The Judge RANTS!
Date: 26/07/15
Flagged Up
The problem with propaganda - or, at least, one of the main problems with propaganda - is that the more oblique, the more subliminal it is, the more difficult it is to counter because of its intrinsically insidious nature. This means that anyone trying to point out that a message is being sent via such methods is immediately met with the accusation of being a member of the 'tin-foil hat brigade', or at the very least of seeing things which aren't there. And, having been thus pooh-poohed, the pointer-out of the matter gets marginalised and on it goes.
That means that certain 'messages' can gain the currency and dignity of being part of the normal run of things, as having become so deeply incorporated into the mind-set of the public that even to challenge them leaves you in the category of 'crank', or even 'weirdo'.
However, since I have long-since embraced my Inner Freak, I don't hesitate to call these things when I find them. And, this morning, find one I did. This is the sight which greeted me when I went to my local council's website to pay my rent this morning:
Now, people who would officially be deemed 'reasonable' (that is to say, whose views fall slap bang into the standard pattern of amiable docility which is considered to be 'normal' for the Untied Condom of Greater Austeria) might point out that this was in connection with some bike race or other. And indeed, there was one which passed through the consecrated grounds of Wrexham, but which has been cancelled for this year, possibly due to the cack-handedness of the organisers in previous years in insisting on road closures which caused enormous disruption to the lives of the people who were unfortunate enough to live on the route. So I don't quite see what the image shown above has to do with us anymore.
But look again, if you will: the key point to me is not the silly buggers in full-body johnnies riding things which look like a cross between a plumbing installation and a disc harrow for the strip system, but the background.
I think it worth mentioning at this point that Wrexham is in Wales, although visitors to the town could be forgiven for doubting this, given that our own native language has long since vanished from everywhere bar the street signs and that one is far more likely to hear Polish or Portuguese spoken in the teeming and properous thoroughfares of our dear home town.
Given that - and given the fact that the bike race I referred to earlier is/was called Étape Cymru (another piece of propaganda, by the way; those in positions of power and influence think that if you stick 'Cymru' onto an event or organisation that means that you give a shit about our national identity) - then the question has to be posed as to what that flag is doing there. Especially as we are considered to be sufficiently grown-up to have our own flag now - you know, like Yorkshire.
The answer is: subliminal advertising. The submission of our own national identity to the vague, shape-shifting concept of 'Britishness' (which - like the 'special relationship' with the US - tends only ever to be invoked by those using it for utterly self-serving purposes) is confirmed and maintained by images such as this. A big cycle race - even one which isn't actually taking place - is deemed to be sufficiently 'prestigious' (another word used largely as puffery, as in 'presitigious development', which - in the experience of Wrexham as of many another place - simply means 'a hideous new building for which perfectly good old buildings were knocked down, and whose cavernous malls lie largely vacant while the developers pay off their bribes to the councillors and then bugger off with the loot'); as I say, such an event is deemed sufficiently 'presitigious' to merit the use of The Flag Of Us All (excluding West Belfast and The Bogside) rather than our own piddling little dish-rag of no consequence.
And - for the reasons I adumbrated in the second paragraph - this disprising of our identity will go unremarked upon by nearly everyone; it has become an attitude so ingrained that nothing short of a bloody revolution is likely to shift it. When you have been the subject of propaganda and legislation for seven hundred years whose primary or sole purpose was to make it perfectly clear that not only are you intrinsically inferior to your masters, but that this is the natural order of things, then only a few hardy curmudgeons and trouble-makers will see anything at all wrong with it.
However, it is particularly apposite that this image should appear on the website of Wrexham County Borough Council, a council which - although keen to play on its location and its supposed 'Welshness' when it suits it - has shown a marked reluctance to ensure that, for example, there is enough Welsh-medium education for all the children in the county whose parents want it. And which has just embarked on a major peeve over the implementation of new standards for the use of Welsh in public bodies, with the 'lead member' (that's pronounced to rhyme with 'weed' rather than with 'dead', by the way; and don't ask about the definition of the word 'member' in this context) for 'communities and partnerships' (yet another example of Modern Bollocksese) complaining that it would - or so he claims - cost the council £700 000 to put the standards into effect, and that - to read between his lines - "One more standard and your Library gets it".
(Said 'lead member' is a Tory, represents a ward right on the border with whatever that part of Cheshire is called this week, and his home is scarcely a couple of hundred yards from the national boundary. Still, at least he does live within the area, unlike one of his colleagues who claims to represent a ward in central Wrexham from his pad twenty miles away halfway across the next county).
And given that a previous council seemed hell-bent until they were stopped by concerted public pressure on subsuming our county into - and subjugate it to the needs of - Greater Chester and the Wirral, and also given the willingness of the council down the years to throw money at all sorts of nonsense (like another UKanian propaganda exercise, the so-called 'Armed Forces Day', in which our young people - devoid of any other opportunities for employment - are enticed into travelling the world giving Johnny Foreigner a taste of cold steel), then protestations at having to spend money on meeting new standards for public service (and the alleged amount suggests nothing more than a total failure of the council's existing provision if it takes that much to bring it up to snuff) - ring a little hollow.
Still, that at least makes Wrexham a typically Welsh council.
