Clearly Not Inviolable

Heading out into a Shanghai Saturday night.  This should be a rather cool thing to do, but instead, it’s strung about my neck as an obligation.  I want some food.  I simply cannot endure one more night at the local restaurants I usually roll into.  So I’m off to the French Concession, trying to find a nice, quite place to have some reasonable food that is still open at 11:15 at night. 

Yes, there is a reason for all this.  The 4:55PM flight was cancelled.  I was notified ahead of time and sat and worked in my room and was generally productive and only modestly grumpy and I knew I had a rescheduled flight at 9:55PM.  I don’t have to tell you that, that was cancelled too.  What I will tell you is that I had to go all the way out to the airport only to find this out and then return to the city, hungry.  So, I haven’t much of a choice just now. 

Neither now, does Britain.  Quite a shocker today.  I had thought that with the murder of Jo Cox and the assembly of wise minds who all weighed-in on the matter, and the myriad of British friends and students and folks I met whom I’d asked about Brexit, who all responded with a weary but clear determination to remain in the European Union that I knew where things would wind up.  The feel-good press had suggested that polls were veering towards “remain.” It would, I assumed, be like the Scottish referendum, all over again.  A build up, to nothing.  But that is not what happened.  Britain voted to leave.  Cameron has just announced his resignation.  Something utterly new has begun. 

It’s hard not to look from a distance on supra-national experiments with envy and respect and think they are simply the proper evolution for humanity.  Something that supersedes national identity seems necessarily noble.  Dutch and French and Germans have built something transcendent to tame a grim millennium’s worth of hate and violence.  This is an achievement that North Asia hasn’t come close to securing.   But the union is clearly not inviolable.

Where does that leave the United Kingdom?  The voting pattern suggests that certainly Scotland and Northern Ireland, who want to be part of the European Union will no longer feel it worth it to remain a part of this United Kingdom.  Were the Scottish referendum to be held again, we’d almost certainly have a different outcome.  Is this what finally reunites Ireland for the first time since Cromwell?  London is used to an oversized influence in everything, but not this time.  London preferred to stay put and the city was told they could not.  I’d like dial up Christopher Hitchens in the afterworld and walk it through with him.  

So I’m here in a beer garden restaurant, named after a Beatles album that is still crowded and still serving food at midnight.  The music like the other conversations is banal, but it isn’t too loud.  It’s been ‘about to rain’ all night and this isn’t any different.  A few drops have fallen but the clouds remain heavy in late gestation.  I wish I were home tonight but in as much as I remain, twice thwarted, this was the better move, at least now, pre-bill, pre-headache.  My meal has arrived.  I’m not interested in photographing it.