The unforced error: Disturbed sleep about Brexit in The Amalgamated Aggromulator

Well, I’m awake. 2:30 a.m. Gurgly heartburny big fat tummy. It’s apparently thinking over the beef barbacoa and rice. Good for it.

I pried myself up and switched on the harsh bathroom lights and shaved my head and beard. The usual, expected shock. Instead of the guy with the big beard, I am now the guy with the big fat nodule of a face/head complex. (I used to at least not carry it in the face. Sic transit gloria mundi.) But it had to be done. Overdue. Summer - and travelling on Thursday to a place where the heat is humid . . . and, most crucially, the quality of my beard-dandruff is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. This spectacle might not work for Christy. So it had to go.

A weekend plant sale is just over. We made enough to help with the bills a bit.

The drama with my seedlings continues. They’re increasing in size. Yesterday the day was a solid blue dome, and I confirmed that the plants follow the sun like sunflowers; the leafy tops are looking east in the morning, they’re looking west in the afternoon. I didn’t know that. I peed on one yesterday morning to help it out, and by the afternoon it had developed little crisp bright brown edges on a couple of the leaves, so I hurriedly watered the pot to dilute the overconcentration of nutrients and felt foolish. Sometimes life sorely lacks a sergeant-major to shout at you and inquire who asked you to do that.

Graagh. 2:48 a.m., now.

Of course the real reason I decided to dig my claws into this stomach-gurgling moment of wakefulness because I had to take one of my ADD pills and write something about Brexit. I had other things in mind - unimportant or frivolous things, a sort of commemorative one about a contraption I built named “Spootnik”, and so on - but . . . wow.

Brexit!

That thing where I came to know what the peculiar word meant a couple of weeks before the vote but wasn’t paying much attention because I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Well, not knew knew. That default thing. And I didn’t have to vote on it personally. So.

And now, glory be, there is so much help in looking the accomplished thing over!

(Here is a marvelous PDF anthology of essays against the possibility of a Brexit - which now gives us a panoramic view of what to worry about and why.)

I am so struck by how amazingly thoughtless it seems. Great Britain suddenly wanders out of Europe, on whim, even seeming astonished that it has done so. A lot of well-developed legacy just dropped on impulse.

In the light of an appalling barrage of xenophobic scare stories in the tabloids about immigrants. And . . . not a lot else. Nationalism, “sovereignty,” vs. a lot about the EU that, granted, it was hard to work up great excited enthusiasm about (a high-handed distant clogged bureaucracy, etc.) . . . but many important established things are hard to work up great excited enthusiasm about.

So, Great Britain decides to become . . . Greater Iceland? It can’t fall back on the British Empire; there isn’t one. And that’s a bad parallel because Iceland is in the EU.

And Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly Remain, ended up voting to stay in the UK awhile back because it wanted to stay in the EU, which has now brought up the possibility that Scotland will now vote to leave the UK and join the EU, which would mean that England would have also absent-mindedly fumbled away Great Britain.

(And the fact that David Cameron, who opposed Brexit, was nonetheless the one who promised to introduce the referendum in order to get a handle on his party’s political problems?!?)
(I said irritably to someone, “Two years of arduous U.S. preparation to flirt with becoming the world’s most astounding political idiot, and Great Britain turns queue-jumper.”)

The EU has had its problems. Certainly. The Eurozone is a big one. One monetary economy but a lot of separate governments with first responsibilities to their own countries. Like, the UK has been able to manage its debt problems through monetary policy, but Greece couldn’t, it couldn’t devalue its currency to compensate for the effects of austerity, because its currency was the euro . . . But Britain already wasn’t in the Eurozone.

And now there is the risk that other countries may now succumb to their nativist/nationalist impulses and politicians (of which there are plenty, these days) and leave the EU, inspired by Britain.
Which could leave the whole great decades-long work of a stable, unified, war-free Europe dangling in the breeze.
A work important to Britain up to now. Theoretically.

What is stunning about this is the combination of the momentousness of this and the casual fashion in which it was done!

And, by the demographics of the vote, this was not done by a lot of know-nothing youngsters. If anything the main support was a lot of know-nothing oldsters.

One thing I have been very struck by, perhaps too much, is people who voted Leave but are now shocked and disturbed that it won. Maybe a few catchy news stories have made too much of the people speaking up; maybe not.
But . . . well, I’ll take this opportunity (I hope it’s not against ProseBox etiquette somehow) to recommend the diary of Feathers Fell for hi/r very comprehensive rants about the situation.

In a comment there I had expressed my astonishment that these people seemed to have thought of their vote as the equivalent of mischievously carving a swastika into a school desk in the third grade. No result contemplated.
Feathers Fell said that, with the First Past The Post system they have there in many places (it’s the same arrangement we have in the U.S.), many people may have gotten accustomed to the idea that their vote didn’t really count. But that situation, with its spoiler-effect dynamics, would apply to elections with three, or five, or seven options. This was a choice between two.
The way s/he put it in an entry, italics mine, was that a lot of people “thought you could have a protest vote on a binary ballot.”

