Homage From Catalonia

This is a News of the Weird story. If anyone other than Barack Hussein Obama were involved, it wouldn’t be as amusing. If the Catalans were mocking George W. Bush, or Nicolas Sarkozy, or Hugo Chavez, then we wouldn’t pay much attention. But when The Messiah of Hope and Change is the object of ridicule, how could anyone not take note?

I won’t to display the image here — this is a family site, after all — but you can follow the links below to see a photo of the Obama statuette.

The interesting thing about this story is that the Defecating Obama purports to be a respectful icon, and not a derogatory one. According to our Flemish correspondent VH:

This little Obama statue serves excellent as a paper-weight, for instance to prevent the Constitution from blowing out the window, or to keep the right sura open on your desk.

Here’s the article from Elsevier, as translated by VH:

Statue of Obama relieving himself seems immensely popular

A dubious honor for the upcoming U.S. presidential Barack Obama in the Spanish province Catalonia. A statue of the elected president, while relieving himself with his pants down to the ankles, flies off the shelves.

The doll is a handmade ‘caganer’, which means ‘a reliever of ones obligation” so to speak, and finds its origin in a centuries-old Catalan Christmas tradition.

Bloody Serious

“It’s no joke,” says the maker of figurines, Ana Maria Pla to the AFP news agency. “It is a tribute to the person in question.”

- - - - - - - - -

Pla has a family owned company near Barcelona that makes and sells the caganers (fourteen euros each). “Obama is our bestseller this year,” says Pla, who says she has many customers from North America.

[…]

Age Old Tradition

Originally the “caganer” was a small figure depicting a Catalan farmer relieving himself, wearing traditional red clothing and a black hat.

Since the eighteenth century, Catalans put the caganers in their Christmas crib as a sign of fertility and prosperity.

In the course of time, parodies of famous personalities from the region, and later from Spain and the rest of the world were made.

Links:

The Obama caganer page
The video