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The Tribes are Gathering

I recall asking my mother what it meant to say:  "The sun never sets on the Union Jack".

She told me what the Union Jack was, and gave me an abbreviated history lesson
about India and Australia and Canada, and even our own Atlantic coast.  I managed to hold together what I knew about the rotation of the earth on its axis with Britishers drinking tea on white table cloths in Africa.  It all had something to do with the British navy, and trade, and guns, and God Save the Queen!

Those were the days, my friend!
They thought they'd never end!
We'd sing and dance forever and a day!

England just hauled down the Union Jack.

The British Empire, having been reduced to an island,
has just declared that it does not like being part of an empire, or even a commonwealth, now that the proverbial shoe is on the other foot.
Great Britain, not so great now, is itself coming apart:
the Scots aren't so sure they want to save the Queen, and neither are the Irish.

Maybe the French will propose, next, to leave the European Commonwealth
(we can call it that, for poetic and political reasons).  It is not likely that Greece is especially enamored of German economists, or international bankers.

There is a terrible irony in recognizing that the British,
having recognized that the world, after all, is a very small place--
small enough to sail around, to be considered one resource--
has become again a small island nation with a small view of the world.

Teilhard de Chardin said that humanity had come to the place at which
it was now looking toward the horizon, and seeing our own faces coming toward us.
The British Empire, no more an Empire at all, like almost every other traditional empire,
is squirming at the recognition that the faces on the horizon, our own faces,
are not necessarily white faces, Anglo-Saxon faces, Christian faces, or subservient faces.

The English want to be Switzerland with a Queen.
The French are probably wondering whether French is not, in plain fact,
the queen of all languages and sauces.
There is no doubt that the Germans believe that Teutonic economics
is the only glue that can hold the continent together.

Everywhere--there and here--the tribes are gathering.



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