Brexiteers stole my peanut butter

A light jesting piece in the Grundina today that might be worth some sort of freudian  'symptomatic reading' if I could be bothered. The author is one H Freeman, who seems to have become a cultural commentator, having risen from the ranks of occasional writer about fashion and celebs in a playful outsiderish sort of way (she is American I think).

The central conceit of the piece is to invert what Freeman takes to be central planks of the imagined world of Brexit Britain. So a 'hard Remain' would involve us having to adopt the worst of European tastes --Nutella not peanut butter [jam, surely, preferably made with cheap British strawberries?], speaking Flemish, drinking coffee out of bowls, wearing berets etc. Laugh! (well no, not much.

I read it first as  material for my never-ending quest about what a hard Remain might actually mean for people, but Freeman ducks that serious issue altogether, of course (except she does say that it would probably involve joining the euro). 

A symptomatic reading would focus on the bizarre stereotypes and luvvie contempt for others that seem to have produced some deep anger and disgust in this rant .

the British people realised that Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Arron Banks had somehow made themselves the rulers of this country...the Brexiters, immediately took this to mean that the people had not just spoken but specifically said, “Please give us the most extreme, most self-defeating, most ideological Brexit possible, even though it means breaking almost all the promises you made during the campaign, such as more money for schools and hospitals, staying in the single market and customs union, and a deal being totally easy to pull off. We don’t care about the quality of our lives – just give us hard Brexit!... As the Brexiters told us once the wheels of hard Brexit started to come off, Brexit was not actually about finances, but about identity. “I never said it would be a beneficial thing to leave [the EU], just that we would be self-governing,” Farage said in June on LBC radio....based on nostalgia, like hard Brexit

The steroetypes about Europeans and their culture are nearly as bad, though, a mixture of disgusting foods, silly incomprehensible languages and, worst of all, outdated clothes. Some of the things Freeman seems to think we would lose are really American imports -- incuding peanut butter.  

It is possible to argue that it is Freeman who is culturally conservative and nostalgic for the old days when we could expect the right sort  of people to be running the country, nice and paternalistically, when extremism was kept in check, when European culture meant the sort of comically backward things you encounter on holiday and could laugh about, and it could all be managed by a Londoner connoisseur consumer dabbling in the most trivial 'multicultural'  goods (the world as cultural supermarket as Turner once said about religious belief).