Skip to main content

If at first you don't secede, try, try again!. .

We, here in Baja Arizona--you know how contagious all this secession business is--are trying to focus on two things at once, and it is not easy for some of us.  

First, climate change is real, and one of the results of that is that the hot places are getting hotter:  Ouch!  And, second, there has to be some way to put some distance between us and Phoenix.  "Phoenix" is a term referring to Jan Brewer, and Joe Arapaio, and a fine and fair focus on political tea in what is still our capitol city.  Thus, Baja Arizona (Lower Arizona, as in Baja California).  

We lived in Minnesota for a decade, until recently.  In Minnesota, "folks" ("folks" are what "people" are, elsewhere) sometimes referred to the state of Iowa as "Baja Minnesota", so I, having once been an Iowan, too, am used to public scorn.  

Texas has always pretended to be a nation, and still has delusions of the Alamo, not seeming to understand that one of the reasons why they lost at the Alamo was that Mexicans despised their slaveholding aspirations.  Texans don't want slaves,any longer.  They just don't want a Black President.  They might, though, someday have a Hispanic majority, so maybe, if they wait, they can just put White superiority to a vote, and not have to refortify the Alamo.  

When Texas was admitted to the Union, they reserved the right, not to secede (as they sometimes say), but to break themselves up into a number of smaller states.  The City of Austin has already suggested that if Texas secedes from the Union, they want to secede from Texas.  

There are reports that the panhandle of Idaho is a separate nation, but since no one knows where the panhandle of Idaho is, the reports are not trustworthy.  (Texas has a panhandle, too, as do Oklahoma and Nebraska and Florida and Connecticut and Alaska and Maryland, and West Virginia has two of them.  Maybe we should put all the panhandles together and try to make something of them; an armed, religious compound, maybe.  Sell time-share vacation homes!  

In Utah, there is some sentiment among . . . let us say, "alternative lifestyle" communities in the four corners region to snuggle up to like-minded folks in Arizona who might like to honor Brigham Young in multiply-cozy ways.  

As you can see, all this Tea Party talk about secession is just more evidence that the Civil War is still being waged.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...