A decade and a half ago, when I hastily enrolled in an MA in gender studies program, I didn’t get very far because I wasn’t entirely convinced that the discipline was right for me. But I also wondered, foolishly, “Why do we need this discipline?” Although at that point I had done a lot of things in many different places in the world, my own life was untouched by the issues core to the equal rights cause. Or so I naively thought. First of all, it’s folly to think that the fight is ever over. It’s an ongoing tug-of-war, demanding vigilance. Secondly, it isn’t a fight only about me (duh). It’s a fight to maintain and build on what women who came before fought for and won, and a fight to gain ground — both in the fights that have yet to be won (equal pay, guaranteed rights to reproductive freedom, which are always in jeopardy, etc.) and in elevating the needs and voices of all women. Previous generations of feminism focused on white (and often heterosexual, middle class) women, ignoring or outright excluding women of color and trans women — completely failing to embrace intersectional feminism. In maintaining a narrow framework for gender equality, the movement has harmed and held back all women, doing the most damage to those ignored by this narrow focus.
As far back as the 1960s and 70s, the roots of this divide were obvious; its lack of inclusion, to some extent, paved the way for the defeats the movement suffered and provided a generous opening for more regressive and conservative forces in the form of anti-feminist backlash, ERA opposition and the right-wing hypocrisy of people like Phyllis Schlafly. Following the turbulence of the 60s and 70s, Schlafly and co were quietly active, poised to ride the great conservative wave that characterized the 1980s, ‘defending’ the family, “traditional values” and a woman’s place in the home. I came to realize that my own dismissal of and indifference to gender studies and feminist theory parallels the careless and selfish approach Schlafly took to feminism, i.e. if it didn’t affect her, it was not a concern. (Never mind that it’s a fallacy to claim that these issues affected neither of us.)
In the recent TV production, Mrs America, which depicts the fight for, and ultimate defeat of, the Equal Rights Amendment, we’re introduced to Schlafly — an educated married mother — who ends up crusading against the ERA and growing an organization of other conservatives who supported her aims. Probably more interested in national defense and arms control policy, Schlafly’s first passion doesn’t seem to have been opposing women’s rights; she had hoped to be an active adviser on defense issues but was never appointed to the kinds of positions she sought.
Her ambitions, if not ironic, at least demonstrate her position of privilege: even if she left the home to campaign and left child rearing to hired help, she still claimed to “have it all”, demonizing women who didn’t aspire to do the same (that is, she espoused the primacy of family and home — and the freedom to work if time and husband permitted it). Her myopia failed to account for the myriad situations in which women — even those of her own conservative persuasion — found themselves. Why, after all, should a woman take a job from a man, or need a salary equivalent to a man, when she should be relying on a husband to provide? (Unless of course, like Schlafly, one considered herself uniquely qualified.) As Mrs America deftly portrayed: many of the women in Schlafly’s organization were struggling with abusive spouses, fear and self-doubt and an ambivalence toward the all-or-nothing interpretation of women’s equality. How would, or could, Schlafly’s worldview allow for these differences?
Admittedly, this was my problematic thinking, too, which I’ve spent years working to undo. As humans, we’re often short-sighted and blinded by our own experiences and surroundings (as well as by those we do not have or have not seen). It makes us too comfortable and too ready to insist that if I don’t see it, it isn’t happening. It’s not as simple as that; I never claimed that women were not struggling or facing inequality. Yet I didn’t perceive that I experienced it — and this was both self-centered and wrong. I did experience it, but I was so indoctrinated into the norms of an unequal society that I didn’t see it clearly. Despite how sensitive I had considered myself to be, the feminist struggle — and feminist theory — felt superfluous. When I realized this bias, it became a mission to understand and empathize with the lived experiences and struggles of others and see the world and its challenges through those lenses in addition to my own. What a different world it is when seen this way. This is reason one why gender and feminist studies are essential: we must see beyond ourselves and build a community of action to move forward. We can’t do this if we don’t understand the history and what’s at stake for everyone — not just ourselves.
