The Bullfighter Who FAILED to Integrate in America!
When the simulacrum becomes self-aware.
OSO, WASHINGTON, LATE 1990s:
After a brief stillness, the bull craned his head to lock eyes with mine. As he began to huff and trot in an arc, I dashed for the warped wooden fence several feet away. I gripped its damp boards, launching myself like one of the Mexican jumping beans that had recently come into my possession. Without pause, without looking back, I ran for the barn.
A regal feline watched from the rafters, sprawled out.
He contemplated the Boy Tornado, baggy clothes flapping, who climbed onto the hood of a tractor with front tires wider than I was tall. I took off my Seattle Seahawks ballcap to wipe away cold sweat while my fluffy audience purred. From Chase the Cat’s perspective, I survived being chased by nothing, which he often did for fun, hence his moniker. Grandma’s warnings came back to me, although she taught me how to climb fences in the first place. She taught me to use blades (such as machetes). She also taught me to notice the underappreciated: fungi, bird songs—
Deliberately fucking with bulls has been popularized in a couple of forms: bullfighting and the running of the bulls, both of which are mortally relevant for bulls, participants, bystanders, idiots abroad, etc.
Some consider such animal cruelty to be a cultural heritage; these practices span as far back as Ancient Rome, exported through conquest to countries like Mexico. Earnest Hemingway wrote Death in the Afternoon, an extended guide and loveletter to bullfighting after encountering the tradition in Pamplona. Though I myself once drew inspiration from a Mexican jumping bean to evade a charging bull, I didn’t mean to emulate Hemingway’s passion.
I think bullfighting is wrong, as do most of the Spaniards around me.
PRESENT-DAY SPAIN:
The grocery clerk is oddly stand-offish, I notice, as I take my change. I smile, quickly stuffing my bolsa grande as to keep the line moving. “Ciao-ciao,” I say. Muted response.
A quizzical look here, a raised eyebrow there.
On the street, I cross paths with a stocky guy in a cerveza-stained La Roja jersey who grins knowingly, performing a nod of surprised exaltation toward me. That was weird. I pull down the brim of my ballcap.
Uh oh…
SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, LATE 1990s:
Wow, that’s a big bush, I thought, walking Fisherman’s Wharf. Suddenly: a large man with an unkempt beard jumped out from behind it, gruffly shouting at me. I screamed, and everyone in the vicinity — people across the street, my other set of grandparents, and the Bushman himself — they laughed.
Now I laugh… about riding the ferry back from Six Flags in turbulent night waters; rollerblading in a sun-baked parking lot; singing Macho Man in the shower; collecting wads of spider webs on a stick; loitering at a wax museum of bygone celebrities; drinking Mexican smoothies with leche in them (that’s the secret ingredient); scrutinizing turquoise dials and knobs of a decommissioned submarine. The experiences we can’t repeat are the most valuable. All the same, had I brought a Mariners ballcap with me to Silicon Valley, there might’ve been a quizzical look here, a raised eyebrow there. A boy wearing a hat with a rival sports team embroidered on it? Forgivable.
But a man in Galicia with a Spanish national flag on his head?
A STATEMENT FROM OUR CEO
Hi, I’m Reese Dickheadballerstein, CEO of Bebop Libre.
The alleged incident that took place on May 23rd, 2026, pains me more than anyone. On my watch, a subordinate split personality portrayed himself as a Spanish nationalist in a proudly regionalist area of Spain, where he should have known better because he lives there. Notably, he was not acting in any official capacity on behalf of The Company. Nevertheless, our public accountability office has determined that this version of ourself had skipped the annual perception management training montage as inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. (It’s required viewing by all of us at the Bebop.)
Before being placed on leave, the personality had this to say:
“Okay look, when I deliberated upon purchasing the hat, a fleeting thought occurred to me: perhaps this is a bad idea. Yet the flag, sequestered to a bottom-corner just above the bill, was very small. I assigned no more than a 15% probability to my being mislabeled a Spanishist. Well, the odds actually hover somewhere around 100%, but remember that this finding was made through profound sacrifice; reputational and monetary. Nearly everyone who saw me wearing the hat, and who will continue to do so, will frown at my likeness in perpetuity. Furthermore, I cannot return the hat because I removed the tag.”
We had no choice but to admit him to a psychiatric institution, though the remainder of the post will remain as-is. Why? Because you’re part of the Bebop Libre family now, and we firmly believe that families should be open and honest about everything. Everything except for the things you don’t need to know.
