Finneran: The Comic's Last Laugh
Tom Finneran, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™
Finneran: The Comic's Last Laugh
It began in Great Britain with the embrace of Brexit, a screw you message to the self-anointed wise men of Europe. The revolution then crossed the Atlantic and shocked the pundits of America on the night of November 8th, 2016.
Donald Trump’s election was a dramatic rejection of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama regimes. It was also a repudiation of Hillary Clinton as the bearer of the torch of Washington insiders and D.C.’s conventional wisdom. Finally, it seemed to be a rejection of the lecturing condescension of the New York Times and its media imitators and parrots as well.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDonald Trump, no angel and bombastically crude to boot, was going to the White House against all odds. One would think that so-called wise men might pause and ask themselves how they could have been so wrong. One would be wrong. Self-questioning is not a strong suit with this group. They could never be so wrong on something so significant……therefore it must be everyone else that’s dumb or deplorable, that’s racist and resentful. Such a wise way to analyze an electorate that had happily embraced Barack Obama in 2008 and then, upon eight years of observation, had chosen his polar opposite.
Let’s face facts. The East Coast and the West Coast mock flyover country. And flyover country is aware of their scorn. They know that their religion is scorned. They know that their simple patriotism is scorned. They know that their way of life is ridiculed. They know that the Times and the Post and CNN think that they’re dumb. The two coasts think that Saturday Night Live is must-see television. Flyover country prefers pork and beans community suppers, square dances in the high school gym, and an early-to-bed Saturday night, followed by Sunday church services. In San Francisco they so knowingly sneer.
Such sneering, such condescension oozes from Brussels as well. Home to the bureaucrats of the European Union, Brussels is as bad as San Francisco in its scorn for simple people and sovereignty. The vote on Brexit came in spite of doomsday predictions of its effects on British life. Many Brits simply wanted to recover a sense that their electoral wishes count more than the whims of unknown but dictatorial foreign clerks.
As with Trump’s election, Brexit was fueled in large part by controversies over immigration. The disasters in Syria and in Africa unleashed a flood of desperate refugees, unlike anything seen since the massive displacements of World War II. Germany, quite prosperous and susceptible to political preening, announced its openness to taking in large numbers of such refugees. At the same time, they lectured Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic about their duty to take certain quotas of the displaced.
Consider the irony of that for a moment---mighty Germany giving a lecture to the Poles and the Czechs on civic behavior. I can see Poland’s middle finger and the Czech clenched fist raised in Germany’s face.
Then enters Brussells with its own dictates about refugees and “open borders”. Talk about clueless. It should come as no surprise to anyone, that countries that once lived behind the Iron Curtain and under the hammer of the USSR do not take kindly to distant tyranny. Their revolt against the EU continues to surge.
The pieties of Germany and the EU are ignored. Elections in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic reflect a proud nationalism, based on popular beliefs that each country has its own unique customs and culture. The Brits are not Italian, the Italians are not Swedish, and the Swedes are not French. And no country has demonstrated an ability to smoothly assimilate the migrants of the Middle East and African tumults.
As with Brexit, as with Trump, the people of Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic have ignored the conventional wisdom offered by their so-called wise men and have elected strong nationalist leaders. Who knows, those elections might prove disastrous for civil rights and freedoms in those countries.
At the moment however, it seems equally plausible that the harmony and cohesion of the EU itself is at equivalent risk.
And, in the most recent rebuke to the elites of governance, the people of Ukraine have just elected a comic over their incumbent President. The comic won in a landslide, as yet another piece of conventional wisdom bit the dust.
The advice and instruction of continental elites continues to fall on deaf ears.
Call it the comic’s last laugh.
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