I am now the proud owner of a rather garish Union Jack teapot. Yes, really.

I had been on a quest, you see, to find objects to make my future room at uni look a little less soulless and a little more occupied. The teapot should match nicely my ship-in-a-bottle, African mask and miniature replica of the Belgian crown jewels already in my possession (I kid you not). But this isn’t really a blog about teapots. It is a blog about flags.

Since acquiring the patriotic pot I’ve done more shopping and have been baffled by the dizzying array of Union Jack related merchandise available; wall prints, stationary, cushions, bed spread, kitchen implements, the full works! I could have a Union jack themed room if I really wanted to.

Why? Well, Union Jacks are just cool. It is a brilliant flag, immediately recognizable even with inverted colours. It also represents our nation perfectly: England riding over the top of Scotland, Ireland lurking in the background and Wales ignored completely. How could you better sum up our United Kingdom than that?

There is a wider trend to consider. There is also a proliferation of red phone boxes, buses or telephone boxes, not to mention Keep Calm and Carry On posters. Supermarkets now stress not only their British goods but their Great British goods.  How about that Great British Summer that seemed to permeate every corner of advertising a few months ago? A year or two ago, two electricity companies entered a legal dispute over who had the right to use a green tinted Union Jack as their logos.

Clearly we live in a time when there is a surge in British pride, (or should I say, Great British pride)… but why?

On some level it is a straight forward nostalgia fest. The tweed jackets and patterned jumpers popular in many menswear shops point in the same direction. Perhaps an economic knock sees us all looking backward to the past, to help us to keep calm and carry on.

It might also reflect deeper insecurities. In post imperial Britain we have a lot of history but no clear future or place in the world. People are often prone to talk Britain down, often as one of the worst places to live in Europe, as heavily indebted or as weak and puny next to the United States. Bigging up Britain is a natural response on the grass roots level. We don’t just want Britain, we want Great Britain!

Arguably though there is a wider trend to consider. Americans seem increasingly backward looking, promising a return to “Tea parties” and Jeffersonian America. I’m not really in any position to judge the rest of Europe, except that nationalist parties made significant gains at the last European elections, and the national Front looks to do well in France.  Perhaps this has to do with China: as the developing world seems to come ever closer to catching us up and buys up ever more of our real estate and football teams, we are too scared to face a future that is Chinese, or Indian, or Arabic.

That interpretation may be a little gloomy. In fact, when foreign billionaires gain a windfall what do they do? They stay at the Ritz, shop at Harrods and buy a Premier League football team or two. They educate their children at Eton or harrow, then at Oxbridge. It isn’t just westerners who are looking to the British past. History sells. The influence that we had a century ago is such to give us an important place in the world which brings our old colonial subjects back to our shores to pay homage.

In the great dynamic of the clash of east and west and the ebb and flow of great economic tides, what does that make my teapot?

It makes it cool, that’s what.

bethanypost:

Gop Debate Digest

~ Picture by Tim Eagan

…exactly what I was thinking!…

A slightly self important blog post.

As if I didn’t have enough difficult reading to do already, I decided to take on a serious work of economics and political thought, the Road to Serfdom by Frederich Hayek.

Before we go any further I should explain that I am of a leftish persuasion politically (in as much as that “left” and “right” are real and not made up so that we can argue over very little). I wouldn’t identify myself as a socialist though, as I have a sceptical attitude towards government power, although I think regulation can improve things, rather than making them worse. I understand that that is enough to make you a socialist in America today.

The Road to Serfdom is a book about Socialism. Written in 1944, Hayek is responding to the calls by some socialists to extend British war economy measures into peacetime in order to “win the peace” and fight a “war on poverty”. He argues that the only logical consequence of increased socialism is a gradual slide towards totalitarianism as the impossibilities of a socialist state lead to an implosion of socialist ideology into a fascist-like state.

For a firebrand libertarian and a passionate anti-socialist Hayek isn’t all that… firebrand, really. Or even that anti-socialist. He certainly wouldn’t fit in with today’s Tea Party in America which claims his influence. He is much too ready to explore the arguments of his opponents and find merit in some of them; he doesn’t see laissez-faire as a hard-and-fast rule and is prepared to endorse government action in a number of situations; he even endorses the creation of a European super state, something far more socialist than I would agree to.

