New White House Draft Plan
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Bully Beef
Patriotic Dissonance
I was thinking further about the Harp, and how it’s used by the Republic of Ireland (as the successor state to the Irish Free State, itself the successor state of the Kingdom of Ireland). But it’s not exclusive – it has been appropriated for commercial purposes.
Guinness basically waited until 1862 to grab the harp – after the Parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland had been illegally prorogued in 1801 under Pitt the Spawn. All the symbols of Ireland’s independent existence within the Three Kingdoms were being actively suppressed by Westminster factions, and I personally believe that “diluting” such a potent symbol by affixing it to an alcoholic drink must have been seen by some as a clever stroke.
Let’s take a little thought experiment. Imagine if, in 1812, the British hadn’t been distracted by Bonaparte and had decided after their early victories in the 1812 war to re-occupy the Colonies, annex them to Canada, and extinguish all the symbols of US independence. And then 50 years later a British beer brand, Newcastle Brown Ale, for instance, slapped on the Great Seal of the United States or the Seal of the President of the United States onto every can. Fast forward another 50 years and a successful rebellion re-establishes an independent political structure. And they go to re-use their own symbols and find they are also now being used to create an aura of “Americanness” around a beer manufactured by a company with a corporate structure foreign to the United States.
Labels: Guinness Harp Ireland
On Guinness
Stout is a simple drink that can be brewed anywhere, but people take it very seriously. Because of the Guinness Family’s Loyalism and the brewery’s location in the Pale, Guinness was long known as (at least outside Dublin) as “The Protestant Drink” and hence the existence of regional alternatives such as Beamish and Murphy’s in cities less traditionally Loyalist than Dublin.
The Guinness company moved out of Ireland to the UK in the early 1930s and severed all connections with the new Irish Free State except for the St James’ Gate site, for which it negotiated a ground rent of around €50 per year for several thousand years. In the 18th century this was apparently a good deal. The St James’ Gate site was heavily developed by Guinness during the 19th century into not just a brewery but an entire urban community that was allowed during the worst years of Ireland’s mid-20th century isolationism to become one of the worst slums in Dublin. It’s getting better but, having lived there, it’s tough to up-sell people on buying some of the new apartments when every few days Guinness disgorges some effluent and everything reeks of burning vegetable matter for hours.
The Guinness family was finally driven out of Ireland during following the Irish Civil War and the low-grade ethnic cleansing of Protestants that continued afterwards. You can walk in St Anne’s Park in Dublin and see the remains of the Guinness Mansion that was burned. It’s quite evocative.
The way Guinness appropriated all the symbols of the old Kingdom of Ireland (green, harp, etc) and so denied their use by its successor states, and the way it managed to lose its politically dodgy symbolism, is truly remarkable marketing. It’s as big as Coke re-colouring Santa to be red and white all over.
No Multicellular Eukaryotic Heterotrophic Opisthokonts Please
Except for some isolated restaurant-related insertions, I’ve tried to avoid eating animals (marine or land) for 20 years. Except for the inevitable beetle carapaces and various arthropod parts so popular in food colourings. My personal definition of “animals” is functional/phylogenetic, based on their being eukaryotic heterotrophic Opisthokonts and specifically multicellular, which conveniently excludes most protists, yeasts, algae (seaweed), plants, and so on.
This is usually too difficult to explain to servers in restaurants, so I usually say “no flesh, no fish, no birds”. I used to just say “no meat” until I realised that people have a hazy and culturally contingent definition of what “meat” means.
But the dilution of the word “vegetarian” has reached such a point where I usually don’t say I am one, and have managed to more or less remember not to use that label to identify myself. It’s sad when a word like vegetarian now requires so many adjectives and qualifiers to pin down its meaning. The utility of labelling and stereotypes is that they should be quick cognitive shortcuts that avoid having to engage much thought.
I’ve also been trapped at parties by born-again self-identified “vegetarians” or “ex-vegetarians” who sometimes take an inappropriate amount of time telling me why they eat or do not eat things. It often puzzles me why people are so intense on this subject, until I remember my Barthes.
I do fully support the right of all people, however, to eat what they want, up to and including bosintang and cat meat.
To impose your own dietary preferences on others is a slippery slope. Your begin with reasonableness, pass through invective, and end up with sacred/profane structures of taboo, hala, and kashrut.
Labels: vegetarian
Pit Stop
So Google’s made me “upgrade” to some version 2 blog thing, right in the middle of a migration to Wordpress (via Movable Type because of some conversion issues). I hope this doesn’t fuck things up.
I was accepted into Northwestern University’s medical program, which makes four schools so far including Yeshiva/Einstein in the Bronx. Nice.
Labels: busy
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