Running for Your Life: Secessionism vs. Bipartisanism vs. Me-ism

Let’s break up. No, let’s come to some common understanding. No, all notions of the public good are derived from personal experience.

Here, in the homeland of Liberal heresy (Park Slope, Brooklyn, where if the Democrat candidate were ever to be removed from the ballot, the Communist, not the Republican, would receive the most votes), it’s hard to believe after the overwhelming election victory last month by our chosen candidate, President Obama, that included on the first Web page of the most popular petitions on the “We The People” White House website http://1.usa.gov/Or4mqw (as of Dec. 9) are requests to secede from the United States of America from six states – Texas (with 119,247 signatures!), Florida, Tennessee Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina – and create six separate governments.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t necessarily see these paltry efforts as serious movements to secede. (As The Economist points out in its Dec.1 issue http://econ.st/11B55yy those Texas signatures amount to less than 1 percent of the state’s population, and a lot less than the 4 percent who actually voted for Obama. Oh, yeah, and secession is illegal in all fifty states, as evidenced by Texas v White, 1869. )

Still, the thousands of signatures are a sign of just how polarized this country has become. In fact, the day after Obama was elected Louisiana submitted its secession petition on the site. It has to date (Dec. 9) collected 37,357 signatures. I’d also like to point out that that is not a lot of time: from Election Day to Dec. 9 is just over a month. And, yeah, a picture of a Chihuahua in a Santa hat is likely to get three times that many “likes” on a Facebook page. But, hey, this is America where politics ranks next to trick-snowboarding in popularity. As many as 37,357 citizens signing on to the idea of chucking America and launching the hypothetical Great National Experiment of Louisiana isn’t a drop in the bucket.

Which brings me to bipartisanism. Seriously. Who besides Obama still believes in this lame idea? Time will tell, but I’m not betting on it. For anyone still believing in bipartisanism, take a wee peek behind the curtain of the protracted NHL labor talks that have yet to yield a deal in order to save the rapidly vanishing 2012-13 season. Or meditate on the likelihood the Republican opposition will submit to reasonable behavior before the fiscal cliff date of Dec 31. That will cure you.

So what can we expect in the Obama’s second term? With neither secessionism nor bipartisanism as our guiding political thought, we’re reduced to, yep, right back to where we were before the presidential campaign, before the Tea Party and the 2010 mid-term elections: me-ism.

The current standard-bearer of me-ism is a long-winded piece by Jeff Goldberg in The Atlantic http://bit.ly/S8sl48, in which the author proposes that Americans get used to the idea of being immersed in a sea of guns and that what we need to better promote public safety is to pass select regulation, all of which is predicated on the author’s personal reflections surrounding the mass murders by Colin Ferguson that took place in 1993 on a Long Island Rail Road passenger train.

So get with it, policy makers and commentators. All politics is personal. Put your “me” in the center of your idea and let it fly. The other two “isms” have been abject failures; this one has all the earmarks of one that will get some traction.

Of course I shouldn’t be surprised. Me-ism is nothing more than secessionism in extremism – as in every person is a nation. With such a specious me-ism argument coming from a publication as august as The Atlantic, fuhgeddaboud any other “isms” gaining prominence anytime soon. The die is cast.

Next: Running for Your Life: Winter, what winter?