He's the Man Down There

Barcelona, 2025

This is Barcelona now, a tale of two cities in one image, of idealism and religious devotion and the actual life that confronts residents every day.

Great coffee in Spain, cortado or espresso. This column / outburst is free-read-free-comment. You can pitch in for the writer’s steady supply here.

Quick Read

From Volte-Face Paris:

As for Auzière, he’d barely understood a word Knowles had said in his overexcited and essentially incomprehensible French. Knowles kept going.

-Yes and down below this Paris there is another city where the slaves live, the ones who perform the vital functions – cutting, collecting, hauling, thieving – under a fluorescent sky. Does your Paris have that, too ?

Auzière’s great round face was like a paper lantern untouched by the slightest breeze. Only the shaggy hairs on his brow vibrated, like antennae. It was in its way a grand performance. He gestured towards the door and after a moment’s hesitation, Knowles collapsed, leaning flush against.

-A baker could play a professor pretty well I bet. Knowles decided to have fun with the whole idea. Absalom joined in.

-Only if they run out of freelance professors –

-You mean failed professors, psychos –

-A baker could do the job. Why not ? Or a garbageman.

-We are actively seeking people in the communications and entertainment sector. Auzière was dismayed by the direction the conversation was taking. He had to get the two jokers out of his office as soon as possible.

Volte Face Paris is a novel set you-know-where, currently sitting in the manuscript pile on a few editor’s desks.

Mr. Munch, meet Fred, Fred Nietzsche

The streets of Barcelona are terrifying, not only in their actuality but in what they all too accurately predict for the future: entire historic entities, living communities emblazoned with Cultural Heritage of Humanity status, blah rah blah, inundated with the dregs of a rootless humanity, the lowest, cheapest airfare specimens come to trample anything that remains of actual breathing cultural coherence. The Catalans know how to pocket a good coin, they aren’t the richest region in Spain for no reason, and they’ve opened la Sagrada Familia before it’s finished so a bunch of yabbos from all eight corners of the globe can stand there uncomprehendingly and snap photos. (These go direct to Instagram and TikTok, and therefore constitute the all-new Great Chain of Being, which excludes contemplation or anything beyond the most rudimentary understanding of what they’re gawking at, etc…)

I can’t say for you but I wanted to run, flee, get away as fast as I could. I can’t make sense of Sagrada with its mix of eclectic, fruity styles, its past-tense modernism, but I’m interested in Gaudi and what drove him to create such a strange, fervent temple of religious belief. I was left with instants of beauty and a heavy case of Structural Incoherence. The incessant alterations of style were so jarring as to leave my nerves on edge. Jesus floating over the altar looked like a pro from Cirque du Soleil.

Step outside and you are back in our actual present, where the European cities, which those bargain tourists want to visit so badly because of some intangible essence, have men carooming around on bikes delivering parcels of food all over town. Watch yourself crossing the streets, there’s a man headed right at you. This man has no idea who you are, nor you him, and it doesn’t matter. The delivery to third parties is all that matters.

This is but one heritage of COVID, that blitz of consensual conformity during which people voluntarily locked themselves in their homes, afraid to open their windows or leave for a drive to the beach without wearing a mask. A fortress where they now prefer to have a Pakistani or an Indian Sikh, who will always be a stranger to them, hand over their meal after pedaling furiously from Point A to B before being given orders to go back to A to deliver to C.

Munch would simply have run out of Screams on Passeig de Gracia on Saturday night. I watched a thief at close quarters as he leaned against a cement block dumped at the edge of Plaza Catalunya as he eyed the possibilities. He looked a little perplexed by this crowd of smiling bozos, not sure who he should hit first. He had plenty to choose from and knew people were too distracted by their phones to register his presence. He waited for the crowd to thin out. How could he vanish into thin air the way the pros do in that crowd ? He wouldn’t get far in that horde of shufflers, stumblers and phone-idlers…

This is early December, what they call the Slow Season.

The Man Down There

The song is one of Jimmy Reed’s hits, co-written with his wife, known as Mama, and it has obvious resonance for anyone who’s been there, down there, looking up, wondering what gives ? with the people in charge. But our little potentates, the bureaucratic directors of our current malaise, are only concerned about the food arriving while it’s still hot. They not paying for the meal and they don’t dare to go out…

You on the second floor, what you don’t know
You reachin’ too high boy, you finally hit the floor
Ah ah baby, I’m that man down there,
I’m telling you boy don’t you walk down those stairs

This is the new striation of the world, the invading forces unleashed by unlimited immigration, facilitated by bleeding hearts who like to watch people suffer (makes them feel noble to be outraged about it), men and women yanked out of their culture so they can send money home. It’s a royal scam, as another song puts it, a new kind of Atrocity Exhibition, and the Man Down There has no choice but to keep pedaling, pedaling day and night, all hours, no contact with the culture he’s moved to, no inspiration, only The Job of Delivery to Europeans too lazy to go out of their houses to confront the world they’ve helped create.

Not my intention to scare you but those are my immediate impressions from being rocketed into the near-future. As robots establish an ever greater presence in our lives, all the effects mentioned above will increase, not incrementally but exorbitantly, like an algorithm on ecstasy. Whatever are humans going to do with themselves….

We’ll leave it there for now but note, on the bright side, the African countries, Burkina-Faso, Niger and Mali prominently, who have dared to break away from the Dominant Narrative and are building countries whose people have a reason to stay.

That used to be called Anti-Imperialism but who knows what far fetched names it will get me called now. Fire away.

I’ll go mano à mano with Barçelona and la Sagrada Familia at greater length in a later post.

It’s an intemperate take so comment and help sooth the savage beast with a cup of coffee or two here. Merci d’avance.