Once upon a time, there was this married couple, that just didn't seem quite right for each other. We'll call her Miss Liberty, and call him Mr. Liberal.
Miss Liberty is an avowed rugged individualist. A hardworking entrepreneur, a pull yourself up by the bootstraps type of girl. Miss Liberty still has the first dollar she ever earned hanging up on the wall. Miss Liberty believes in the work ethic: keep working hard enough and smart enough, and you'll achieve the American dream.
Miss Liberty values her own freedom and liberty more than anything else: you can't tell this woman of the Millenium what to do, or she'll give you what for. And she cares about her family and her children very deeply, a very nurturing lady. In terms of making a little go a long way, and making a home, Martha Stewart has nothing on Miss Liberty.
Miss Liberty is an occasional outdoorswoman. She likes to go shooting and hunting, and is never found without her favorite guns, many of which were handed down by her parents. She's a sports enthusiast, maybe even a bit of a tomboy. She loves cars.
Some people have called Miss Liberty cold and heartless. They say she doesn't care about the poor. But she's given the poor work so often, that many families have been fed by the jobs Miss Liberty has provided with her shrewd business acumen.
Mr. Liberal is your typical New York kind of guy. He knows what is good for everyone, and tries to make everyone live the way he sees fit. Mr. Liberal is a freespender: he spends money and tosses it away like it's going out of style. Mr. Liberal isn't poor: he takes in a lot of money from his lucrative law practice, but it doesn't stop him from raiding Miss Liberty's bank accounts and credit cards. Mr. Liberal frequently dips into Miss Liberty's till to donate to the poor: he believes money solves all ills, and if you just give people enough, they'll manage.
Mr. Liberal, although he has seldom touched a gun, is not adverse to hiring bodyguards who wear them for the protection of himself and his key friends. He's tried to do things like play war games, but every time he and his friends go out and try their hand, he can't do anything right. Mr. Liberal has always had a latent resentment of the fact that Miss Liberty served in the Army
with distinction. It is threatening to his manhood.
Sexually, Mr. Liberal is a dog: whatever gets you through the night is alright. Whatever anybody does is their own business. And if a baby results, well, we can raise it, abort it... all the same to him. This has been a constant source of tension in their marriage, because Liberty always believed in the sanctity of a family.
If ever there were two people who could not ever hope to be happy in a good marriage, it would be Miss Liberty and Mr. Liberal. But they tried. To their credit, they put in many a long year together, for the good of one another, for the good of the children. For a while they made it work. Very well. With her strength of character, and his guile, they became the Power Couple of the world. Everyone envied Liberty and Liberal.
But this marriage has turned ugly. It has Miss Liberty and Mr. Liberal almost to the point of violence. Their kids are also fighting, having to often choose between the two. You used to be able to sit at the family dinner table and put aside differences and have a nice meal. Now the partisan bickering at the dinner table is so unbearable, that half the kids don't even bother showing up.
It started during the Vietnam war, when Mr. Liberal went on that "tune in, turn on, and drop out" binge. He got introduced to a lot of new ideas then, things which just didn't make any common sense to Miss Liberty. Liberty always wondered how Mr. Liberal could be so consumed with recreational drugs, yet still support sending his friends to prison if they used them. It didn't
make any sense.
Then Mr. Liberal got on that vegetarian kick. He started this "it's wrong to kill animals" thing. He was always calling Miss Liberty "murderer" and such. Didn't matter that he was always paying for the abortions of all the secret girlfriends he had knocked up. But when Miss Liberty found out about that, well, they've been fighting over the subject of those abortions ever since.
Then there is that continuing affair where Mr. Liberal is trying to get Miss Liberty to give up her gun collection. Man, that gun collection of hers is so threatening to his manhood. He's begun to live in mortal fear of that gun collection. He's always telling the kids that those guns are evil and shouldn't be in the house. He says Liberty is "frightening" to him.
And when Miss Liberty threatened to cut off Mr. Liberal's line of credit and gravy train, he had one of his friends, a Mr. Irwin R. Schuyster, threaten to sue her for everything she owned and ever would own. One time, Mr. Schuyster even threatened to frame her with criminal charges and send her to prison. Liberty relented, but the marriage has never been the same since.
Now to be fair, Miss Liberty has been known to go off on Mr. Liberal. Like the time she called him a "queer" for spending so much time with his gay friends in San Francisco. She derides him for not being "a real man" and for being, as she terms it, a "pantywaist".
What sane marriage counselor anywhere in the world, would suggest to Miss Liberty and Mr. Liberal that they stay together?
Miss Liberty is not without a point of reference on this. She remembers when her mother, Miss Dixie, tried to separate from her father, Mr. Union. Miss Dixie had to fight long and hard, but ultimately, Mr. Union brought her back to his home by force, dragged her by her hair, stole everything she owned, pillaged her and raped her, and deprived her of every human right and dignity a human being should have, all for the sake of the sanctity of marriage.
