City mouse, country mouse
Political Waves
Newly arrived from Texarkana, she was promptly dubbed "Tex." She was older than me, socially inappropriate, embarrassing to a fault and always too loud. Now I'm going to say something really mean: I was THRILLED when she finally left. It took well over a year, one in which every day was painful to my fledgling adolescent sensitivities. She was part of me and mine, I developed an enormous amount of patience to deal with her but -- at a critical time in my 'becoming' -- she was a hindrance I simply couldn't overcome.
I feel the same way now about the South.
Those of you who have read me over the years know I have no love for the Federalists. These are the states rights people, anxious to protect their little corner of privilege and power. We've seen a lot of that recently. In fact, with the rise of the church folk back in the 90s, the states have been flexing their muscles in a way reminiscent of the mid-19th century.
My state, for instance, is trying to pass a law to declare any federal gun laws put into place void, should they occur -- this is called "nullification" and it isn't constitutional. States don't care, they do it anyway; they have since way back ... and way WAY back, a good many of them did so as "the ultimate act of treason."
When the North finally won that war, Lincoln was prepared to be even-handed with the South. All that was put to bed by one disgruntled Southerner, John Wilkes Booth. Abe's replacement, Andrew Johnson, was unable to establish a moderate plan for rehabbing a conquered enemy, rolled over by Radical Republicans who insisted on a pound of flesh for their wartime troubles. This led to a period known as the Reconstruction, for which the South has still not forgiven the Fates that betrayed them nor the rest of the nation for its participation.
They're taking their vengeance now, re-dividing the country along the Mason/Dixon line as well as those invisible barriers established by the culture wars. They've fought our black president to a standstill, and they're not through.
The first read that follows is what I tell myself when I'm exhausted, annoyed, and impatient:
Hell, let 'em go, we can't convince them. Give 'em Texas ... and Georgia and Florida and South Carolina, where they'll back their lying, philandering ex-governor -- creepy Mark Sanford, oozing Christian platitudes and dragging his mistress behind him -- the moment big anonymous money goes after moderate Dem. Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, branding her a liberal abortionist with a police record. If they can't rise above the muck, let them wallow in it.
The next tells you about nullification; who's trying, who's fighting it. Then, read about the new NRA President and the “War of Northern Aggression.” Great Balls of Fire!
Jude
Lee Siegel, the Daily Beast
Apr 30, 2013
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/30/memo-to-the-south-go-ahead-secede-already.html
Let’s not be fooled by all the bipartisan rhetoric that has been streaming out of the GOP since Romney’s self-destruction. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners in a handful of red states still want to secede? Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform. The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage. Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down—and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon. As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.
The sad truth is that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can only be achieved at this point if the nation is split in half. Far from being fanciful or fanatical, the proponents of secession have a stronger grasp of political reality than just about anyone else. In fact, there are serious reasons why the North itself should take the lead in a secessionist movement.
Just think what America would look like without its mostly Southern states. (We could retain “America”: they could call themselves “Smith & Wesson” or “Coca-Cola” or something like that.) Universal health care. No guns. Strong unions. A humane minimum wage. A humane immigration policy. High revenues from a fair tax structure. A massive public-works program. Legal gay marriage. A ban on carbon emissions. Electric cars. Stronger workplace protections. Extended family leave from work in case of pregnancy or illness. Longer unemployment benefits. In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.
But I don’t want to appear blindly partisan—a sundering of the union would make the other half of America equally fulfilled. The red-state republic could finally establish a theocracy in which the fundamentalist Christian church would legislate all the important aspects of civic life. It could either send its illegal and/or legal immigrants northward or reinstitute a reformed system of indenture whereby immigrants are purchased by bona fide citizens who have a fully modernized respect for private property. It could, taking the lead from the pioneering Kansas legislature, abolish the income tax, raising revenue from, for example, a “pay to work” program. It could ban abortion in all instances, including rape and incest, and use the growing population of orphans to establish an impressive standing army.
The red-state nation, giddy with new mobility, could make the 1958 Chevy its official car, and use the cutting-edge resources of cable television and the Internet to broadcast postwar situation comedies 24 hours a day. It could arm all of its citizens, and thus relieve itself of the financial burden of maintaining law-enforcement agencies. And without any type of regulation, it could finally compete with similarly unhampered societies all over the world.
