Friday, March 25, 2016

1916-2016: Does anyone actually know what this is?

The filamentous achenes of the
dandelion puff ball
Ah, 'tis upon us. A terrible ugly thing is born. We don't even know what it is. It's just, well, it's a thing. I mean, we couldn't do nothing about it. We couldn't really make it about identity, because the nordies would have got uppity about it. We couldn't just make it about commemoration, because that's morbid and we don't do poppies. We couldn't make it a celebration because, well, you know, the shooting and all that.

It wasn't even a military victory, but a military defeat. It didn't result in independence, just a perpetuated dominion that manifested itself in a face saving drift towards non-dependence in 1949, preceded by a long sequence of guerrilla actions, a civil war, and economic emergencies (including a sovereign debt default) that were both unseemly and undignified.