Hoots mon!

....from the "Scottish Heritage" website.

EVERY nation needs a symbol to express its identity. Out of Scotland's history three core symbols emerged: a plant (the thistle, commemorating Alexander III's crucial victory against the Vikings at Largs in 1263), an animal (the Lion Rampant, remembering the Royal beast kept by King William the Lion) and a saint (Andrew, chosen to root Scotland in Bible values)....

....For Scots today Saint Andrew with his cross is still a potent symbol: Andrew was a networker who brought the wider world to meet his Master; the saltire is a multiplication sign of dynamism and enlargement. This recalls Andrew's initiative in bringing the boy to Jesus at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and is an appropriate symbol of entrepreneurial skills for Scotland in the 21st century. There are other advantages: sharing Andrew as our patron with Russia and Greece gives Scots a worldwide orientation.

http://heritage.scotsman.com/greatscots.cfm

thanks to Flash for drawing my attention to this

Just kill me now

PC/BC - Appendix 2

Eric:

When I was growing up, the children's TV show "Vision On" was interpreted in sign-language for the benefit of the "deaf and dumb". Christmas cards were sold in aid of the "spastics society"; and certain children were routinely described as "mongols". Newspapers openly used the word "pooftah" (in the sense of "10 ways to spot if your neigbour is a pooftah") All of that would be pretty unthinkable today.

I don't know whether the change in language reflected a change in social reality; or whether the social change was made possible because language had changed. Did our decision to start saying "paramedic" make it easier for women to enter that profession -- easier for little girls to imagine it as a profession that they could possibly aspire to? Or was it just that we started to feel silly using the term "Ambulance-Bloke" when it was obvious that the person applying the bandage was an "Ambulance-Bird"?

Similarly, the BBC used to think it acceptable to have a TV show called "The Black and White Minstrels" in which white performers put on black make-up and curly wigs and sang middle-brow pop-songs. They don't do that any more. Spike Milligan did sketches about a family of Pakistani Daleks, who said "Put them in the curry! Put them in the curry!"(*) instead of "Exterminate!"; Benny Hill did sketches about dirty old men and school girls which now look like borderline child-porn; and Jim Davidson made jokes about dis black guy called Chalkie who had de very long penis. You wouldn't get away with any of that today.

Again, it is hard to know whether we became a more racially inclusive society because we stopped insulting black people on TV, or whether we stopped insulting black people on TV because we had become more a more racially inclusive society.

So: there are certainly words that we used to use but don't use any more, and there are certainly TV programmes that we used to watch but don't watch any more; and if that's what you mean by "political correctness" then a movement towards "political correctness" certainly happened in the 1980s. And some of it may have been over-zealous. For example....let me see....er....when I was at college, someone in the Student Union got very uptight about the fact that the lavatories were labeled "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" rather than "Male" and "Female." And I once heard someone refer to a wheelchair user as "differently abled". But actual examples of people saying "vertically challenged" and "chronologically superior" are embarrassingly difficult to come by.

I am extremely skeptical about whether any of this can be laid at the door of an identifiable movement, let alone one that consciously identified itself as "politically correct". I think that it is more likely that "political correctness" was an invented label, applied to a number of different activities by people who disapproved of them. Even supposing a more or less cohesive Movement For Political Correctness, I find it hard to see why "campaigning about racial and sexual exclusion" should be defined as "leftist".

The "PC" that I'm conceding the existence of has almost nothing to do with the purely imaginary PC Brigade from the Daily Express, of course.

(*) Okay, I admit that one has a certain surrealistic charm

Charles:

On 21st October a group of my old college-type friends met up in Portsmouth, and starting out in a plasticated chain-pub called "The Trafalgar" worked our way around half a dozen pubs, drinking a pint of Real Ale in each. We had lunch in place called the Still and West which serves some of the best Fish-and-Chips in England. It adjoined the docks, and if we strained our necks a bit, we could see the masts of the Victory with the "England Expects..." flags blowing in the wind. I even put on a Union Jack tie for the occasion. At the end of the evening, we toasted Lord Nelson. Actually, a double rum on top of all that beer and fish and chips was probably a mistake. We rounded out the night with a traditional English curry from a traditional English Indian.

