There was a time when the UK ruled the waves. Today, he seems to be diving deeper and deeper into the absurd and sad attempt to make the sea pass through a funnel, using Italo Calvino’s metaphor that gets right to this point.
The collapse of the Liz Truss government in just a month and a half It is the new rise – who knows when there may be another – of Tory-sponsored aberration that has driven Britons away from the values of pragmatism and style and reliance on the knowledge they sowed to such a high degree in my past. The whole path that led to Brexit and the current dizzying chaos is the triumph of anti-footed values: contempt for facts and experts, competition, and weight. This is the flag that has been flown in the UK, with the irresponsible contribution of many politicians and many media outlets.
The result of this drift is that we find today in a position and with a tool completely unsuitable for facing reality: with a small and solid funnel to confront the enormity of the sea, the waves and currents that rock the modern age in an astonishing way on a global scale. The fallacy of believing that they would regain control on their own and that belonging to the European Union was the source of evil. Dance to the rhythm of this populist nationalist daydream, continuing to escape forward based on baseless mantras, twisting without truth.
From Boris Johnson’s Brexit that opened the border between Britain and Northern Ireland without wanting to admit it first and unwilling to suffer the consequences later, to the horrific tax cuts that Lis Truss made without the financial cover, everything looks the way it is: an inadequate degree. Of seriousness, maturity and surrender to populism. And only with this ideological repression, it is difficult to face reality. Inevitably, the knot reaches the comb. In the form of scandalous parties and white lies that irritate the public, in the form of non-existent markets for fundamental errors. More will come.
Truss also announced his resignation, across the channel, leaders The twenty-seven have come together to continue the arduous search for common answers to modern challenges. Of course, there is no shortage of flaws in its management. Of course, selfishness was revealed. It sure is going very slowly. But the size of the chasm separating Downing Street/Westminster and Brussels should be cause for reflection. Pragmatism, method, confidence in knowledge, the search for facts and compromise continue to dominate this side of the channel. Far from perfect, these ships of the fleet in which we travel, but how much better they are to face the world sea than to face them naked with popular nationalist ideological oppression as the only tool at hand. We have a compass and astrolabe for a great crew. We are sailing. But there is no reason to relax, because the symptoms of nationalist populism, to see the world through two funnels like glasses, are not present on the Old Continent.
“Make the sea pass through a funnel” is a metaphor used by Italo Calvino, in a completely different sense, in reference to Natalia Ginsburg’s novel, words of the night. He wrote: “Poetry has always been like this: to make the sea pass in a path of oppression.” That is exactly what Ginzburg achieves in that animated little novel in which all life, all emotion, enters perfectly. But literature is one thing and politics is another.
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