In Mrs America, I saw parallels to the 2016 presidential election and the Democratic Convention. The electric exuberance and humanity of the Hillary supporters created this false idea that passion and appearance would carry the day, and right up until the announcement of Trump’s victory, everyone was convinced Hillary Clinton would win in landslide to become America’s first female president. We all know what happened. Mrs America showed this kind of hubris in the feminist group, which underestimated both Schlafly and the mood of the American people. Ratifying the ERA seemed like a no-brainer, but the overconfidence bias gets us time and again. Passion does not make one’s desired outcome inevitable, particularly when one side has dismissed the other as unthinkable. In the US today, heading into the 2020 election, we’re in a similar place: it does affect us all, even the people who are mostly untouched by the daily disasters of the Trump administration.
Mrs America (and Cate Blanchett‘s outstanding performance) managed to humanize Schlafly and even show her hypocrisy as personal struggle without making her likeable. It also gave voice to many of second-wave feminism’s leaders, such as Betty Friedan (a fantastic Tracey Ullman), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), Gloria Steinem (a surprisingly effective Rose Byrne), and Shirley Chisholm (superb turn by Uzo Aduba), whose names and work I’m very familiar with but was shocked to find that the vast majority of people I meet, both my age and younger, have never heard of these women unless engaged in feminist studies. This is the second reason gender and feminist studies are desperately needed. This history and these names are not well-known enough outside of small academic and movement-related circles, and we can see how quickly rights gained can be threatened or stripped away, particularly in volatile social and political times.
The most remarkable achievement of Mrs America is in showing the journey of Sarah Paulson‘s character, Alice, a Schlafly friend and ardent supporter, who begins to see some of the hypocrisy and near the end of the series meets a number of the women on the pro-ERA side. Wandering through their “camp”, she is treated respectfully, kindly — she is surprised by the women’s humanity. She is also surprised, after belting out a rousing rendition of “This Land Is Your Land“, to learn the origins of the song:
Flo Kennedy (Niecy Nash): “You were up there belting out a Marxist song.”
Alice: “No it isn’t. It’s patriotic.”
Flo: “Exactly.”
Alice also realizes that she has been living in Schlafly’s shadow and in fear… While both sides claim to have advocated for a kind of choice (pro-ERA for total equality and anti-ERA for letting women retain their “rightful place as protected homemaker”), it becomes clear that the latter does not account or advocate for women who do not have the luxury of choice, and would offer them no options in making a decent living for themselves. Alice wakes up: she begins to find her voice, gets a job and revels in the fact that it was her choice — finally grasping that women’s experiences are not the universally white, middle-class, married, privileged scene she’s taken as the norm. No, in fact, the diversity of women’s experience necessitates having the freedom to choose.
“You could have your arm on fire and say you’re fine”
A music-filled, middle-of-night drive to Oslo and a quiet few hours alone before the day begins, listening to Obama’s final speech. He was not perfect, but comparing him to what is coming is just… well, it blows me away. How on earth do we go from someone thoughtful, eloquent and educated (and scandal-free) to … the indescribable and constant shit show we have been witnessing and are about to witness for the next four years?
Every day the news throws some new crisis/scandal/revelation into the mix about Trump, his dealings, his proclivities – all alongside his monumental pettiness, wasting time Tweeting about Saturday Night Live and Meryl Streep, for god’s sake – somehow imagining that any of it will make a difference now. He’s been elected already – he’s heading into office in only days. And if none of the revelations before the election derailed this orange lunatic, why on earth would a person or the media expect that any of them will make a difference now? The Russians having dirt on him, him being in collusion with Russians, and any number of other uncountable other piles of shit – none of these things are going to make a difference if they haven’t already. People talk of conflicts of interest and illegalities, potential grounds for impeachment, but no, dudes only get impeached for lying about blow jobs. Trump just lies about and conceals everything else and nothing happens.
I am, as I wrote the other day, generally feeling quite happy despite the state of things in the world (Trump, Brexit, Syria, etc.) but at the same time am submerged in a place where all I do is feel. It’s not that I am an unfeeling person; it’s that I have over many years trained myself to tune out or turn off feelings when they become too much. And right now, everything feels like something. Everything takes on more meaning and depth. And part of me hates this. It is as though a flip was switched, and I can’t get it to turn off. It’s painful and distracting at the same time as exhilarating and almost intoxicating. Another part of me enjoys this entirely new experience, feeling the ‘training’ and discipline of ignoring feelings unravel and let feeling take its natural course, wherever it leads.
