I don’t know where I read that. Was it the motto of old Florence, or something? Whatevs, Scanalyst is my place to be serious. So here’s what I propose:
Forget “regionalization” of our country. If as everybody is now saying, we are hopelessly divided, and the only question open is where to make the incision, I suggest a kinda Mohs surgery approach:
Isolate and excise the areas of diseased tissue.
…which are:
the cities.
New York, Chicago, LA, SanFrancisco.
I live in rural Pa, and much as I’ve always ed New York, I’m ready to cut’er loose now. Same with the other cities i mentioned. ( I’m still on the fence about Philadelphia; I think its main problem right now is the Soros DA Krasner.) Th concerns of those city folk, those who trade and those who prey on them, have absolutely nothing to do with the concerns of my rural compatriots.
Every week I drive through Pa counties Monroe, Schuylkill, Northampton, Carbon, past homesteads displaying evidence of multigenerational habitation, every one a freehold, most displaying more than one American flag.
They don’t hafta wait around for goods and food from the metropoli; rather the reverse.
They live with machinery and animals every day, and all, animate or inanimate, serve some function which the buman’s maintenance of them makes possible.
They live in the weather, they live WITH it., ploughing snow or at least ploughing through it with their old reliable trucks and tractors.
That’s America, dear polymaths. Not the polyglot holding pens the cities have become.
So many of the issues the Progs bitch about are urban issues. Just f’rinstance, “income inequality”. Yuh, in Manhattan you see the fabulously, stratospherically wealthy! AND you see the wretched poor who possess no more than a stolen shopping cart packed with piss-smelling dry goods. In the countryside, it’s much harder to sort people out socio-economically.
Why don’t we treat the cities like sovereign nations, tribes, with their own territory which they should maintain through taxation of their own denizens? And maybe, each one metropolis get one electoral vote. Or 1/2.
As an Appalachian-American, I demand justice and equity for MY people. And the political and social issues of the cities stand in our way.
Don’t divide the country. Simply excise the urban concentrations.
Ah but we must remember that it was our Great Patron Saint of Grift and Duplicity, Alexander Hamilton, that said the country’s future was with the cities. While not surprised, I am rather pleased to see that it is in fact Jefferson’s vision of the country as an agrarian, decentralized republic that is winning the day with the liberty movement.
No, divide. One cannot simply live with a Stage 4 Cancer. Once it reaches Stage 4, one must do everything in one’s power to separate oneself from the malignant tumor that threatens to destroy the whole body. Cities and their inhabitants, by and large, are tumors killing this republic.
Thomas Jefferson saw it coming, “When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.” Cities have been corrupt, and corrupting, since antiquity.
Many state legislatures in the U.S. were apportioned to balance power between urban and rural interests, just as the U.S. Senate provide a balance between large and small states. All of this was blown away by the Warren Court “one man one vote” decisions in the 1960s, which had the result of handing almost total political power at the state level to those pullulating hives of foul iniquity.
Redressing the balance of power between the cities and the countryside might help, but I suspect not so much given the influence of mass media, which is entirely a creature of the cities and, in the U.S, the worst of them.
Just cut off their water and power, draw a cordon sanitaire around them to keep the Golden Horde from escaping and ravaging the landscape, and wait for about three weeks. Or, a 125 kiloton airburst at around one kilometre if you’re in a hurry.
Yes but that’s what I’m saying. Why should I leave rural Pa for rural…idk, even Florida, if Carl Hiassen is to be believed? I kNOW I could go to Tennessee or Missouri and find people like the ones I grew up with. We, the landsmen, should not have to move. Town v. Country, that’s the great divide.
I “Pullulating hives of foul iniquity” .
But no I’m not suggesting we cut ‘em off, strangle ‘em. Just, Y’know, let ‘em fend for themselves. They’ve got a lot of the wealth of the country as a tax base.
You only hafta look at one o’ those maps of the US, shown In red and blue, to see that (a) we the peasants are in the majority, and (b) the city folk are voting perfectly opposite to all issues concerning our well-being.
As for the suburbs, which right now are everywhere a battleground: sorry but no, folks, you can’t stay there. Either move into the urb, or head on out to Ruritania. Crunch time!
Is the problem with the concept of a city, or with the reality of what too many cities have become?
The hardy country folks battling through the snows in their old pickups rely on places where pickups are designed, iron ore is turned into steel, and pickups are manufactured. Those places are generally cities. Unfortunately, nowadays those cities are generally in Asia.
A hypothesis – the problems with Western cities are largely a consequence of the problems of allowing the evolution of a permanent Political Class which gets seized (to use the EU expression) of stupid ideas. Such as the idea that a sustainable society can be built on financialization and lawfare instead of on production. And the idea that they have solved the problems of global pollution by putting it out of sight in Asia.
A healthy sustainable society needs healthy sustainable cities. We have allowed problems to develop which are too big to run away from. Our choices are (a) deal with those problems, enduring the necessary pain, or (b) stand back while those problems drive us into societal collapse, with resulting much larger pain.
Long-term optimist. Either way, our current problems will get resolved. Two or three generations down the road, life will be getting better. If our descendants have to speak Chinese … does it matter, as long as they have good lives?
What they have become. There is nothing more demonstrative of the decay of US greatness than visiting a city. At first glance you see the decades of muck and grime and then you start to see in your minds eye the city as it was before the grime. Then you just notice a faded, old facade. All due to inducing people into dependency of some kind or another.
“one man one vote” Supreme Court Decision, Reynolds v. Sims 1964 is what destroyed state governments in New York, Illinois, California and other states — by stealing power from rural regions and giving it to cities.
If the next New York governor, passed legislation that ignored this horroble ruling, BY SETTING UP STATE SENATE DISTRICTS AS COUNTIES FOR EXAMPLE, the state has a chance at turning it around (a long shot for sure but possible)!
ed New York, I’m ready to cut’er loose now. Same with the other cities i mentioned. ( I’m still on the fence about Philadelphia; I think its main problem right now is the Soros DA Krasner.) Th concerns of those city folk, those who trade and those who prey on them, have absolutely nothing to do with the concerns of my rural compatriots.