Without the FDA, a new red-state republic could use refined transfats to develop ever tastier delicacies, perhaps energizing its economy by instituting a toxic-food-for-toxic-toys program with China.
Bitter sarcasm aside, both regions of the country would, in a word, have conferred on them the fundamental freedoms they each believe the other side is denying them.
Instead, we are stuck living in an America whose politics hang suspended somewhere in the 1850s, when the almost symmetrical divide in the country kept one half of it mired in a barbaric system of slavery—itself rooted in ancient customs and conventions—and the other half moving quickly, along scientific and technological lines, into the modern era. Almost 150 years after the end of the Civil War, when it comes to basic issues and fundamental values, America is still split right down the middle.
***
It boggles the mind that, even as I write this, the so-called sequester, imposed by law in lieu of a balanced budget, has kicked in and is about to cause misery for millions of the most vulnerable Americans on both sides of the divide. Other countries suffer strife or war or anarchy or real economic terrors. We, on the other hand, the most prosperous and most powerful nation on the face of the earth, squabble like young newlyweds over how to pay the household bills.
The conventional, almost formulaic description of this political psychosis is that the Democrats and Republicans cannot “agree” on a solution, which they would be able to do if only the two sides would act rationally and “listen to” each other. The fact that they cannot “negotiate” results in a “stalemate,” which summons to mind the happy delusion of a demanding chess match at the end of which the two competing parties can at least take solace in a game beautifully and intelligently played. Or we hear on Fox that the Democrats are ideologically blind and fanatical in their pursuit of a totalitarian government. Or we hear on MSNBC that the Republicans are ideologically blind and fanatical in their pursuit of a Darwinian dystopia.
The. Country. Is. Split. Right. Down. The. Middle. May I, with the subtlety of cannonballs falling upon Fort Sumter, suggest that we stop using the anodyne categories of red and blue, and start calling the two sides “Confederate” and “Union,” which is what they really are?
The association of North with modernity and South with regression is so prominent, so visible, so all-encompassing that its familiarity has made it invisible. Here are the facts—with important exceptions in every category. The great research universities are in the blue states. So are the great medical schools, the great hospitals, and the great law schools. The great art and history museums are in the blue part of the country.
The most important popular and “high” art is produced by blue people, in blue places. Even the best comedians—with the exception of Stephen Colbert—are, you might say, from free as opposed to slave states.
By contrast, the South leads in all the negative trends. The South has the highest infant mortality rate. It has the most traffic deaths. It leads the country in gun deaths. It has the greatest number of obese people. It has the highest rate of diabetes. It has the largest number of people dying from stroke—a broad swath of the southeastern United States is known as the “stroke belt.” The South has the highest rates of cognitive decline.
Interestingly, though the South is home to the major tobacco companies and to carcinogenic Coca-Cola, the highest incidence of many types of cancer happens to be in the North. Which just proves that the stress of living alongside the Confederacy is now seriously affecting our health.
And the country’s great, recent Southern presidents? Jimmy Carter did more damage to the liberal agenda, which had been heroically advanced by that arch-fiend Richard Nixon, than any other modern president. In 1993, Arkansan Bill Clinton proposed a budget nearly devoid of social investment and almost identical to Reagan’s years earlier. Even when they find themselves in the vanguard of mainstream American politics, Southern politicians heed their atavistic instincts—and their gift for nimble expedience—and turn, like flowers straining toward the setting sun, back to the 19th century.
As for the great numbers of enlightened men and women in the South, let me cut through all the nuances of history and polemic and invite them all to flee northward. To paraphrase Swift, I am opposed to the Southern tribe as a voting, obstructing, retarding whole, but not to the countless individuals who make up the tribe, some of whom of course are exemplars of decency, humanity, wit, sophistication, and charm. Let them come north, and enrich us with their grace and charm. (And maybe if CNN moved their headquarters to New York or Philadelphia or Boston, the network could save its plummeting ratings simply by changing its employees’ diets.)
***
I used to take sharp issue with the argument, advanced by Tom Frank, that
red-state citizens are rubes deceived into voting against their own material
interests by wily Republican elites. My feeling was that people who lead a
hardscrabble existence, like so many in the South, don’t define their lives in
economic terms since the economy has failed them, and always will. Instead, they
set the spiritual wealth of their cultural values—God and country—against the
liberal domination of national culture; against liberal elites who are every bit
as rich as their Republican counterparts but who seem to have no sympathy for
the ordinary lives of the hard-pressed who abide by a different system of
values.