Part of this requires acknowledging all feelings – and I am used to silently stuffing them down, down and down to the point that I don’t even know I am doing it. As one dear soul said, in asking me how I was doing, “You could have your arm on fire and say you’re fine”.
The other part requires acknowledging the validity and value of the feelings – it’s one thing to say, “Yes, I feel this way” (whatever way it is). It’s entirely another to admit that it is important or not just some ridiculous digression with which you shouldn’t bother anyone else.
It will sound strange that I am ridiculously embarrassed to admit that I have been binge-watching Sex & the City this week. I readily admit my shamefully frequent hate-watching of shit like Zoo or the relentless and neverending decades-worth of cop and legal procedurals without the kind of shame and self-disappointment I feel at admitting that I’ve succumbed to watching this. I’m watching, and I cannot even call it total drivel – it’s not that bad. But it was so overhyped when it was new that it should/could not have been seriously watched during its heyday. Sure, watching it the way I’ve been watching puts too fine a point on the annoying parts – and they are many. But there are moments, when I set aside the fact that this is a show built around the pathetic idea that successful, independent, sexual, attractive women pretty much let their lives revolve around meeting someone, that elicit some kind of provocation or pique an emotional response. I think SaTC spoke to so many people at the height of its popularity because there are a lot of women in the same situation. Most of us can relate to some part of SaTC, whether it’s the elusive hunt for “the one”, thinking we’ve found “the one” only to be jerked around, or even the sad but seemingly ridiculous storylines like falling in love with the micropenis man, the out-of-control alcoholic, and god knows whatever else. Or a few pearls of Samantha Jones wisdom, i.e. in the new millennium (which was just dawning as this aired), sexual orientation will end up being more fluid and about experience and individuals over gender. We’ll see – but we’ve certainly moved in a more fluid direction in the 16 years since it aired.
As I wrote to a friend: “I am horrified at myself because I ran out of crap tv to have on in the background while I work so I have done something I swore I would never, ever do: I am watching Sex & the City. It is funny though what impressions you get of things while they are happening but you are not really watching. I had very misguided ideas on what happened in the Carrie/Big relationship, for example, based on water-cooler office talk and shit. I had during its original run seen an episode here or there … like one ep from season 1 and one ep from season 4 so it was not like I had any great continuity of plot – even though it is not hard to piece together or guess.” And being who I am (tv addict) I knew a LOT about it without ever watching it, but then actually watching it there are a lot of things I did not know.
The most fun part of the show actually has been realizing how old it is. It started almost 20 goddamn years ago. It featured loads and loads of actors who were nobodies who went on to do other things – people I barely recognized because the first season was from 19-fucking 98! What? The first two seasons included Justin Theroux in two different roles, Timothy Olyphant looking a little creepy (has he maybe had his teeth done since?), fucking Donald Trump, and even Gabriel Macht long, long before his success in Suits. There was even a 30-second scene of a silent Mireille Enos in the episode Valerie Harper was in.
Maybe when the show debuted it felt fresh – it did, after all, help to usher in an era of prestige TV that has led to this flood of vast and quality TV choices. But looking at it today is it provocative, as it clearly was meant to be? No, not so much. In fact, at certain points it feels hateful, full of all kinds of discriminatory BS, privilege and stereotypes. Can I overlook that?
Yeah, because, oh well now that I am watching it it is nowhere near as obnoxious and overblown as it was to me when it was new and everyone was obsessed with watching it. Now that we are awash in a sea of varying quality shows that are still better than network tv, it no longer feels like there is much novelty around something like SaTC.
The first season of American Crime was often hard to watch. It was challenging material, telling intricately interwoven stories that highlighted prejudice and different perspectives. It was good, but I was not sure it could stand for another season.
