Essays in Idleness

Oh look: today is the 29th of March, anno 2019. This is the day the British were to have a huge street party to celebrate their escape from the putrid, dark, inhuman bureaucracy of the European Union.

We have got it in a string,
And the Whigs can all go swing …

— as Jonathan Swift wrote of a similar occasion, back when Britain was emerging as the world’s great power, at least partly for good. “All their false deluded hopes, will and ought to end in ropes, and the Queen shall enjoy her own again.”

Except, this time, and rather characteristically, they’ve made a mess of everything, and caught themselves deeper in the very sticky goo they were trying to exit.

It would be simplistic to blame the delay, the sabotages, the sordid compromises, the incompetent political conspiracies, on Britain’s own putrefying, dark, inhuman establishment — on her bourgeoisie, and the straitjackets in which they feel comfortable. It would be unfair to suggest that even if they lose, the Remainers will win, by extending Britain’s own vast, intrusive, Twisted Nanny State, to fill any gaps in regulation and surveillance from which the EU was to have been evacuated. (But at least their decisions would have to be made closer to home.)

Allow me to be simplistic, and unfair. At a distance, I have watched their whirligig in the molasses. The vote to “leave Europe” was clearly won, but it wasn’t a consensus. On the other hand, Britain got stuck into “Europe” without any referendum vote.

The argument for maintaining, at the highest possible level, the monstrous and profane machinery of modern state control, is easily answered but not defeatable. As I am reminded by my own quaint dealings with Canada’s version of jackboot “nice,” one wrestles not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore, one must take unto one the whole armour of God, and stand.

People are persuaded that the demons who rule them are indispensible. (Strictly speaking, not devils but their servants and slaves.) They provide the “safety nets” to those who might fall from the Temple. They make sure, like Holden Caulfield, that we will never hurt ourselves. They take responsibility for a nation of children, who will never be adult enough to take care of themselves.

The unambiguously evil book to which I allude — Catcher in the Rye — was taught in the Canadian high school I briefly attended. Even then, my proposal was to push Holden Caulfield over the side. But my classmates were all mesmerized by the niceness, by his (fraudulent) “idealism.”

The best way to leave Europe was, all along, to walk. And in the best British tradition, to walk like Charlie Chaplin, and do as much damage as possible to the dark European machine, thus helping other nations to escape its clutches.

____________

More of my political rambunctiousness this morning, over here.