I wrote this in the spring of this year, long before Charlottesville, early April to judge from the opening, but decided against printing it here, on account of it had nothing to do with baseball and I’d already published a few columns that were mostly not about baseball (etymology, poetry, voting systems) and also because I thought it would annoy people, and not in a good way. Mainly I thought it would annoy Bill, in that it consigns him to living in a country that I obviously don’t admire very much, but since in the past few days, Bill has expressed remarkably similar ideas to those expressed here, I think I’m merely fleshing out one possible way of turning Bill’s idea into practice. Now this is sort of odd, I think, in that the recent discussion began with Bill responding to a "Hey Bill" of mine by labelling me a "self-righteous kidney" or "self-righteous hypothalamus" (I may have gotten the body part wrong, but I never forget an accusation of self-righteousness) but we seem to be in very close accord, at least as I understand his notions of secession and union.
This was originally titled "Can we all get along?" which I’ve appended below so it makes sense, but otherwise this is my early April piece, unchanged, salvaged from the reject pile.
Can we all get along?
No.
We can’t.
They surrendered to us 152 years ago next Sunday, us being the Union Army and them being the Rebs, but I’m starting to think that they were right. Not about slavery, of course, nor about the agrarian future of this country, nor about how long vegetables and meats should be cooked, nor really about anything, but this: the South shall rise again. As long as that’s their position, as long as Southerners insist that they never lost that war, or that they were victims of Northern aggression, or just that they don’t care who won the war, they’re going to preserve their culture and, wherever possible, impose it on the rest of us, I’m starting to agree with them. Maybe we’d just be better off as two separate countries. As that early Communist and late Goldwater-Republican John Dos Passos wrote presciently (about himself and about the country), we already are two countries. Let’s make it official.
Seems to me that we – Americans—are having the same arguments over and over and over again, never settling anything for longer than a few years at a time, bouncing violently between electing rightwing governments who overturn the previous centralized democratic-socialist government’s practices and laws, and then a new batch of decentralized unregulated free-market capitalist governments that do the same. This isn’t progress, or balance; it’s perpetual opposition, negativity, discontent, discord, and hatred. It’s institutionalized nay-saying. And it mostly comes down to North vs. South, rural vs urban, and similar things that are largely geographical in nature. So why not a simple geographical solution?
We certainly need some radical move to make progress here, instead of being stuck in this perpetual squabbling about a zillion different issues that aren’t going away: single-payer health insurance, the federal deficit, the defense budget and the role of the military, public transportation, immigration, abortion, tobacco use, foreign aid, torture, medical marijuana, you name it. Why not settle all this stuff by forming two separate countries, and get on with our lives?
It won’t be easy, maybe not even possible, but wouldn’t it be lovely to settle all the above-named squabbles (and so many more) so that a clear majority in each new country would be mostly happy with the way these squabbles got resolved? Here’s what I propose:
Canada annexes the U.S. East Coast and West Coast and parts of the North Coast. (Or those parts of the U.S. annex Canada—either way. Dudn’t matter.) By aligning with Canada, we would form two countries, each of them perfectly contiguous. (The North gets Hawai’i, though. The South gets Alaska. The North/South thing would make more sense the other way around, but non-contiguous is non-contiguous, and the politics work out better that way.) The C.A.N.U.P.A.S. (Canada And New United Provinces And States) would comprise all of Canada, of course, plus the East Coast as far south as Washington D.C., that hated symbol of oppression. We would, in Barry Goldwater’s colorful language, saw off the Eastern Seaboard and give the South its freedom back. The whole West Coast would be Canupas, of course, and on the North Coast we would get Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, taking Chicago, that corrupt mess, off the South’s hands, too.
The exact states would be open to discussion. The border might get drawn, for example, somewhere in the middle of the state of Virginia instead of along the Potomac, and if we can get Arizona to sign up then we can add New Mexico and Colorado, too. All we need from Arizona is the southern part of the state, including Tucson and Phoenix. Nevada can join the Union, too, if they want. Maybe we could extend the south up through the central part of Pennsylvania, to include that middle section that’s often nicknamed Northern Alabama plus maybe a few New York State counties west of Ithaca. State borders would be irrelevant here, so we might, for example, draw a line from Idaho’s southwestern corner south to the southwestern corner of Utah, and down through the northern section of Arizona and New Mexico, up along the Continental Divide to the middle of Wyoming. Things like that. It’s all up for grabs.
In fact the "states" as such would be irrelevant. Inside of Canupas, we might redraw the current states far differently: perhaps New England would be one big entity (state, province, call it what you will) and New York, New Jersey and southern Connecticut another. The upper Midwest might be another, and so on, along the West Coast and the southwest states. I see Canupas realigning along larger entities, but maybe the New Confederacy would like to align along many smaller ones, so as to give the maximum power to each smaller locale to determine its own laws, with no federal bureaucracy imposing its will on any of them.
The New Confederacy can fly their Rebel flags all day long and all night if they choose to, make Christianity mandatory in their public schools, make thinking about abortion into a felony, and outlaw vaccines. They would have the Southern coast the full length of Texas all the way up the southern part of the East coast as far as the Virginia border, plus the Mississippi River all the way from New Orleans to the Ohio River, where it would then form the border between Iowa and Illinois.