The second season is an even more tightly woven narrative, with more riveting performances from mostly the same cast and a few new faces (Connor Jessup, best known until now from Falling Skies has been particularly good, which isn’t a surprise when you consider that he was also one of the better parts of Falling Skies). Masterfully done – often employing images disconnected from sound, so you are never sure what has happened until it unfolds moments later. Fluidity, uncertainty, exceptional and brutal storytelling from different perspectives. Are you ever sure what has really happened? No. If anything the story in the second season punches you in the gut with the realization that there are no absolutes, yet we watch all the characters from their very different perspectives grapple with their own “absolutes” and the dissolution of those certainties.
The second season, as I write this, has been over for some time, meaning that I am left with very few details. The important point – and reason why I am writing about this so long after the fact – is that it does punch you in the gut and make you question what is true and real. The story revolved around feeling versus fact.
And, right now, America is faced with a high-stakes election in which “feeling” trumps (no pun intended but apt here) fact. Stephen Colbert revived his Colbert Report character to introduce the term “Trumpiness” and address this topic; John Oliver took it a step further, explaining that the theme of the recent Republican National Convention was “a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts”.
I highlight these timely things, despite their non-existent connection to American Crime (apart from the tangential Trump & GOP “feeling” that crime in America is out of control and crime rates are on the rise, despite the fact that data doesn’t support this “feeling”) because it is easy to lose sight of the fact that other people have completely different experiences of the world. What one person, irrationally or not, fears, is normal to someone else. American Crime excels at telling a complex story from fragmented viewpoints (in a way that our lacking-in-nuance political system never will).
I wrote a lengthy and relatively well-researched piece on the consequences of Brexit, looking at all the things that came to my mind about Brexit’s mostly negative implications. I even took a moment to meander into random musings on how the little European star-circle symbol on people’s car license plates will have to change in Britain – back to the Union flag or to individual country flags, like those in Norway and Iceland.
And then… in not at all dramatic fashion, my computer automatically restarted, and WordPress had not saved the latest draft. Not one single word of it.
I don’t remember a time in recent memory that I have been so angry. Mostly at myself for not obsessively pressing “save” or writing it in Word from the get-go.
Despite the post being about the UK and its future following its vote to exit the EU, the exercise of thinking about and researching it also led to a great deal of thinking about the United States and what it will soon face. I had written quite a lot about America at the same time as elucidating the potential problems of Brexit – about how Britain is just earlier to the “party” in terms of heading down what may well be a very dangerous path. America is bringing up the rear, but still roaring toward voting against its own best interests and isolating itself, rolling back human and civil rights and essentially creating a living nightmare. (Is this hyperbole? Perhaps. But we can’t sleepwalk through all of it in any case.) I wrote a lot about how rights fought for and won, such as the right to abortion, are precious and should not be taken for granted. Just as at least half of the UK, and more than half of the Scots and Northern Irish, once had all the rights granted to EU citizens – and now, that is in doubt. (Much of the reason the Scots voted against independence a couple of years ago is because they were promised that the UK would remain in the EU.)
At any given moment, the whole political and social landscape can change and become little more than a circus in which politicians become clowns and verbal acrobats and contortionists and individuals are essentially powerless circus animals. In the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, whole countries were powerless in the end.
As the clown car that was the US Republican primary process emptied out, leaving the biggest clown of all, Donald Trump, in the driver’s seat, it dawned on the “reasonable” half of America that we should all be scared shitless (but not scared into inactivity). A Trump presidency will be a disaster. Beyond which, Trump just named Indiana governor, Mike Pence, as his running mate – and, as Robert Reich describes in a Facebook post, Pence is “one of the most extreme right-wing officials in America” and went on to describe how.
As we can see from the continued and contentious tug-of-war that defines the right-to-choose (which is a personal liberty and health issue – not a moral issue no matter what religious zealots claim), these issues are never set in stone or decided finally. Things can change, which is both good and bad. While the right to abortion may erode, which is a bad change, we can also see that the right to marriage equality has moved forward, which is a good change. But rights are always in a state of flux and subject to the winds and whims of change. This is especially true when no issue, no political candidate, no momentum ever enjoys a very clear majority – everything is split closely down the middle. No huge majority exists, generally, on one side or the other of any issue.
