"Let's put our heads together and start a new country up
Our father's father's father tried, erased the parts he didn't like
Let's try to fill it in"
-REM, Cuyahoga
The morning after a long one-day bench trial. Woke up with the usual terrors at 5 a.m., only to fall back dead asleep and give myself the grace of another couple dream-filled hours before I rolled out of bed. Those dreams are always the most vivid and telling, in the last couple hours of a normal sleep cycle rather than just before an alarm or a worry forces me awake.
The trial went fine. There's an anticlimactic quality to bench trials--we rarely give a closing argument, and didn't yesterday, so you just close the evidence, shake hands, and walk out of the courtroom past scowling bailiffs eager to see you leave so they can lock up. We'll write our own proposed final judgments, submit them within a month, and wait. I still don't have a final judgment from the case I tried in September. It drives clients batty.
For me as the lawyer, however, the biggest stressor is simply getting all of my evidence into the record, and hoping my witnesses don't say anything too damaging. Yesterday the client was effusive in his praise afterwards. I'm hoping he'll remember all that when the bill arrives.
I saw blessedly little news over the last several days, and opened my laptop this morning to an alarming array of stories about the dismantling of the federal government by an unelected oligarch. And the Rs are letting it happen, indeed reveling in the destruction. It's almost satanic, this quality of theirs that they cannot create, only destroy. But now I've read the book, and have a strong Marcionite sense that they worship at the altar of the Evil Creator.
In any event, the guardrails haven't held because the elected officials who manage them are either complicit or can't act without the cooperation of those who are complicit. The coup succeeded. It's over. And this is what my neighbors wanted. Burn, baby, burn, as they chanted when they were teenagers before growing into elderly MAGA people. The same sorry generation, for the most part.
So I figure the only solution is geographic. The free states need to exercise their power to move beyond being a part of the United States. Or maybe claim their birthright as U.S. citizens, coopt the name "United States", and force the trolls wrecking Washington to accurately rebrand themselves as the resurrected Confederate States of America.
The problem here is geographic contiguity. You have the West Coast, and you have the Northeast, with Illinois hanging there like a uvula in the maw of the upper Midwest. Except for maybe Colorado and New Mexico, the rest of the country comprises the crazy CSA. But how do you connect the free states?
Over coffee a few days ago with P (have I mentioned this morning how much I miss her?), I blurted out the solution: merge with Canada.
I mean, just look at a map:
Voila! One big happy country! I didn't draw the line down Lake Michigan to Illinois, but you get the idea. The wingnuts will lose access to the lovely Pacific, but that should be no big deal given that they can simply sail across the Gulf of America and through the Panama Canal after they liberate it from the people who actually live there.
This would also be a bold retort to the Cheeto Messiah's "51st state" nonsense. Not only would the Canucks politely decline the crass pickup line, they'd leave the bar with the most desirable states in the old U.S.A., leaving him to take Gaza home for a roll in the hay, or more accurately the rubble.
And let's face it, the average New Yorker or Oregonian (at least of the coastal variety out there) has much more in common with our brothers to the north than with, say, Mississippi or Alabama. Culturally, this would be a non-event.
Of course, I'd miss the food. Northerners can't cook, and neither can Canadians. Peg would have a new role as a food missionary to the frozen places, teaching them about chile peppers and grits and the like.
Ten years ago this would be inconceivable, but things have changed, the center hasn't held, and it's time to think just as boldly as the twenty-something Musk employees in DC reading your medical records on some government server as I write this.
You may say I'm a dreamer . . .
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