Beau Elliot
“Think outside the box,” we are often told. It’s even in the Horoscopes today, recheck it (we know you already checked your sign; reach out beyond the box).
Less often are we told, Why do you believe there’s a box you must think outside of?
Just wondering.
As I read this from NPR: “Shortly after polls closed, British voters rushed to the search engine to ask what, exactly, they had just voted on. It was the second-searched EU-related question in the UK.”
Good of you guys to wonder now.
Of course, people who actually deal with data (not me all the time; it’s like dealing with grits, Donald Trump, and other messy stuff) will tell you that reading anything into search-engine numbers is like discovering pyrite.
Pyrite? you ask. It’s also known as fool’s gold.
Which is what the British apparently found with their Brexit gold rush. Or whatever it was.
Of course, the Bregrets began almost immediately, especially from the Brexit leaders. That huge mutlimillion pound influx that will not go to the EU but instead to the British health system? Not happening. The end to immigration to Britain as we know it? Not happening. The Sun rising in the east? 50-50.
Of course, Donald Trump was around, because news doesn’t happen unless the Trumpster can stick himself in the middle of it.
So Trump took a trip to Scotland to visit one of his luxury golf resorts right at the time of the Brexit vote. And as the Brexit vote returns came in and the British prime minister resigned, Trump held a press conference and addressed the issues at hand: his golf course.
Yes, he went on and on about renovating the old lighthouse and the luxury suites that he had created so much that you began to believe it was no longer a lighthouse but a heavy house.
And, oh yes, throughout his conference, Trump was surrounded on the green by dozens of orange golf balls decorated with the Nazi symbol.
It was a stunt by a British comedian, thus proving that Britain may have Brexited, but the spirit of Monty Python lives on.
Trump did manage to say some words about Brexit. As the British pound was crashing faster than his poll numbers, he noted that a weak pound would benefit his golf-course resorts. A weak pound brings the tourists in, don’t you know.
Of course, maybe a weak British pound turns into the British ounce. Then what?
Well, no worries for the Trumpster. His mantra seems to be “What? Me Worry?” Which would be fine, bravo optimism and all that, except the mantra is also that of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman.
Yeah, that’s what I would like to see: Alfred E. Neuman in the West Wing with the nuclear codes. You gotta admit, it’s a lot more interesting than Col. Mustard in the library with the candlestick.
The other interesting thing about Trump is that, after the Brexit vote, he tweeted that the British were out celebrating their “liberation.” I’m not sure where he saw these people, except maybe on TV, because the Trumpster was in Scotland, and the Scots voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU.
So where are we, post-Brexit? In the box or out of the box?
Maybe it’s like the old machine-shop joke: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to tool & die.