"Going fission": Moeller joins the dissolutionists
"Abraham Lincoln really did a number on us," says Thomas Naylor, founder of the non-violent, left-libertarian secessionist organization, the Second Vermont Republic, "He convinced the vast majority of Americans that secession is illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional."That quote appears in Bill Kauffman's 2010 book "Bye Bye Miss American Empire," which explores in depth, and with much color, a handful of individual regional political movements that exist today with the mission of withdrawing their state or region of the country from the United States of America. Kauffman, who supports the separatist movements on principle, and politically resides in a sort of Ron Paul/Ralph Nader/anarchist triangle, has written a book ostensibly supporting state's rights on this topic while also disavowing ethnic purity movements. Those that "want to separate as a means of preserving the white race, or La Raza, or pure Hawaiian blood, or whatever their ethnic obsession happens to be. I don't write about them. Life is too short to waste on assholes."
Today's media would-- and do-- label secessionist movements as "libertarian," but it's worth noting that communalism can only exist on a smaller scale also. It's really about localism. Do you consider localized direct democracy to be the best form of government? Except for the wealthiest among us that pervert the system, we all feel an undeniable sense of powerlessness in our nation of 300 million-some souls. Kauffman lays it out this way: "A Vermonter who dislikes his town's junk-car ordinance can remonstrate with his landsmen; a Vermonter who dislikes the Wall Street bailout or the Iraq War can shut up and get drunk, but he can't get within a Free Speech Zone of Barack Obama."
Consider me formally intrigued by the notion of a mass exodus of the states. I am recently coming to see this outcome as the logical extention of the movement to dismantle the American Empire I waste so many evenings writing about. Americans have a hard time understanding this, living as they do in the country that is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" (Martin Luther King Jr.), but a global empire is capable of causing a hell of a lot more bloodshed than any regional tyrant. Consider the words of Karl Hess, "Adolf Hitler as the chancellor of Germany is a horror; Adolf Hitler at a town meeting would be an asshole." Overwhelmingly, for me, the greatest benefit I perceive of a potential mass secession of states, besides humans asserting their desire for a greater liberty, would be the defunding and dismantling of the American war machine.
Some states would do much better than others on their own, according to me. I have no problem envisioning the Second Vermont Republic as an almost paradise on Earth-- townhall-style representative government for their just over half a million people, a great education system, health care as a human right, along with a sustainable, green economy. In truth, Southern states would likely spiral downward economically. They're massively supported by the federal welfare tap in the form of military spending, and assistance for the needy that is much needed there as their workforce is almost entirely non-union, and upward mobility severely limited by a craptastic education system in most of the states. I share your concerns about a hypothetical Republic of Southern States of America, and the prospects of such a government for guaranteeing the protection of minority rights, and I'm not limiting that phrase to mean ethnic and racial minorities, but minority opinions as well. But I share the same concerns about Iraq, and I'm not advocating for Iraq to join the Union. The South has New Orleans. They'll be alright.
In Lincoln's time, the greatest threats to dehumanization came from the institution of slavery and from the violent continental expansion of the federal government and its army. Slavery was outlawed, but the violent colonial expansion continues unimpeded. We are dehumanized today by being the ultimately complicit, yet generally powerless, citizens of a depraved government, hijacked by war criminals, that, in just its latest incarnation, is the type that sends robots to bomb Muslim civilians, officially recategorizes the civilian dead as "terrorists" to cast a shroud over their crimes, and then while the "terrorist" is being buried, sends the robots again to drop bombs on the funeral procession.
The ineffectiveness of the even larger governing body, the United Nations, to control these actions further illustrates the limitations of sprawling governments. The United States ignores U.N. bylaws and resolutions. It has refused to pay its bill. It plows forward with racist wars unsupported by the other member nations. Arundhati Roy calls the U.N. "the world's janitor.. employed to clean other people's shit... used and abused at will."
