Just farcical: “The Good Putschist’s Handbook.”

Just farcical: “The Good Putschist’s Handbook.”

Mr. Iu Forn, funny man for the excellent Catalonian newspaper “Avui” (Today,) writes in a gag article (dated January the twelve 2006...)


The Good Putschist’s Handbook


“We are afflicted also by an awful pandemic of military personnel drunk with power (and probably absinth) whose dislike for the Catalonian New Statute attains degrees of high dudgeon almost impossible to withstand. Their nervous anger is such that nothing but the menace of sudden aggression, in the shape of armored vehicles sent posthaste to crush the population, allays albeit a little the intolerable pain of their nail-biting angst.

“Whatever. The point is, put up or shut up — are you coming or are you just bantering like hens…?

“This I’m telling them, as a friend, in case the first option is the chosen one, as it has historically been often enough, the option of coming in with the full forces of aggression:

“First, if coming into Barcelona by the Diagonal Avenue, better leave the flaming panzers at the end of the road, and take the tramway instead. This is a self-renewing city and we don’t want to make the mess irreversible, do we?

“As you advance forward up the Diagonal, look at your right hand and see a banking see, a big edifice called The Box (la Caixa,) where some eager Catalonians are darkly plotting to take over another of the asspaining economical pillars in order to deprive Asspain of its nationalistic resources. That dastardly building obviously deserves to be assaulted and reduced… Careful, though! If in the process of wholesale destruction, you happen to find in one of its cubicles a tall blonde girl, better leave her be. It could be one of the your king’s daughters working for the diabolical firm!

“Later, when, during the ransacking of the city, you happen to get the brilliant idea of taking away to your asspainish land the official papers of the Catalonian people better wait a little more, as it seems that some of those that were already stolen by your predecessors in 1939, are only now in the process of being returned. Taking them all together will doubtless save both a trip and a few moneys, always useful for other chores as worthy of these.

“Do not forget also that the new so-called civic ordinances forbid for the city the practice of certain forms of prostitution. In consequence, it would be advisable that the martial junket would rather be performed without the assistance of your saintly mothers.

“Here is an important message: please be advised that the Financial Times, this pink daily that last Tuesday said that an article of your hallowed national constitution (the article number 8) contains “failures,” that for a people to wish to name themselves a nation is democratically suitable, and that the attitude of the francoist party rallying behind a putschist general “surely represents a worse danger for asspainish unity than the Catalonian ambitions,” please be advised, I repeat, that this is not a Catalonian daily. In consequence of which, before you bomb it to oblivion you better inform yourselves of its whereabouts, maybe through a call to the British embassy.

“Let’s not forget a last item. Once the invasion has been successfully established, do not fail to follow the recommendations of the justice of the supreme court who the other day pretended that Catalonian is a folkloric curiosity akin to dancing flamenco. Better in that case that as the occupation progresses all you heroes write yourselves in in courses to learn flamenco dancing. Better that obviously than having to learn Catalonian.”


—————————————


[A smidgeon of background to the jolly article: A neurasthenic fascist general (by the name of Merdós de Mena) blinked first, and announced the invasion and wholesale bombardment of the Catalonian Lands. After being sacked by Mr. Mono, the secretary of war, probably for giving away too soon the intentions of the francoist military — whose great feats of arms are the conquering of an inhabited island rock, called the island of the Parsleys and the Goats, and the unending torture and blackmail of its own disarmed nationals — the Financial Times, the Economist, and other independent media laughed at the reasons given for such a sacking:

“—It is ludicrous that a nationalistic fascist given to all kind of ridiculous jingoistic shenanigans sacked a fellow bellicose idiot for the same reasons the same simpleton of a war secretary never fails to show himself in performing in his clownish interventions in the fascist nationalistic TV of that fascist nationalistic circus called Asspain... He must have been hating the one-upmanship of his silly inferior.”

Now even that harmless article has ruffled the nationalistic feathers of the valiant hens.]