BREXIT: A MODEST PROPOSAL My suggestions via Arc Digital

I've written a piece for Arc Digital suggesting an easy way to make the current conundrum over Brexit something more bearable, entertaining and successful for all concerned. The piece was recommended to readers on Medium, in their World section, and they have provided a link by which you can read it and laugh without necessarily having to subscribe there, though that's not a bad idea. You can find that link here....happy reading

THE BREXIT OUROBOROS: BORIS JOHNSON, TRUMP & BREXIT

I've done another Brexit piece for Arc Digital, this one about Johnson's ascendancy to No. 10 Downing Street, his relation to Trump, and the future for Britain and Brexit. Just a few small topics. You can find it here. The ouroboros title went by the wayside, but it was all I could do not to call it the Ouroboris, the worm that eats its own tail. Which is basically what Britain is doing via Brexit. And Boris. Give it a clap if you enjoy it.

I actually has a paragraph comparing Johnson and Trump to King Gorice and Goldy Bluszco (you can guess which one is which, I hope) from E.R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, until I realised that if no one would know what ouroboros meant, even fewer would have read Eddison's fantasy novel (now you know!).

BREXIT, TRUMP, AND HISTORY'S HAND: MY ARC DIGITAL ESSAY

I've written a piece for Arc Digital on Brexit from the point of view of a dual national American living here in Britain, and lamenting my inability to look with schadenfreude at my adopted country from the point of view of an American, because when I look at America from the point of view of a Brit (or even an expat Yank) I see something just as horrific.

I should point out that schadenfreude, and indeed angst, with which I end the essay, are both German words happily emigrated into the English vocabulary, and neither is likely to be invited to leave the OED if and when we cut our ties with the EU.

In fairness, the piece wound up being less about my own personal dilemmae, and more about a history of Brexit for Yanks and others who remain unaware of it, and a pointing out some parallels between the world of Brexit and the world of Trump. You can link to it (Arcdigi publish on Medium) right here. Many thanks to editors Bonny Brooks (who suggested the topic) and Berny Belvedere.

MRS MAY, MR BECKETT AND THE BREXIT ENDGAME

"The negotiations for our departure are now in the endgame," said Mrs Theresa May on the evening of 12 November, at the Lord Mayor's Banquet in The Guildhall, a suitable occasion to celebrate the kamikaze-like devotion to a display of the splendor of British (or English) sovereignty. It came a day after the ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the end of "the war to end all wars". The BBC Radio 4 Now Show was more perfectly ironic in describing the Remembrance Day ceremony as honoring the lives of hundreds of thousands of Englishmen who gave their lives in defense of Brussels.

But it was odd that May should choose a word recalling Samuel Beckett's play to describe the negotiations which would stretch until three in the morning that very morning, and which appear to offer very little to anyone. May's genius has been to divide her own party into three factions, one more than plagued Offshore Dave Cameron, which means that every aspect of the Brexit debate is now 'covered' by BBC by presenting all three sides of their national debate: that is, the Tory party: 'Irish Jake' Rees-Mogg and the errrggghhhh group of hard-line No Deal Brexiters; the Remoaners led by the latest opportunistic Johnson, JoJo, the one who gave Toby Young a job regulating university students, until someone noticed; and May's backers (the hapless Damien Green in the BBC Radio 4 Today knees-up I heard a few days ago) for whatever piecemeal 'deal' she manages to get in the end, hampered by the fact that Michel Barnier and the EU play chess while she plays Chequers. Put May, Mogg, Green and JoJo together and you could stage a production of Waiting For Go Now.

In Beckett, and much of Theatre of the Absurd, life is meaningless, and we cope with the existential anguish knowledge of that fact produces by engaging in rituals that create a sort of meaningful structure for our existence. As metaphors for May's Brexit Britain, you could much much worse.

