Leave voters looking for new things to fuck up
“Definitely Trump 2016”, announces Richard Head, “just imagine the royal shitstorm that would arise as the most powerful human civilisation tears itself apart from the inside”, he declares as the flame of nihilistic glee flickers in his eyes, “it’ll make the potential disentanglement of peace in Europe look like a shit in a sandpit… I’m going to book my flights and buy my ‘Make America Great Again’ hat right away”.
Yet, in wanting to watch the world burn, Richard – or as his friends like to call him, Dick – is not alone. A swathe of people with nothing to fight or live for have embraced the fact that they’re too well off to feel the effects of any upheaval, and too boring to go out and live the life afforded to them. Consequently, they have donned their Brexit mitts and taken up arms against the world, fighting in the only ways they know how; shitty ironic memes and a tendentious A-level grasp of orthodox economics.
Pressed as to why he supported Brexit in the first place, he informed us that “it’s really just a reaction to shit wine”
Empowered by the vote Leave victory, and riding the wave of misaligned working class discontent, they have changed their focus away from the pseudo-academic legitimisation of regressive blood-and-soil politics, outwards, to the great wide world.
Some don’t wish to go so far as ‘breaking America’, and instead, look for smaller causes to fuck up. “Scottish independence could work” suggested Wayne Kerr, “Brexit gave me a taste for insular-minded atavistic bigotry, just one of many transferable skills that will help me fit in up there, I can hear the bells of Bannockburn already”. Pressed as to why he supported Brexit in the first place, he informed us that “it’s really just a reaction to shit wine – I’ve heard that the good stuff is only 2 euros a pop over there -the best we can hope for is a dissolution of the union so that everyone else is too poor to enjoy it”.
Whether it concerns US pastors and the actions of teenagers, or an ineptitude at seducing Spanish women, the story is always the same.
To understand this sentiment, you have to go beyond their disregard for general hygiene, STEM degrees, and ironic enjoyment of their father’s music, and delve instead into the psychoanalytic canon. Whether we consider Levinas on ‘the other‘ or Lacan on ‘the neighbour‘ -those that are outside of our circle are inherently weird, creepy even. They have a world of enjoyment that we are not privy to, which makes us rigid in our jealousy, and keen to deny them what lies outside our own field of pleasure. Whether it concerns US pastors and the actions of teenagers, or an ineptitude at seducing Spanish women, the story is always the same. Now, when one’s field of enjoyment is one’s room, subreddit, or local area network; then it is possible to find the germ for a desire to see any vestige of world order crumble.
When this sprinkle of continental analysis was messaged to prominent ‘Leave’ online media comment activist, Vera Jene, she coolly replied with “dank mVIII”, asked then for her future plans, she announced the simple, yet achievable aims of scattering gelatine over the People and Planet allotments and typing axioms such as ‘socialism inevitably leads to totalitarianism’ and ‘redistribution only works in theory’ on every left wing chat forum her pudgy fingers can locate.
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