Category: serious stuff

Some thoughts about Brexit

As many of you know, I blog about the British constitution over at A Venerable Puzzle, so the United Kingdom is a subject that’s close to my heart. I was surprised by the result of yesterday’s vote. Despite the shifts in the polls, I assumed that the uncertainty surrounding Brexit would ultimately encourage people to vote to remain within the European Union. But as I watch the reaction to Britain’s decision, I find myself growing frustrated by the superficiality of it all. According to the Twitterverse, anyone who voted to leave is a xenophobic relic. Donald Trump has been thrown into the mix, too, and there has been lots of hand-wringing about what this means for the presidential election in November.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned as a historian, it’s that the decisions we make are rarely straightforward, and events are shaped by a multitude of factors. Therefore, the narrative that the vote to leave was simply motivated by distaste for foreigners strikes me as too simplistic. It glosses over the fact that there are other reasons to leave the EU, including legitimate concerns over national sovereignty and a lack of European accountability. But instead of recognizing the fact that people might have genuine issues with the EU, it’s easier to dismiss their views as the product of ignorance and hate.

A lot of the American commentariat also seems unaware of the fact that yesterday’s vote was hardly a bolt from the blue. Britain has been ambivalent toward the EU for a long time, and successive Governments have rejected key aspects of the European project, including the Euro, the Schengen Area, and the commitment to ever-closer union. In other words, Britain’s estrangement from the EU predates the rise of Trump and the migrant crisis.

As is so often the case, people seem to assume that there was a Right Answer and a Wrong Answer in the Brexit vote. I see it as a choice between two paths. Both have hazards, but both have opportunities as well. Britain is neither doomed nor saved by yesterday’s vote, and it will be some time before we can accurately gauge its impact. Nevertheless, I hope that the chaos of the present will soon give way to better things.

RIP Barbara Mertz

Barbara Mertz (aka Elizabeth Peters) has passed away after a long battle with cancer. Despite earning a PhD in Egyptology from one of the best programs in the entire world, the gender mores of the 1950s prevented her from finding work as an Egyptologist.

In a classic example of making lemonade out of lemons, she turned to writing fiction. Mertz was a prolific author who wrote over 50 books in genres ranging from popular Egyptology to romance. She’s probably best known for her Amelia Peabody series of mysteries, which she published under the pseudonym of ‘Elizabeth Peters.’ Although the Peabody books were set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main character’s passion for Egyptology let Mertz put her academic background to good use.

 

Mertz was a first-class writer, and she will be sorely missed.

As for those learned scribes. . . it has come to pass that their names will endure forever, although they are gone, having completed their lives. . . they made heirs for themselves of the writings and books … which they made…. Their… memorial tablets (are) covered with dust, their chapels forgotten. But their names are pronounced because of these books of theirs. . . more profitable is a book than a graven tablet, than a chapel-wall well built. . . a man has perished, and his corpse has become dust. . . but writings cause him to be remembered in the mouth of the story teller.

-Papyrus Chester Beatty IV

 

The case for non-partisan presiding officers

The other night I watched the procedural wrangling in the Texas Senate as Democrats tried to stop the GOP from ending Wendy Davis’ filibuster of Senate Bill 5, which would have forced most of the abortion clinics in the state to close.

The special session of the legislature was going to end at midnight, so the Republicans were desperate to stop Davis. Over the course of the proceedings, GOP senators lodged three points of order in a bid to break the filibuster. Two of the points of order dealt with germaneness, while the other objected to the fact that Davis had a colleague help her put a back brace on. All these points of order were ultimately sustained by the President of the Senate, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst.

The problem is that Dewhurst is a Republican, and so he had a vested interest in breaking the filibuster. Indeed, there was a strong aura of partisanship in the way he and his deputy conducted themselves in the chair. The three points of order against Sen. Davis were arguably trivial, and he may have ignored Sen. Leticia Van De Putte when she tried to move the adjournment. He also declared that the bill had passed, even though the votes weren’t tallied until after the midnight deadline (though he changed his tune a few hours later, stating that the bill had failed because he hadn’t signed it “in the presence of the Senate” before midnight).

Unfortunately, this sort of partisan behavior from a presiding officer is hardly unprecedented in American politics. From Washington DC to the state capitals, presiding officers are usually active members of the majority party and are expected to deliver its agenda. Regardless of which side of the aisle they hail from, it seems that the temptation to bend the rules in favor of their party colleagues is often too strong to resist.

This approach stands in marked contrast to that found in Britain. When a new Speaker of the House of Commons is elected, they immediately sever all partisan ties. This political neutrality persists even after they step down: if they choose to take the customary peerage, they sit in the House of Lords as Crossbenchers. Freed from the bonds of party loyalty, the Commons’ speaker is expected to be an impartial umpire who serves the whole house. They must be particularly diligent about protecting the rights of the Opposition as well as those of backbenchers from all parties. When exercising their rare casting vote in the event of a tie, convention dictates that the speaker must always vote to give the Commons another chance to consider the matter before a final decision is taken.

