This is a core statement: "I’ve spent the better part of my youth thinking up creative insults for these men, trying to form and reform the contempt and disgust that almost everyone who came of age in the UK after the financial crash feels for the way these people have pissed all over our futures and told us to enjoy the gentle British rain. But now, when it comes to it, I find I can’t summon the bile. I can’t access the heat of rage that kept me writing all those late nights in filthy flatshares in between jobs, as my friends descended into pits of depression and anxiety and gave up on their potential, as more and more young people came out to protest and met only the business ends of police batons. I haven’t the energy to be angry, not right now. I don’t even feel contempt for these bloated little hypocrities that fucked up my country and cauterized the futures of almost everyone I care about. I feel nothing at all about them, still less for the millions of people they conned and called it democracy. It’s all catastrophically sad, and it’s going to be sad for a very long time."
Brexit is truly the end-of-the-road for Europe. Theresa May, meaning what she represents, is far worse than Donald Trump and everything that is behind him. Trumps is not a show, but the show elements in him/it feeds its opposition big time, even if unintentionally. May's politics, are like a cold, almost robotic, steel instrument cutting through the social fabric - meeting no effective opposition, because effective political opposition is impossible within the current socio-economic dispensation prevailing in England specifically, but in large tracks of Europe generally. So if we want to keep our heart working (Laurie Penny again), it might be good, before acting, to have a (yet another ;-) look at our current (meta-?)political predicament: the collapse of 'the Left'. I'll start with a proposition: the Right is subjectively divided, but objectively united, whereas it is the reverse with the Left: thinking it's one when it is so irremediably (for the moment) divided. And the simple reason for thar is: class. Undoubtedly, the elephant in the room is the '1%' - actually it's a herd. And the biggest problem is that the herd getting larger by the day. Such a momentum makes it irresistibly atractive to the still rather large demography just under it (aka 'middle classes'). Happily forgetting that for every new millionaire born, nine, or nineteen, or twenty-nine, or whatever number of people from that very same demography gets demoted to the level they most fear: the wrong half of the '99%'. No, they all think they are going 'to make it' thanks to their hard work and talent, and if not, that they will have failed, like the rest, the nine, nineteen, twenty-nine, etcetera. 'Losers! Such Losers' the Donald would blurt ... It is a replica of sorts, at the level of society as a whole, of what has been observed in agriculture over the past 50 years or more: a constant, remorseless consolidation where the 'winners' went to look at their former collegues and equals as legitimate roadkills - not victims of the hazard of circumstances, but people who simply 'didn't have it'. This 'false consciousness' cements the unity of the Right, drawing to it an electoral majority of supporters for the perfectly wrong reasons. And their day of reckoning is nowhere in sight. But on the Left, the split is even more profound. Mostly a question of class, the Left has its rich (in 'power, knowledge, and income') and its poor (idem) too, but also of way of thinking - or maybe of thinking tout court. Remember: the Right does not think - that is where all conspiracy theories flounder - it simply does, or maybe better: it simply _is_. The eternal mistake of the Left, especially its more 'moderate' parts, is to believe that coming up with perfectly reasonable proposals which are bound to benefit everybody will convince a majority to vote for it. Well, it won't. But even before that, the established ('rich') part of the Left has been, and remain eternally unable to phrase a coherent programme that would benefit the majority of common people (the 'poor') - let alone to implement it when it is in power - look at France, where the socialist party has the presidency, the majority in both houses, presides over the largest number of provinces, and 'mayors' most large towns. Outcome: near-total stagnation + foreign military adventures ... Why? Because most 'reasonable' (or 'rich') Left people do not understand, and have nothing to say, to the still vast majority of 'the poor'. Not at the level of 'gut feelings', which the Right is so apt at raising in the first place (out of nowhere? well, mostly), and then at exploiting to the tilt, but at the level of ordinary, everyday life, with all it brings in terms of challenges, issues, despair (amidst the ruins left by austerity for instance), but also of simple pleasures and community life. Reasonableness and advances (in material and immaterial 'capital') has slowly morphed into personal or 'clanic' individualism, embraced with glee by the upper layers, and imposed by brute force upon the lower ones. In both cases the feeling of and for the commons has been near-irremediably lost. It is now being slowly regained, here and there, albeit still by a very tiny minority, at least in 'Western' Europe. In other parts, it has never vanished entirely, that is, to the same extent. Reason why Greece is actually more resilient that England, and under the duress it is in - greater by far than Great Britain's, for now - it might collapse as a country, but not as a culture or a society. It will thus not sink as deep at the England will, and neither will the 'garlic' countries when times will be up for them (and I just hope, and expect, that Scotland and N.Ireland will have jumped out before the English Tory-ish nightmare comes true). This will be the real outcome of Brexit: ultimately proving Baroness Thatcher true after her time: (there was, but) there _will be_ no such thing as society . Let's just pray Brexit will not extent beyond the shores of 'the blesed isle' - for my own country for instance, the Netherlands, I am none too optimistic. And there may be other takers, especially in the former Ostblock. So if the Left is lost (for the moment, and 'the future will last a long time'), what remaisn 'us' to do. Maybe Laurie Penny's snip at the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' jugs is not that much off the marks after all. My idea would be let's keep calm and start building up our own communities and try to make a better world by making our little worlds better places. Keeping a very close look at the many small mistakes and large failures we commit in doing so while trying to address them, not burrying them. Keeping also an eye, and be open to, other same-minded endeavours, and supporting them. It may not be a guarantee for success, but at least a way to cope in a less despair-loaded way with a world that is so fast accelerating towards its teotwawki moment. Cheers from Firenze, p+4D! 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