Britain Chooses the Ocean

There's a saying attributed to Charles De Gaulle "If the British ever have to choose between Europe and the Ocean they will always choose the Ocean." I haven't been able to verify if De Gaulle actually said, but regardless I think it explains why they majority of British voters choose to leave the European Union. Personally I hate the term "Brexit" because it sounds like corporate media Newspeak. But I think the vote to leave the EU is biggest news this year, even bigger that who wins the US presidential election, because it will decide the future of Europe and much of the world as well. It's too soon to tell what the consequences will be, but it's clear that the supposedly "inevitable" move toward European integration is in trouble.

Many progressive minded people, on both sides of the Atlantic, seem to lament the vote. It's important to distinguish between the "idea" of European unity and the reality that the EU has become an undemocratic, bureaucratic monster. It may not be totalitarian like the Soviet Union, but it has become the despotism of German Chancellor and her loathsome Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble. If the British people decide that they don't want to be bossed around by Merkel and Schauble, who can blame them?

Omar Mateen--An American Not a Muslim

The recent shooting in Orlando Florida by Omar Mateen has brought out the usual shrieks from the Islamophobes. It happened just a few days after the killing of singer Christina Grimme by a lunatic who then committed suicide. What's the connection? That this country has an epidemic of maniacal killers with ready access to guns and ammunition. The Lone Shooter has become an "American Type," almost the symbol of this deranged country. It has become a tradition dating back to Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman, the original campus shooter (UT Austin 8/1/1966). These incidents have become so common that it only becomes "national" when the victim is a celebrity or the body count goes into double digits.

Much like the original "Night of the Living Dead," we are experiencing an epidemic of mass murder, committed not by zombies but by maniacs with access to guns and ammunition. The US will be the first major polity in history that will succumb not to outside invasion or meaningful political struggle, but to uncontrolled random violence with no intelligible motive.

The End of the Modern World

Those of us who remember back to the 1960's remember how people used to talk about "the modern world." Sometimes it was also called "modernity,' it was supposed to be a kind of "upward curve" of increasing prosperity and progress. The science fiction of the time, such as "2001: A Space Oddity" foretold a future where humanity would soon be travelling to the far reaches of the universe.

The ensuing half century have turned out to be more of a downward curve. Economic conditions are declining all over the world. Even in the First World standards of living are falling. This is causing growing levels of social and political breakdown. Increasing violence is making democracy unviable, leaving the only alternatives of anarchy or dictatorship. The whole idea of modernity is collapsing, and people all over the world are giving up on the future. We may scoff at those Islamists who are trying to return to a mythical caliphate. But in Europe and the US, the growth of racism and xenophobia indicates a desire to return to an imagined past. Modernism, with its glowing promises, has been discredited.