So yes, I value English Culture in the same way that one values one's old armchair or one's ancient and much loved teddy-bear: it's yours, you've got used to it; you feel comfortable with it; and you wouldn't want anyone to take it away from you.

One of the bits of English Culture I find quite endearing is the tradition of Morris Dancing -- a sort of heavily stylised country dance, in peasant costume with much waving of hankerchieves, generally done by hulking great beery men in clogs. (By "find endearing" I mean "when I came upon some Morris Dancers outside the town hall a few weeks ago, I watched a dance and put 50p in their bucket.") A few Morris "sides" maintain the tradition of, er, blacking up their faces with boot-polish. (The were originally "Moorish Dancers". Possibly.) If someone were to say "That's actually highly offensive to black people" then I don't think "We've been doing this dance since before black people were invented" would necessarily be a good answer. (The town of Lewes takes bonfire night more seriously than most, with people dressing up in Puritan costume, carrying banners saying "No Popery" and burning a firework filled effigy of the present Pope. If anyone were to say "This is in questionable taste" then I don't think "It's a longstanding tradition" would settle the question.)

Do minorities or incomers have the right to tell the majorities or natives how to behave? Provided we only mean "how to behave in public" then I think possibly they do. If I wish to display a racist caricature of a Ruritanian in my own front room, then I think that I have a perfect right to do so; but if I display it on a public hoarding, I think my Ruritanian neighbour has a right to complain, even if he's the only Ruritanian in the village. "Ah, but in this village, we've been abusing Ruritanians for a very, very long time" is neither here nor there.

I don't think that the British should maintain British culture "as a default", because I don't think that there is any such thing as "British culture". There are, and have always been, a large number of different "cultures" in these islands. I don't think that an English member of the house of Lords who went to Eton, attends his parish church and tortures foxes in his spare time shares more culture with a working class Catholic from Glasgow than either of them do with a British Hindu from Tooting Bec.

If someone had told me to take off my Union Jack on Trafalgar Day, I would have been very aggrieved, just as I would have been if someone had taken away my armchair or my teddy-bear. I would have been more annoyed if they had taken away some part of my Englishness that I value more highly than my tie, say, Glastonbury Tor or the works of Shakespeare. Whether we are parts of a majority or minority culture, we should be free to practice our made-up rituals and festivals, unless and until they proven harmful to someone else's welfare. Or that of the fox. Try to stop us, and we have every right to get cross.

But no-one is. The same issue of the Daily Express which carried the "JESUS BANS CHEDDAR CAVES" headline contained an op-ed piece which spent five columns listing those aspects of British culture which have been "banned".

"Christmas Trees and carols are now widely banned in public places...carol concerts have all but disappeared.... displays of the Union or St George's flag are regularly challenged by officials... crackdowns on bonfires and firework displays with the result that the excitement of November 5th has all but disappeared... this month that shining symbol of London individualism, the open-backed Routemaster bus was withdrawn..."

Every word of it total fantasy (except for the bit about the London buses, which are very old and being replaced by modern, safer ones). If British culture was under attack, the Denby-Scholes of this world would be right to be angry; in the same way that if there were Vampires in London, I'd be right to get some garlic.

But there aren't.

Louise:

I think that there are Christian hegemonists who would like every school lesson to open with a prayer; "Thought for the Day" to go out at prime time, and TV shows critical or disrespectful towards Christianity to be more or less banned.

And, sadly, there are also Secular hegemonists who would like all religious discourse banished from the public sphere, to the extent that they feel horribly oppressed by the existance of "Songs of Praise".

The other 99% of the universe are secular pluralists, who think that Jonathon Miller and Peter Owen-Jones can live happily together on BBC 2.

The Arch-Druids point, I think, was that some of those who say that we shouldn't dispaly Christian symbols for fear that it might offend people of Other Religions are really secular hegemonists who think that we shouldn't display any religious symbols at all.

