Joe Bob's America

"Joe Bob's America" for 11/29/91

By Joe Bob Briggs

Northern California--the part with the redwoods, the peach groves, the mountains, the water and the recreational vehicles--wants to secede from the rest of California. They're serious about it. They don't even want San Francisco or Sacramento, but they DO want Petaluma. That oughta tell you something right there.

Meanwhile, Texas is talking about seceding from the United States again. (For you out-of-staters, this is a discussion that comes up about once every 20 years.) It's actually easier for Texas to secede from the union than for Northern California to form a new state, because the right to secede is written into the original treaty changing the Republic of Texas to the state of Texas. So it's always dangling out there, like a temptation, every time the Texas-bashing gets especially intense. In the sixties somebody wrote a Texas best-seller called "The Five States of Texas," describing just how the state would be carved up into five separate states and what the borders would be (this is ANOTHER right under the provisions of that same treaty).

Then we've got the case of Eastern Washington. I've never been to Eastern Washington. I can't really tell you what's IN Eastern Washington--although I think Spokane is there--and that's just the way the people of Eastern Washington want it. They don't want anybody noticing THEM, and they don't want anything to do with anybody else. They would like to become separate from a "Seattle-dominated" state. (Translation: City people don't understand us.)

Then there's Staten Island. I almost forgot Staten Island. And Staten Islanders say that's the problem. Everyone ALWAYS forgets Staten Island. There are New Yorkers who don't even know that Staten Island is part of the city. They feel just like Eastern Washington when they say, "What do the crime problems of the Bronx have to do with us? Why should we pay for solving them? And why are we treated like second-class citizens just because our lives over here on this little island are boring and middle class and peaceful?" And so they want to be the first borough to secede from New York City.

Don't forget Upper Michigan, which periodically decides to divorce itself from Lower Michigan.

Then there are the states that don't just talk about it--they DO IT. The people in the backwoods of Virginia didn't care diddly squat about slave-owning in the rest of the state, so when the Civil War came they turned into WEST Virginia. Carolina split into north and south long before that--and anyone who's spent time in both places knows that these are VERY different cultures. These splits always happen for a reason.

New Hampshire fought for its independence from Massachusetts. I'm not making this up. I hope it was a snowball fight.

In other words, the idea of a state line is always a shaky prospect to base anything on in the first place. The only thing they're good for, really, is to put a limit on how far the highway patrol can chase you.

What's going on here in 1991, though? Where did this latest mania to carve everything up and get SMALLER start? Pretty soon somebody will be publishing a book called "The Twelve States of Rhode Island."

I think I have an idea of what's happening.

There was a time--people don't remember it now, but it existed--when people formed states and counties and cities in order to grow and build things and make money and raise families and live with other people who wanted to grow and build things and make money and raise families.

But now states and counties and cities have a different mission. Instead of growing, they want everything to stay just EXACTLY like it is--because anything that changes only gets worse. And instead of building things, they wanna build security fences around everything that's already there, to keep the arsonists from burning it down or the burglars from vandalizing it. And instead of making money, they want to hoard money. And instead of raising families--which means spending a lot of public money on schools--they want to raise ONE family, their own family, which means spending a lot of private money on the one school their kid attends.

And instead of living with other people who believe in the same things, they wanna live alone. Keep out. Go away. America was a good idea 50 years ago, but get real. This is the nineties.

To discuss the meaning of life with Joe Bob, or to get his world-famous "We Are the Weird" newsletter, write Joe Bob Briggs, P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221. Joe Bob's Fax line is 214-368-2310.

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