But now, even as I sit and type, the results of the 2014 referendum on Scotland's independence are coming in and it looks like the wildlings north of the wall have decided to keep the U in U.K. after all.
There was a lot of interest and no small amount of consternation about this issue in this country, curiously, which I extrapolated from the sample group of the 8 other people I work with. Of course we work in a highly politicized industry where voicing your actual opinions on matters of domestic politics will at best spark a poorly worded and overlong "debate" of shouted Fox News vs. MSNBC talking points and at worst get you branded a socialist, automatically disqualifying you from participation in the morning coffee supply collective. Nobody's wanted less in a community than a communist. So maybe it's just that sounding off on foreign politics is a safe way to sound off on... well, anything at all.
It's tough to fathom why Americans might care, given that Scotland is the place, as accurately described by John Oliver, known best as "...the birthplace of Shrek, and that accent you think you can do but actually can't." Maybe it has to do with the potential affect on the fate of some very real nuclear weapons, that seems a bit esoteric, even in the Putin era.
I think actually it's the Fox News/MSNBC problem in the first place. Any issue in the U.S. right now is always binary, always Manichean, blue or red at the exclusive expense of any blurs of purple. Meanwhile, the Scotland vote couldn't be any more stark or simple, with one single-line ballot question whereon one must then vote YES or NO. The fact that it's YES and not AYE is automatically proof of deep rooted anticaledonianism, but what can we say, sometimes racism is institutional.
But this Scottish question, while passionate and earnestly felt, has been expressed in a way that has been unfailingly rational and almost always polite.* Scotswoman and cultural strip-miner J.K. Rowling's most harrowing concern is that she hopes afterward that everyone is still friends. If you're not convinced by anything else, note that the most rip-roaringest, crowd-spurringest speech of the whole cycle was given by animatronic technocrat Gordon Brown, the man chased from the prime ministership of the whole U.K. on charges of terminal boringness.
There's nothing at stake here except the thing that is actually being voted on. In Tea Party America, we trot out the word "traitor" when we disagree on which intersections should get traffic cameras. In the U.K. the pre-vote jitters had to do with trying to figure out how long the post-vote awkwardness might persist between people who supported either side. And this is on an issue which technically one might consider actual treason, undermining the territorial integrity of the country.
I'm glad we're paying attention because I hope we can take away some lessons from this when Hawaii or Alaska or Puerto Rico or the whole of the American South finally get their own secession measures on ballots in front of voters. I don't have a lot of hope though because, in the case of the South, there will be no avoiding the elephant's-trunk-in-the-room question about who gets stuck keeping Florida. If there's anything worth a shooting war, that might be it.
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*Although no doubt with an ample amount of effectively employed vulgarity. No country does it better.
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