I think that he theory may have some hypothetical merit; but he appears to have been speaking in response to a Daily Prophet journalist asking him what he thought about "some councils prohbiting traditional festive symbols" - which they aren't. It was a plausible theory about a non-existant problem.

Do non-religious folks really feel offended and excluded if someone hangs up a picture of Babyjesus in their shop-window, by the way?

On the Origins of the BCs

They've started called lunatic asylums "care homes". It's madness gones politically correct, I tell you.

On Friday, the Daily Express ran a headline.

"NOW CHRIST IS BANNED"

Two lines of text, black on white. A sort of poetry of the apocalypse

"NOW CHRIST
IS BANNED"

Four words.

NOW

"In addition." "On top of everything else" "We knew things were bad, but this is really the last straw." The word drags us into the conspiracy.... we all know, it's so obvious it goes without saying, that many things have been banned recently, we can't think of any actual examples, but we're sure they have, and now this!

CHRIST

The person? The religion? Or just the word? I think there is a little wordplay going on here. We have just had the annual "local council abolishes Christmas" stormover. This year it is the Cromwellian Lambeth Council who have canceled the festivities – or more specifically been caught using the phrase "Winter Lights" to describe its municipal December decorations in some literature.(1) We are supposed to infer: "Yesterday, they banned Christmas, and now, Christ is banned."

IS

The journalistic present. We are not reporting an event which has happened. We are informing you of a state which now exists. You have woken up in a bad new world where a new thing has been prohibited.

BANNED

A key tabloid word. It's meaning is ambiguous – it doesn't been prohibited by law, necessarily, or censored, or abolished – but it implies that Someone is telling us what to do, and we don't like it.

NOW. CHRIST. IS. BANNED.

Who is the evil authority figure doing the banning? The Curator of Cheddar Gorge geological museum. What has he done? Removed the letters "B.C" from the dates on some of his exhibits.

So in fact CHRIST IS NOT BANNED AT ALL

In fact THE WORD "CHRIST" IS BANNED

Or more precisely THE FIRST LETTER OF THE WORD "CHRIST" IS REMOVED FROM THE LABELS IN ONE MUSEUM.

That's it. That's the whole story. Main headline, front page, inside page and leading article in a tabloid on sale in every shop in the land, predicated on "Small Museum Re-Labels It's Exhibits."

Museum bosses are trying to erase Jesus Christ from the pages of history. In the latest ludicrous attempt to tear down traditions, curators have banned the phrase BC --before Christ -- and insist on using BP -- Before Present -- to avoid offending other faiths. The astonishing decision caused national outrage last night

I like the use of the term "Museum Bosses". It implies some kind of powerful, dictatorial autocrat, a geological Fat Controller. I like the way in which, somewhere between Page 1 and Page 7, the plural "Museum Bosses" shrinks to mean the curator of one small museum. I like the idea that there was "national outrage" on Thursday night, even before the Express had broken the story. We don't do national outrage very well in this country. The French set fire to other people's motor-cars. We write mildly rude remarks in museum visitors books.

BC is used for dates leading up to the birth of Christ to help place the timing of eras throughout history and is internationally accepted. But officials at the Cheddar Caves Museum in Cheddar Gorge Somerset -- one of Britain's most popular tourist attractions (2) -- say that this is not politically correct, and have changed all exhibit dates to BP....'BP has no meaning, and if it means the present day, then it's always moving. It really is a completely nutty idea'.

The writers of this piece – sorry "ludicrous tabloid bosses" – apparently to want us to believe that the BP dating system is the crazy whim of an individual museum curator who is hyper-sensitive to the feelings of those of other-religions-and-none. In fact, as everyone knows (3) "BP" is actually a long established notation when dealing with extremely ancient events. I assume that, when we are talking about a geological time-frame, we can't necessarily come up with a date which is accurate even to the nearest millennium, making "BC" and "AD" fairly pointless distinctions. If a dinosaur skeleton is sixty-five million years old, you would hardly label it "Tyrannasauraus Rex: 64997995 BC". For the purposes of the BP dating system, the "present" is deemed to be 1950, because the advent of nuclear testing messes up the results of carbon dating after that point. If you were being very strict, you might use the term "Radiocarbon Years Before Present". It seems to be a fairly widely-used when talking about geology: the educational section of the Yosemite National Park website gives the history of the valley in the "BP" system.

