National symbols

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Today, there was a news on one of the major Portuguese newspapers online edition. Some journalist, named Wang Xiao Feng, photoshoped a picture of Portuguese athletes on the Olympic Games and associated the Portuguese national symbols to Colgate. The punch line is that the colours (green and red) are alike the Colgate box colours and that the word Portugal (Putaoya) is the junction of the words Putao (grape) and ya (tooth). It basically shows the Portuguese team showing the altered symbols and smiling at the public.

At first I was like.. what the hell? But when I read about the meaning of the word Putaoya it got a laugh out of me. I mean.. it is brilliant. Unfortunately, to my distress, I decided to check the blog and check that post by myself. What I found out was disturbing to say the least (not that I shouldn't be expecting). On the post's comment, I found a large amount of Portuguese comments and believe me, they weren't pretty. Between insults to China, Wang and his family I couldn't help but feel shame for those reactions. Not because they represented Portugal in any way, but because it uncovered the aspect that Portugal really have much to travel until most people stop being so damn retarded.

I tried to post in the man's blogs to show him solidarity and to tell him not to take this too personally. That there was nothing wrong with his actions. Unfortunately he seemed to have removed the post as I was writing the comment. I tried to add another comment but I didn't see it on the comment list after that. Maybe it was waiting to be reviewed? The blog is in Mandarin and I couldn't read mandarin for my life so I've no idea. Anyway..

It was a bloody joke, a good one in my opinion. Sigh.

Here is the link to the newspaper's entry:
Fotografia é piada em blogue chinês

And his blog:
不许联想搜索网

So.. I was wondering..
Would this be bound to happen in your country?
Would you be offended by something like this being done to your National Symbols?

 

[olosta]

Your entry is very interesting and makes one to think about nationalism and patriotism, whatsoever. How proud can a nation be, to get angry at an innocent joke? Why can´t we laugh on ourselves, what is it that drives us angry? Are the symbols that important for the self determination? I guess they are, for some people. I really don´t know what reactions would something like this invoke in Slovakia, since I am not interested in politics. But I think it wouldn´t bring out such sharp reactions, since I don´t feel like slovacs would have so much of patriotism, the opposite, we are rather indifferent to this kind of things (or the majority of us), since we still didn´t find our place in the new Europe.
But I agree with you and sympathise with the journalist, because i don´t think he wrote it with the intention to offend Portugal or it´s state symbols. The negative reactions of people are definitely wrong and I think they result from misunderstanding of the context (since asian languages give a more important emphasis on the semiotics of the words than most indoeuropean languages) of the entry.