Why is it that the ritual serving of a glass of tasteless white wine has become so integral to the ceremonial protocols of these useless functions? The question may actually lead us back to the famous essay of Roland Barthes on the picture of a bottle of wine (later collected in his Mythologies, 1957) in which he argues that the visual transformation of the object into bourgeois sublimity of health and happiness is what the sign represents against the medicinal fact that it might actually be harmful to your health - as in fact in the US there is always a warning on any bottle of wine to that effect. The question as a result is not the bogus bifurcation between secular and lslamist distinction regarding the juridical inhibition of alcohol but between an abiding sign in the European ceremonial semiology and the evident disparity of fact from fantasy. To mend the world and the fragile fate of nations in it, whatever measure of legitimacy such international organisations as the UN may still carry will have to be liberated from such bogus bourgeois insignia as a bottle of cheap chardonnay and whatever it is made to mean and signify

President Rouhani, a glass of chardonnay, and the fate of a nation - Opinion - Al Jazeera English Sunday, October 6, 2013 @ 2:42pm