By this point, I could care less about such people. All I know is
that they stand opposed to every social and economic arrangement that would make
an increasingly harsh and exponentially more complicated America more bearable
for those with little or no material resources. I don’t really care what the
matter is with the so-called average American. My attitude now is somewhat less
cerebral. Fuck Kansas, and fuck the horse it rode (into the Union)
on.
Perhaps my newfound sense of explicit disgust with America’s backside
is why I cannot join in the ongoing celebration of Abraham Lincoln that seems to
have seized the country since Obama’s first election. Never mind the perhaps 1
million lives that Lincoln destroyed for the sake of preserving the Union—not
for the sake of abolishing slavery, which was Lincoln’s sacred pretext. Slavery
was an abomination and it had to be wiped out. But how many slaves would have
been destroyed, spiritually or physically, by the time the South fell if it had
been allowed to secede? Would it have been 1 million? Who has the audacity to
compare agonies?
These days I sometimes fall into a counter-historical
revelry in which Lincoln allowed the South to remove itself from the Union.
Within months, hundreds of Underground Railroads would have sprung up, slowly
draining the South of its shackled manpower. The thriving Northern economy,
galvanized by technological advances, would have made it possible to boycott
Southern goods that could then have been bought from other countries. Northern
economic and political might would have purchased important foreign alliances,
which could have been used to isolate the South. In maybe 10 years, with the
help of Northern and foreign arms, Southern blacks would have overthrown a
feeble, decaying government run mostly by alcoholics lost in a haze of deluded
grandeur.
Who knows? By the 1870s, we might have had a black republic; by
the 1880s, the first free and equal pair of interracial countries; by 1890, cool
jazz. On the eve of the Second World War, the pact between the North American
nation and the Southern American nation might have established such a powerful
and enlightened pair of biracial republics that Nazi and Japanese theories of
racial superiority would never have gotten off the ground.
Or
not.
But it hardly matters what might have been. What exists now is
unworkable, untenable, and damn near unendurable. We are living in a permanently
forked land. If you’re reading this website, you’re most likely one of “us.” And
what “we” often write about, with scathing exasperation, is the retrograde
stubbornness of “them.” Just as the German playwright Gustav Freitag famously
reduced all drama to a single five-act structure, all of “our” political writing
can be reduced to a few themes or tropes. We are for high taxes. They are for no
taxes. We are for prohibiting, in various degrees, the private ownership of
guns. They are for the universal ownership of guns. We are for choice on
abortion. They are against it. We are for stem-cell research. They are against
it. We are for universal health care paid for by taxes. They are for excluding
government from health care (except when it comes to Medicare). We are for legal
immigration in generous numbers. They are for a small trickle of legal
immigration. We are for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, materialist, rationalist,
secular society in which gay people marry and raise adopted children, and women
more often than not rule a roost that has two electric cars in every garage and
a small bottle of morning-after pills in every purse. How about them?
Let
us, along with the secessionists, get real. Maybe, by turning our
unacknowledged, absolute division into a recognized aggression—by liberating the
two irreconcilable halves of the country into two frankly contending rivals—just
maybe, we can, at last, play ball.
Little Czechoslovakia split itself in
two; why can’t we? ++
States begin passing pre-Civil War
‘nullification’ laws to fight gun safety laws
Lois Beckett, Pro
Publica via Raw Story
Thursday, May 2, 2013
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/02/states-begin-passing-pre-civil-war-nullification-laws-to-fight-gun-safety-laws/
In mid-April, Kansas passed a law asserting that federal gun
regulations do not apply to guns made and owned in Kansas. Under the law,
Kansans could manufacture and sell semi-automatic weapons in-state without a
federal license or any federal oversight.
Kansas’ “Second Amendment
Protection Act” backs up its states’ rights claims with a penalty aimed at
federal agents: when dealing with “Made in Kansas” guns, any attempt to enforce
federal law is now a felony. Bills similar to Kansas’ law have been introduced
in at least 37 other states. An even broader bill is on the desk of Alaska Gov.
Sean Parnell. That bill would exempt any gun owned by an Alaskan from federal
regulation. In Missouri, a bill declaring federal gun laws “null and void”
passed by an overwhelming majority in the state house, and is headed for debate
in the senate.
