La mierda has hit the fan

When I started college, the internet was still pretty new. Completely new to me, in fact, because I was coming from northern Michigan--not exactly on the cutting edge of technology. I remember spending hours at a time being mesmerized by Netscape and all the things you could look up on it. Song lyrics! The weather! ...Okay so not much has changed. I also remember that occasionally the email system would spin out of control: Someone would, appropriately or not, email some list, then someone would reply to the whole list, then someone else would reply to the whole list about how you shouldn't reply to the whole list, someone else who just found out about the list would take the opportunity to broadcast some unrelated message about Greenpeace or something, prompting a reply to all about inappropriate uses of the list, prompting another reply to all about not replying to all, and then people would start replying to all asking to be taken off the list, prompting even more replies to all about not replying to all, making even more people want to be taken off the list.... Remember those days? Improved email etiquette, better list management, and spam blockers have probably all helped make those inbox-busting cycles mostly a thing of the past; in fact, I had all but forgotten about them. Until today.

It started with an email from the University administration to my department mailing list about Catalan courses offered by the University. (I'm still trying to educate myself enough to write something coherent about Catalan nationalism. For now I'll just say that it's a sensitive subject and language is a huge part of it.) Someone replied to the whole list saying that it wasn't such a great idea for the email to have been written in Catalan because the people who would be taking the class (i.e., those who don't speak Catalan) wouldn't be able to read it. I don't speak Catalan and I was still able to get the gist of the original email. Still, it was a somewhat valid point (they might as well have included a translation in the email), although not really one worth sending to the whole list. From there it just spiraled out of control, though.

A lot of the emails that followed were in Catalan (the rest were in English or Spanish, and some were translated into two or all three languages) so I couldn't follow the debacle word for word. What I did get was that some people were making arguments about this being a Catalan university, Catalan language, Catalan identity, etc. Others were pointing out that translation would improve communication, which is clearly a good thing. And of course others were writing that the ensuing discussion wasn't an appropriate use of the department mailing list (don't those people realize that they're part of the problem?). Then people started quoting the Estatut*. Then they started calling each other names. Really. I don't want to reprint without permission, but here's a paraphrasing of part of one of the English emails that went around.

"I've lived in Catalunya for four years now, and have found that even the best-educated Catalans lose all capacity for rational arguments when issues such as the Catalan nation or Catalan language are involved."

These are all people with PhDs. If not more mature, you'd think they'd at least be busier than all this. There were 48 emails sent in about a four-hour period today (I counted). I kind of knew that people get riled up about the Catalan issue, but I hadn't really witnessed it until today. Yikes.

Oh, and ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. Don't mean to be blasé about it, but people here seem to be skeptical that anything will change. I was enjoying listening to Zapatero address the issue, because political speeches are pretty easy to understand: usually spoken clearly and slowly with lots of pauses and repeated words (esperanza, terrorisma, victimas). Not a lot of content, but good for improving my confidence about Spanish.


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*The Estatut is the Catalan constitution. Right now they're arguing over whether or not Catalunya should be recognized as a nation, and what exactly it would mean if it were. I'll write more when I understand it better.