Ink Tea Stone Leaf

A certain member of the House of Representatives called recently, not for the first time, for the negotiation of a separation of the United States into two parts. I thought this was rather cavalier of her, considering how hard she has worked to allow her chosen dictator and the party he has enslaved to get their grips on the whole of it of it, and how thoroughly that party fetishizes the flag and would surely object to removing any of its precious stars. The fact that it sounds somewhat appealing to me just makes it feel all the more like bait; is she hoping enough people on the other side of the divide will endorse this to justify mass treason trials? Or am I giving her too much credit in assuming that she knows how to set and bait a trap?

Of course, my education grounded me in the conviction that secession is not a viable or legal option in the United States, tainted as it is by the legacy of slavery and the Confederacy, and contrary to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and all of our greatest leaders. But much as I recoil instinctively against the idea of secession, I have to admit that a break in the Union is not an entirely unrealistic outcome, given our current circumstances. Most sovereign states are not as large or as culturally diverse as the USA, and the example of the Soviet Union shows that such things are possible even when they appear unthinkable. And if it could be accomplished through legal and peaceful means rather than through a civil war, then two thirds or more of my objections to the notion would soften considerably. It still might not be a great idea, but it would at least get fewer people killed.

To put it simply, even if the Congresswoman’s half of the country got to keep the name and the flag (however many stars they put on it), I would rather remain where I am and become a citizen of whatever post-American entity established itself in my locale. And if my half got to keep those things? Just as well. Might be just as bad, but either way it’s equal.

The thing is, when people like the Congresswoman call for things like this, they are not thinking in terms of what is best for the country, or the world (thinking about what is best for the rest of the world is actually one of the things they would like to redefine as treason). They are thinking in terms of the algorithms governing their social media feeds. It annoys them that they have to share a flag with people and places that won’t conform to their agenda. It bothers them to have to think about places like New York and Los Angeles as part of their own country, to which they would consequently have some responsibility. They would be more psychologically comfortable regarding such places as foreign, so that they could ignore them, and allow themselves to know even less about what it is actually like to live in those places than they already do.

I would like that too. I would rather have the luxury of worrying about the people living under the authoritarian rule of today’s Republican party than continue to be one of them. I love pie, and I love it best in the sky.

As shallow as these motivations may be, there are real reasons to suppose that the United States, as it is, ought not to exist any longer. The establishment of this transcontinental empire, extending even to islands half a world away from its capital city, was accomplished through dishonorable conquest and the ideology of racial supremacy. The effort to apply a single national standard to hundreds of millions of people, as defined by the culture of colonists who viciously enslaved the indigenous people of one continent while attempting to brutally exterminate the indigenous people of another, is not an ordinary exercise in national unity. Over long enough spans of time, great land empires collapse one way or another. This empire has done nothing to suggest it is immune to the ebb and flow of history.

If people of the Congresswoman’s persuasion do not like me bringing these things up, I would like to cordially remind them that she is the one who brought up the idea of dissolving the Union, not I. I would have it continue regardless, as long as I thought it were possible. I may fantasize about hard core right wingers voluntarily establishing their own theocratic state on some remote arctic island, or perhaps the moon, and leaving me alone. But I’m not the kind of person who thinks they ought to be deported.

The thing is, our motivations for wanting to split up do matter, because they color our next steps. When the Congresswoman talks about a national divorce, she is not contemplating her side having to give up anything of value. The things that the other half of America possesses, she either regards as having no value (because she is a fool) or she believes that her half would be entitled to hold onto. For example, we in the progressive states would not be allowed to hold onto the military installations or hardware in our territories; the reactionary states will need those in order to continue menacing and occasionally invading our cities. This will, incidentally, be much less controversial when this technically no longer constitutes the use of the military against American citizens.

The idea that the Congresswoman would need to get her passport stamped in order to take her family to visit the Statue of Liberty does not enter into her idea of a National Divorce. Neither is she magnanimously consenting to pay her President’s tariffs when importing such goods as are grown or manufactured in California or Illinois. She is not expecting that the Federal money the most reactionary states receive will lessen as a result of a loss of tax income from the more progressive, and generally wealthier, states. When she talks about negotiating the separation of our two halves, she envisions using the power her party presently holds to extract every possible concession and reduce the other side to poverty and dependency.

People like the Congresswoman are not concerned with what they stand to lose in a National Divorce because that isn’t what they actually want. What they want is to turn their political enemies into aliens, and expel them. In their fantasies, this means losing nothing except opposition. In reality, they can’t have that without civil war, which is to say they can’t have it at all, because in a civil war they will lose more than their fantasies can encompass.

This is ultimately what secession means in the United States. One day it may be necessary to envision, and subsequently to build, one or more post-American societies on this continent. Perhaps, over the long view of history, this will be viewed as a kind of justice. But people who wave secession or “National Divorce” around as a magic wand for making inconveniences go away are not acting in the best interest of anybody except their own egos. I don’t think the Congresswoman has thought this proposal through with any more depth or seriousness than she did when proposing that wildfires were caused by Jews with space lasers, but it’s precisely a lack of depth and seriousness in the politics of this country that has enabled her and her cohort to remake our republic into such an unappealing prospect.