BC is also a little unhelpful if you are talking about the early history of Christiantiy. Christ fairly obviously wasn't born 4 years before the birth of Christ, but he is generally reckoned to be born in 4BC. (If you aren't careful, you get caught up in millennial conundrums about whether it was 1 BC up to December 25th and became 1AD on Boxing day, does that mean that the year 1 only lasted until Hogmany, and how on earth did the Romans manage for so long without a zero?) Academics, of course have been using the terms "CE" and "BCE" since..well, since the year dot. You can pretend that this means "Before Common Era", "Before Christian Era", or "Before Current Era" depending on your mood.

These points bypassed Rosemary and Mark Yule (both 45, apparently) who told the Express that they were "shocked to see the BP signs when they visited the museum with their sons Greg, eight, and Robbie, seven." (Maybe this gratuitous information about the ages of their informants and their informants family is intended to make a point about the importance of dates. Or maybe it's just a way of filling up space. Incidentally, in the context of last week's "Lambeth Bans Christmas" stormover the name "Yule" looks highly suspicious).

Rosmary said "These signs are all over the walls -- every date says BP instead of BC it's...

wait for it...hold your breath... it's coming

it's....

Will she or won't she? Can she spot a cliche at 50 paces? Is there a an invisible autocue following her around? Or does she just say the kinds of things she thinks she's supposed to say when interviewed for the Daily Prophet?

....political correctness gone mad.

Just in case we've missed the point about who is to blame for all this the Express provides us with a 25p-a-go phone-in-poll in which we readers can answer "Yes" or "No" to the fair and balanced question: "Are PC fanatics right to ban Christ?"

"But Andrew -- its only the Daily Express (4). Do you really need to write a five page article about how the Express wrote a three page article about a ten line label on an exhibit in a museum that hardly anyone ever goes to?"

Actually, yes. Because while it was a very bad news item, it was a very good example of something we should all be terribly scared of.

The words "Politically Correct" used to be used to mock clumsy or redundant attempts to use inclusive language ("We've been told to stop saying "freshmen" and start saying "freshpeople" – isn't that a bit politically correct?") But the Express seems to be using it primarily to refer to a a group or organisation or movement with a political agenda. We read of "the political correctness brigade", "PC fanatics" and "fanatics of political correctness". We are told that their aim is "to tear down our traditions" "to write Jesus out of our history" "to erode the very foundations of British culture." It envisages a conflict between one group – "the political correctness brigade", and another group who have a shared culture (our tradition, our history, British culture) which the first group hates and wishes to destroy.

Who, exactly, are the "we" who are under attack? In case we are a bit slow on the uptake, elsewhere in the paper, a reader's letter spells out the answer for us.

"Ban this," rants Ms Diane Denby-Schole from Birmingham "prevent the other, change all our traditions, turn what was once the the proudest nation on Earth into some wishy-washy grey pulp where only immigrants can follow their traditions..."

Pause, breath in. "Our" traditions are being changed, but "immigrants" can follow theirs.

"Indeed, they are actively encouraged to maintain the traditions of their homelands."

Their homelands, being places other than Britain. I trust you are keeping up?

"Birmingham council is an oppressive vehicle that had already banned the flying of our national flag."

Has it, Ms Denby-Scholes? Has it really? Banned it from where? Under what legislation? (I very much doubt that the flying of any flag is banned under English law, and that I would be perfectly within my rights to run the swastika up the flagpole if I so desired.) Are you sure that "banned" doesn't mean "isn't flying it from the town hall at the moment."

"Come on Britons. Stand up for your traditions." (5)

I think that is pretty unequivical. "We" are Britians, non-immigrants, true-blue Brits: they are immigrants, with different traditions, from different homelands. Or, not to beat about the bush, black people.

