Mark Shannon
Writer/English Teacher, 47
Arrived in Barcelona in 1994 from New York City

     Often times my students will ask me how Bush got re-elected. You have to remember we see different news here. The early days of the Iraq war, we saw dead bodies. Slaughtered, gruesome, depressing. Horrible stuff – civilians, kids. And then you turn on CNN, and it’s clinical, business as usual. Even now, that makes me so angry. It was censorship, without question. You just did not see a dead civilian on TV in America.
     There is a more skeptical attitude towards government here in Spain. There seems to be a gullibility in the American public, that at times, is a charming innocence. But it can be extremely infuriating that there isn’t more skepticism. I’m struck by my students’ ability to take a theme, define it, look at all the different angles, and come to an opinion about the subject. This business of arguing from ideology first, before doing any research, is really being taken to a new extreme over there.
     I hear some anti-American things, “They’re not curious. Why are they so stupid?” I always have to explain that for starters, some people in America have never met anyone that didn’t speak English, or that wasn’t just like them, so it makes it a little hard to identify with people outside their world.