Keeping that in mind, the endgame, as it were, of Endgame is instructive. Watch Clov's final speech again; you can find Michael Gambon's version here. "You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness"

DARKEST HOUR: OSCAR WATCH I

Of course the major fuss about Darkest Hour is Gary Oldman's performance as Winston Churchill, which is the hot favourite for an Oscar in a couple of days. Darkest Hour is the latest in a series of films about the early days of the Second World War; given Britain's impending exit from the European Union, this retrospection (while the 100^th anniversary of the Great War was in progress) is telling. And you could easily look back to 2002's The Gathering Storm as a precursor to this cycle, and to Albert Finney's performance as the benchmark for future Churchills. Because Gathering Storm was made by HBO and BBC for television, Finney wasn't eligible for an Oscar (he did win a TV Bafta and an Emmy).

Oldman's Churchill contrasts with Brian Cox's in another Oscar-eligible film, Churchill. Where Cox lets his own rough edges give Churchill more bite (and makes his self-doubt, which is the movie's theme, that much more telling), the reason Oldman's performance is the odds-on Oscar winner is that it plays so much against his persona as an actor. It is not that his Churchill is a remarkable interpretation, but that it is a bravura force of acting to convince us that an actor who played Sid Vicious or Lee Harvey Oswald can convince against physical type.

And this Oldman does, which is why an Oscar would be deserved. Whether his Churchill is, well, Churchillian, is another matter. Not least the drift into a northern accent (listen to his final words in the film—like the narration of a Hovis advert). He works by accentuating some gestures, particularly of jaw, and by overall bearing, but he also is sometimes seeking to present a kinder, gentler Churchill. This of course is partly down to scripting, and the way the film-makers want to present a softer-centered Winston—this is the charming but self-obsessed Churchill with a touch of the Boris Johnson's about him, especially in his scenes with Kirsten Scott Thomas, although, since she is his wife, perhaps not so Boris. The film sticks to what have become generally accepted tropes of Churchill at war: the young secretary who 'tames' the curmudgeon (Lily James, looking beatific as Churchill recites his speeches accurately) and the requisite King's Speech meetings with King George, which end in friendship and respect. Ben Mendelsohn as George VI is one of a number of actors helped by their casting for their physical resemblance to their characters, and Mendelsohn does not fall back on the speech impediment as he conveys his own resolve to battle on (by staying in London, not evacuating). By contrast, Samuel West is instantly recognisable as Anthony Eden, not because he looks like Eden but because he has a superficial attractiveness and charm and, of course, a moustache.

Churchill's winning over the King (as opposed to George's great friendship with Halifax) is interesting in another sense, because the film creates a fictional trip for Churchill on the underground, one stop to Westminster, which the filmmakers turn into the longest one stop imaginable. The reason is to let the common people, including a West Indian man and a child, express their admiration, and convince Churchill not to sue for peace with Germany. We know he did not need that sort of convincing, and we know he never, ever, got into the underground, not ever, but it is as if Joe Wright has to convince a contemporary audience that Churchill was a real man of the people as much as a man of the King (it is just those Tory toffs who can't abide his pushiness, which the film implies he gets from his American mother, bless them).

But the film, like Brexit, is less about Europe than about the Tory party and their resistance to Churchill's leadership. The key figure here is Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane) another case of remarkable physical resemblance and played very well as a cross between Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood. There has been some criticism of the film for taking small liberties with the whole question of Chamberlain's successor, but in general it gets the basic tenor correct and cannot be faulted for sometimes dramatising it with face to face scenes that didn't actually happen. If anything, it slights the support for Churchill within the Tory party (see, for example, Lynne Olson's Troublesome Young Men, which sometimes gets a bit too American touristy, but tells the tale of the young Tory rebels who backed Churchill—and note too Halifax's own memoirs, which were notoriously less than forthright).

The key scenes involve Chamberlain poised to cue the Tory benches to support Churchill's speeches, or not. In the first instance, their silence is deafening, and immediately brings to mind the current Brexit situation, and the fact that it is another case of the Conservative party putting its own squabbles well ahead of the good of the country. Ronald Pickup makes the most of a dying Chamberlain, and in reality these are the film's best scenes, within Parliament, shot to reflect an almost timeless history as well as a smoke-filled room in which deals must be done. A darkest debate, if not hour, and brilliantly shot by Bruno Delbonnel.

