Mental Strife
Even Britishness is not enough for some people. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has launched a project specifically for England, to "find and celebrate the nation's cultural treasures". As one might expect in a society that lumps culture in with media and sport, pretension and ignorance vie with irrelevance to lay their offerings at the feet of Britannia.
The project is called Icons - A Portrait of England, which gives pretension a formidable head start. A traditional Italian puppet show about a murderous wife-beater; a painting by a German artist of a violent and gluttonous Welsh tyrant; and a Scots-sponsored rendering into archaic Albionesque of sixty-two chunks of unreliable Hebrew history, do duty for the "quintessentially English" in popular culture, art and literature.
The SS Empire Windrush, without which we might never have had Enoch Powell or the BNP, reminds us that our national tolerance of alien hordes remains undefiled by the Government's increasingly desperate attempts to define what our nationality might be. The good ship's presence is balanced with that of the Spitfire, which reminds us, once again, of the single overarching inescapable fact of English life, namely that we won the war. The imperial cup of tea, and the money-grubbing FA Cup, remind us why we had to.
Naturally, members of the public are invited to visit the project's website and make their own nominations, of which a new dozen will be announced every three months. Nominations so far include the recently-disappeared Routemaster bus, the black cab, Big Ben, the Tower and the Tube map. That insignificant percentage of the country which does not constitute London is represented by the English pub (saturated by quintessentially English game-shows blaring on widescreen Japanese blatherware) and fish and chips.
Most depressing of all, perhaps, is the inclusion of William Blake's Jerusalem, a text which exudes facile patriotism much as Tony Blair exudes Fabian socialism, but which nonetheless was hijacked by solemn philistines for the glory of the First World War, pressed into ill-suited service as the official anthem of the aforementioned British National Party, and is mob-bellowed annually on the Last Night of the Proms amid waving Union Jacks and suffocating self-complacency.
The project is being developed by ICONS, which is, presumably by design, a non-profit organisation. According to the About Us page on the website, ICONS is "being incubated by pioneering new media company Cognitive Applications" which, handily for incubators of the English quintessence, has offices in Washington DC.
The project is called Icons - A Portrait of England, which gives pretension a formidable head start. A traditional Italian puppet show about a murderous wife-beater; a painting by a German artist of a violent and gluttonous Welsh tyrant; and a Scots-sponsored rendering into archaic Albionesque of sixty-two chunks of unreliable Hebrew history, do duty for the "quintessentially English" in popular culture, art and literature.
The SS Empire Windrush, without which we might never have had Enoch Powell or the BNP, reminds us that our national tolerance of alien hordes remains undefiled by the Government's increasingly desperate attempts to define what our nationality might be. The good ship's presence is balanced with that of the Spitfire, which reminds us, once again, of the single overarching inescapable fact of English life, namely that we won the war. The imperial cup of tea, and the money-grubbing FA Cup, remind us why we had to.
Naturally, members of the public are invited to visit the project's website and make their own nominations, of which a new dozen will be announced every three months. Nominations so far include the recently-disappeared Routemaster bus, the black cab, Big Ben, the Tower and the Tube map. That insignificant percentage of the country which does not constitute London is represented by the English pub (saturated by quintessentially English game-shows blaring on widescreen Japanese blatherware) and fish and chips.
Most depressing of all, perhaps, is the inclusion of William Blake's Jerusalem, a text which exudes facile patriotism much as Tony Blair exudes Fabian socialism, but which nonetheless was hijacked by solemn philistines for the glory of the First World War, pressed into ill-suited service as the official anthem of the aforementioned British National Party, and is mob-bellowed annually on the Last Night of the Proms amid waving Union Jacks and suffocating self-complacency.
The project is being developed by ICONS, which is, presumably by design, a non-profit organisation. According to the About Us page on the website, ICONS is "being incubated by pioneering new media company Cognitive Applications" which, handily for incubators of the English quintessence, has offices in Washington DC.
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