Sunday 25 September 2016

"Hopelessly out of date"

"The EU is an institution rooted in the past and is proving incapable of reforming to meet the big technological, demographic and economic challenges of our time. It was developed in the 1950s and 1960s and like other institutions which seemed modern then, from tower blocks to telexes, it is now hopelessly out of date."
Fortunately, there's an alternative, brought to you by people so modern and zeitgeisty that their instinctive frame of reference is the chivalric romances of the High Middle Ages:
"In the past, a knight of the realm who had failed in battle and lost would have quit the field and retired in humility to better understand their own failings.

"How surprising then to find that far from that, Sir Craig Oliver, one of the leading lights of Remain, has decided to instead try to pin the blame for his failure on others, particularly the new prime minister."
Iain Duncan Smith

To be fair, given the imperial nostalgia animating the Brexit project, Iain might be channelling a something a bit more up to date - maybe he's rocking the 19th Century faux Medieval vibe of Pugin, Sir Walter Scott and the Pre-Raphaelites. But, whether it's feudal or Victorian, those Brexiteers really do need to drag a few of their talking heads kicking and screaming into a slightly more recent century (the 20th would do), before they start accusing other people of being out of date.
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?

La Belle Dame sans Merci

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