Only because she knows that the Fake News media will print anything she says, no matter how misinformed, stupid or racist she sounds, Marjorie Taylor Greene yesterday said that the red states should ‘secede’ from the United States. This isn’t the first time this moron has promoted the secession idea and in fact, I really need to stop referring to her as an idiot because she's smart enough to have gotten herself into center focus on Fake News.
But I’m going to do MTG one better and surprise some of my liberal readers and friends with the idea that I not only completely support her demand that we split the country into two, but I’d like it to happen right now.
In fact, last year I self-published a little book (pictured above) in which I wanted to know why we ever took them back – the ‘we’ being the Northern states and the ‘them’ being what had been the Confederacy between 1860 and 1865. Obviously, those 13 good-for-nothing states aren’t the only states that are red, but with the exception of a couple of states in the Midwest (ex. Kansas, Nebraska, etc.) the red states located north of the Mason-Dixon line and west of the Mississippi River have few people and lots of cows.
So, when someone like MTG talks about the red states splitting away from the United States, she’s talking about the 13 states which left the country beginning in December 1860, and then were brought back into the Union after Lincoln invented the idea that the United States of America was a ‘perpetual’ political arrangement because “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
How about a house which is smaller than it used to be but is also cheaper to maintain? Is that such a bad thing? If that’s what we would get by telling MTG and her cohorts to fu*k off and disappear, I think it’s an excellent idea.
Various agencies track the per capita expenditures made by the federal government to residents of every state, which works out to $10,000 and change for the highest – Virginia – and $12 for the lowest – California – in 2023. Two of the top ten states are Virginia and Maryland, payments which represent salaries and fringes to men and women who work in D.C.
Ready? Of the other top 10 states that get the highest per capita monies from the feds, six of these states are former Confederate states – Kentucky, West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and South Carolina. These six states also exhibit the widest gap between what they receive from D.C. in federal aid versus what they send to D.C. in federal tax payments.
For all the GOP bullshit about how the country is being choked and destroyed by the power and authority of the Deep State, the bottom line is that if it weren’t for monies paid to the federal government by residents of blue states which are then sent back as federal aid to the red states, the residents of those red states would be starving in the streets.
If that’s the kind of country that MTG wants to create by having the red states secede from the Union, to quote Grandpa, ‘gai gezinta hai’ (read: get lost and go away.)
What did we get from having an open border with a bunch of states which said they wanted to go their own way in 1860 and 1861? For one thing, we got tobacco, which has really been a firm foundation for public health. We also got racism from those shit-ass states, although the racist policies of Jim Crow only appeared after the Union troops pulled out in 1877.
Oh! And let’s not forget jazz. Or the lovely songs of Stephen Foster with lyrics such as ‘Massa’s in de cold, cold ground and de darkies is all cryin.’ To quote Langston Hughes, those ‘darkies’ were crying out of joy.
I’m really tempted to set up a GoFundMe account to help MTG pay the costs of printing money and stamps for her red country. Maybe I’ll ask Steve Bannon to advertise this effort om his podcast.
After all, he did such a good job of raising money to build the Mexican wall.