Last week, José María Aznar, the former President of Spain and a conservative, flipped the bird to a group of protestors who had been shouting at him. I can’t help but think this never would have happened in the U.S., but then, in the U.S. people bring guns to presidential appearances, which makes the finger almost seem quaint. Still, it’s a hateful gesture, and the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t do if you thought your mother were watching, but there he is, smiling smugly.
I think when you smile and flip your target off simultaneously, it’s kind of like saying, “Not only do I hate you, hating you doesn’t even put me in a bad mood.” It’s saying that you can hate them without even really being affected. It’s a sort of cheap pose, but, then, you’re already giving them the finger. (Strangely, in El País, they refer to his middle finger as his dedo corazón, “heart finger”.)
There are two ways I can give the middle finger, one with a kind of fist and one with the fingers tightly curled at the knuckle. I’ve been sitting at my desk making the two, trying to see if there’s some kind of psychological difference, and I realize that the fisted-finger is the first one I learned as a kid when it was all a new idea. The second middle finger, the curled-knuckle, looks distinctly cooler, and I learned it later, from the kids at school. Our ideas of cruelty were almost all limited to making people feel bad, and I don’t think we realized what real hate was and what real damage it could do. The spiritual peril of trying to look cool and hating someone at the same time was lost on us.
Anyway, Aznar is doing that second finger, the curled-knuckle one.
