'I come down to dinner wearing a dress. I confess, george's interest encourages me to be more experimental and meticulous in my appearance. we sit across from one another eating potatoes or something... he blushes and looks at his plate. I don't know what I feel. I only want to respond, probably to please him...'
the fluxromance continues. horsemouth is editing it to supress the details of what billie and george get up to, not because he thinks you will be shocked by george (and perhaps billie)'s tastes in sexual activity, but because he wants to leave it more general. the fluxromance is not really about billie's tastes, she likes george, she likes his scene (mostly), she is reciprocating his kindness.
but george's friends do not like her. they are alarmed by george's late blossoming sexuality, they view her as an interloper, they worry about the status of the fluxarchive after george's death.
the fluxromance will continue out to february 28th (with another appearance of zefiro torna), until the flux wedding. the fluxtherapy (the immobilisation therapy) will end on december 16th.
horsemouth has responded to a piece by zoe williams in the guardian.
zoe's argument is that the trope of brexit is that now we seemingly cannot care about both practicalities and abstract democracy - and that one seemingly must now be sacrificed to the other. that we are sacrificing economic practicalities to an abstract democracy.
once upon the time we possessed the recipe for this reconciliation, it was called pragmatism, we instead sacrificed a little of our democracy to remain in the EU. and as we lay sunbathing by the pool in spain we knew it was worth it. we knew it was worth it because really deep down we know our democracy is a sham. (indeed arguably the roots of brexit lie in the failure of our democratic process to absorb the likes of UKIP etc.). we will now have to re-learn the lesson of the weakness of democracy n the UK again, and do it the hard way.
lots of arguments were made about how we would be better off after brexit (on the side of campaign buses for example) but these did not really influence people because people voted leave on the basis of democratic principle or anti-immigrant sentiment. those of us who voted remain did so out of pragmatism or a certain lazy internationalism (this is the weakness of our argument, it lacks principle).
horsemouth admits to being surprised by the referendum result but he was not surprised by the sorry debacle of incompetence since. he was however fascinated to watch an entire segment of the political class get enthusiastic about wrecking - led (in the death) by boris pfeffel johnson the most european and the most international of us all. (born in the USA, descendent of turks, germans, and swiss french ancestors).
and so here we are. it's the final countdown (again).
horsemouth's guess is that deal or no deal the economic consequences will be horrific and long lasting and their burden will mainly fall upon the poor (just like covid). (it's not worth arguing about how horsemouth can know this because we will all know soon enough anyway).
it's not so much that we've shot ourselves in the foot as that we've gone and knee-capped ourselves as well. (still it's likely to bring irish freedom forward which is a good thing)
zoe quotes hannah arendt's 'the origin of totalitarianism':
'to yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless and unreal.”
(god those germans write well)
zoe quotes this from the hag ridden by nuclear war 1950 preface (it is typical of this day and age that quote is not from somewhere in the middle of the book nor near the end). the point however is that the world did not end in the 1950ies in a nuclear war but rather that an armed peace and reconstruction established itself (together with all the fictions of human reasonableness that go with profitability and progress).
given the weakness of the remainer argument on democracy zoe cannot resist calling the argument for brexit 'totalitarian'. ok she makes the pretence of shying away from doing this but it's there nevertheless.
but what would hannah arendt actually think of brexit?
hannah's experience, driven out of germany by colleagues, friends, lovers as they succumbed to anti-semitism would presumably lead her to excoriate the brexiteers (and their racism), but is there not something vaguely disgusting in the conformity of the remainers, their interest only in their skiing holidays at the expense of the losers out to globalisation in their own countries and the refugees fleeing persecution attempting to get into the EU. hannah's experience is of a society shutting down into such a conformity.
brexit really is the UK version of MAGA. a counterstrike against globalisation from the right. it's a bit of a tragedy that we will have to go on to learn this lesson in full and at length (but that is not to say that the US is out of the wilderness yet). the 'subterranean stream' of western history has broken out again and must be squarely faced. it is no good trying to hide in an ideal past (an arcadia) or in a glorious future (a utopia), nor in realpolitik or a return to good sense and good governance.
the beast is lose.
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