Monday, February 25, 2008
Shorn (of respect) Connery
Currently, one of the television channels in the UK is running a top one hundred of the most embarrassing/obnoxious/gets-on-your-tits individuals of this past year. I have no idea if SIR Sean Connery is one of these but he should be. This tartan Bahamian (The King of Scotland should have been about him not Idi Amin) has let it be known that he will only return to Scotland when it becomes independent. He is also an avid (and financial) supporter of Alex Salmand and the break-away Scots. Meanwhile, from his crofter’s cottage in the western isles of the Bahamas, Sir Sean pontificates on politics in the way only those who believe the grandiose hype about themselves can.
Having accepted a Knighthood and the lickspittling that that entails (read my blog on Dame Helen Mirren) he rides forever on the assumption that a man who once played James Bond, is, somehow, really some kind of James Bond, forgetting that James Bond represents probably the ultimate bounder among the English establishment’s cavalier, amoral-patrician heroes. Connery’s Scottishness is as ersatz as Japanese Scotch, a spin, a deluded self-construction that sells his image.
Maybe what he is and represents is what Scotland will become with independence; a kind of MacDisneyland full of quaint fables, funny accents, insularly self-satisfied and bedecked in tartan. A bit likely Eire, in fact! Isn’t it time that we forgot all this nationalistic nonsense and got down to being European, anti-chauvinist and egalitarian? Be proud of our histories, maybe, but prouder of what might be achieved if our cultures were allowed to enrich each other, freely.
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