Mobilizing the pre-Civil-War doctrine of “nullification,”
these bills assert that Congress has overstepped its ability to regulate guns
2014 and that states, not the Supreme Court, have the ultimate authority to
decide whether a law is constitutional or not.
The head of the Kansas’s
State Rifle Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association, says
she put the bill together and found it a sponsor. While the NRA regularly lauds
passages of states’ gun-rights laws, it stayed silent on Kansas’ law, and, so
far, has kept a low profile on nullification. (The group did not respond to our
requests for comment.)
Many observers see nullification bills as pure
political theater, “the ultimate triumph of symbolism over substance,” as UCLA
law Professor Adam Winkler put it. He said he doubts the laws will ever be
enforced, and, if they are, expects them to be struck down by the courts.
Winkler and others say nullification laws violate the Constitution,
which makes federal law “the supreme law of the land2026anything in the
Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.” Indeed, U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder wrote a letter last week to Kansas Gov. Sam
Brownback, asserting that Kansas’ law is “unconstitutional.” (Brownback, who
signed the bill into law, did not immediately respond to our requests for
comment.)
But the growing number of such bills — which have passed by
large majorities in at least one chamber of seven state legislatures–highlight
the challenge gun control advocates face in their attempt to fight for gun
regulation at the state level.
It also shows how nullification is fast
becoming a mainstream option for state politicians. In Pennsylvania, 76 state
legislators signed on to sponsor a measure that would invalidate any new federal
ban of certain weapons or ammunition. The bill would impose a minimum penalty of
one year in prison for federal agents who attempt to enforce any new law.
Supporters of nullification are not simply frustrated at what they see
as congressional and presidential overreach. During a hearing about one of the
nullification bills she had introduced, Tennessee State Sen. Mae Beavers called
the Supreme Court a “dictatorship.”
“You think that the Supreme Court is
the ultimate arbiter of any of these laws. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe
it was ever granted the authority under the Constitution,” Beavers was quoted as
saying in The Tennessean. (Reached by phone, she asked to comment later, then
did not respond to further requests.)
The Supreme Court rejected
nullification in 1958, after Southern states tried to use the concept to avoid
desegregating public schools. “No state legislator or executive or judicial
officer can war against the Constitution without violating his solemn oath to
support it,” the Court ruled.
Winkler, the UCLA law professor, said that
even though the nullification trend was likely to be ineffectual, “It represents
a strong, powerful opposition to our government.”
The concept of
nullification has had a resurgence since the beginning of President Obama’s
administration. More than a dozen states have introduced bills to nullify
Obamacare.
The Tenth Amendment Center, a group that advocates
nullification as the solution to a range of policy issues, from marijuana
legalization to Obamacare, publishes model gun nullification language. The
center has little direct contact with state legislators, Michael Boldin, the
center’s founder, said.
The roots of guns law nullification trace back
nearly a decade.
In 2004, Montana gun rights activist Gary Marbut drafted
a bill stating that any guns manufactured and retained in Montana are not part
of interstate commerce, and thus are exempt from federal regulation. The bill
failed twice, but it became law in 2009 after Republicans took control of the
statehouse. By Marbut’s count, at least eight states soon enacted “clones” of
the Montana law. (Those laws don’t go quite as far as the more recent
nullification legislation. For instance, most of them don’t make it a crime to
enforce federal law.)
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
responded to the earlier laws with letters to local firearms dealers explaining
that federal laws and regulations “continue to apply.”
The day the
Montana law went into effect, Marbut filed a lawsuit in federal court asserting
the right to manufacture weapons in the state without a federal license. The
suit, now before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, has been backed by a large
group of supporters, including Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment
Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Goldwater Institute, and a group of nine
attorneys general, some of them from states that had passed their own versions
of the Montana law.
Representatives of Goldwater and the Cato Institute
said they see the case as not primarily about guns. Instead, they say, it’s
meant to persuade the Supreme Court to rollback the Congress’ power to regulate
commerce within a state.
“The likelihood of victory is low,” said Trevor
Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional
Studies.
The latest set of bills 2014 including Kansas’ new law
2014represent a far broader and more aggressive challenge to federal law. Even
conservative organizations have been skeptical of the trend.