It's certainly a more satisfying film than Churchill, and Cox's performance in that film, while perhaps getting Churchill with more overall accuracy, suffers from the strange characterisation he's forced to enact, in which Montgomery's weaknesses are transferred to him. Oldman's ability as an actor is something that has gone overlooked by many for many years, because he's lacked the flashy roles, though not the convincing character parts (often as villains) such as in The Contender or Leon. But his Churchill is very much of a piece with his Beethoven or his George Smiley, both parts where he gets an essence of characters he would not commonly be thought his to play. That alone makes Darkest Hour worth viewing.

NOTES ON THE EFFECTS OF BIASED DEBATE ON THE JET-LAGGED

I've been quiet on IT the past two weeks, mostly because I returned to the UK and went right into a job voicing highlights of the US Open tennis, which involved working in the middle of night. Hence I have remained effectively jet-lagged for the past two weeks, and formulating coherent thoughts about things (other than the NFL, where I continue to pick all the games for nfluk.com, and am now doing a twice a week --Friday and Monday--betting and general column for Betfair) has proven difficult.

Except when I am provoked, especially on the political side. Hence I've produced a couple of longish moans on facebook, which might be considered curmudgeonly by the cruel-minded, but which I will share here just to let you know I am still engaged....

HILLARY'S BOOK & THE 'BERNIE BOYS'
The most popular hook for media coverage of Hillary Clinton's book about the 2016 election has been her blaming the loss on Bernie Sanders.Well toast that on the log fire. I posted a link to a November New Yorker article which detailed how actively Bernie campaigned for Clinton; only Bubba and Chelsea were out there more for her. So here was my reaction:

On behalf of Bernie Bros of all genders (and Barack Boys, or don't you remember when she tried that one briefly in 2008, until someone pointed out the ambiguity of using 'boy' in the Bog O context?) can we all now please woMAN up and accept that Hillary deserves at least some of the blame for losing to the most unelectable candidate since Barry Goldwater? Or George Wallace?

Blame Russians, blame a Republican Party whose success relies on disenfranchizing voters, blame Comey, blame Comey again, but it is time to STFU about Sanders. He was out there campaigning while the Perezes and Wasserman Schultzes were hiding from voters they drive away because it's so obvious who they don't give a shit about. And yes, it's true, Bernie walked the walk for Clinton...

TOUGH ON BREXIT AND THE CAUSES OF BREXIT

Then I unluckily caught a few moments of Any Questions on Radio 4, and heard a Brexit 'debate' where the central issues were issues that are non-issues, but no one, on any side mentioned it.  I had suffered through a few minutes of another edition of it, or Question Time, or Ask Dimbelby or whatever they call it, the previous week, as I mentioned in my last post, about the self-parodying Jacob Rees-Mogg and the nepotistic BBC and its Dimbelbies. Of course Rees-Mogg, son of the editor of the Times, qualifies just as much as a legacy. But this week the real affront was the fraudulent Brexit con job....

How many times do I have to repeat this? There should be no debate about EU migration. Under Schengen, UK controls EU migration. Any EU citizen unable to show means of support after 3 months can be sent home. BUT the UK is too lazy, like its work force, to enforce a policy which isn't abused on large scale AND the politicians, particularly on the right, don't want to sacrifice their wrapped in union jack Little England xenophobia and appeals to bigotry.

As to the economic advantage for low-paid hard-working British families (TM).  Do you really think British companies will rush to hire British workers at high wages? Is there any single point in history, including the massive need for wage slaves during Industrial revolution at its peak, when this has EVER happened in GB? Name one. Right, I knew you couldn't. Listening to Dumbelby and panel 'debate' immigration is a painful joke. Are they ignorant? Or do they prefer an ignorant electorate?

