From “The Scratching Post”: Out of the mouths of idiots …

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, March 14, 2023, published here by permission of the author.]

Back in early 2020, I wrote a piece titled “Thinking the unthinkable,” arguing why a divorce between the Red and Blue States was thinkable, if not desirable. I followed that with a companion piece, “The necessity of divorce,” offering a plan for getting through the messy separation process. Not surprisingly, the feedback was sparse. Few people are willing to come to grips with the unthinkable.

    So I decided to bark up other trees … until now. A month ago, the frumious Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the same separation in a couple of tweets. My reaction was mixed. I was happy to see that a public figure had put the idea into mass circulation, but I cringed to see that the advocate was MTG. In today’s politics, her face is to buffoonery what Washington’s face is to patriotism. Why couldn’t a Republican intellectual — pardon the oxymoron — like Thomas Sowell have been the spearhead? As time passes, it seems that neither he nor any other Republican is willing to take up the banner. I’d be discouraged but for a recent survey of 1,000 likely voters. It found that 34% of them agreed with the idea, and nearly as many Republicans favored it as didn’t.
    The silence of Republican politicians is easy to explain. They gave up on thinking at least two decades ago. (Truth be told, they never liked it much after Reconstruction.) Then came the ultimate retreat — the refusal to speak their minds for fear of alienating crackpots in their leadership and base. They’ve given leadership a bad name.
    Mitt Romney, a Republican of a different stripe, scoffed that we’d disposed of MTG’s idea in the Civil War. Steve Schmidt, a former Republican and “never Trump” activist, also chimed in. He claimed MTG had “called for a second American Civil War.” Both men ignored a key sentence in one of her tweets: “National divorce is not civil war.” Maybe they would counter with, “Yes, but the very attempt to enact a divorce would lead to civil war.” That’s quite a leap. The attempt might also lead to a deeper examination of grievances and eventually to a reconciliation. Or it might lead to the creation of two new nations with two different constitutions. Is the danger so great that separation must not even be discussed?….
[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2023 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.