Only slightly more than half of the UK voted to exit the EU, meaning that Scotland and Northern Ireland, which both voted with a larger majority to remain in the EU, are dragged along with England and Wales’s bold-but-stupid plans. By extension, this means that a slight majority of Americans choosing Trump can drag the entire country toward chaos against its will. (We saw something similar when Bush II became president after a too-close-to-call, contested election in 2000 versus Al Gore. We see how that turned out.)
The point: We always have to be vigilant – about rights we already have and about continuing to vote (hopefully against lunacy).
This is why Brexit is perplexing. It feels like we are moving backwards, like when you are stuck in a nightmare and try to run but are stuck no matter how fast your legs move. Brexit was sold to the British public as a way to “take back control”: but take back control of what? Your own circus burning down?
No one framed the losses of Brexit better than political journalist Nicholas Barrett. Do read the whole eloquent thing, but what it boils down to is:
The working class who voted to leave will be the ones most adversely affected by Brexit (voting blindly against their own best interest)
The youth of both the UK and Europe both lose the right to live and work freely in each other’s countries; the older generation has taken away an unknown world of experiences, relationships and opportunities from the younger generation
Anti-intellectualism wins: “We now live in a post-factual democracy.” (Bush, Blair, Trump are all examples of how facts have less and less currency.)
This last point is most telling – and has been barreling toward disaster for a long time, even if it seems that the trend is more like a pendulum. Americans elected an intellectual (Barack Obama), who also happened to be America’s first black president, but will go to the extreme anti-intellect next time. At the same time, they will blindly and blithely claim, post-factually, that we live in a post-racial society because we once voted a black man into the office of president. All the facts speak otherwise, as a deeply insightful piece from Henry Rollins illustrates.
Bill Clinton was fairly intellectual, so a lot of people thirsted for the anti-intellect of George W. Bush in the post-Clinton era. (And the sliver-thin difference in number of votes between Bush and Gore left the country without a declared presidential election winner for more than a month. The fact that it was even close is what alarmed me more than the results themselves. That was the final straw for me as far as living in America goes. I had already moved away, but that cemented my resolve to never go back.)
I have given a lot of thought to these points and tried to look at them through the Brexit lens: demagogue leaders rush into Brexit without a plan, lie to the voters (who, by and large, are average people – meaning that they are not going to dig for real information for themselves; they are reactionary) and their issue wins. Once the vote is over, and they gloat (see Nigel Farage) but also backtrack on promises, back away from the supposed “facts” (see the lies about the money Britain was sending to the EU that could be used for the National Health Service) and do the most cowardly thing possible: they stepped down and said they accomplished what they wanted. Fine, that sounds Farage-like. But Trump-clone-blowhard Boris Johnson stepped away from power only to be handed the office of Foreign Secretary when a new government was basically appointed (I realize that’s how the system works but is mightily undemocratic seeming). And David Cameron was the idiot who set all of this in motion, somehow underestimating the power of the post-factual world we live in and the apathy of most voters – and the passion of single-issue and uninformed voters who have been scared into voting against their own interests. And now we seem to be heading toward a refrain of Britain in the 1980s: ultra-conservatism, economic uncertainty and unemployment and… if we are lucky, a surge of great music (since that is all there will be to cling to).
What will Brexit mean in real terms? People have had time to digest it, and with the (in)digestion, heartburn is setting in.
One journalist, Ian McConnell writes: “It has been difficult to escape the growing feeling, since the Brexit vote, of being stuck in one of the more shambolic episodes of Dad’s Army.”
Caveat: I am not British so it’s not really my deal – but it affects the whole world, all of Europe, and most of all, Britain itself. I have my own British interests in that I co-own a business there, have relationships there (well, in Scotland anyway), and have, like most Europeans, enjoyed the freedom to visit and stay as long as I wanted or needed to. I out myself here as a pro-Scottish independence, SNP supporter who forces all my Scottish friends to educate themselves, register to vote and vote – I might be deluded, but I think Scotland would be better off without England and remaining a part of the EU (as they voted to do). In this case, Scotland knows what it would be getting into if it were to vote to leave (i.e., “taking back control”), completely unlike the UK’s slapdash and uninformed vote to leave, which has left the country in a kind of tailspin – anything but in control – regardless of the British stiff upper lip they’re trying to display to the world.