BRITISH DEMOCRACY & BREXIT: A BLEARY-EYED REPORT

The take-away from last night's election is dysfunction: and not just the Tories using the ballot box to try to solve short-term internal policies. The problem is assuming the nation is behind Brexit, when in reality the nation remains divided. The problem is assuming Brexit is the only issue, when social policy played a big part.

May with a 'majority' in Parliament based on 36% of the voters, asked for a mandate to move ahead with her own dream of hard Brexit, whose details she would not share with the voters, as if this were a yes/no referendum II.

Yet both major parties accepted the country's 52/48 split on a yes/no vote on an issue of massive complexity and huge constitutional change as 'the will of the people', when in truth it was a chasm in the British populace. The young, who justifiably felt the greatest loss after the Brexit vote, apparently made their presence felt yesterday.

But because the British electoral system is totally dysfunctional, a 42% vote couldn't give May a 'majority' much less a mandate, nor could the rest of the opposition cobble together one (though their popular vote--Lab/LDP/Green/SNP/PC-- would constitute an absolute majority).

You can hear Europe laughing. And after the scare tactics of the Tories and their press about Jeremy Corbyn's 'links' with the IRA, the terrorist-backed Irish tea party of the Democratic Unionists now hold the balance of power in the Disunited Kingdom.

AND YET YOU CHOOSE TO LIVE HERE or ENDURING UNNECESSARY HARDSHIP: AN ELECTION MEDITATION

When we were younger, agitating for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, we used to have 'love it or leave it' thrown at us as a discussion closer. As it turned out, I did leave it, though not for lack of love for my country, and eventually I settled in Britain, where I have lived for forty years, and am a citizen (or, until recently, a 'subject') of the United Kingdom. The latter title seems more appropriate today, as we face an election to confirm, indeed, if the media are to be believed, rubber-stamp by acclimation, a minority government which asks for its minority of voters to give it an even larger majority of seats in the House of Commons.

Today's arguments are conducted in the more hermetic setting of social media, but they have grown almost as fierce as they were back in the Sixties. Which was confirmed to me the other day on facebook, when I was shocked to find a friend, with whom I've had the same arguments during the 2015 general election and the 2016 Brexit vote, but intensifying each time he wraps himself in the Union Jack, finally calling quits to discussion by saying 'and yet you choose to live here'.

Which admittedly is a little less excluding, albeit less catchy, than 'love it or leave it'. But I wouldn't let it lie, pointing out that indeed I had chosen to live here, unlike his own lucky self, fortunate to have been born a citizen of the country he loves so blindly. That was a riposte, not a reply, and I found myself wondering why I feel such despair in the face of this election, and why that translates into such disparagement of the country in which I chose to live. Was I creating the flag-waving antagonism I now felt? or was it the Union Jack-wrapped myopia itself that inevitably generated such antagonism?

My friend challenged me: “name me a country that values talent and ability more -- we may be far from perfect, but the days of the posh twit are significantly on the wane.” Well, I started naming countries of which I have some experience or some very good idea of their societal structure, which seem to value ability more. Canada, Australia, NZ, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, probably France, even my native USA. Then I realised such information was useless. His challenge was built on Little England false modesty and faux self-deprecation, distilled perfectly to a Mrs. T. I summed up his English world view that brought us Brexit: "we are far from perfect but it is a truth universally acknowledged that no one else in the entire world is better."

When I came here in 1977, following my English girlfriend who'd refused to spend a second winter in Montreal, I found Britain still endearingly backward in many ways, and I discovered George Mikes' loving dissections of the English, in particular the telling and still accurate perception that there is nothing an Englishman loves more than 'enduring hardship', and the kind of hardship that gives him the most satisfaction enduring is 'unnecessary hardship'.

The Britain I came to was civilised and caring in its bumbling ways, but this was also a Britain whose National Front was bleating hate, backed by one in seven English voters in the 1978 local elections. The rise of Mrs. Thatcher subsumed the NF at that time, but now, after 40 years of Thatcherism from both major parties, their descendants have been assimilated into our mainstream, skinheads replaced by Faragistas, and Britain has become a meaner country, rallying around xenophobic calls of fear and hatred, in pursuit of recreating a fantasy vision of Rule Brittania.

