So, all over Spain and Latin America, in the press and on the Internets, people are saying "¿Por qué no te callas?" (although Google keeps asking me if I mean "porque no te callas?" but really, I don't!). When I showed the clip to my daughter, she laughed in recognition: the king's gesture, his tone, and the expression are just SO SPANISH! There are now dozens, maybe hundreds of versions of the same few clips posted in YouTube with comments that range from the virulently anti-monarchical to the grotesquely racist versions of Chavez-is-the devil, with a lot of very impassioned arguments in between. And of course there are now lots of parodies, remixes, ringtones, and arguing about whether King Juan Carlos (or Juancar) should be praised for telling Hugo Chavez to shut up, whether or not he was rude, or who is the most fascist, Aznar or the King who was chosen by Franco, ad infinitum.
Every so often, someone actually says something sensible, but this is one of those viral moments when an image of an event becomes the pretext for other kinds of speech acts that really are more about venting spleen than reasoned political discourse. And, of course, they are occasions for relajo of the kind that circulated after Zidane's infamous head butt incident in the World Cup final against Italy.
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2 comments:
It is SO SPANISH, yes. I always have this reaction when I see intonations and gestures like that, "Wow! They are still doing it in an absolutely unadulterated way!"
(When I was a student in Spain my roommate from Extremadura said I spoke like Lope de Vega. This was because I had just been studying a lot of early modern literature, and had not been practicing as much modern spoken Spanish. Now I have a colleague from Madrid and I keep telling him he speaks like Perez Galdos. He does not believe me but it is true. I can no longer read Perez Galdos without laughing out loud because he is so madrilenyo.)
I totally agree! This is SO SPANISH!! Did you know that the most popular ringtone in Spain is now these immortalized words? Pretty interesting huh? There are so many people at my church in Spain who do the exact same gestures, it's interesting to see them in the royalty...
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