So, they came together to embrace and share their melancholic whimpering. Candlelit vigils and sorrowful pleas to the EU to ‘look after our star’.

I read that some of our fugazi centrist politicos have expressed our departure as a national humiliation. Well, it might have been a good idea, it might not have been. But any humiliation has surely radiated from the coteries of limp-wristed, soppy clowns, holding hands and humming Ode to Joy in a both metaphorical and literal EU circle-jerk.

Candlelit vigils? Do me a favour.

It was frankly excruciating, but on a positive note, the Russians and Chinese have probably changed their minds about invading us. Way too much hassle just to end up running the largest lunatic asylum in the southern hemisphere. Not to mention the astronomical cost of the Prozac needed to keep all our hippies happy.

If they hadn’t already been doomed to political oblivion, we would likely have seen the Liberal Democrat hierarchy throwing red roses off the white cliffs. It does rather feel like we’ve been teleported back to 1997 though, and Henri Paul has just served up Princess Diana’s final wallbanger.

It’s like national mourning sickness has started to set in once again. Recreational grieving, fuelled by a social media machine that spews its torment into a gaping national vomitorium.

This whole collective mania of mass grieving allows the former audience of sad news to become the new actors, who play out a fresh drama themselves. It’s not our EU departure that is the headline but the reaction of the who people who are ostensibly devastated by it.

I’m fascinated and exasperated by it all in equal measure.

Fascinated because the role of social media in its propagation is content marketing with a Ben Johnson-grade of smoke blown up its own arse. A seemingly endless web of new audiences can spring up around any or all these snowflakes, which in gathering momentum create whole avalanches of snowballs that grow with an exponential power you’d find it mind-bending to quantify. Much more effective than any spray-and-pray dissemination that traditional activists spunk up. And the missive diffuses hard and fast, and at high-factor multiplication.

It’s idea-metastasis on Chernobyl-strength radiation and if the idea or emotion is negative, it’s truly frightening. Interestingly, that’s how the whole Brexit piece gathered its momentum. You see, whatever cause is being championed, the underlying mechanisms and structures are going to be the same. And even where – as with Brexit – one side demonstrates a more effective mastery of the darker arts, the other side will without delay up their game to level the playing field.

And that brings us back to the weeping, broken, coin-avoiding #FBPE doomsday cult. As vacuous but as contagious as the £350m red bus bullshit. You’s have to be as thick as pigturd to be carried along by any of it, but many were and are. Different messages, same mechanisms.

Same dishonesty, different sides of the argument.

So, does all this sorrow reflect genuine grief? Does it heck. This grandstanding is all fuelled by an inner need to satisfy emotional needs, rather than any real rapport with the EU as an institution. The majority of freaktard Remainers had as little insight into the mechanisms of the EU as your average rabid Leaver prior to 2016. They now need the grief of their loss like the flag-weaving freaks need their triumphalist parties.

In some ways, losing the referendum and ultimately leaving gave them so much more than winning and remaining would have. It has made them feel truly alive as opposed to obligatory endurance of their wet-blanket, dishwater-dull biological existences. The euphoria of winning is ephemeral. The pain of losing and perceived injustice will burn a lot longer. For some of these morons, this will keep them going, even define them, for life.

The truth is that they’d all be better off getting a hobby.

In some senses, this ersatz grieving will become a new religion, with its solemnity, candles, and artefacts. Something to bring sections of communities together and to provide a stimulus for the giving of pastoral guidance. They will suffer for our salvation.

For some Remainers at the funeral of our EU membership, it will be comforting – and possibly compensatory – to be able to whip themselves up into an outrage about something that ultimately, they can walk away from in the end. It may change somethings, but nobody’s going to die. A risk-free way of letting off some steam. Let them have their moment, I suppose.

For others, though, the whole disruptive sideshow of Brexit satisfies wholly different needs.

And there are plenty of alternative consumers of the spectacle. As an aside, when I say alternative, my reference point is what I had always been led to believe was the starting point from which to deal with any challenge: looking at the facts and working out the next best steps.

It’s not like that now.

For many, the spectacle of this celebration of impotence alleviates boredom and provides entertainment. The intensity of emotions experienced by the snowflake saps will amount to nothing more than grief porn for the more edgy personalities. Some titillation to quicken the pulse and inject some spark into the mundane everyday routine. And not all of these would even have voted Leave. A growing number of erstwhile Remainers take equal delight in the self-imposed suffering of the euro-lemmings. Even some of the more impassioned Remainers grew appalled at the emotional arguments for the EU that would surely whistle in the wind like those of the Empire-nostalgic Dads’ Army of Leaver little Englanders. And so it came to pass because the Leave win was arguably more of a Remain loss.

Furthermore, you might wonder what the percentage of Leave voters was who didn’t care either way about our EU status and just wanted to put some poncy noses out of joint? All those posturing mugs who fawned over every tosh-laden word from every caviar-bloated EU hierophant. Probably more than enough to have swung the result, I would have thought.

Whatever the make-up of this alternative group, you just know that they are simply getting off on the fact that there has been so much emotional upheaval. These are the people who get their kicks from watching the world burn. At one end of the spectrum it’s Schadenfreude; at the other end those who simply feel a light titillation with an exciting but murky event that they can connect to, safely, at a distance. You know, the same lickspittles who are fascinated by true crime but who shit themselves when somebody raises their voice in a pub.

So, the ‘suffering’ of these home-knitted planks truly does provide salvation for some, albeit as a beta-effect of their snivelling. It’s not the coming together again as a nation that most of us were after, but we’ll not look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it’s a (candlelit) night mare (sic).

Some of these Rejoin space cowboys have stated that they won’t let up until the UK re-attaches itself to the Euro-machine. That’s a lot of life to be spent grousing for an outcome that no person alive today will see in their lifetime. Unless of course renewed EU membership sees hitherto uncontemplated concessions from either side. And that isn’t going to happen. The EU won’t concede further ground beyond the UK’s previous membership arrangement, and the current Rejoin support would whither to a slither if Schengen and the Euro became mandatory.

Karl Marx referred to religion being the opium of the people. Well, make no mistake, Brexit grief has become the new religion with more adherents than even Christianity can muster in the 21st Century UK. Everybody needs to get real, or we’ll be spending a lot longer than the next 3 years or so high on the new poppy and deeper into denial.

It will be like a never-ending circus of mourning.

Meanwhile, only the funeral directors will be laughing. Along with the Russians and Chinese, of course.

unsplash-logoAndrey Zvyagintsev