Time for a Divorce?

I posted the below on my Facebook page the other day; I'm transferring it here because if this blog is less read than Facebook, it's also less ephemeral. On December 5, 2015, the Texas GOP voted down a proposal to put a referendum question on the state primary ballot asking voters whether they thought Texas should secede from the Union. It got me thinking....Why not?Last week on the Charlie Rose show, I heard Karl Rove recount a moving story about how a crowd of 30,000 mourners spontaneously burst into "God Bless America" as the train bearing McKinley's body pulled into the depot in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania--a full 17 years before Irving Berlin wrote the song.This solicitation for the God, Guns, and Gold video (from the Bible-based survivalist outfit Solutions from Science) tells how colonial ministers used to lay their six shooters on their pulpits before they preached--even though the six shooter wasn't invented until 1833, 57 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. These are silly examples of ahistoricism, but they come from impassioned self-described conservatives, who claim that they draw their inspiration from history. Both have views that are as incompatible with life in the modern world as they are with the factual versions of the Golden Ages that they are so nostalgic for. They aren't even compatible with each other--it's more than likely that the pragmatic Rove and the Christianist Joe McDurmon hate each other almost as much as they both hate me. And my point is?

If America came to me for marital therapy, I would urge it to sever its union as quickly as possible--peacefully, mindfully, and equitably, of course, but definitively, because when two people can't agree on even a baseline for reality, then they shouldn't be living under the same roof. Do it for the children, I'd say: it's more harmful than helpful for them to be living in such a toxic environment.