And so we come to the point. Every day, I read a news story about how someone called "the political correctness lobby" has done something faintly ridiculous, and how some ordinary person has been shocked and outraged by it. Without needing to remember, or even believe, the details of any specific story, I acquire a general sense of paranoia. I start to believe that a "politically correct" minority is out to get me; and I gradually and insidiously associate them with the non-white Other who is still an immigrant after two or three generations. And so my white middle class neighbour and me start to think of ourselves as an oppressed minority. If you keep winding us up, we are apt to do something crazy like vote in for a far right Conservative government, or even the BNP. Which is (I assume) what the people who write this kind of drivel are hoping for.

On Monday, the Express reported on the front page that British Legion collectors had been banned from pinning poppies on people in case they injured them.


(1)In Tate Modern there is a glass of water. It is a very ordinary glass of water, but it has special significance because it was poured in 1973 by surrealist artist Michael Craig-Martin. Mr Martin said that the the glass of water was, in fact, an oak tree. "Craig-Martin’s assertion addresses fundamental questions about what we understand to be art and our faith in the power of the artist," apparently. Or possibly it's about Catholicism: if the Priest can say that a wafer is Jesus, why can't I say that a glass of water is a tree? Given that it was created in 1973, it isn't clear how the curator's stop the work from evaporating; or whether they are allowed to top it up from time to time. But this is probably part of the joke. I assume that the Daily Express is up to date with the idea of a conceptual art, and thinks that, as bed or a pile of bricks can become a work of art if an artist intends it, so a row of fairy lights turn from "religious" fairy lights to "secular" fairy light depending on the intentions of a local politician.

(2) According the Office of National Statistics, the most popular tourist attractions in the UK are

1: Blackpool Pleasure Beach
2: British Museum
3: National Gallery
4: Alton Towers
5: Tower of London
6: Tate Gallery
7: Pleasureland
8: Natural History Museum
9: Chessington World of Adventures
10: Science Museum
11: Legoland
12: Windsor Castle
13: Edinburgh Castle
14: London Zoo
15: Roman Baths
16: Chester Zoo
17: Stonehenge
18: London Aquarium
19: Knowsley Safari Park
20: Edinburgh Zoo

(3) Everyone who took the trouble to look it up on Google, at any rate.

(4)PAXMAN: They also publish Horny Housewives, Mega Boobs, Posh Wives, Skinny & Wriggly. Do you know what these magazines are like?
BLAIR: No, I don't....

(5) To be fair, the sub-editor who composed Ms Denby-Scholes letter also points out that, and I quote "true-Blue-brits" have no problem with participating in, say, a Diwali celebration, and that Pakistani and Sikh shopkeepers sometimes fly the Union Jack (despite the fact that it has been banned...I give up.)

Blogger wastes lunchtime in pedantic discussion about Peter Jackson. Ends up quoting Python.

Not all Conservatives are fools, but...

On the basis of "Question Time", Cameron is an every bigger, smugger git than Blair, whose manerisms he imitates so much its spooky. Whereas the Other One shows some signs of being an actual human being. He talked in a normal human voice, and used something I recognised as English, rather than all that "vast majority / the reality is" un-speak that political clones think makes them sound clever. Although what he said was equally barking: most of the people in lunatic asylums are there because they smoke cannibis, apparently, and Ian Duncan Smith was quite clever. Cameron had the guts to come right out and say that he admired Mrs Thatcher in front of an invited audience of Conservative supporters.

An airy-fairy civil libertarian writes...

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Girls Watch Buffy, Shock

Pope wet, water Catholic, etc.

Davewatch

Pleased to meet you, Reverend, your cousin is insane

I don't always trust everything Tony Blair says; I sometimes suspect the Archbishop of Canterbury may be a bit on the liberal side; Bob Dylan's really rather good, Richard Branson's trains are occassionally late; I've learned three obscure new facts about Tolkien, there's a new comic book you really ought to read, Dave Sim talks a lot of rubbish and a little bit of sense, Doctor Who isn't as good as it used to be, except when it is.

Sorry haven't posted recently, will become vocal again before too long.