KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Manchester Convention; New Hampshire; November 15, 2008
by Kirkpatrick Sale       

James Thurber once told the tale of the tiger who escaped from a zoo and made his way back to the jungle.  In captivity, he had learned a great deal about how people do things and he thought he’d apply that to life in the jungle.  So he met up with a leopard and talked him into teaming up  to bilk the animals of their village by staging a boxing match for which they’d charge a freshly killed bore for admission and then would fake the actual fighting so that neither of them would get hurt.

The tiger said to the leopard, “You just go around saying that you can’t help winning because I am a big palooka, and I’ll go around saying I can’t help winning because you are a big palooka, and everyone will want to come and see the fight.”  The leopard agreed, and for the week before the fight the two of them went around bragging that each would win because the other guy was a palooka.

Come the night of the fight, the tiger and the lion were dressed for action at the arena in the middle of the woods, and they were very hungry because they had done no hunting on their own.  But no animals showed up. “The way I look at it,” a fox had said to the village, “is this: if the leopard can’t help winning and the tiger can’t lose, it will be a draw, and a draw is a very dull thing to watch, particularly when fought by fighters who are both big palookas.”  The animals all saw the logic of this and stayed away.
When it came to be midnight and it was clear no one would come, the tiger and the leopard fell upon each other, injured themselves so badly and were so weak from hunger that a couple of wild boars came along and killed them easily.

Well, the motto Thurbur drew  from this was, “If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you.”  I think I’d add to that,  “That match was a farce, the animals could recognize. When it comes to ours, if only humans were as wise.”

And now I guess you know what I’m talking about, a recent match fought between two big palookas.  Only in this case some of the people actually did turn out for the fight, even though they’d been told for six months and at great expense by both sides that the other candidate was a big palooka.  Well, Thurber has another story with the moral, You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. They did.
What can you say about a system that spends nearly a billion dollars and takes two years every four years to produce two palookas to run for high office?   What can you say about a system that allows  that money effectively to let corporate America buy politicians of so-called “both” parties to serve at its bidding for the next term of office?

What can you say about a system that openly, blatantly proves that its politicians are craven lackeys of the financial plutocracy by having an administration that could invent and a Congress that could pass a measure that robs the public treasury of a trillion dollars, for the benefit of financiers and bankers who created the mess this money is supposed to fix ?   And what can you say when that open, blatant admission of corruption, vice, graft, and evil is met by no roar of outrage, no righteous uprising, but passive acceptance by the great majority of the so-called citizenry, who go on to elect a man who thoroughly supported it?

The United States has never shown itself to be more unmanageable and incompetent, more venal and degraded, more undemocratic and ungovernable, than in the last three months.  That alone, one would think, would cause the people to reject outright the system of passive palooka-presidential elections and say: no more, we will be conned and bamboozled no more.  That alone should have been enough to swell the forces of opposition in this populace—I mean true opposition, not reform and rejiggery—and give rise to secessionist campaigns in every state and region in the country.  And yet here we are, alas, only 50 of us and we don’t seem to have the populace clamoring to get in to join us.   

We must somehow get the American people to be as smart as the animals in the jungle, to recognize that they are not being either represented or served by this political system of Tweedledee and Tweedledumber that allows Washington to be a wholly owned subsidiary of unprincipled, venal—and as it turns out not-so-smart--corporate capitalism.     

We must try to get them to understand the deligitimization of the federal government—delegitimate, invalid, without moral authority—not something that anyone would want to pledge allegiance to.  I’m not talking just about Bush and Cheney, though their eight-year record of illegality and deception is long and squalid, I’m talking about the corruption shot through the administration at all levels, the illegal usurpation of power by a few unelected onetime financial “wizards,” the supine, rotten, self-serving, and contemptible Congress with full measure of blame on both parties, and stretching back at least 20 years.   

Thomas Naylor and I have had disagreements over the last few years having to do with where the emphasis of secessionists in winning over the public should be placed.  I have always thought that the major concentration ought to be on what I have called the Pulls, the many opportunities and freedoms that would come with independence, escape from the idiot laws and regulations of the federal government, the chance to keep moneys for local priorities, and the possibility to have true democracy, responsive and responsible government, and participation in the decisions affecting the lives of citizens that can come only at a small and human scale.  Very strong motives for secession, such Pulls as those.   

But Thomas always felt that it was the Pushes that brought most people to secession, the Pushes created by repulsion and hostility to the myriad acts of stupidity, illegality, incompetence, and malfeasance by the Washington establishment. Recently it has felt like he was right.

Let me count the ways, some of them. Two foolish wars fought foolishly and at stupendous and seriously debilitating cost, continuing a tradition of the militarization of this nation under the control of a military-industrial complex that began in 1941 and has not ended for a moment since; the creation of a $10 trillion debt and $66 trillion fiscal hole that puts each household in America  in hock for $455,000, and the failure of even any serious attempts at fixes and reforms; the liberation of Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac during the Clinton administration, protected by Congressional laws that assure there would be no regulation, expanded by the Bush administration until they single-handedly created the gazillion-dollar mortgage mess that threatens to engulf the world in a depression as devastating as eighty years ago; the trillion-dollar bailout to the firms that created this mess, at least those favored by Goldman Sachs, such  as AIG,  in which Goldman was heavily invested; a government-sanctioned creation of an unregulated financial system that was allowed to invent something called credit-default swaps and invent a system whose total market of $55 trillion is more than the gross domestic product of all nations on earth combined and  so tumultuous that it has eaten up uncounted trillions and compounded the financial meltdown.
.
Only a besotted and deformed public could confront Pushes like those and not demand revolutionary change, the kind of change that would dismantle forever the bloated centralized American empire, and allow the people of the land to create new independent states, from one end of this continent to the other, that could bring democracy, self-sufficiency, stability, and sanity back to our lives.  Our task, our vital task, and one both more necessary and more possible at this juncture, is to awaken and inform and liberate that public, offer them the alternative of secession, and build a movement that will make it happen.   NOW. 

THE MANCHESTER DECLARATION

We, the delegates to the Third North American Secessionist Convention, meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, do declare the following:

# The recent election, far from signaling some sort of change in the imperial system or restructuring of the essential political order, unfortunately perpetuates the two-party system and its old familiar politicians that for decades have promoted the interests of the corporate/financial  elite whose willing servant it remains.

#  The recent financial flailings and machinations, including the trillion-dollar bailout of the institutions that created the economic meltdown in the first place, provide ample and blatant evidence of Wall Street’s control over American politics in the interest of trying to see that the rich get richer and the rest get nowhere.

# Together these two processes, along with the long string of  abuses and usurpations over the past decades, unmistakably indicate that the United States is bankrupt in every way-- financially, economically, politically, socially, academically, militarily, and morally.

#  This fact should demonstrate to the American public, and the world, that it is the very scale and complexity of the various interlocking political and economic systems that is the fundamental cause of their failure—as well as the reason that no one on the scene has any idea whatsoever how to fix it.

#  That being the case, it is necessary, for American democracy—not to mention sanity,
prosperity, sustainability, governance, and peace—that the imperial system be dismantled and various states, regions, and elements of the United States exert their right to secede into independent  regimes laying their foundations on such principles and organizing their powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

It is to this end that the secessionist movement will dedicate its energy, time, talents, moneys, and sacred honor, and we invite, indeed implore, the participation of our fellow citizens.

Passed this day, the fifteenth of November, 2008.