There seems something general to say about voting here . . . This was not a poll as to one’s mood about things. News outlets often talk about voters “registering their displeasure”, but that’s not what a vote actually is. A vote decides what happens next.
With the people who did vote that way and are now dismayed and discombobulated - the comparison that comes to mind is having not understood the difference between honestly answering a question “do you ever feel like killing your boss” and actually murdering your boss.

(Note to self: Write about that other voting conversation too, and about the idea that “you are not the consumer of your vote.” But another time.)

And then there is the nature of the motivation for choosing Leave. Well, not absolutely the only motivation, but a big one.
I got the worst possible look at this when I found myself reading a comment thread in YouTube congratulating the Brits on “a great day for caucasians.”

And I have just read that there have been a lot of minorities and foreigners or people who looked foreign getting horrid racial slurs yelled at them in public in London over the last couple of days.

(I can’t get too superior. Here in the US a fellow running for Congress was emboldened enough by the Trumpers’ spirit of the times to put up a billboard saying MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN. He took it down after backlash from neighbors. He was planning more billboards, one of which was supposed to say “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be miscegenators.” He said he thought the time was right, because of Trump.)

I would put up a photo montage of the hundreds of anti-migrant British tabloid scare headlines that pushed the Brexit . . . but it sounds like the most depressing downloading/uploading and linking work ever, so I won’t.

And, before the vote, there was the brutal public murder of Jo Cox by a man yelling “Britain first.” He later amplified this in court with “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.” Jo Cox was a member of Parliament, with a background at Oxfam; she supported staying in the EU and defended the rights of Syrian immigrants during her first term.

. . . Perhaps I should have just gotten some more sleep instead. I’m not saying anything new. And I’m compulsively reading so many people who are writing better and more comprehensively about this than I am.

But, one thing. The rather incoherent, impulsive way that this happened, though it is separable, connects enough with the way the Trumpers are lining up for whatever comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth that it scares me.
(Oh, Trump. The other day I saw an out-take from one of his speeches where he was just softly crooning, “America first, America first, America first . . .” It was like a Nazi back-rub.)

This essay I read yesterday is relevant: “We have entered a new political era - one in which popular support for the core institutions of liberal democracy can no longer be taken for granted.”

In which I found this remarkable passage:

Two decades ago, 1 in 16 Americans believed that Army rule would be a good way to run the country. Today, it is 1 in 6. The picture is even bleaker among the young and affluent: Support for military rule in this group has increased nearly sixfold, from 6 percent to 35 percent.

. . . What?

Feathers Fell writes of the Brexit event: “Who knew that constantly telling the population that the cause of their problems was immigrants and the EU would result in the population becoming hostile to immigrants and the EU?”
Well, you could say the same of an endless political discussion here that says that Washington and Congress are the problem and horribly corrupt, and that the other political side is a demonic threat . . . an endless drumbeat of that, people centering their political identities on that.
Is faith in the system that is theoretically (has historically been) the center of our “civil religion,” in the steady, calm business of democracy and deliberations and keeping on holding elections, supposed to magically survive and prosper and be thought the “main thing” on some other, untouchable channel - while it’s been constantly raged at and vilified without restraint? Or only and unendingly seen as the forever inconvenient, “broken” present battleground?

Whatever everyone is talking about is usually taken as being what’s important. Whatever they aren’t . . . isn’t.

(Did I ever write in here about the clump of Trump supporters, supposedly rock-ribbed American conservatives protective of American liberty, who, when asked who would make a better U.S. president - Obama or the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin - all picked Putin with only one exception? There’s a man who gets things done!, was the feeling. Their priority-perspective had the one absolute pole, at Obama, and on that hinge it could otherwise swing - oh, anywhere.)

I could also bring up - have I mentioned it already sometime? I may have. I said in a note on Feathers Fell’s diary,

There used to be a book I meant to buy but never did, possibly written tongue-in-cheek but I never found out for sure, by something called the World Power Foundation - which claimed to be a sort of religion for the Winners, whoever they happened to be. One of the mottoes I saw in an advertisement for the book was: "Excitement is more important than equality."

Maybe the steady solutions-framework of due process, universal rights, non-xenophobia, mutual searching understanding, etc. will turn out to be - in general, or in the conditions of our new information soup - in the end *just not exciting enough*. It's possible. It's a slow-motion nightmare of mine.

Anyway. So here we are.

I should find coffee.

P.S. Bonus good caustic analysis from an intelligent comedian who does great stuff about everything:

In advance:

The aftermath:

Part 1 -

Part 2 -

Last updated June 29, 2016