Its caring side has also been tossed into a giant rubbish bin of greed, where need has been subordinated to profit. Everything has its price and nothing has value unless it hands the apparatchiks a dividend. Avarice promotes division, and a society where people's basic welfare takes the very last seat on the privatised bus service, is not a society at all. That was, after all, Margaret Thatcher's point, 'there is no society' and it was the point of Offshore David Cameron, whose 'Big Society' was the next-best thing to no society. When Cameron said 'we are all in this together', by 'we' he meant 'they' and by 'this' he meant 'that mess I am leaving them'.

Every facet of life is poisoned by this. I came here and stayed here by choice, and I've lived here long enough to maybe adjust to enduring unnecessary hardship. But my son, who was born here, and considers himself English, didn't grow up with that old-time ethos of tug your cap and endure. He's been told there's a brighter future, but at the same time constantly being asked, literally in the case of his primary school, to trim his expectations.

Ten years ago, when my mother died, I found the letters I had written her from London in 1972, when I visited Britain for the first time. 'I could live here' I said more than once, little thinking that five years later that would be a real possibility. In fact, I moved to Montreal in 1975 and was considering that my adopted home when female circumstances intervened.

When I became a British citizen, I felt pleasure that it had come to pass. I watched the portrait of the Queen, whose eyes seemed to follow you as you took the oath. I was, according to the mayor, the only new citizen who sang the national anthem without looking at the lyric-sheets which had been provided. 'It's not the most complicated song in the world,' I told him, though I probably should have added for safety's sake, not to be thought a subversive, of course it is a fact universally acknowledged that it is the best national anthem in the world. I was happy that as a UK citizen all of Europe was now open to me, as well as to my young son. Now, when I look at the possibilities that will be taken away by Brexit, when I look at Britain snowballing downhill into American-style pay for play education and health systems, both of which used to be free here and both of which are hugely expensive over there, I despair. With the likelihood that our twisted electoral system will fail yet again to reflect the need of the electorate for change, I wonder if it's time to go home. Then Donald Trump comes on the news. This would be enduring unnecessary hardship indeed, and born an American, I am not genetically predisposed to it. But I fear even the British are going to find their endurance tested should the election polls be correct.

SLEAZO INPUTS: JO COX, OMAR MATEEN & THE POLITICS OF SENSELESS VIOLENCE

Jo Cox would have turned 42 today. Before she could, she was murdered by a man named Thomas Mair who, as we heard at the time, may or may not have suffered mental problems, may or may not have been committed to far-right or xenophobic policies, may or may not have yelled 'Britain first' as he pulled the trigger. But Thomas Mair was simply the fatal tip of an iceberg of abuse which Jo Cox received in her short time in parliament, invective and threat addressed to her for what we all know is no good reason. Still some people found rationale or excuse or compulsion enough to make those threats, and now she is dead.

It was only a week since I had sat in the World Service studios for four and a half hours, commenting live on Muhammad Ali's memorial service. What I watched transcended my sadness to fill me with hope and joy; I have rarely felt so proud to be American. Two days later, a man used an assault rifle to kill 49 people and wound 53 more at a gay club in Orlando. Then came Jo Cox's murder. When I heard the news I flashed back more than six years, to the shooting of the Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords while she was conducting a 'Congress on Your Corner' mobile surgery in a supermarket car park. Six people were killed but Giffords, remarkably, survived being shot in the head; her shooter was described as a paranoid schizophrenic, originally judged incompetent to stand trial, but is now serving life in prison. He has never explained his motivation.