A lengthy but not exhaustive list of what Brexit may mean (I am not a lawyer, an economist, any kind of expert or a psychic – but I have enough common sense to know that these may be among some of the results):
Currency value/price increases: Even before the Brexit vote, the value of the British pound started fluctuating on fears of an exit vote. The very morning of the vote’s result announcement, the currency plummeted and continues to struggle. The value of British people’s money, thus, has decreased, so in “taking back control”, they have not only made their own holidays abroad more expensive for themselves, in the short term, they have voted to probably raise the costs of their everyday goods in the long term, both in the sense that they will pay more directly and in the sense that everything will cost more as import costs rise, which will be passed on to consumers (and maybe, to make up for shortfalls, VAT will rise too – who knows?). These price hikes and less valuable money all come at a terrible time, of course, because the vote also means… uncertainty rippling throughout the entire economy.
And what does that mean? “Taking back control” means job losses for BRITONS – not just for all the immigrants they imagined were flooding in and stealing all the jobs. It’s not just the big multinationals (think finance/banking here) that will create these holes; small businesses are already feeling the punch to the gut (and who owns small business in Britain? Quite often it’s Britons, yet again!), announcing layoffs, scaled back investment or growth plans and price hikes.
Unemployment and possible loss of employment rights: Yes, unemployment is likely to rise. The aforementioned business uncertainty and probable exodus of companies to other locations means that job cuts are inevitable. It’s going to make those previously referenced price hikes that much more painful; it’s going to make it harder to afford to go away on holiday (if the freedom of movement problems stirred up don’t bar your way first).
A Credit Suisse report warns that a Brexit recession could lead to an increase in the unemployment rate that equals about 500,000 lost jobs. The report expects an increase in the overall unemployment rate from about 5% to 6.5% by the end of 2017 (maybe sooner, depending on what happens). In the week after the Brexit vote result, the number of posted job ads in the UK fell by 700,000. Pretty significant.
Beyond the sheer rise in unemployment, though, Brexit makes the UK a much less attractive place for foreign direct investment, which could have contributed to economic growth and created a lot of new jobs.
FDI: Foreign direct investment is not something most average people think about. The UK has long been one of the world’s most attractive FDI recipients because it had a unique set of attributes that companies looking to locate and invest need and want, including being an English-speaking country with (at least in London) an international, multilingual population, great infrastructure and access to the European single market.
I take FDI more personally, as I have worked in this industry for some time and have seen how the trends move. A company – large or small – looking at its options for relocating and investing will benchmark UK against other European locations, and where once UK competed favorably, the exit from the single market will exclude the UK from serious consideration. It’s quite complicated and multifaceted. (Ireland will probably benefit from the UK’s “taking back control”.)
Economic slowdown: Economic slowdown can mean a lot of different things, which encompass many of the other points in this list (stagnant growth, unemployment, etc.). It also includes a downturn in business output and in optimism, which have already been affected by Brexit. It can also mean that a recession is coming. The uncertainty I wrote about above also leads to a “deer-in-the-headlights” effect, where businesses are fearful of taking any action, which can likewise contribute to negative economic consequences.
Trade fits into this equation. With Britain exiting the EU, Britain will no longer be party to the trade agreements made by/within the EU. It will probably have to renegotiate and start from scratch on trade arrangements (more than 100 of them), and while the Leave campaigners claimed this would be easy, that Britain had so much to offer – so much leverage – nothing is further from the truth. US President Barack Obama even stated as much, saying Britain is at the back of the queue.
