In last week's issue of New York Press, Christopher Ketcham offers an entertaining look at why New York City should secede from the United States. He writes:
Money—who's making it, who's taking it—has always been and always will be the only argument for American rebellion; it was the predicate for the original New World secession from the English empire in 1775. If taxation without representation was the complaint then, it remains the rub today. Mayor Bloomberg's office claims that New York City sends as much as $11.4 billion more to Congress than it receives in services. The current hacks in the White House opt—among many other indignities—to blow our prodigious revenue on the occupation of Iraq, which as of May 2004 had cost New Yorkers $2.1 billion. The darker burden, of mortal consequence, is the vast terrorist recruitment the war has spawned, with New York—dense, vital—still the most coveted target.
After bashing Abraham Lincoln for awhile, he describes an evening of describing his plan to bar patrons in Brooklyn about why the city should secede.
I offered that New York would be a kind of Hong Kong off darkened China—a money mecca, but also a hub of trade, books, news, movies, advertising, art, fashion and free-thinking. Why, I asked, should New Yorkers, galvanite forces of growth and creativity, remain the fleeced animals of a corrupt regime 200 miles away that wastes our wages and workforce in a criminal war?
I noted that New York City poses a threat to no one, that we'd have no army or navy or air force, that we'd have no territorial designs. Hence, no foreign power, aside from the United States of America, would ever bother to invade us, and that if the U.S.A. ever tried it we'd have the twentieth-best-funded army in the world, the NYPD, to oppose the invaders, not to mention millions of able-bodied men in our heavily armed enclaves (Bed-Stuy would make Fallujah look fun). The Free Republic of Gotham would be the Switzerland of America: peace-loving, gorgeous for business (our GDP, $414.1 billion, would stand at almost twice that of the Swiss Republic).
Yet there resides a higher law, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. This is the moral law that says that governments "are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." No one in my Brooklyn bar understood the concept. The patrons cried out, "But I'm an American! We're Americans!" Things went badly.
After escorting myself into the night, I understood that a New York City secession movement is hopeless. People aren't ready for it. Yet I can't help but think of what Tom Paine wrote in his explosive pamphlet, Common Sense, in 1776: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."
Once walked through Bedford Stuy alone.
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7 comments:
i just read a great article by Ketcham in December's Harpers about the political machine in Brooklyn and one man's quest to bring it down. it was very enlightening about the history of machine politics both here and abroad, the real world inner-workings of politics in our fair borough, and how the machines are often more successful in getting things done than the reformers that usually tkae their place.
and i'm all for NYC seceding from the US, just for the record. maybe the major cities from the eastern seaboard from Boston to Baltimore should all secede and forma separate "United Cities of America".
is that a picture of balgavy, circa 1995?
If NYC has no territoral designs on anyone else, then what are all those shiny new SUVs with Empire State plates doing every summer up here in Maine, sitting in the parking lots of realtors driving up prices on 'agreeable little summer homes' known to the rest of us as 'now unaffordable essential shelter'?
Have to admit that I love the idea of the city as some sort of commercial outpost, completely unfettered by political affiliations or morality. Kind of like Mos Eisley. A wretched hive of scum and villainy indeed.
weasel, that is all part of the plan. we are just trying to weed out the undesirables before we make the big move. you can keep those fuckers once we do.
The day after the election I purchased the domain name nycnation.org with the intent of someday setting up a secessioncentric site. Haven't done anything, of course. And I don't know how serious vs. parodic I would want it to be anyway. But I have no romantic or patriotic notions about being American. It's like gay pride: I'm not proud to be gay, just like I'm not proud to have blond hair or blue eyes or proud that I was born in 1970. Similarly, I'm not proud to be American, as I had nothing to do with what country I was born in. However, I am glad and relieved and even proud that I chose to live in New York City and still do.
You get the Maine delegations' vote for NYC independence if you agree to implement these following conditions:
1) The storied Yankees franchise be sold to a consortium of used tire merchants in Oklahoma, and they henceforth become known as the Tulsa Yankees.
2) Randy "Chicken Man" Johnson is not to be allowed to leave with the team and instead is to be sent to that famous mental hospital of yours they always talk about on NYPD Blue. He must be ill for saying all those disparaging things about the Sox.
3) You accept the forced relocation to all those crazy pirate bastards in New Hampshire to their rightful home of Staten Island; we get to create a New Hampshire sized minefield off our southern border to keep out those lovely folks who come to the wilderness and demand the NY Times or Boston Globe at 7am. The paper comes from here but it goes somewhere else to get the ink put on it, numb nuts.
4) Finally, Maine gets to secede too, and join our true bretheren in Atlantic Canada so that finally we will be in a time zone comensurate with our needs.
Nice "Life Aquatic" hat in the houseboat post, by the way.
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