Brexit and Meghsit: The Island, Kingdom, and World Revolving Around It

Happy New Year, those of us in 2021.

Great Britain has broken off from its chums of the EU, officially.

The European Union. Originally started because of iron and money and power to consolidate, as I understand it. It was mostly about Germany and France, with some touch of Luxembourg. And it certainly grew.

My only significant time in the Continent was in Spain when I was 18. I was there in a June when they had their EU elections and the TV propaganda emitted the "Ode to Joy" gallant music of the newer and more united Europe. Surely a weighty counter to the ubiquitous United States, but also this conglomeration of Western democracies wedged into the side of the then mighty U.S.S.R., the dreadnaught Soviet Union (it had an Iron Wall for hundreds of miles, with innumerous tanks and arms.) Parades and shaking fists, the full flung flags with the all those republics (14 to be exact, plus Kaliningrad on the Baltic), all those missiles, all those millions of hectares, the tanks, the Politburos, the manifestos and troops consorting with Cubans and Vietnamese and perhaps Malaysians and Indonesians, whereever the Marxist dream could find purchase and establish foothold within the hopeless plights of the hungry masses and the intellectually craving budding ant-capitalists of the world.

I read later in grad school that even Italy had its proponents of Marxist Communism. One of my (British) professors required it as reading. I had a few British professors in southern California

Oh, Italy! Bastion of our historical Western art and culture: you have the freedom to think such poorly contrived nonsense. You produced the early Popes, Galileo, the Roman Catholic Pontificate until now, bring in a Pole, a German, and even a South American, and now these genius red, or even less flattering "pinko" baters... Utter geniuses, don't you think? Idiot killers of proper capitalism and human hopes to survive the miasma of taxes and otherwise hard to push oneself from the depths of the bottom world of free markets and constitutional democracies and republics.

 

The EU, an organization that I argued to my American-born political science prof Art Stein (see his book: Why Nations Cooperate, an academic piece heavy with Game Theory) would not be able to exist without the pan-nation NATO, (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), the military and security league that also includes Canada, ensuring the Western powers post World War II will not be enveloped by the great Soviet Russian-driven Bear of the Eurasian steppes and tundra. And of course the more tactically advantageous Black Sea, due to rich breadbasket and iron repository Ukraine.

Iron, there it is. Source of wealth and power.

Hence, the EU and its origins.

The U.S. always had those things. So the more economically challenged Europe consolidated to make use of its economic mechanisms and tools. A financial system to motor its security and well being, prosperity.

Back in 2015 or 2016, the peoples of Great Britain convened a vote to leave this economic union, which had reach beyond only financial impact and growth. Maybe the Brits were tired of the ponderous Germans and French, who observed Greece or other pan handlers, like even Spain and Italy, siphoning off their hard earned Euros, which could have been better kept francs or Deutschmarks. And, there were literally a million or so Polish people, not to mention the foreigners of farther and more exotic climes, infiltrating the teeming cities of England proper.

Britain, or rather England, wanted the United Kingdom, back? Is that what this Brexit boiled down to?

Being itself: prim, proud, proper, propinquitous, propitious, and a dozen other p-words, that in no uncertain terms signify and connote that Great Britain is indeed, Great. Grand. Grandiose and wonderful. A mighty might that the sun never sets on. Probity. Preponderance. Great enough to take along Scotland, Wales, and of course Northern Ireland with it wherever it charts its courses.

Oh, and this royal family. The crown. My father wrote about the King and the Royal presence based on his earlier ancestor Peter Clinch in the 1700s. The royals of jolly ole' England, so elegant, eloquent, well-spoken, well measured and filthy rich.

Prince Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor.

 

I was impressed with him when he deployed to Afghanistan and ran combat missions! Wow! In the ilk  of Americans John McCain or the children of Joe Biden or Sarah Palin. Way to go, oh royal one.

All due respect.

Then he married this American, an actress and entertainer, Meghan, and things went awry since then.

The circus continues strongly into 2021.

And here I am, in the first day of Brexit in chilly former Royal Colony Virginia, on an appropriate wet, damp, cloudy, rather Dickensian-like London day, grey and lighter than two weeks ago but still in the throws of winter.

Pandemic is killing, presidents are transitioning, senator candidates in the south (Georgia) are spending like profligates; the world spins on, churning its dollars through social media and the Chinese imports and exports and espionage and intellectual property thievery, and the illicit drugs and smuggled aliens keep up their unending march.

We keep spinning around the United Kingdom of 2021, which may not be so united as before, or perhaps it has found its center more than ever?

Read the Economist, the Guardian, BBC News, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Magazine, and a dozen other lesser rags and one hundred other periodicals and journals.

They'll let you know.

Britain moves on. We are there with it.

Cheers, for the New Decade of this somewhat incredible and bewildering century, the one we know as our own.

Brexit, stage: next ...