Property values/housing: In a classic case of people voting on an isolated, single issue – and not really understanding the complexity of it, many voters cited (potential) property price decreases (the Treasury warned that house prices would decrease as much as ten percent) as their reason for voting to leave the EU. Aside from the fact that voting should be about benefit to the entire country, not just what you individually think you can gain, this is naïve voting. Maybe property prices decrease as a result of Brexit, but it conversely means that property values decrease, so those Britons who already own property may experience negative equity, which could be particularly acute in northern England and real losses on their investment. The danger in focusing on a single issue also fails to take into account all the other factors at work, e.g., unemployment, wage stagnation and recession, which may lead many people to not be able to afford a home no matter how far property prices fall.
A large part of the Leave campaigning focused on “taking control of” immigration and the borders of the UK; most Britons, though, did not think about what leaving would mean for their own mobility. Or what that would mean for their friends, family members and colleagues who already live in Britain – and what that uncertainty and what a mass expulsion of Europeans would mean for the economy (no, it does not automatically mean that there will be floods of open jobs for British citizens; so many Europeans work in Britain in the first place because companies often have unique needs and Europeans unique qualifications that match up; some Europeans will do jobs that British people don’t want to do).
This reasoning also failed to consider that Britain already has exceptions in place that keep people from completely freely showing up in Britain. Britain never joined the Schengen area and thus controlled its borders much more tightly than other Schengen-area countries.
Breakup of the country: The breakup of the United Kingdom is a topic I should not have passionate feelings about and don’t think it’s one about which I can be objective. (Not that I have been totally objective throughout my points here.) On this topic is even more personal. I’ve spent a huge amount of time in Glasgow and feel an exceptionally strong connection to Scotland and see its potential outside of the UK. I supported the independence referendum last time, despite having no vote, and I “activated” all the people I know in Scotland to educate themselves, pick a side and vote.
I don’t necessarily think independence is going to be an easy option. But I support it. When the SNP launched the first bid for independence, they had a lengthy manifesto and a detailed plan and platform. By contrast, there was NO plan for the UK outside the EU, despite it being an even more complex divorce.
Reigniting Northern Ireland problems: I don’t feel the same passion about Northern Ireland as I do about Scotland, but I don’t think anyone needs to be reminded of the (T)troubles there. Northern Ireland is a high-stakes Brexit gamble. It’s the UK’s only hard land border with another EU (or any) country (the republic of Ireland), and what happens to this border now that the UK has voted to leave? Will this vote kick up new calls for reunification with the republic of Ireland, and will that reignite the “bitterness and bloodshed” that remains an explosive possibility. The really young may not remember firsthand the violence between Protestant Unionists and the Catholic nationalist minority and the terror that surrounded this battle. It’s not something anyone wants to see repeated, and while it may feel like peace was achieved “long ago”, it’s still less than 20 years.
You can search and read endlessly on these topics and do not need my help.
Food: There are areas Brexit will affect that the average voter probably did not even think about. One of these is food (and how much food is imported, and what that could mean for availability and price).
There could also be a knock-on effect to British farming, which will lose EU agriculture subsidies.
Music: Maybe because I care so passionately about music, films and the arts – but mostly music – I am most concerned about its future. What happens to the industries and the touring musicians and the legal/copyright stuff? It’s complex….
Alienation/isolation: The price of going it alone and “taking back control” could be isolationism and, as mentioned, moving to the back of the line. There is no certainty that the UK will end up in isolation – the world is a bit more globalized than that. But was the risk worth it? Is the “control” you think you took back keeping you warm at night and comforted?
As Britain careens toward its own economic, political and existential doom, I’m almost tempted to laugh except that pointing at the chaos is an entirely misplaced form of schadenfreude. Their chaos is probably only foreshadowing what worse ugliness is to come in the US. If much of England and Wales can vote the entire UK out of the European Union, much of America can vote the “reasonable parts of the rest of America” into the oblivion of a Donald Trump presidency. Who will be laughing then?
