Bitter for two more years while discussing Lacan

The Observer today on how to react to proposals to celebrate Brexit Day.  A grim - looking C Bennett sees it as:

A blue passport on the fourth plinth, dog shows in abandoned libraries, a Wetherspoon [so much more vulgar than Man Booker] literary prize? We can but hope 

the great You Lost Get Over It Festival ...the principal task for its newly appointed director, the event professional Martin Green, will be selling the fiction that a crass, xenophobic, hideously timed and inherently divisive event, conceived of purely as a trumpeting of the country’s Moggian – ie immigrant and metropolitan elite-free – destiny, can also bring us, as Green puts it, “joy and hope and community”.

Bennett sees the appeal to creative talent from the director as a way back in for the legendary:

individuals who recognise themselves in Dominic Cummings’s recent caricature: “Oxbridge English graduates who chat about Lacan at dinner parties with TV producers and spread fake news about fake news.”

But surely, as an occasional discusser of Lacan myself, albeit not at dinner parties with TV producers, the point is to get genuinely creative people,not sad recyclers of fourth-hand wisdom. Anyone who has really read Lacan, as opposed to being able to chat about him, (one or two people) would be marvellous -- from the little I have gained, Lacan is very insightful and pretty funny, even if also a full-on French academic discourse and bullshit  peddler.

Researchers at British Future have commended, as a model for the new festival, that project’s “reach and resonance across different sections of society, crossing divides by politics, geography, age, ethnicity and class”.

But the event organisers disagree about choosing 2022 as the date. That year, Bennett reminds us would be

the anniversary [she meant centenary?] of Irish partition [and will take place among] continuing post-Brexit divisions and disintegration,

She speaks of the rights of the 48% (which she assumes are just as bitter as she is) to mourn. In a rather self-aggrandising and virtue-claiming sentence:

Nobody, not even the miserabilist cynics ritually denounced by professional choreographers of national pride, objected to remembrances for the war dead.

And then, some real bile,curiously revealing of npb prejudices:

How many of the disappointed 48%, however resigned to the outcome, will welcome the chance to forget old principles and come together with Mark Francois? [What a common little man he is!] How shall we celebrate our losses of citizenship? Would it help if the Queen parachuted in? [Vulgar! And all for athletics!] What brilliant cultural intervention – be it theatre, exhibition or a volunteer army – will transform the end of free movement, a stalled economy, shrivelling union, international ridicule and the extinction of the postwar European dream, into something as cynic-crushing as Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder? The new James Bond?

 She is right,however, to remind us of the appalling mess that was the Millenium Dome

That a more skilful generation of planners may surmount similar challenges cannot, however, detoxify the new project.

Bitter Remainers will go on and on, lightly and competitively discussing Lacan at dinner parties, sneering at both J Rees-Mogg and M Francois, and ruing the money spent on promoting the dreadful 2012 Olympics.