheless are so expensive that they’d be perceived as millionaires anywhere else in the world. In the San Francisco mid-Peninsula, they’re just getting by decently, though not killing it by any means.
I also met people from a third group, which shows a hidden dynamic that has played a big role in the success of many tech behemoths. They are workers coming mostly from Asian countries—though not exclusively since there’s a growing representation from Latin America and other developing parts of the world, like the least wealthy Eastern European countries, for example—who hold a temporary visa tied to their job. To them, losing their position is a matter beyond stressful, since not getting another job fast enough may mean a rejection of their legal non-permanent status, and hence be subject to expulsion (even when they own a home, have children who were born in the US, or remain in their most productive years).
What polarization does to optimism
Guess what, Spaniards are in an interesting position when they live in California. We’re perceived as Europeans, but there’s arguably no Hispanic (if we defined Hispanics as people whose culture of origin is related to the Iberian Peninsula, “Hispania” being the Roman denomination of the westernmost Southern European peninsula) more related to that definition than citizens of Spain, Portugal, or Andorra (let’s not forget the tiny Pyrenean mountain country with Catalonian identity).
However, when I met people in the Bay Area who spoke Spanish, I often found that their role in society was very different from mine, and their Spanish language (the same as mine) is also perceived differently and looked down upon. Self-perceived realities are non-objective by definition, but let’s not be naïve and acknowledge as adults that the bias is real and has nothing to do with merit or hard work.
And I don’t want this to sound condescending to people I’ve met who tend to gardens or work in the construction trades; the so-called low-skilled jobs often require skilled, poorly paid workers. While doing a home renovation, a friend of mine met a Central American college-educated worker who showed professionalism and quality in his work. He’s been paying taxes for years, works on Saturdays and, on his rest day, Sundays, he manages to work around his home or take other jobs outside the reach of his contractor, who is a Mexican-American (legal) resident.
Serious people, caring fathers driving their kids to activities on the little time left, making ends meet with skill and asking nothing, owing nobody. Most of the time, they aren’t legal residents, nor will they become so anytime soon. Yet I keep hearing the rhetoric that these people are taking advantage of the US and are criminals. Something doesn’t add on. Either I manage to hear the nicest stories and meet the nicest minority of an otherwise more convoluted demographic, or all people coming to the US aren’t treated equally.
Let’s be clear: I didn’t show the same commitment, I’m less convinced of the many good things the US has to offer people, and I’m more critical of the flaws of the country than any of the Hispanics (primarily non-white) that I met, living legally or (often) not in this country. I did have it easy; they didn’t, don’t, and won’t. But hey, the bad perception of this group, its “otherization,” makes you popular and “tough on crime” and can get you an election. If so, any uncredulous citizen should follow the money and see what happens to taxes for billionaires in the coming term.
What I’m trying to say is something that will be obvious to the observer: There’s nobody more convinced in the actual value, vigor, and validity of the American Dream than those who came to this place from abroad and worked hard, built companies, coached their kids, did community service. They are the most despised by insiders who are the most tired and cynically view the country they consider as theirs “by heritage” as in risk or “done.” I also want to clarify that this isn’t a naïve post. I acknowledge that immigration into the most developed nations requires extensive regulation. However, it can be done in a humane way and not boasting about it as if it were a celebration, a modern version of, say, burning heretics at the stake (Europe anyone?) or lynching people (better not to go deep on this).
The bad and the ugly
I mentioned the good. (There are many other good things about the US and about our life here, but I don’t want to make this too personal. I’m fortunate. We’re fortunate.)
Now, the bad and the ugly. In this article, I highlighted some of the positive values of competition. But I think there’s a big deal of misunderstood competitiveness in the US, a phenomenon that takes different shapes: I dislike it, especially when I feel things are framed as a rat race, a Hunger Games clash, or a Lord of the Flies, survival-of-the-fittest Burning Man. Europeans never interiorized any doctrine of a manifest destiny (well, let’s avoid Napoleon and Hitler today), and it shows. Any conversation at a certain level in Europe will feel more detached from events, as nobody feels their life is the most important thing that happened to the universe. There’s a certain level of entitlement that comes with having ruled the world for decades.
This article is getting long. Take care. And remember: Coming together once in a while and believing in something proactively can yield healing benefits for all. The time you start banning, excluding, creating a cast system, or giving the helm to otherworldly ideas, you’re just going to feel disappointed.
Nothing good comes from doubling down on prejudice and negativity. To Victor Frankl, Austrian psychologist and holocaust survivor:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
It’s very American to rebel and refuse a context that seems focused in highlighting only negative things. Being optimistic despite the gerontocraZy may feel revolutionary.