It will be a lot like the 1980s of Thatcher and Reagan – only much worse. More xenophobic, more reactionary, more chaotic, more violent. And even though I know many people care deeply, the fact that things are unfolding this way makes it feel as though no one really does. The current escalation of terror attacks (all blamed on Islam or racial unrest but underpinned more and driven by all kinds of other issues – socioeconomic and historical vestiges of colonialism and slavery) feels like a parallel to the various terrorism that took place in the 1970s, which then led to the 1980s of trickle-down economics, a continuation of the Cold War and constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the AIDS crisis, the escalation of the war on drugs/Just Say No and all the socioeconomic and racial implications of that (i.e. turning drug problems into a criminal justice problem rather than a public health issue), a lot of economic unrest (striking, etc. in the UK), Bhopal, Chernobyl, the famine in Ethiopia, Iran-Contra, Tiananmen… and a whole lot of other not so pleasant stuff.
The rest of this decade may be tumultuous indeed: like the ills of the 1980s on steroids. I hope I am wrong.
Media, political parties, political analysts and pundits, popular culture and just about any person you talked to in the US or abroad laughed off the Donald Trump presidential candidacy as a joke. Whether because Trump himself would lose interest, because it was such an outlandish proposition that it seemed impossible, because eventually he’d go too far and no one would stand for it any longer, because people love sensationalized stuff (they do, after all, love drama and reality television), because one of the “serious” candidates would surge ahead, everyone chose to ignore what was unfolding. And they chose to ignore the real-world precedent of the laughed-off, joke candidate who swept into power and did real damage.
World history is full of examples (Ronald Reagan was just a bad actor), but I think back again to watching the Italian TV series, 1992, which explored the idea of Berlusconi as an unlikely, laughable political leader (and its joking about how that would be as ridiculous as a Schwarzenegger political career…). No one seems to heed the warnings of these previous disasters, and we are doomed to repeat what we have not learned from.
It’s been all over the news – the question (or some variation of it): “How can I move to Canada?” was one of the most searched Google queries during the US primaries’ Super Tuesday events. At one point, a Google data editor posted to Twitter that this search query had spiked 350%, which eventually hit a 1,500% spike.
And who could possibly have predicted that this innocent question, borne of the fear, frustration and panic brought on by the possibility of a Donald Trump (or a Ted Cruz!) presidency, would lead to the Canadian government immigration website being overpowered by traffic spikes? I think a lot about these kinds of unintended and unforeseen consequences – fascinating for sociological as much as technical reasons. I have been a frequent visitor to the site myself as a maniacal citizenship collector and lover of Canada (Canadian friends have even named me an honorary Canadian in the past). I have followed the changes in Canadian immigration laws/rules, which turned more conservative and closed during the Harper years. These will probably be revisited under the liberal Justin Trudeau administration. As I visited and revisited the Canadian immigration site, I hated seeing Canada become, well, less Canadian and less aligned with the values that the whole world associates with Canada.
Anyway in all the time and all the years in which I had visited the site, I had never been greeted by this:
Every day, it seems, another website falls victim to its own success or demand.But in this case, a little-seen (unless you are trying to move to Canada, which is probably a high enough number but doubtfully website-breaking numbers on normal occasions) government website is not necessarily the kind of site you’d expect to be overpowered by stampedes of would-be Canadians. (Get it, Stampede?)
Sure, many government websites are not the most heavily trafficked web spaces, and an unexpected spike is just that – unexpected. Some such issues are quite predictable (referring here to the US government’s Healthcare.gov debacle, which US President Obama called a “well-documented disaster” that nevertheless led to a better government understanding of how to handle technology). And eventually that disaster was fixed. Big, small or somewhere in between, even public sector entities (in fact, sometimes especially public sector entities) are responsible for fairly high-stakes information – public safety, public health, economic data – you get the picture. For that reason, they should always be prepared. Not every flood of traffic is expected, but when it does happen, you hope – and they hope – the site is ready. I mean, uninsured Americans were required to use Healthcare.gov to sign up for insurance. Yeah – how, if they can’t even get into the site? And you’d really hope that when the time comes to escape the Trump demagoguery, Canada and its government websites will be ready for you!
For now, though, in the heat of the Super Tuesday returns, the Canadian immigration website, apparently not ready for the influx of potential immigrants from the US (or at least not ready for their website visits to the Great White North), struggled to keep up with demand, posting the warning pasted above to all its visitors (and today, several days later, the warning is still there).
Now if only anyone had heeded the months of warnings about Trump/Drumpf.
