by Doctor Science
This is a thread for our UK friends. It's going up later than I hoped because I've been watching live-blogs of our own Constitutional crisis. Perhaps the most distressing part is that Republican members of the Judiciary Committee are laughing during the markup hearing. I suppose this is tactical, to convey that they think this impeachment is a farce. But it also conveys that they don't take government seriously in general, which I guess is #onbrand.
I still find Brexit baffling, though I've recently read some good explanations--or at least coherent stories. One is Heroic Failure by Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. He talks about Brexit as being part of the English (specifically English, not British) tradition of heroic failures: Scott of the Antarctic, the Light Brigade, the Franklin Expedition, General Gordon, Dunkirk, Kipling's "If". The original Heroic Failures were a mis-direction from Empire, a way for the English to center *their* suffering, to distract from noticing the sufferings of their unfree subjects.
They keep going back to WWII as a touchstone, more than the rest of the EU does, because though the UK was on the winning side it wasn't made better off by the War, while Germany and Japan quickly became economic powerhouses.
It's a particularly English problem because since the late 90s the other nations in the UK have devolved assemblies or parliaments to decide local questions, while England's issues are decided by the general Parliament in Westminster.
My father is Irish-American and his mother emigrated due to The Troubles in the early 20s. Like O'Toole, I am gobsmacked that UK leaders and Brexit voters don't realize that the free, open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a bloody big deal that keeps Ireland (and the UK!) from going back to the status quo ante, which was just bloody. The British in general don't seem to grasp that the core value of the EU is *peace-keeping*, and that the Irish border is not a secondary issue for them.
O'Toole also talks about how Brexitism overlaps with the nihilism of punk, where life is dull and grim and you just want to burn it all down. And how that's connected with the English tradition of masochism (there's a reason French sex workers called flagellation "The English Vice"). Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about Brexitism and England's Ruling Pathology: Boarding School Syndrome, and, like O'Toole, notes that to sustain an Empire you have to grow reliable crops of heartless imperialists.
I have to go to sleep now so I can't really make this a terribly coherent post. Good luck, Britfriends, we're rooting for Team Sanity.
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