2014

Connecting with the previous post, made almost fifty years later in 2014 this short film by Charlie Brooker and Adam Curtis might help explain a lot of our recent disorienting world... "no one was sure what was real or was fake ... its a strategy of power" – sometimes called "non linear warfare". A short profile of the architect of this strategy – Vladislav Surkov – is on the BBC Radio 4 website here.

1966

This isn't my usual content here, but YouTube offered it to me and it is certainly very interesting. Also, if it is from 1966, it has many prescient themes for what engulfed Northern Ireland around that same time. 

Voddie Baucham

Irish Whiskey Review livestream

Had a lot of fun doing this livestream chat with Marty McAuley and Justin Macartney – and of course with Fionnán O'Connor last Saturday night, ahead of the BBC broadcast of Whiskey Talkin'. More on that to follow...

Football's Coming Hame

Well done to the marketing people at Adidas for this stroke of Scottish genius, painted onto a wall in Glasgow ahead of the European Championships which begin next week. 

Football is not just a sport, it is a deep form of popular identity formation, both locally around towns and cities, and also for nations or countries.

I have travelled back and forth to England a lot from 1992 onwards. I distinctly remember summer 1996 – the summer of the Euro '96 tournament being hosted there, and of course the famous anthem Football's Coming Home – as the summer when Englishness and St George's Flags seemed to suddenly explode in popularity. Flags were flying in pubs and gardens and town centres to an extent I'd never seen before. And being from NI, I am fairly flag-conscious!

The wave of 'Cool Britannia' was a factor in Tony Blair's Labour Party coming into government less than a year later in May 1997 (remember Things Can Only Get Better?) – yet these things also enhanced the sense of individual nations within the UK. That autumn, in September 1997, the Scottish Devolution Referendum was held, and by summer 1999 Scotland had its own Parliament once again. And ever since, Scottishness has become more and more distinctive.

Englishness and Scottishness have revived and diverged over those past 25 years. Football might have kicked it all off in 1996. 

Untidy desks and three perspectives on the "culture wars"

In this interview, Eric Kaufmann says that "if your desk is messy you're more likely to be liberal on immigration" (go to 28:40). So that's me defined – and might help explain why I see the Ulster/Scotland relationship as one of a continuum of two-way (im)migrations rather than one-way top-down power-led oppressor-imposed "colonialism".

I first came across Kaufmann around 2007 when he did an academic review of the then Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies at the University of Ulster. There's a lot that's interesting stuff in this interview with Thaddeus Russell around the whole "culture wars" and "wokeness" stuff that's so hot right now. Russell himself is an interesting figure, he says on his own website that "during my early childhood our house on Woolsey Street in Berkeley hosted Black Panthers, IRA guerrillas, and Marxist intellectuals from all over the world."

Another angle is by Mary Eberstadt of the Catholic Information Center in Washington DC who sees it all as a surrogate family, a social purpose for the family-less generation, as she explained in this recent Triggernometry interview –

Finally, this fascinating, detailed and lengthy article in Jewish periodical The Tablet by Michael Lind – The Revenge of the Yankees: How Social Gospel became Social Justice – looks back to 100 years ago in the USA when it was an American Northern Protestant 'Social Gospel' ideological élite who sought to set the nation's cultural agenda. He makes the connection between that movement and today's increasingly authoritarian secular 'wokeness' (which again seeks to set the cultural agenda) and proposes that it is in fact a direct descendant. Here's a killer quote –

"The increasingly powerful and intolerant woke national overclass justifies its cultural iconoclasm in the name of oppressed minorities. But this is just an excuse for a top-down program of cultural imperialism by mostly white, affluent, college-educated managers and professionals and rentiers. Woke attitudes are much less common among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans than among the white college-educated elite.

What we are witnessing is a power grab carried out chiefly by some white Americans against other white Americans. The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatise, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees." **

Kaufmann and Russell get onto similar ground as Lind, by asking if what's happening around these issues is neither racial, nor economic, but is in fact a class conflict (go to 24:00) –

"... could it still be about class? Class is defined both culturally and economically – you can have working class culture and be rich, and vice versa ... it's been largely a civil war between those who are 'of college' – who went to college and speak the language of humanities departments – and those who are not of that world and that culture. Higher education has defined the culture of the dominant liberal class..."

The world is changing. There is always lots to think about. The easy answers are usually wrong.

• Thaddeus Russell's website is here

** PS:  Where Lind goes wrong is that he slips into 'groupthink', and fails to explain that the group term 'Protestant' is not a singular entity, but a widely diverse categorisation. 'Protestant' – both in Ireland and in America – can often be an unhelpful term, just used as a lazy umbrella which in fact camouflages a multiplicity of differing ideas, denominations, communities, the powerful and the powerless, etc. It should be theological, but seldom is any more. The 'Protestant' concept in the context of Michael Lind's article is the very same WASP 'Protestant' concept that JD Vance, author of 2016's Hillbilly Elegy, dissected when he said this in his opening pages –

“I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the northeast ... Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree.”