re: #37 The Ghost of a Flea

Being a kid there in the 80s there was always this paradox of Britons being intensely vain about their empire and deeply disgusted by the colonials they deliberately brought back to the homeland, as though it was a massive imposition to acknowledge that their social engineering had created the circumstances such that there were all of these brown people who were British.

Brexit felt like the recurrence…the farce after the tragedy, perhaps…of all of that.

Empire is a prion-based brain disease, I swear.

My favorite example is probably the Gurkhas. Just because the Brits spent the better part of two centuries lionizing the absolute shit out of those dudes and then got real fucking uncomfortable about letting a bunch of south asian vets with war injuries actually retire inside the UK.