Is this the flood? Maybe.
I woke up in Paris when I got the news. It’s June 24, 2016. I wouldn’t call it a hangover. Those are just annoying: the kind filled with little regret and more bewilderment at your own decision-making. But like I said, this wasn’t a hangover. I didn’t make any decisions. I woke up in Paris with an awkward numbness.
But why? Why did they leave? Is this the beginning of something new or are the symptoms of an old disease finally showing themselves? Better yet, why do I even care?
It’s June 24, 2016. I was in London later that day. I get out of the Tube and I find myself stepping into a fog of an oh-so-familiar awkward numbness. Newspapers were everywhere, but the paperboy’s enthusiasm and exuberant capitalism weren’t. They were hanging from street stands like dead meat, the kind that is so still that one wonders if it ever had life in it to begin with.
Page after page was slathered with empty words. “We’re Out” meant nothing, or at least no one knew what it meant. In that sense, it was pretty much meaningless. It was a silence that wiped all traces of hope into the abyss. The media had hanged itself.
But I still took one, a souvenir from ground zero. A trophy for making it out alive? I hang it in my room because I feel my windows aren’t doing me justice. Now when I want a break from thinking, I just stare at the front page hoping that will do it for me.
My eyes scour through those pages for the new world, to see what it’s like. But this paper isn’t really a window (yet). All I see are those same empty words lifeless on dead paper. I still don’t know what “We’re Out” means.
My advice is don’t do what I’m doing, it’s dangerous. I am trying to walk the fine tightrope between a mirror and a window. You see, it’s really a matter of perception. Sometimes you look through them and other times you see yourself in them.
But this time I don’t see myself. Maybe if I keep staring at it, that page will become the window I so desire. Or maybe it will become a mirror disguised as a window with a view that isn’t new at all.
Until then I keep it on the wall, waiting for it to make sense. So in the absence of me really knowing anything, here’s what I think. Welcome to this new column:
The U.K. looks desperate, uncoordinated and incompetent. What they do have going for them is that the winds have changed, and it’s blowing right into their sails. The tides have picked up, and they’ve become violent, raging against the machinery of bureaucracy and culture.
The shadow of Poseidon is slowly swallowing every last stronghold of neoliberal pride. With wind in its sails and the shadow leading the way, the Brexit boat sails forth, rocking on the enraged waves of a revived god.
Poseidon is the bogey man. It is he who sleeps under every politician’s bed, even the politicians who sail under his dark silhouette. Poseidon, the god who shapes the winds of change, the god who changes the tides, is under no one person’s grasp. Yet it is most comforting to be in his embrace.
You see, if he is the one who creates the hurricane that is ravaging through this world, it is in the eye of the hurricane that you want to be. That’s where British Prime Minister Theresa May is, like a pet in a house fire, praying that she can keep herself right in the eye of the hurricane and go wherever it allows her to go.
But see, that’s the part that gives me hope. Everyone is just trying to sail as fast as they can. No one is in a position of power. Everyone isn’t on the same boat, so to speak, but they sure are all facing the same crazy storm. To shield themselves, everyone is trying to throw up the façade that they somehow have leverage, that they have a wall or a channel to protect them.
They’re missing the point, because no one wins in a storm. Everyone’s going to lose before anyone can even win. The shadow of a greater movement, the shadow of Poseidon, does not give anyone strength. It just clouds the status quo.
The beauty of it is that Jean-Claude Juncker, May, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel and Kanye West all know it. There is something so moving about being stuck together in this storm. There is something so human and pathetic about Brexit. This is “Ring Around the Rosie,” and whether you know it or not, we’re all holding hands.
