Official Running of the Bulls Website Attempts Mournful Reverence and Fails

The official website of the Festival of San Fermin, which hosts The Running of the Bulls, is an odd mix of dumb cartoons and chronic savagery on any normal day, but especially so when the whole dumb-ass ritual leads to the inevitable gruesome death.  This morning Spaniard Daniel Romero became the event’s 15th death as he was gored in the neck and fell into cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital.  But don’t tell that to official mascot Mr. Testis, the blue bull, cuz he’s still rocking it out on the San Fermin website, showing his bull wiener and making googly eyes right next to video of the dead guy! Classy.

As recently as yesterday the front page was awash in headlines, (that still remain on the ticker), celebrating Thursday’s exciting two minute run of the “lightning bulls.”  But now they’ve also whipped out a bunch of “dark days” articles about the deceased, young Daniel Romero, with headlines like “Pamplona in Shock.” Because, hey, who could have seen this coming?

Of course, injuries and gorings are, like NASCAR crashes, the reason for the season, so it’s not surprising that they celebrate the gore with a daily body count of injuries.  What IS surprising is that they went ahead and decided to go ahead with the tally today and record Romero’s death as a part of it.  It’s like a box score, except instead of balls and strikes it tells you your son’s not coming home! (Full disclosure: we’d been keeping a bodycount as well, but for pretty much the exact OPPOSITE reason.)

And there, ever-present, is festival mascot Mr. Testis with his goofy, shit-eating grin and topless cow-chasing antics.  They’ve even posted videos of him “reading” the news every day with his co-anchor Hilariously Droll Eurotrash Guy.  What will they do with Mr. Testis’ report today?  Will they put a mournful veil over his big blue head?  Or perhaps a black arm band or something.

As Jack rightly points out elsewhere on this site, this is tragic but it’s certainly not going to stop anything, not even the rest of this year’s festival.  If anything, it’ll probably raise the profile and spectacle of this romantic ideal of Latino Machismo in the face of death.  But goddammit, this is 2009: one year away from the sequel to A Space Odyssey. When it comes to goalposts for Latino manhood, we’ll take The Most Interesting Man in the World over taunting confused animals any fucking day of the week.

La Fiesta de Pamplona y el Encierro [SanFermin.com]