Is it terrible of me to consign my progressive but Southern brethren and sistern to live their lives under Confederate rule, and worse of me to oppress those conservative northerners like Rudy Giuliani and that idiot LePage to live under oppressive Canusap rule? Hey, everybody’s free to move and live in the part of the continent where their views prevail. Personally, I would be sorry to lose Florida, where I have a house, and possibly Colorado where I have family, but like I say—hey! Everybody’s free to move….
The big issue would be what would happen to urban centers in the New Confederacy, small areas with big populations that mostly vote Blue—Austin, Raleigh, Cleveland, places like that. Some of this issue could be dealt with by finetuning the borders (I don’t think it would be too hard to get Cleveland into the contiguous Canupas, for example) but any way you slice it, you’re still going to have liberal voters living in Lawrence, Kansas, deeply unhappy living in the New Confederacy as well as farmers living in rural New Hampshire who feel alienated from the politics of Canupas. This means that minorities and gays and women in the New Confederacy will find that a lot of the progress that they’ve made over the past century has gotten undone, and I would say to them that by moving to a different part of the country, they can make more progress still, as I would say to the New Hampshire farmer complaining that his country has just gotten horrible: there’s a country next door with your precise values, speaking your language, welcoming you with open arms. Go, or else shut up about how important your values are to you.
Even if we didn’t annex Arizona and New Mexico, which opens the door to Colorado, the southern California border still leaves open the possibility of eventually annexing old Mexico as well, and still have a contiguous openly multi-lingual country, from the North Pole down to the Panama Canal. (I think I this would mean annexing Guatemala and Costa Rica and El Salvador; I’m not too solid on my Central American geography.) We wouldn’t have (or need) a wall on our southern border, of course, because our southern border would be the northern side of the Panama Canal. We’d be one big country, just next door to another big country. But Texas would be free to construct (and pay for) whatever barrier they choose to keep our Old Mexican citizens out of the Rio Grande, and the Canupians out of the rest of their country. They can be xenophobic to their heart’s content.
I think life in this New Confederacy would be hell, of course, but New Confederates would think that life in Canupas would be worse than hell. Oddly, I think both sides would be right in this assessment, as I think both sides probably believe that each society is doomed to implode. And who knows, maybe Canupas would be overrun by furriners and become a coast to coast urban ghetto terrorized by drug-dealing transgender gangsters regularly unshackled by a liberal judiciary. I don’t see that happening, but I do see a New Confederacy without a viable workforce (I imagine a lot of immigration to the Canupas by underpaid and exploited workers), isolated from the rest of the world.
Personally, what I’d most like to see (in the sense of "wondering" and in the sense of "put-up-or-shut-up") would be what the New Confederacy would do about its own federal government when they no longer have "Warshington DeeCee" to blame all their problems on. Would they go to a states-rights model, with an extremely weak federal government? I can’t see how that would work effectively, how they would have any sort of cohesive foreign policy, or how it would be anything other than a crazy patch-quilt of laws that change, sometimes radically, every few miles? I believe they now victimize the current federal government mostly as a means of evading responsibility for living in a pluralistic society, and blaming problems on "them" instead of solving those problems, but maybe I’m wrong. I’d like to see if I am. Best case scenario for the New Confederacy is that they could show us what a model non-centralized government looks like, freed from all federal constraints, though I see the opposite happening and the New Confederacy begging to re-join the Canupas after a few disastrous decades. As they see with us, I’m sure.
Let’s find out. The virtue of living in a country whose values you respect outweighs for me the vice of constantly relitigating the same non-budging issues over and over.
This guy here, Kevin Baker, https://newrepublic.com/article/140948/bluexit-blue-states-exit-trump-red-america came up with a less radical redrawing of the map, and maybe his political "blue states exit" plan makes more practical sense than mine, but they both speak to the same impulse: Put up or shut up. The lesson I take from the election just passed is that Republicans have been campaigning forever on a platform of "Bad Federal gummint shoving us around, shoving health care down our throats, we’re smarter than you elite faggots think, we could do everything better if you give us power," and guess what? They sold that bill of goods to a majority of voters (well, a minority, but let’s not relitigate that one, too) and now they’ve got the power. Turns out they don’t want to redesign health care, and I suspect they don’t want to do a lot of things they’ve been saying they would do if only they got the power. There are a lot of white folks on food stamps, on opioids, on expensive prescription drugs, on Social Security, on Medicaid who, push come to shove (and push has arrived), actually want the entitlements they’ve voted against.
Do I think this can or will or should happen? Not really. But I wouldn’t lose very much if it did, would benefit personally in many ways, as most of my political stripe would, and I think sincerely offering it (or a more modified version, such as Baker’s article proposes) will put the feet of fake Confederates into the fire, where they belong. If you’re for individualism, state’s rights, free-market Darwinian no-gummitt capitalism, then ok: you can have it. Gorge yourselves on it. But the truth is that you don’t really want those things. You just want to bitch about how the fed’ral gummitt reg’lations oppress you, when in reality they are shoveling my money your way. Put up or shut up. I’m tired of your whining.
Here’s somebody who thinks I’m blaming the wrong people, and who thinks we all CAN get along:
http://www.alternet.org/culture/liberal-shaming-appalachia-inside-media-elites-obsession-hillbilly-problem