Traditions, say the corny ones, are layers of ancestral habits that transform over time, often with delirious additions normalized by the passage of years. This is what happens with Christmas lighting ---to which has been added the controversy over the secularization of its motifs and also the annual squabble over nativity scenes, immersive stars, and the mare que els va matricular---, an aesthetic use to which has now been added the custom of taking advantage of the traffic lights on Paseo de Gràcia to quickly run and take a selfie. The new tradition, nauseatingly perpetrated by foreigners and indigenous Barcelonans, is not only inscribed in what wet-blanket cultural critics call the narcissism of the hyper-visualization of the tourist experience, but also in capturing an instant of happiness associated with the (more than probable) danger of being run over by a car.
The human being is a fascinating product; the contemporary tourist is not content with posing with pouts in front of the dreadful Christmas light decoration of one of the ancestral streets of the Eixample. They also enjoy, as if the city were an amusement park, the subsequent honking of horns from the long-suffering Barcelonan drivers who (still) have the pretension of driving through the city without annihilating herds of South Koreans. In all this, our very intelligent municipal authorities helped, who, to warn us of the future of collisions that awaits us, organized that nonsense called F1 road show on the same Paseo de Gràcia; far from celebrating a sporting event, that exhibition of missile-cars speeding at full throttle through the center of Barcelona was a warning of the future of the city-circuit. Our streets, mireusté, will only be a controlled danger zone.
As happens every year, and given the multitude of cretins who gather in the middle of Paseo de Gràcia, the City Council has asked the Urban Guard to take action, and this is how our gallant agents have proceeded to cordon off the busiest sides and to deploy personnel at the corners, so that people have the delicacy not to die in the attempt. All of this is an optimal metaphor for the Barcelona experience, a pack of experiences that, in addition to the obligatory photograph, can include the chill of a car accident or the half-angry warning of a police officer who is praying for his shift to end so he can go home without having to pick up a corpse. When it comes to selling postcards of postmodern danger, I would complement the selfies with some more experiences, such as bungee jumping from Casa Batlló or a canyoning tour that includes being able to dive into our fountains.
Like any delirious experience, capitalism has already had the grace to transform human foolishness into a business as fun as it is macabre. In the Mr. Youtube universe, you can find many videos and photographs titled Selfies taken before death that show a series of individuals-tourists in a photographic pose (generally, opening their arms and smiling, to complement the grandeur of a cliff or a waterfall) just before falling down its rocks and losing their lives. My macabre spirit enjoys these reports where the protagonists' smiles will immediately be stained with blood. In the same way that great cities like New York and San Francisco have transformed their wonderful bridges into the ideal space for suicide tourism, I would say that the City Council should promote the Eixample as an ideal place to treat oneself to an assisted and quick death.
Let no one be disturbed; traditions usually almost always have a relationship with the act of living, but they must also be linked to our perishable nature. In this sense, Barcelona has the obligation to convert this use of deadly selfies into an attractive product for funerary tourism. Times of crisis require innovation and, in this matter of economic eschatology, Catalans are true geniuses.