Sent from my iPhone (at Davos),
Reese Dickheadballerstein
Spain is one country, but it’s more like a trenchcoat stuffed with several autonomous regions, split personalities and all. No matter the extent of the thronging high-speed rail network, the regions remain steadfastly protective of language, customs, governance, and the definition of tortilla de patatas. Francesco Screti ascertains that the most competitive Spanish identities are Catalanism, symbolized by the donkey; Basqueism, the sheep or more fearsome boar; Galicianism, the cow; and Spanishism, the Osborne bull. There’s overlap and much, much more going on, but these aren’t comparable to rival sports teams as are the fickle political positions in the United States. Spanishism can be seen as an encroachment upon regional identity, separatist or independentist sentiment notwithstanding. The vast majority of Galicians aren’t Galician nationalists, but they do appreciate when their autonomy is respected.
Autonomy is universally expressed by the negative space of the desert. Hoyo de Manzanares, Desierto de Tabernas, and Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park are pictured in Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood’s breakout leading role. He made a career out of pretending to be a cowboy in ever-desertifying Spain.
Films and television about cowboys shooting each other continue to be shot here, while a couple of hours by bus from Barcelona, there’s an annual Spanish Burning Man where Mad Max meets tatted pan-European DJs. Back when America carefully managed its perception, its image in desert mythology was repackaged from Spain’s geography, Spain’s culture, and Spain’s colonial impact on Mexican culture, romanticized. American capital projected motion picture simulacra a lifetime ago via Hollywood as it slopmaxes cyberspace with AI simulacra now.1
America reappropriates reappropriations of something it never was through post-ironic machismo cosplay, thrashing to reassert, without life nor art, the life-art imitation dynamic still thriving in Spain today, where about one in five residents were born abroad.
The street art, billboards, stickers, and posters can be invisible to those who’ve spent most of their lives in rural or suburban environs. Having gone from everything being miles apart to car-free Urban Density Heaven in Spain, forms of expression I considered to be the “filler” of video game worlds — background textures and decorations — just so happen to transmit useful information: language exchange meetups, Galician metal concerts, organizing. These are matters significantly more topical to me than Spanish absorbencymaxing tampon commercials and crypto scams that The Algorithm has decided are relevant to my interests, and yet Spain’s urban centers arose over a thousand years before techbros. Don’t speak ill of our wise magisters who were the court eunuchs in past lives; they’re only trying to extend their current lives with stem cells derived from the cryogenically-preserved foreskins of their NDA progeny or something.
A bullshit fighter in yellow aviators and a bucket hat, brain chemistry awash in rogue waves of exogenous substances and paranoid mania, documented America before its lineage to the Old World had been supplanted by a new, self-slopping operating system. He invented Gonzo journalism by casting himself into the fringes of American society at his own peril, popularized by becoming the Vegas vibe he traced down the highway at 100 miles per hour.
He never found what he was looking for, because it wasn’t in America. It wasn’t American. Eventually he came to resent the caricature of himself he became, a self-perpetuating simulacrum that took on a life of its own in pop culture as epitomized by the “Raoul Duke” persona, a legally-necessitated surrogate of the real author. Johnny Depp’s cinematic portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson as Duke — despite the care and craft involved — had severed its countercultural roots. Thompson’s self-awareness of an attachment to that which lacked connection shrouded his later years in bleakness, much like another writer who had profoundly inspired him, so much so that he once stole “an elegant pair of elk horns that hung proudly over the entrance to Hemingway's house,” wrote Douglas Brinkley for Rolling Stone in The Final Days at Owl Farm.
Hemingway and Thompson are gone, but the proto-Vegas vibe is not. It was in Spain the whole time. An hour after my misidentification as a Spanishist… I was catcalled. Treated the way a crab leg gets objectified in the smoking section of a casino buffet entertained by wheezing dancers with swollen eye sockets. Where? The street corner outside my apartment. En España.
BACK TO PRESENT-DAY SPAIN:
I jostle my haul haphazardly onto the kitchen counter. Spanish Doritos and blue cheese, mm mm good. Then I switch my politically-charged hat out for my MAGA hat with the Osborne Bull patched onto it. Just kidding. The goal is to now take a stroll without incident. Bushmen need not apply.
I don’t want to be noticed an hour after I did an accidental nationalism. And nothing says “please go away” like earbuds abuzz with someone improvising tasteful lyrics over The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army… while dissociating. I reach an intersection I’ve passed a bajillion times, without incident, and briefly glance up from scrolling through comfort episodes of my podcast. This is when another novel event, one in which I become the center of attention, occurs.