Mair, on the other hand, was being portrayed in the media as a loner with problems, at least until he felt compelled when he appeared in court to give his name as ‘death to traitors, freedom for Britain’, which convinced the judge not to brand him a terrorist but to refer him for psychiatric examination, as if Mair’s membership in Britain First and the Brexit referendum tomorrow were trivialities. Meanwhile, in the immediate outpouring of grief for Jo Cox and her family, a memorial appeal solicited donations for her three favourite charities, and a Tory councillor in her native Yorkshire tweeted his anger that her death was being used for political purposes by the Remain campaign, and falsely characterising the Leavers. As if to prove his point he made an obscene suggestion as to what he might be donating to Jo Cox’s memorial.

Compare that to the portrayal of Omar Mateen, who shot up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando a few days before Cox was killed. In this case of conflicting motivations, there was little doubt in the media’s collective unconscious that Mateen was, unlike Mair, a terrorist. I could place photos of the two men side by side and give you a clue to part of the explanation for this bifurcation.

We feel a human need to try to understand what seems incomprehensible when faced with such events, yet in the times since January 2011 when Giffords was shot, there was also a different sort of need, not just to assess motivation but also to claim identity victimhood, establish primacy within the latest atrocity news cycle. In the wake of the Pulse massacre, it was if the issues were queueing up to be taken the most seriously. At times the debate took on the tone of a television commercial: 'he's a homophobe'. 'No he's a terrorist.' 'Stop! You're both right.'

Omar Mateen chose his target carefully: it was a gay club and he appears to have been a self-loathing closeted gay man. He was also a Moslem and called the 911 emergency hotline just before he died to claim allegiance to ISIS and martyrdom for himself, something that apparently should be done before you undertake your act, not after. He was an abusive husband to his first wife. He was also a child of the internet age, a Millennial to the death, checking Facebook to see if 'Pulse Orlando shooting' was trending online even as he fired his gun.

Are these categories mutually exclusive? Omar Mateen used a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle to inflict his damage; he had tried unsuccessfully to buy weapons and armour a few weeks earlier elsewhere in Florida; the gun store owner had reported him to the FBI. As with each of the interminable mass killings in America, this immediately became a gun control issue, and almost as immediately the US Senate failed to take even the mildest action at reforming America’s gun laws. It is likely only a matter of time some American commentator or NRA official, should they need more ammo, as it were, in the debate, notes that despite Britain's tight gun control laws, Thomas Mair used a pistol to kill Jo Cox.

It transpired that FBI had already questioned Mateen twice, based on conversations he'd had and people he knew, to inquire he if might be a terrorist. They found no reason to believe he was.. He also worked for G4S, in America viewed primarily as a supplier of security guards, not a major provider of government services as they are in the UK. G4S ran two separate background checks on Mateen. Paradoxically, his gun purchases, despite his history of domestic violence, were likely overlooked precisely because he had no ties to international terrorism, except those in his own mind. Buying guns makes you a proper God-fearing American. Yet in most of British media Mateen remains a terrorist, while Mair remains a lone crazed assassin.

When he wrote The Family, his book about the Charles Manson killings, Ed Sanders coined the phrase 'sleazo inputs' to try to explain what drove Manson and his followers to enter the world in which their gruesome killings were necessary and justifiable. In Manson's case those included the underbelly of LA, the cheap bars and strip clubs, the petty criminals, the religious hustlers, drug dealers, and show biz hangers-on. Having spent most of his life in prison, when Manson was released into the hippie world of the Sixties it was like putting a small piranha into a goldfish bowl.

We've moved on since 1971, but our goldfish bowl, while more exotic, may not be any better prepared for the odd predator. The Mansons of our time need not seek out sleazo inputs in the underbellies of our cities, on the fringes of our lives. Those are beamed into our living rooms and fill our cyberspace. They are amplified by the respectable media, who need sleaze to attract an audience; they are repeated by those who deal in the currency of fear: calling on us to take sides, demonizing those who think or look or act or vote different, encouraging us to be all we can be while staying safe behind wall. They warn us that trouble is always brewing, that we are always under threat. They glorify the power of those who ‘serve’ our society with weaponry, at the same time they insist there actually is no society beyond our self-interest, and that self-interest is always under threat and must be protected. In our world these are not sleazo inputs. They are, simply, inputs. No wonder bodies fall.