Today I've been told by a partner, who defines herself as a Republican, that her daughter drives her crazy. "Do you know what my daughter is singing?" She told me, and immediately she has approached his mobile phone to me. A group of children were singing a simple but catchy chorus. This was what they repeated:
"Viva España, viva el Rey,
viva el mando de la Play".
That would translate as:
"Long live Spain, long live the King,
and Playstation fight stick"
I couldn't help laughing, as no doubt my partner expected. And then I remembered other similar examples of which I have heard recently. Because what I have described is not a massive trend, nor do I think it reaches a "trending topic", but it's a real fact, and it's not the only one.
There's no action without reaction, and children are not stupid. Currently, hundreds of Catalan public schools are imposing on children a unique language that in most cases is not their own (according to the same generalitat only 36% of Catalans have Catalan as their main language, Spanish being the most widespread language). That control has long been extended to non-teaching hours (playtime). Children don't understand (nor should they) politics, but they know that their parents and other adults complain because they're taught things that don't correspond to reality. Many Catalan children disagree when their teachers tell them that they're not Spanish, or that they should speak only Catalan, always.
It must be said that when a person is calm and focused it's easier to express himself in a second language, while anger, fatigue or indignation inevitably make the main language emerge. And perhaps that's why the main language is usually that of rebellion, that of indignation. When my generation was the age of our children, we also tested the limits of our teachers' patience by saying forbidden words, before covering our own astonished smile with our hands. Now the forbidden is the language of the most. That's why many children are attracted to what shocks their nationalist teachers, and not because they know they are (I've already stated that children are not moved by political parameters), but because they know that their "teachers" are scandalized by everything regarding Spain and the Spanish language.
Something like that must have thought that girl attacked by her nationalist teacher when she drew a Spanish flag. She was just testing her teacher's limits, unable to conceive that hes teacher had no limits. And I don't intend to blame the independence movement for the intolerable actions of that individual (a single person can't define a collective or an ideology), but I blame it for the promptness with which that story was buried, because if everything have referred to a nationalist flag would have given rise to demonstrations, special programs in prime time and televised trials.
Children like to defy prohibitions. Generations before, other Catalan children spoke Catalan secretly under the prohibition of the Franco regime. Not only that. The last echoes of that extinct regime still resounded when I and other children sang in a corner of our playground absurd versions of the Spanish anthem, such as:
"Franco, Franco
que tiene el culo blanco
porque su mu-jer
lo lava con Ariel.."
That would translate as:
"Franco, Franco
who has white ass
because his wife
washes it with Ariel.."
Today, other children recite in secret, under the prohibition of the current Catalan nationalist regime, other innocent phrases that they still don't fully understand. Maybe they'll never be monarchists, nor Playstation champions, but in a way those words will be another piece of the puzzle of his future adult personality.
"Viva España, viva el Rey,
viva el mando de la Play".
