That’s right: Other sites sell you candy pills, but here’s the real dope.1
Plenty of people2 are having a high old time praising the Brexit vote as an uprising of the “people” against the pointy-heads, ignoring the fact that the vote also polarized the old against the young, and the “Celtic Fringe”—Scotland and Northern Ireland—against England, and specifically not-London England. There were plenty of “people” who voted “Stay”, not because they want sissy-britches, French-speaking Brussels bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight telling them how many milligrams of rat shit you can put in a banger (which is a sausage, and not a very good one), but because they think the UK is better off in than out.
I don’t think it’s a good sign when 64% of those under 25 vote one way and 58% of those 65 and over vote the other. It’s also not a good sign when two parts of a country—the Celtic fringers—start thinking a whole lot about leaving. In a previous posting, I expressed considerable sympathy for the “Brussels Sucks” syndrome, complaining that elites listen only to themselves, but carefully avoided coming up with a solution, even while implying that a “Leave” vote might be necessary to wake up the pointy-heads.
Well, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t because I assumed that a “Stay” vote was a certainty. I thought I was speaking in the abstract, when, as it turned out, I wasn’t. The stunning wreckage that the “Leave” vote has imposed on British politics as almost without precedent, a sign, I suppose, of how deeply globalism has disrupted the lives of large sectors of western society at the same time that it has greatly benefited other sectors. In “taking matters into our own hands,” the Brits seem to have destroyed their own country. Better them than us, huh?
- I stole this line from one of the very first issues of Mad magazine, used in an article parodying New York tabloids, whose rowdy, tough-guy approach to journalism was entirely unknown to me. ↩︎
- George Will, thoroughly “Wall Street” in his economic thinking—pro-immigration and pro-free trade—takes the opportunity to huff and puff in a pseudo-Churchillian manner against continental elites—“Sixty years after Britain’s humiliation in the Suez debacle, Britain has a spring in its step, confident that it will flourish when Brussels no longer controls 60 to 70 percent of the British government’s actions.” I’d say that the last thing Britons are feeling is a spring in their step—“panic nipping at their heels” might be a better metaphor. On the “Left”, Green Party candidate Jill Stein gets all Bernie on your ass, praising the “Leave” vote as a blow against global capitalism. Like Bernie, Jill believes in good jobs for white people. ↩︎
