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The Angry Buddhist

A division of Marines will invade North Carolina on February 7 during the thick of the presidential primary season. I kid you not. As on D-Day, the invasion will fall during the full moon when tides are favorable. This has nothing to do with the Mayan calendar. Semper Fi.

Apparently, having run out of oil-producing third-world countries to overrun, the Pentagon has targeted the Tar Heel State. Depending on one’s latitude, North Carolina will either be occupied or liberated. The invasion is part of a massive, two-week, Marine-Navy-Coalition Forces amphibious exercise called Bold Alligator 2012, intended to “revitalize” and “update” the Marine Corps’ “core competency” in amphibious warfare and start “the process of shaping the post-Afghan US military.”

This is an ominous and unprecedented event. It has the flavor of a Burt Lancaster-Robert Ryan conspiracy thriller. Ostensibly, the Marine Corps is worried about budget cuts. In an age of drone warfare, storming the beach in amphibious landing craft as on Iwo Jima or Grenada has become strategically obsolete. I wonder, though: is this more than just made-for-TV propaganda?

The post Reconstruction Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the military from acting in a law-enforcement capacity. A specific directive from Congress is required. In these treacherous times, it is not completely conspiracy-theory paranoia to imagine a military coup d’etat in this country. The American Century is past. We live in a security state. The Republic is far-gone, atrophied, with democracy now little more than a tribal myth. Watching the Republican “debates” is astonishing. You have to study and rehearse to be that stupid, and I’m talking about the media moderators.

Military takeovers are not uncommon in dysfunctional societies. See Paraguay, North Korea or Egypt. We already experienced a political coup d’etat in 2000 when Gore won the election with a popular vote majority of 540,000 and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court halted a recount in totally corrupt Florida, awarding the presidency and electoral vote to Boy George.

This mock invasion scenario deserves a Hollywood treatment. After Cape Hatteras is taken, could the 2nd Marine Division veer north, burn D.C., retrace Lee’s march to Gettysburg and declare the South an independent nation once again? Who would stop them? Who could? If so, President Obama will go as he served, meekly. He will be shackled to an economy seat on Air Force One with one carry-on item only and jettisoned over a remote atoll in the Solomon Islands to become a footnote in history. Somewhere between Millard Fillmore and Gerald Ford.

“If we all turn out with a rebel shout the South shall rise again.” And why not? Jesus did. For many in the South, it looks like a Marines invasion could seem heaven sent. It’s not so far-fetched. According to Republican Arkansas Congressman Loy Mauch, the Confederate flag is “a symbol of Jesus Christ.” Mauch is also a member of The League of the South, a group that is endeavoring to form an independent Southern nation. The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a neo-Confederate hate group “that advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by ‘European Americans.’” It is just the tip of the iceberg of Southern, redneck, pathological hatred that has stained this continent for almost 400 years.

Elsewhere, Michelle Bachman signed a Christian conservative pledge to uphold marriage and family that claimed African-American children were more likely to grow up in two-parent families during the era of slavery than under Barack Obama. In Arkansas, the legislature, in a 71-16 vote, passed a bill in 2011 that allows public schools to teach the Bible as history. In Georgia, the governor has suggested that prisoners on probation be sent to work as low-wage farm laborers, essentially a return to indentured servitude. The rebel flag still flies on the grounds of the South Carolina State House. Brain-locked Rick Perry believes that Texas is the “Prophet State” and has threatened secession. Enough already. I say let the South secede. Good riddance. Kiss off. Hasta nunca, baby. It’s our only chance to restore the Republic to a new age of reason.

Rewriting history, the world would be a better place today if the Union had had the sense in 1865 to grant secession conditionally to the South. First, the freed slaves would have been granted generous financial compensation for all of the suffering inflicted upon them and their ancestors. Then they could have freely migrated north or west.

Without their cheap labor and our Yankee tax dollars since then, today’s heirs to the Confederacy would be lording over their own third-world dystopia, one big FEMA trailer camp, something like Mexico but with much worse food. Mexico would be building the fence. Desperate white-trash migrants looking for field work, crossing the border into Chihuahua by night, would be hunted for nickels and shot down like pariah dogs, their carcasses left to the buzzards and the bleached bones strung as necklaces and sold to tourists in the Mayan Yucatan. Illegal rebs would sneak across the heavily fortified Mason-Dixon Line to be hired at subhuman wages to clean our houses and mow our lawns, and Jesus would provide them with health care.

Without the South, JFK would not have been assassinated, Martin Luther King would have been his Secretary of State, Viet Nam a tourist destination and the North would resemble Canada with universal health care. But destiny has decided otherwise. The South is an atavistic and savage clan, and we are fatefully bound to it like Siamese twins till death, a slow and painful murder-suicide it seems.

To be honest, the demagogic ideology of the South has already prevailed. The class war has already been fought. The corporate plutocracy controls most of the wealth and all of the meaningful political decisions. Occupy Wall Street encampments around the nation were the last paroxysm of dissent and were duly crushed by the State, ostensibly because of the stench of urine. The reek of hate, hypocrisy and corruption are far worse, and you can’t simply hose that down. OMMMMMMMM

Angry Buddhist says, “If befriend donkey, expect to be kicked.”

– By Carl Rosenstein

1 thought on “Let the South Secede

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      Spot on! Thank you for your candor! The south draws more federal funds than they contribute, so an added bonus by allowing their secession would be an improved fiscal discipline in the north.

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