“A state
law that criminalizes federal activity 2014 I would oppose that as both
imprudent and wrong,” Burrus said. The Cato Institute’s chairman wrote an op-ed
this spring arguing this kind of nullification is invalid.
Goldwater
Institute’s Nick Dranias, a constitutional expert, said the term “nullification”
is sometimes applied to legitimate attempts to exert state sovereignty, “and
sometimes it is essentially lawless civil disobedience.”
States should
only pass laws challenging federal power “when there is a reasonable legal
argument for sustaining them,” he said. And the penalty for enforcing federal
law in “hard cases” should be “a misdemeanor at most.”
The Heritage
Foundation, a conservative research group, released a “fact sheet” last year
titled “Nullification: Unlawful and Unconstitutional.” (The fact sheet does not
address guns in particular.)
The Montana activist whose helped inspired
the nullification movement Kansas is also a bit skeptical. While he simply chose
to challenge the federal government’s commerce power, Kansas is “bucking federal
power more generally,” he said.
“I think, maybe tactically, they may
have gone a little further than they needed to,” Marbut said.
Though he
supports the principles behind the Kansas law, “I don’t know how much of that
they can uphold when it gets to the courts.”
But Marbut hopes that the
rapid spread of gun law nullification bills across the country will encourage
the Supreme Court to hear his case.
”I see the tide moving our way,”
Marbut said. “I think the Supreme Court has figured out that the people of
America are gathering their torches and pitchforks and it’s time to settle
things down by reeling in the federal giant.”
A spokeswoman for Alaska
Gov. Parnell, who has not either approved or vetoed the state’s nullification
bill, said last month that “he is supportive of it.” But, she added, “The bill
(as with all bills that pass) is currently undergoing a thorough review by the
Department of Law.”
In Kansas, Patricia Stoneking, the president of
Kansas State Rifle Association, said she was recommending that Kansans not start
manufacturing guns under the new law until its legal status has been clarified.
Even if Kansas’ law ends up being struck down in court, “We actually are
not going to roll over and play dead and say, 2018Oh, no, shame on us,’”
Stoneking said. “The fight will not be over.” ++
Incoming NRA
President Calls Civil War The ‘War Of Northern Aggression’
Ian
Millhiser, Think Progress
May 3, 2013
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/05/03/1958961/incoming-nra-president-calls-civil-war-the-war-of-northern-aggression/
In a 2012 speech to the New York Rifle & Pistol Association, where
he also refers to President Obama as a “fake president” and calls Attorney
General Eric Holder “rabidly unAmerican,” incoming National Rifle Association
President Jim Porter applied an odd label to the war that ended slavery in the
United States and put down the single greatest act of treason in our nation’s
history:
The NRA was started, 1871, right here in New York state. It
was started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my southern boys had
the ability to shoot in what we call the “War of Northern Aggression.” Now,
y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the War of Northern Aggression
down south.
But that was the very reason that they started the National
Rifle Association, was to teach and train the civilian in the use of the
standard military firearm. And I am one who still feels very strongly that that
is one of our most greatest charges that we can have today, is to train the
civilian in the use of the standard military firearm, so that when they have to
fight for their country they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to
fight tyranny, they’re ready to do it. Also, when they’re ready to fight
tyranny, they have the wherewithal and the weapons to do it.
Watch
it [at the link above.]
Setting aside Porter’s unfortunate label for the
Civil War, his speech suggests the NRA could take an even sharper turn to the
right than it has under its present leadership. One of the standard issue
firearms for infantry servicemembers is either the M16 rifle or the M4 carbine,
depending on the branch of service. Both come standard with the ability to fire
3-round bursts, and many models are fully automatic weapons. So when Porter
calls for civilians to be trained “in the use of the standard military firearm,”
these are the weapons he is describing.
Indeed, the the term “standard
military firearm” may include even more deadly weapons. A former Army sergeant
and Iraq War vet ThinkProgress spoke with identified the AT-4 antitank grenade
launcher and the M203A1 grenade launcher as weapons she was trained to use as
part of her standard issue training. In addition to her rifle and a standard
issue pistol, she also carried a SAW M249 sub-machine gun as a standard armament
during convoy missions.
Here is video of what this weapon can do [open
the link above to watch]
By contrast, the NRA’s outgoing president David
Keene, recently told an audience at Harvard University that he believes “fully
automatic weapons” should be illegal for civilian use. ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final
word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil
triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King
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