Catalan retronecrophilia

I’m distinctly uneasy at the prospect of Catalonia being defined in a new statute of autonomy as a nation. The reason for this is very simple: I feel my chances of being allowed to be my own sweet n sour libertarian self are infinitely greater in the state sketched by JFK in his 1958 pamphlet, A nation of immigrants (famous quote: “a society of immigrants, each of whom had begun life anew, on an equal footing. This is the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dare to explore new frontiers”), than in an Iberian reworking of the hyphenAmerican ghetto. (Both traditions claim as their memeparent Walt Whitman’s “nation of nations”–Kennedy specifically citing him–and the same kind of multivalent/woolly writing turns up in the late C19th Spanish and Catalan federalists. It’s probably there in Basque writing too, but I need to maintain some vestiges of sanity.)

The Catalan nationalist socialists of the cake possession and consumption brigade are now seeking to calm the nerves of those of us who don’t exactly see 20th century Yugoslavia as the best model for 21st century Spain by saying, more or less, “Hey, relax, we’re just using the word in the first sense in the RAE dictionary: the totality of the inhabitants of a country governed by the same government.”

That this is a lie, and that the proposed statute is nothing more than a charter for ethnic supremacists, is confirmed by subsequent sections of the proposed statute, which justify the creation of powers for this “nation” by referring to the alleged historic linguistic preferences, rights and struggles of very old corpses, with whom only a minority of present-day citizens–living in a permanent state of self-imposed collective hysteria–feel any sense of empathy. Leaving aside the obvious unconstitutionality of the proposed reform, attempting to screw the living in order to please the dead is shameful and ridiculous.

Trevor @ 1 October 2005 5:05 PM

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