The other night I stayed with a neo-peasant Catalan hippy couple living in a grace and favour masia in the hills, for which you and I and anyone else without the requisite ethnic badge would probably have to lay down something in the region of €750K. The guy, son of Andalusian barkeepers, agreed that affection for nations and flags was a sign of mental debility, but then said that everyone should have or establish roots in the soil somewhere, and that the rootless were a terrible danger who should be eradicated without delay. These scum are no longer principally Jewboys, but “Anglican Anglo-Saxons”, which race in his imagination occupies a zone stretching from Alaska to Augsburg (remember those damn Fuggers) and from Lapland to LA. I explained that, far from being rootless, I am like a strawberry complex with runners connecting roots in various places. Now my host–who is of a horticultural bent–can say that some of his best friends are Anglican Anglo-Saxon soft fruits.

I think this primitive xenophobic ignorance is behind the neo-Nazi and neo-fascist demonstrations that each year mark the Catalan nationalist day of moaning. Americans are famous for their lack of geographical sense, but this is only because everything about Americans is well publicised. The other day I was in talking to people in a country bar when the blacksmith next to me said, “So which football teams do you have in England? Milan’s in England, isn’t it?” Hint for Spanish geography teachers: Italy is where the sun rises, and England is where it apparently quite often doesn’t.

Categories: Les bourgeois, Roads

RSS: post comments, blog comments, blog posts

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.