Crosstown traffic

An angry blogger – and, I suspect, the author of some incomprehensible emails which have been sent my way - has linked to my last blog entry in a post entitled “Racisme, alcohol i l'anglosaxó anticatalanista”, or “Racism, alcohol, and the anti-catalanist anglosaxon”.

Hi ha un anglosaxó a Barcelona que no entén que els gossos no entenguin el català. Aquest anglosaxó odia els catalanistes i no ho acabo d'entendre, perquè, segons ell, està casat amb una catalana.

There is an anglosaxon in Barcelona that doesn’t understand why dogs don’t understand Catalan. This anglosaxon hates catalanistas [catalan nationalists] and I don’t understand, because, according to him, he is married to a Catalan woman.

I never said “I don’t understand why dogs don’t understand Catalan”. That’s completely beside the point. In fact, I know a very friendly Golden Labrador who is fluent in Catalan and goes nuts when you play the first part of Jane’s Addiction’s “Been caught stealing”. I know of a bilingual cat who survived a four-story fall onto the mean streets of L’avinguda Verge de Montserrat (The Avenue of the virgin of Serrated Mountain). He usually keeps to himself but has been known to speak both Catalan and the invader language of Castellano depending on who will give him food. I even know of an iguana who speaks Catalan and some English (some say Catal-english). And finally there’s the sad story of the monolingual Catalan ferret who was struck by lightning and now, for some inexplicable reason, can only speak Chinese.

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Another strange fact …

My girlfriend’s grandmother, or la iaia, as they say around these parts, told me of how she used to sing for Catalan folkloric choirs after the civil war (in Catalan, by the way). But she also sang in Falangist choirs because they were handing out much-needed clothes.

And it’s another fact that she was married to an ex republican soldier.

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And please man, stop being so solipsistic. Catalan does not equal Catalanista. And Catalanista doesn’t mean “good” or “savior of the Catalan people”, unless you’re defining it according to your own ill-begotten axioms. It’s an ideology like any other, and it shamefully excludes the interests of Chinese speaking ferrets.

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Don’t miss the first part of Trajecte’s post:

L'altre dia hi pensava: si a mi no m'agrada anar amb gitanos ni moros, però tampoc els vull cap mal, sóc racista? Jo no els vull pas cap mal, però no m'agradaria pas de barrejar-m'hi. Clar, dir això, o tan sols insinuar-ho públicament, em pot comportar molts problemes, i seriosos. Però en el fons, no sóc racista. A més, no vol dir que acabi casant-me amb una musulmana, tot podria ser. Però el fet és aquest: ara per ara, a Catalunya, són una classe marginal i, com totes les classes marginals d'arreu, de totes les èpoques, són potencialment més perilloses que les altres classes de la societat. Afirmar això és racisme?

The other day I thought: if I don’t like hanging out with gypsies or moros [somewhat derogatory term that refers to people from Morocco … which would never be used in their presence unless you wanted a beatdown], but neither do I wish them any harm, am I a racist? I don’t wish them any harm, but I wouldn’t like to mix with them at all. Sure, saying this, or simply insinuating it publicly, could bring me lots of problems, and serious ones. But deep down, I am not racist. Furthermore, I don’t want to say I will end up marrying a muslim woman, everything is possible. But the fact is this: nowadays, in Catalunya, they are a marginal class and, like all marginal classes everywhere, from every epoch, they are potentially more dangerous than the other classes of society. To state this is racism?

As you can see, that really wasn’t even worth the time it took to translate it, except for the choice part about marginal classes being potentially more dangerous than other classes of society (that is, within this mindset, moros, gypsies, the invading Spanish hordes, guiris, and Chinese speaking ferrets). The awe-inspiring power of trajecte’s illogic is making my brain reel.

Flipo, tio.

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This is a great new entry from Urban Dictionary:

blogorrhea

To write a blog entry just for the sake of posting an entry, not because you have done anything interesting today.

I couldn't really think of anthing good to blog about, so my last post was real blogorrhea.