Brexit and The Great Homogenizator

The Great Homogenizator took a punch to the face yesterday. Whether other blows will follow or not is anyone’s guess.

The Great Homogenizator is the most powerful giant of our time. He breathes the rarefied air of libertarian freedom and he is fed by a thousand currencies. He despises small things, he loathes real differences, but most of all, he hates fences.

He destroyed my hometown.

There was once a little town in western Pennsylvania. It had its faults, and in part it was originally built to serve other giants. But it had this going for it: it was a real place.

It was home to a small liberal arts college, and it had a church for every shade of Christian faith, and right out of River City, it had a town green with a real gazebo.

It was only 15,000 souls or so. But it had everything you’d need: a professional class, a working class, a town paper, tidy farms, and good hunting in the woods nearby.

We moved away when I was small, but we moved back when I was a teen. I remember the first day back in town we ate at a bright little Pennsylvania Dutch restaurant.

It’s mostly gone now. Main Street is derelict, every fast food chain known to man litters the place, and outside of the old town, on the highway, there sits a Super Wal-Mart like some sort of oversized Lego block.

There are ten thousand ravaged towns just like my old town all across America. They all look the same. There’s no real need to visit them. Everything you can see you can find at home now, it is all just as charmless and empty as where you live.

But yesterday the plupart of the British population punched the giant in the face!

Did they know what they were doing? Did they have any sense what a bloody giant does when it gets mad? I don’t know. But I hope some other people land their blows before the giant can fight back.

Localism

People used to have a way to talk about local color without running the risk of being pilloried for nativism.

They knew that the space between heaven above and the earth below is filled with archons and angels. These were real things. And even though Christians knew they should never be worshipped, they also knew they weren’t nothings, figments of the imagination, or superstitions. Only later, when divine sovereignty was said to be seamless and immediate did these intermediaries die off in our minds.

This is reflected in the market economy. Where now, in our secular age, the only sovereign measure of value is the almighty Dollar, or Euro, or whatever. If you can’t sell it or buy it, it’s nothing. It has no value.

Well yesterday some people disagreed. They said, if I can understand what they’re saying beneath the accents, “Our land is not for sale!”

Adverse Possession

In real estate there is something called, easement by prescription. Another name for it is adverse possession. It works like this, believe it or not: if you trespass long enough, flagrantly enough, you can acquire legal possession of someone else’s property. The only way to stop this from happening is by resorting to the law and filing suit.

I’ve noticed over the years that when presumptuous people are told, “that’s enough” a tantrum follows.

Today I will look to Wall Street to see the tantrum.