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Charlie Brooker
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian:
"Rejoice! Thanks to the national obsession with football, the cross of St George has finally been reclaimed from the racists. Nowadays, when you see an England flag on a car, sprawled across a T-shirt, or flapping from a novelty hat, you no longer assume the owner is a dot-brained xenophobe. Instead you assume he's just an idiot. And you're right. He is.
It's a great piece of visual shorthand. Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation's dimbos to wear dunce's caps in public. No one would stand for it. There'd be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We'd see rioting in the streets - badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.
Instead, every numbskull in the land is queuing up to voluntarily brand themselves. They even pay for the privilege! As brilliant ruses go, it's the most brilliant, rusiest ruse you could wish for. I can't wait for stage two, when they're persuaded to neuter themselves with safety scissors.
The only problem I have with this berk-demarcation scheme is the design of the flag itself. Personally, I'd jettison the big red cross/white background malarky in favour of a black rectangle with the word CRETIN printed in the centre in stark bold text."
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