Metropolis: Take your nation and shove it

Ed DeVries is an itinerant Texas Baptist preacher who has a separated-at-birth resemblance to the goofy look of actor Randy Quaid. Last week, he was sitting in a booth at Sticky Fingers barbecue in downtown Chattanooga declaiming loudly to no one in particular — his tablemates politely tried to duck his righteous ruminations — that the decline of the United States was linked to the decreasing use of the King James Bible. “No other version has divine inspiration,” he said in a near shout.

Sitting across from DeVries was Cory Burnell, who heads a group called Christian Exodus that wants fundamentalists to move to South Carolina and take over the state. I quipped that the takeover happened decades, maybe generations ago. Burnell, who still lives in the devilishly secular California, replied, “Politicians act like they’re with us, until they’re elected. Then they turn their backs on God.”

At a nearby table was J. Michael Hill, a former college professor who in 1994 teamed up with 40 die-hard sons of Dixie, including many academics, to found the League of the South. Hill has often been accused of racism – 11 years ago he wrote in the magazine Southern Patriot that his vision is an independent Dixie “where the interest of the core population of Anglo-Celts is protected from the ravages of so-called multiculturalism and diversity.” Tall, bearded and charismatic, Hill last week enthusiastically related how many media calls he’d been getting. “The message is out,” he said.

Looking around at the 50 or so folks – many bedecked with Confederate flag shirts, hats, lapel buttons and neckties – in the crowded Sticky Fingers meeting room, it appeared “the message” was recommencing the Civil ... um, I mean the War of Northern Aggression.

But defying that conclusion was gold miner Dexter Clark, who sported a 2-foot-long beard and enumerated the achievements of the Alaskan Independent Party – including the election of Gov. Walter Hickel in 1990. Likewise, retired Duke University economist Tom Naylor, natty in a Green-Mountain-State-green sports coat, disclosed how he’d defend an independent Vermont with an army of dairy cows – Bovinistas, he calls them. Equally non-Southern, Burt Cohen, a radio talk-show host and former New Hampshire state senator, warned: “We’re too big to govern. We have to prepare for when the empire falls.” And in the vortex of the chatter was one of America’s true iconoclastic cognoscenti, Kirkpatrick Sale, from the decidedly Yankee Hudson Valley in New York.

What all of the very disparate political radicals had in mind is a fractured, segmented America, many nations where there was once one. Hill made a point of referring to “these” United States, not “the” United States. “Secession” was the password to a convention of go-it-alone radicals in Chattanooga.

“We don’t all have the same political outlook or worldview,” Hill said. “But we are all here to challenge the status quo, an out-of-control empire.”

CL’s cover story in this issue is a collection of essays that take off from the hyperbolic, albeit tantalizing, suggestion of Atlanta’s secession from Georgia. That concept earned high, if sometimes barbed, praise from those gathered in Chattanooga. Ray McBerry, chairman of the Georgia League of the South chapter – who pulled almost 50,000 votes (12 percent) in a 2006 Republican primary challenge to Gov. Sonny Perdue – said: “We really are two states, with two sets of values. Most of the people I know would support Atlanta seceding. They feel the downtown Atlanta establishment has unwarranted authority over the rest of the state.” Of course, Atlantans feel that way about rural Georgia counties’ unwarranted authority over the metropolis.

Is the idea of secession loopy? Independence movements are not new or novel in America. The Revolutionary War was a secession from the British Empire. Vermont and Texas were once independent republics. Several states have the right of secession embodied in their Constitutions.

Maybe it’s time.

Kirkpatrick Sale – a writer best known for his brand of neo-Luddite opposition to America’s wasteful consumer society – began to assemble secessionists three years ago with a “radical consultation” that resulted in the founding of the Middlebury Institute. Last year, Middlebury sponsored its first convention in Burlington, Vt.; the second was the meeting last week in Chattanooga.

Sale said secession is a practical concept because it doesn’t advocate such sweeping changes as the elimination of capitalism. In America, it would resemble the breakup of the European empires, including the Soviet Union. Pointing out that imminent shortages of oil, the possibility of severe climate changes and the collapse of the dollar will force people to seek local solutions – raising food in each community, for example – Sale said: “The future is on our side.”

Naylor is bespectacled, and his face is framed with flowing white hair – a good approximation of, appropriately, Benjamin Franklin. He says the movement’s strength is its pugnaciousness. “What could be more ridiculous than tiny Vermont taking on the empire?”

Questions about racism dogged Hill and his confederates in the League of the South. Hill conceded that harmony after secession “won’t be the easiest thing because of history.” Walter Kennedy, a Louisiana league member who has authored books such as The South Was Right, commented: “This isn’t 1950. The conservative nature of the South will now defend equality before the law. A return of Jim Crow? It ain’t gonna happen.”

The meeting last week ended with the adoption of the “Chattanooga Declaration.” It argues that the “old left-right split” is meaningless and dead, that the “power of corporations endanger liberty as much as government power, especially when they are combined ... in the American Empire,” and that the “American Empire is no longer a nation or a republic, but has become a tyrant.”

A lot of Americans clearly feel the same way. A year ago, a CNN poll found that an overwhelming 71 percent of Americans felt “our system of government is broken and cannot be fixed.” Things have gone from merely terrible to really horrible since then.

In the vision projected at Chattanooga, America would become a collection of self-governing states, some connected by confederations. The South would embrace social conservatism – there would be no debate about the evils of gay marriage or abortion, for example. The Northeast would harbor the blue-state ideals of community and multiculturalism. Rugged individualists would flock to the West and Alaska.

Sale effused: “Only in that type of diversity can we have liberty.”

The Middlebury Institute is the convening organization of the secessionists. Its website at http://middleburyinstitute.org/ contains the “Chattanooga Declaration” from last week’s meeting.

The Alaskan Independence Party is at http://www.akip.org/.

The Second Vermont Republic is at http://www.vermontrepublic.org/.

The League of the South is at http://dixienet.org/New%20Site/index.shtml. A critical look at the league by its archnemesis, the Southern Poverty Law Center, is at http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=453.