On flags and fascists

ere I come back to Gordon Brown’s explicit suggestion to achieve a new harmonious order under the flag of a unified British national identity.

Territorial animals

This follows last week’s reflections on the patriotic predicament  to which a global dimension is also added that explains how the new ‘progressive’ British neo-nationalist discourse works. On the clip iconic folk singer Billy Bragg ‘repeats’ Gordon Brown. More next week.

The patriotic predicament, British style

This is about the sheer futility involved in the attempts at developing a new, as it were, minority-led, ‘progressive’ and ‘alternative’ yet still grand-national British patriotic predicament by the very ‘secular’, ‘liberal’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘unprejudiced’ representatives of the British ethnic minorities themselves (Afro-Caribbean, Muslim…). The clip below offers a possible way of linking the particular and the universal. 

Exiles (III)

More against that kind of fashionable metropolitan cosmopolitanism where freedom of decision seems always guaranteed. The name of the clip “Betik eskamak kentzen” refers to a Basque popular song by fishermen’s wives “always removing the scales from the fish” .

Exiles

Last week I mentioned Edward Said, a huge thinker of Palestinian origin who died a few years ago after a long illness with leukaemia. Following a more or less deserved holidays we should all have settled down by now. Here I continue with his reflections on exiled intellectual life. No major short-circuits and no animals this time. Just a straightforward series of quotes on his honour, and a video clip by Joseba Sarrionaindia, perhaps the Basque writer who better epitomises the ups and downs of exile life.

On Summer and travel –II- Why global terrorist monsters should not complain

Summer: everything slows down. Here is the second on the series on travelling cultures. The clip is related to the topic but is already thinking of Christmas. Blues.

Basque ethnic rhino goes Superlambananas too

I had planed to post something “on swans, spuds and ducks” but we’ll leave it for another time, hopefully next week. The thing is I have gone Superlambananas too and quickly put a miniclip together which I feel like I have to show you. Here it is. If you read below you may refrain from watching it so click first and, if anything, give up on the reading.

Ugly ogres: beware of beautiful voices talking on your behalf

We keep on with Jonathan Swift who in this piece is shortcircuited with Shrek 2. Find also a very short clip where Richard Rorty gives his opinion on the topic of Truth.

Slaughtered piglets and legless spiders

On this one I have short-circuited anti-racist activist Darcus Howe with Jonathan Swift, the  writer of Gulliver’s Travels although I deal with the also famous text A modest proposal instead.

Un chien andalou & the alien bitches

We follow last week’s clip by Zizek on reality as 1/ stupid reality, 2/ external appearance and 3/ the appearance of the spectral,  phantasmatic Real. In the clip below, the results of the opinion poll are far from imaginary: that’s the kind of ‘reality’, we silly Basque ethnic cows, have to put up with. In the aftermath of the Madrid bombings a politician said that they are all terrorists, whether they put a beret or a turbant on and why not? since almost 80% of the population seems to believe so. Everything goes! So, out of the blue, here is another story, neboulous and ghosty.