Sadly, I don’t see us adopting a British-style speaker any time soon since both the GOP and the Democrats are eager to have as many advantages as possible when they’re in power. 😦

Grief Sucks

January 15 was one of the worst days of my entire life. The night before, I started to feel sick, and after several hours of hardcore vomiting, I ended up going to the emergency room. I spent several hours there while they filled me with fluids and anti-nausea medicines, but by 6 AM I was cleared to go home. When I returned, I fell into bed, totally exhausted.

When I woke up several hours later, there was an anguished voicemail from my mother waiting for me. “If you want to say goodbye to Grandma, you need to come home now.”

I immediately tried to call Mom back, but her phone wasn’t on. For the next few hours, I was left in an agony of uncertainty. It all seemed so unreal. Even though Grandma has been fighting cancer for the past several months, the idea that she might die seemed utterly absurd. She’d beat it once before, and we had every reason to think that she’d beat it again. Even though she’d just had surgery due to complications from her radiation therapy, she was expected to make a full recovery. For her to suddenly be on the brink of death seemed unthinkable.

Even worse, I was in no condition to travel. Although the anti-nausea medicine had stabilized me, I felt wretched and I was still running a fever. And there was no way I could risk giving my bug to my Mom. But the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to make it home before Grandma passed was like a knife to the gut. She was one of my favorite people in the entire world, and I would have given anything to say farewell in person. In the end, I had to settle for saying goodbye over the phone. They were some of the hardest words I’ve ever had to speak.

And then there was the wait. There are few things more excruciating than waiting for someone you love to die. I kept thinking about how when I was little, I hated having to say goodbye when Grandma would come to visit. I would cry and carry on and beg her to stay just a little bit longer. Twenty-some years later, the sentiment was still the same. Thankfully, the Physicist was with me when I finally got the news. That was a small mercy, at least.

The stomach virus cleared up in time for me to head back to Michigan later in the week. Grandma thought that traditional funerals were rather morbid, so she wanted us to go to her favorite restaurant and have a party instead. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of storytelling, and I think she would have liked how it turned out. But after the party, we were confronted by the innumerable practicalities of death, like how to divide up her possessions. Her house had a bizarre atmosphere of normalcy: it was as if Grandma had just gone out to the store and would be back at any minute.

I had some wonderful times in that house. When Mom and I first moved to Michigan, we lived with Grandma and Grandpa for a bit. It was one of the darkest times of my life, and I owe them a huge debt of gratitude for making a turbulent time of transition much smoother. That first Christmas together was particularly magical, and it set the stage for many more happy occasions together.

Now that Grandma is gone, I don’t have any grandparents left. It’s the end of an era, and a sobering reminder that nothing in this world lasts forever. Everyone we hold dear will eventually turn to dust. Sic transit gloria mundi, and all that.

When someone you love dies, it’s as if someone has suddenly dug a great pit in the middle of your garden. At first, you can’t bear to look at it because it’s ugly and raw and reminds you of what you’ve lost. But with the passage of time, the jagged edges soften and it gradually becomes part of the landscape.

The more you look at it, the faster you come to realize that it’s not truly empty. Floating around in the blackness are memories of your loved one, each one a preserved snippet of the time you spent with them. Encountering them will be painful at first, but eventually the sting goes away, and they become celebrations of what you had rather than reminders of what you lost.

Dies iræ! Dies illa solvet sæclum in favilla

Math class was about to begin when our teacher ran into the room. “A plane has hit the World Trade Center,” she said as she switched on the television set that stood in the corner of every classroom. We were supposed to have a quiz that day, but it was swiftly forgotten as we spent the next forty-eight minutes watching the unthinkable unfold before us on the television screen. When the bell rang, we quietly rose from our desks and trudged to our next class, but by that point every television in the school was tuned to the news. The horror of the situation seemed to increase exponentially with each passing moment as the Twin Towers finally collapsed, the Pentagon burned, and rumors abounded of car bombs exploding throughout the capital.  By the time I returned home, it was clear that thousands had died and life would never be the same again.

Looking back now, I think a whole era died on September 11. When I was a kid, there seemed to be a pervasive sense of optimism. Life seemed to be getting better all the time. The Cold War was a rapidly fading memory, and the booming economy brought prosperity to many. But that terrible Tuesday morning ushered in a new era, an era where the comfortable certainties of the past seemed like mere ghosts. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven polarizing, both at home and abroad, and our victories there could still prove to be hollow ones. The economy is now more of a cause for worry than celebration, and unemployment remains stubbornly high. Our country faces a looming debt crisis, yet our politicians seem incapable of the sort of rational behavior necessary to confront it. With all this, it it any wonder that surveys show such pessimism? I think my generation is going to have a case of nerves that persists long after the economy recovers and the troops come home.

The “Dies irae” has been running through my mind all day as I remember the thousands who died. Its final words make a fitting coda for this post:

Pie Iesu Domine, dona eis requiem. Amen.