Friday, January 31, 2020

A short rant about England on Brexit Day

On Wednesday I flew home from England. On Thursday I wrote this, in a mood. I'm still in that mood today, so here it is.

Clowns for Crowns turning their backs on progress
Brexit is a manifestation of England's desire to return to a past that never was. It's a consequence of Britain's slanted and archaic electoral system, due for reform hundreds of years ago, paralysed by self-protective cronyism, and obsessed with its masturbatory rituals that are as laughable and anachronistic as the idea of Greatness Through Empire. The rush to leave the European Union contrasts with the lack of a concerted initiative to demand a written constitution. Why bother, when you already have the Magna Carta?

England nurtures delusions of superiority fed by wars fought long ago, and only won thanks to the kind of international unity and co-operation it now abjures. There's a casual acceptance that the English can still entrust the government of its country to old and wealthy white men. Men who'd rather be out of the city shooting beasts that someone else will pluck, roast and serve to them on a silver tray. Someone whose name they do not know, but who will vote for them anyway.

The English continually kowtow to an accent that exerts an inexplicable, deadening power over the non-ruling class. The Queen's intonation is Brexit's vocal architect. The English will mock and parody this accent in fake acts of on-stage rebellion, but in reality always defer to its tea-room, note-perfect, condescending cadence. Its evocation of pomp on high ushers the people towards a life of law and order, commanding that they honour and obey and bow down before wretched, useless parasites who in other European countries were long since hung from the gibbets or confined to lunatic asylums.

Something in the way they talk...
The English desire that their dirty, exploitative history - that fattened the practitioners of those haughty accents through slaughter and slavery - carries them forward on the momentum of myth. The myth that it will always somehow jolly well pull through. The myth that, although they were thankfully conservative enough to fight the Nazi ideology, is itself founded on generalised fabrications about national character steeped in an island mentality and the need for apparent freedom from a perceived tyranny. They'll stick with their own oppression, thanks - the homegrown version that fosters a laziness in intellect, a chronic lack of political imagination, and an eager willingness to be the master's favourite dogsbody.

England loves to lie down and celebrate its subordination to a class of mediocre, plum-mouthed charlatans who can not believe their luck. Of all the subjects they got to rule over, they couldn't have asked for more willing executors of their own degradation. Let the laughing bells of Brexit toll for drunken, sickened England.