Silly Little Country

A Country Free of PC

Well, in the end, you come to understand why PC exists and has any force. This is really funny in a weird way - chase link and page down to second item - in that it reflects the amazing insularity of Spanish culture. Here is a piece of the ad.

And now the Spanish basketball team, the reigning world champions, have added another confounding chapter to a disgraceful timeline. In a full-page ad in Spain's best selling newspaper, the sports daily Marca, the team posed smiling and stretching the skin on the side of their eyes to appear Chinese.

The advertisement was for a courier service that sponsors the Spanish Basketball Federation, and apparently not a single player on the Spanish team thought that a slant-eyed gesture might not be the best image to project to the Olympic hosts.

Had the games been in Sweden, would their all donning blonde wigs have produced such a reaction?
On the other hand this is not a culture with a great history here recently.

In 2004, Spanish national soccer coach Luis Aragones referred to French footballer Thierry Henry as "that sh--- black;" also that year, Spanish soccer fans made monkey chants at black players on the English team; earlier this year, black Formula One racer Lewis Hamilton, of England, was subjected to such abuse in Spain that an International Herald Tribune reporter wrote that "it seemed almost as if the Ku Klux Klan had relocated to a racetrack near Barcelona."

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:41 PM