Disunion

by Jim Washburn

“No problems yet as computer worm awakens.”

“Mom reacts to laser arrest.”

“Somali Pirates employ Global Positioning Satellite technology.”

“Texas Gov. asserts right to secede.”

If the newspapers of today could be chucked 40 years into the past, how many of the headlines would look like science fiction? The one that really gets me is Texas’ Republican governor Rick Perry claim that his state has the right to secede from the union. So much for “the party of Lincoln.”

Perry has since taken pains to stress that he only thinks that state could secede, not that it should, yet, but it’s still a deeply uncivil notion, particularly when voiced not as a legal abstract in a law journal but in the heat of the Obama-hatin’ anti-tax tea parties.

A small sci-fi bell just went off in my head, like that tinkley sound you’d hear right before Captain Kirk tapped some Romulan ass—he did the Horta, too, but you know that.

The tinkley bell said, “Fritz Leiber A Spectre is Haunting Texas.” Fritz was the underrated sci-fi giant who wrote a great story in 1964 about human destiny being shaped by sentient oil that needed us to build rockets so it could go visit oil on other planets. I’d recalled his Texas book having something to do with a state that had grown too big for its britches, but I forgot the details.

Someone was kind enough to summarize it for Wikipedia: Scully Christopher Crockett La Cruz, whose family had immigrated from Earth, returns to the former Canada “only to discover that Canada is now North Texas and what is left of civilization in North America is ruled by primitive, backslapping, bigger than life anti-intellectual ‘good ole boys’ convinced of their own moral superiority.”

Chuck your 1968 Leiber book 41 yours into the future, and old sci-fi looks like today’s headlines. Smug anti-intellectualism is practically a conservative litmus test these days, making the right a place with no home for the reason and moral rectitude of a William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater. Those guys loved a good debate.

We’re two months into the Obama presidency, and they’re raising the specter of secession? Can’t they just nail some theses to the door instead? Why go nuclear? He’s the President of the United States, for chrissakes, not Rodan. Obama was elected by the conservatives’ brother and sister Americans, an unambiguous majority of them. Suck it up, guys. That happens in a democracy, when the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene.

Where were these tea partiers when Bush was racking up the biggest deficit in our history, while perhaps getting us the least good out of all that money of any president in history? How are they sitting with the trillion dollar war we didn’t need? Why weren’t they taking to the streets when Bush started the Wall Street bailouts, with none of the accountability and transparency Obama’s sought?

Methinks the teabaggers whineth too much. Even at the worst of Bush’s Constitution-shredding and nation-gutting I didn’t hear people on the left talk about dissolving the nation. Now conservatives are mewling about a report from the Department of Homeland Security assessing potential home front threats, upset because it mentions anti-abortion and anti-immigration groups as potential sources of threats, and that veterans might be targeted by radicals for membership. Some allege the report will be used to justify spying on law-abiding organizations. Some see an Obama plot, no matter that the report was initiated and largely completed during the Bush administration, plus it has a sister report on potential threats from leftist organizations.

Where were these voices over the past eight years, when law-abiding anti-war organizations, including veterans’ ones, actually were actively spied-upon and infiltrated by the government? It’s not outlandish for the report to suggest anti-abortion groups can produce radicals who foment violence, since they have a long history of killing doctors and burning clinics. And there is certainly reason to be concerned over a nexus of radical right organizations and disgruntled veterans with advanced weapons training, as a hole in Oklahoma will attest. But right-wing commentators are spinning this as being a slur on our brave troops, you know, the troops of whom there are 4,274 fewer alive today thanks to Bush’s grandiose missteps?

The original Boston Tea Party was an insurrectionist act, and rightly so. Not only were the colonists ill-served and little-represented by the British government, they also had a better idea of how to do things. And now we have yahoos primed to sink our more perfect union in the nearest body of water. Why? Because democracy prevailed. We have a representative government. If, for example, Obama wants to move toward normalizing relations with Cuba, it’s not because he’s a socialist; it’s because the old way has failed for a half-century and 71% of the people he represents want to try a new way.

And it isn’t like Obama woke up one morning saying, “There’s not enough on my plate: let’s normalize relations with Cuba.” It’s because he was about to meet with of our good neighbors in the Americas, and they are all asking us to normalize relations with Cuba, as they have, and as we have with far worse regimes in China and elsewhere.

So now he’s being attacked for listening to these fellow nations. “America can make up its own mind!” is one complaint. Sure, but isn’t it a good idea to listen to all points of view first? We have a long history of not doing that—of seeing all relations as adversarial, and always dealing from a position of power—which has created whole new sets of problems for us.

Is that what we’re going to do with our states next? Instead of being a family where the 50 siblings work through their differences, will we become 50 rival corporations vying for advantage?

The right’s festive insurrectionists would replace our system with what? With the Republican budget, the one that didn’t have any numbers in it? With the free-falling nation of Greater Katrina? With the daily pronouncements of Ubermeister Limbaugh?

“If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.” Thomas Paine said that.

“You can be in my dream if I can be in your dream.” Bob Dylan said that.

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