From the passenger seat of a car, a drunk Española makes direct eye contact with me and shouts with all of her might—
“GUUAAPPPPPOOOOOO!”
My pupils play pingball, and a single bead of cold sweat scurries down my forehead. I lift my cap to wipe it off as I try to recall what ‘guapo’ means while smothered by the brain fog of anxiety. Then I assume it’s a slur for a tourist or foreigner. No, that’s not it… the Galicians have collectively decided that I’m a Spanish nationalist — the only logical explanation. Now I’m panicking about that, and simultaneously meta-panicking about panicking. Am I panicking?! No exogenous substances required.
Meanwhile, there’s an audience: the people across the street at the bar have their eyes trained on me. Grins emerge; a hoot here, a ‘tee-hee’ there. The shameless miscreants are celebrating my humiliation! Somebody says something close by; I don’t hear or understand it and my vision blurs.
I phase between shade-soaked trees where I stew in melancholia, like a spiced octopus subjected to a rolling boil.
Then I madly cackle at the obscene podcast damaging my eardrums and brain. A nearby couple embracing one another on a bench think I’m laughing at their expense. They’re worrying they’re not right for one another anymore, aren’t they? My panic resumes.
FREAK POWER NOW:
Growing up in America is confusing, even as a native English speaker, because words used there tend to defy the surface translation.
“Nice glasses,” for example, is just another way of saying, “Fuck you and, by the way, fuck you for being visually impaired.” A Southern classic: “Bless your heart.” That’s just a nice way of saying “fuck you.” One I can’t help but utter while watching someone else do something I’ve not volunteered to do myself is, “That’s one way to do it.” But ‘sick’ and ‘bad’ and ‘wicked’ and ‘filthy’ can have positive connotations, depending on the context. While these quirks reverberate all over the English-speaking world, the inversion is applied without limit to the founding document of my origin country.
The American ideal of libre matters a great deal to me. Thompson sought to claw it back in his 1970 campaign for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, calling for Freak Power. Yet the power was in Spain all along.
“We can't stop here, this is bat country!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Much lipservice to the glories of ‘individualism’ is paid in America, yet its suburban patriarchs, for illustrative purposes, may only wear an ironed shirt with a collar. Unless of course they’re cosplaying as cowboys to shoot a friend in the face. “Those damned immigrants don’t integrate,” says one such anti-individualism individualist, prominently displaying every symbol of the in-group. “They don’t learn the language,” he grumbles, after telling his wife “that’s one way to do it.” His liberty to be a self-licking asshole is unconstrained. Don’t remind him of his immigrant ancestors. Don’t tread on him; if he found out he was mired in conspiracy theories because he lives in a hall of mirrors where everything means something else, far removed from anything real, his pride would gush out as if an estoque de verdad had been deposited in his hindquarters.
Despite my wounded pride and challenges with active listening, vision, taste, fright, and communication, I do think that I’m off to a better start integrating in Spain than I had in America. The reason is simple: the mythology I was raised on in America feels like reality in Spain. I don’t have to agree with everything they do here, like bullfighting, or eating octopus. Pulpo, a staple of Spanish cuisine, is favored particularly among the Gangs of Galicia, served at Festas da Ascensión here in Santiago de Compostela. Snails aren’t for me either, but this has less to do with ethics as it does the mental image of gastropod mucus blanketing the Pacific Northwest.
Nonetheless, these aren’t structural issues that would impede my ongoing integration, but the erosion of freedom — and basic common courtesy — guaranteed my pro-America ideals couldn’t meet their potential in the country of my birth. Freak Power may have been pro-freak, but it sought to restore Lady Liberty’s values decades before she stripped all of them for cash. I’ll pass on the freedom to be shot by a dog, thanks. The real challenge for me here in Spain has been dropping the habit of hallucinating duplicity in all things. I must stop looking for the disheveled man behind every bush 🧐.
Let the fungi and bird songs remind us that we’re not simulacra. This is not a simulation. Unless you are a simulacrum…
Finally, I can’t fault the señorita in mistaking me for 1000GUAPO.
Without a cat’s eyes, who can tell the difference? He and I are both musical prodigies of comparably taut physique, leaves of the same bushy fractal. The resemblance is literalmente astounding, what with the gold chain and grill. Come to think of it… [flashes gold ring] my better half and I are due for a date just like the one featured in the below music video. You know me: I’m always prepared for the occasion with Sangre de Toro stashed in the cocina.
Simulacra and Simulation was not intended to be an instruction manual.