Democratic representation is a facade in the U.S. also. The House of Representatives, "the people's house," has only one representative for every 647,000 citizens. In 2012, there are over 300 million Americans. In 1776, there were 2.5(!) million, and there were 65 representatives, one for every 38,000 Americans. Nobody with purse strings today ever advocates expanding this number of delegates. I guess this is because they wouldn't all fit inside the 1793-constructed Capitol Building during State of the Union night, and because it would mean more lawmakers to have to bribe. And consider California, a state with 37 million people, and what would be the 8th largest economy in the world if it was on its own. They have only two votes in the United States Senate, and they're both cast by Jewish women from San Francisco. Wyoming's half a million people get 2 votes when we declare war. The second largest city in the nation, Los Angeles, effectively gets none, and if that's not bad enough, the Los Angelinos' state government is even 400 miles away from the city limits. It's no wonder they're all nuts out there.
The only traditional way for a U.S. President to wake Americans from their slumber has been to bomb some non-white people, and now even that doesn't cause a stir among the hooples. The vast majority of Americans have checked out entirely, and the ones that marry themselves to the idea of possible reform, you know the kind that wander around with sandwich-board copies of the Bill of Rights over their shoulders, are the ones perceived as lunatics. Those are my people. I guess it's true for the rest that, as Rosa Luxemburg once wrote, "Those who do not move, don't notice their chains."
Kauffman quotes the author Norman Mailer, who had the cut of a fellow traveler. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969 on a platform of having the nation's largest municipality secede from the rest of New York state as a 51st star on the flag. Says Mailer, "We are like wards of an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us-- we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to look to criticize the lack of our power to criticize... Our condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy." Sing it, brother.
I know the conventional wisdom is that state secession is a wildly unlikely scenario, but the seeds are being planted, and the Constitution has actually always been neutral on the topic. (We can add states, but we can't subtract?) It certainly won't happen first here in landlocked Iowa, but there are very real movements afoot in the geographical hinterlands-- Alaska, Hawaii, and the territory of Puerto Rico most prominent, with lesser ones in Texas, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The Soviet Union broke up only about half a decade or so after a time when the prospect had seemed an utter impossibility. Every other empire in history eventually disintegrated. Ours is the only empire left so it makes sense that it would be the next to go.
It's hard to imagine the oligarchy in Washington saying goodbye to Alaska without a fight, because of the state's abundance of natural resources, or Hawaii, with its strategic military position. They're central to the Empire, and that's why we're in both of those places to begin with. So maybe an outpost like Vermont is the perfect location to throw the first sledgehammer at the wall. Neither Democrats nor Republicans would miss the maple syrup socialists of the Green Mountains.
I have not come today to bury the Union. The stench of the Union's rotting corpse is so putrid at this point, I don't even want to get near it. Maudlin sentiment is hardly a good enough reason to keep the band together. Our national concerts are increasingly a medley of stale old tunes better left to a previous generation, but with half of the audience booing when you try to play the stuff off the new album. A worse yet excuse for continued unification is patriotism. I could give two shits about that vile weapon of warmongers. We need to face facts that we, as American citizens, have absolutely no control over this government as it exists. Casting a ballot is not an exercise in citizenship. If it was, your ballot would have choices on it. In any other location on the globe in which the only "choice" was between two corporate-chosen and vetted candidates, Americans would call the system "fascism." At least at one time we would have. Before the gangrene. Powerlessness over time breeds tolerance for helplessness. Voting in America today is more like an act of surrender-- less the act of participation in democratic government than a personal submission to the sorry reality of being only a cog in the machine.
Let's start over in several key regions with the benefit of two and a quarter centuries of hindsight. If the "forefather" metaphor is apt, then as their descendants, it's impractical for all of the cousins to continue living, as we do, in the same house playing by the old rules. Time immemorial has turned the first Americans into omniscient deities when they were far from it. The "forefathers" had some fantastic ideas, true, and then they were also, almost to the man, white supremacists. If they came back to life today, don't you think many of them would be shocked and dismayed to see that we were treating their blueprint from a now-ancient time as something more akin to a holy text? It was only a blueprint, for fuck's sake. I think they would also say, what's a Hawaii?
Time marches on, and sometimes people simply outgrow each other. In the 21st century, educated people recognize the imprudence of staying together in an unhealthy, emotionally abusive, violent marriage with broken communication, little cooperation, and all parties involved talking over each other at all times. It's time to part amicably while we still have a shred of humanity to allow for amicability. We can still visit.
posted by CM @ 9:21 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home