Logan's Done

I'm buoyed by the case for Scottish independence and hope that it gives the Basques and the Catalans and the Slow Foods movement and the Walloons and the Texans and the Inuit and the obscure tribes of the Amazon ideas.  Liberal futurism is always so blandly totalitarian--whether utopian or dystopian, the whole Earth is forever resolving itself into world governments or other vast transnational, deracinated, cultureless, monolingual blocs, as if history is but a pale reflection of entropy and in the inevitable flight from primitive tribalism our animal passions cool to match the background radiation and we all end up in white corridors wearing space jumpsuits and eating our food in pill form.  But why should the future be thus?  Liberalism likes to blow kisses in the direction of diversity, but seems to fundamentally despise actual difference, and when they blow their stacks because some obviously racist conservative type denounces them as the real racists, I sorta hafta laugh, because it thrusts awfully near an uncomfortable truth, which is not, lord knows, that Asians are the smartest and blacks have an extra calf muscle due to natural selection on the slave ships or whatever, but rather that culture actually exists and has meaning; that it cannot simply be dissolved by New Deal social democracy or a more unified European fiscal policy or even hundreds of years of subjugation by some larger national entity.  Riddle me this, maze uh-meez: why shouldn't the Basques be free?