The biggest problem with the book is that Hayek fails to recognise the diversity amongst socialist groups, in particular the Labour party; a flaw ironically shared by many Labour historians who would have like the party to have been a bastion of socialism supported by a solid working class vote. This interpretation does not stand up to close scrutiny. At its formation Labour party was a very broad coalition. Hayek’s professed enemies the “Statists” were there, but so too were many defecting Liberals, radical nonconformists, imperialist radicals and working class Tories of the Disraelian mould.

The 1930s saw an increase in the proportion of Statists in the Labour party and it is to their debates that Hayek is listening, not to the party mainstream. In their promises to “win the peace” through a planned economy he mistakes the hubris of war for a genuine party policy. Attlee’s government was socialist in character, too much so, but a slide towards totalitarianism was certainly not inevitable and general freedom was preserved.

Still less foreseeable was socialism’s own desire to reform. The Fascist/Stalinist state was not the end point in socialism’s evolution; Franco, Dubcek, Khrushchev and Gorbachev all took substantive steps away from the totalitarian state which Hayek saw as inevitable. Most successful has been the de-totalitarianisation of China. A nation where the state continues to own and or run the commanding heights of the economy in a monopolistic fashion is not only overtaking many capitalist economies but is becoming a world centre for capitalism. Im am not an admirer of China, and belive that China faces severe internal challenges and has certainly not come to terms yet with ideas of individual freedom; however, undoubtedly it proves that totalitarianism is not inevitable and that socialism is capable of compromise.

The appeal of “The Road to Serfdom” is in its sincere passion and determination to save Britain from what it could have become. He also raises good point on the need for respect for the individual and the preservation of general liberty, which can be put in danger by socialism. Hayek’s suppositions are flawed – moderate socialism is possible; by learning from some aspect of socialism and fusing them with capitalism we can strengthen capitalism whilst leaving our liberty largely intact. Thus, I do not accept Hayek’s arguments which, whilst understandable in the context of their time, have largely been overtaken by history.

The bizarrest book that I’ve ever read is Ecce Homo by Nietzsche . Yes, that’s right, I read a book by Nietzsche. I figured I’d probably better read a serious work of philosophy before I go to Oxford, and I wanted to see why Nietzsche is so controversial.  Plus the book is short. And an autobiography rather than proper philosophy. So it should be an easy read, shouldn’t it?

No, decidedly not.

Ecce Homo is Latin for “Behold the Man” and is the phrase Pontius Pilate used to introduce Jesus to the crowd; the use of the title by the self-declared anti-Christ Nietzsche for his autobiography was deliberately controversial.

Then again so is Nietzsche. He has quite a reputation which precedes him as a founder of postmodern philosophy, self-declared anti-Christ and as Goebbels favourite philosopher. The fact that Ecce Homo is also his last book, written in his final furious burst of creativity shortly before his collapse into permanent insanity (probably due to syphilis), meant that I had been expecting an odd book. And yet…

The first section is called Why I am so wise and lists every characteristic which he considers good and then searches for the reason that he has it in such quantities.

The second section, Why I am so clever explores what personal habits are necessary for a genius such as himself, including what to eat (as genius resides in the intestine), where to live (in a dry climate) and what music to listen to (he debates for a long time whether Wagner is the answer. I don’t actually remember his conclusions).

The third section is called Why I write such good books and consists of him reviewing each book he has written in glowing and egotistical terms, declaring that they will change the world. He seems unable to tell fiction from reality, repeatedly praising Zarathustra as the wisest being ever to live, despite the fact that he is a fictional character in one of his books.

Finally, Why I am destiny consists of Nietzsche attempting to spell out his place in history. He makes a last ditch attempt to put in some philosophy about morality, but it is basically just an advert for his book “The Antichrist”. Unsurprisingly, In Nietzsche’s opinion, he is the single most important being to have ever lived.

Other features of the book are stranger still. Nietzsche writes without paragraphs – there are numbered chapters each consisting of continuous text. He also punctuates his work with frequent italics, adding special stress on the most controversial parts. His arguments are largely controversial and ill argued – the amoral barbs are no deeper that Oscar Wilde’s but betray a deep ill nature towards its subjects as well rampant egotism.

The book is a mere one hundred and thirty pages long and yet I feel exhausted having read it. I even skipped over long sections debating on whether Wagnerism is equated to tragic Dionysianism or not. I can’t find any purpose in the book at all – have I missed it or is it genuinely completely absent?

todaysdocument:

“I Have a Dream” today…

In part 3 of “The March,” we hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This film was produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA) about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Read the transcript for this segment and watch Part 1 and Part 2 of “The March.”