Well, that was a different era. We in the year 2000 don't drag our wives back kicking and screaming into a home where they are going to be miserable, or going to be abused.
Yesterday, Miss Liberty thought about ending the whole thing. She went to an attorney to inquire about a divorce. She asked about whether Mr. Liberal could contest such a divorce, and how. Would her reputation be dragged through the mud? Would Mr. Liberal's friends even decide to gang up on her, and do to her what was done to her mother?
The attorney was horrified to learn that Mr. Liberal was implicated, but never charged, with burning down a house full of Miss Liberty's best friends. Likewise, there was the incident where the wife and child of a good friend of hers were shot to death by some of Mr. Liberal's friends. She, to this day, swears he had something to do with it, although no one has ever been convicted for it.
And then when Miss Liberty goes home, she visits that gun collection. Occasionally, she's neglected to always clean her guns and take practice. Now she's at the range almost every day, and she cleans her guns a lot more often. It's a pretty gun collection really. And she's got what seems like truckloads of ammo. They have a long history. One of them's a Revolutionary War era musket that belonged to her great great grandfather.
Lately, these pretty guns have begun to talk to Miss Liberty. And those nice shiny cartridges have begun to look mighty appealing, as she contemplates what a mere five years ago she had thought unthinkable. What her friends were telling her she was going to have to do all along.
And Mr. Liberal has been talking to his chief security consultants, Mr. Alfonse T. Fiery, and Mr. Fred B. Ingraham. They're suggesting they be allowed to conduct a surprise preemptive strike and take away all of Miss Liberty's guns.
But the problem is the kids. The kids that are loyal to Miss Liberty have sworn to use that gun collection to kill anybody that tries to harm Liberty. Including their own brothers and sisters who like Mr. Liberal better. Should push come to shove. Those kids stand guard over that gun collection, and have vowed to destroy anyone who tries to take it.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have two Americas. I could frame the current large controversy in any number of ways. I choose to frame it as a bad marriage. A marriage between two disparate and dissimilar kinds of people. A marriage that is doomed on its face. A marriage which can be peaceably settled and the assets of the marriage divided appropriately. Or a marriage which is
going to turn violent, where one, or both, of them could be killed if it continues, and perhaps even some of the children.
For those of you who say that I'm crazy for even suggesting such a thing as a separation, a divorce, a secession: I offer the preceding parable.Which undoubtedly will come to pass. One way or another. Because in these times, most bad marriages are allowed to end. Because not allowing them to end is just madness. Nothing in a divorce can remotely compare to the traumatic
event of the children witnessing one of the parents killing the other, or killing each other.
Peaceful separations are the vogue today. The Czech Republic and Slovakia just did it, the conclusion to something they called the "Velvet Revolution". India and Pakistan separated, albeit that was a lot more contentious. We could do it fairly easily.
Now some of the kids will undoubtedly want to stay with you, Mr. Liberal. New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachussetts, Rhode Island, Iowa, Minnesota, and authoritarian loving places such as Illinois. Others, like the South and the Rocky Mountains, would be better served by going with Miss Liberty.
Out in the West, we need to split the California kids. You should take Los Angeles and the Bay Area-Silicion Valley region, Mr. Liberal, since those kids obviously like you. But most of the rest of the kids should stay with Miss Liberty. The same with Oregon and Washington. You take the coast from Portland to Seattle. Liberty'll keep the rest. Hell, I've even heard rumors that
Alberta is contemplating letting Miss Liberty adopt her.
Florida could present a problem, too. But I'm sure Liberty will give you that Miami-Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale gold coast, Mr. Liberal. So long as you let Miss Liberty have harbors like New Hampshire in your territory. Then there are those pesky Indiana Hoosiers and Ohio Buckeyes: who knows what they'll wind up doing.
If I may even suggest something radical: Mr. Liberal, you can even keep the name. The United States. And its federal government and all that largesse. All that stuff we DON'T like about the United States. Miss Liberty has an alternative: you see, when her mother Miss Dixie was dragged away, she never legally surrended the name or the government she had. The
Confederate States of America. You take old Dixie, and pair her up with the Rocky Mountain states, and a new Constitution, where we still hold the right of the individual as sacrosanct.
In fact, with a little help from my friends, I have written such a Constitution: The New Confederate States of America Constitution. You may find a first draft of it at http://www.newconfederacy.com/confedcn.htm.*
As one of Miss Liberty's kids, I'm going to suggest that splitsville is inevitable. We can do it the easy way. Or we can do it the hard way. The easy way is secession and a peaceful agreement that we cannot, and therefore shall not, any longer live in the same house. The hard way is where we employ the use of that nice shiny gun collection of ours, in the precise way old Tommy Jefferson intended.
Complain about it all you want. But I'm sick of the economic thievery and utter intellectual dishonesty of liberalism, and the welfare state, dumbed down school system, special favors under the law, medical monopoly, corrupt criminal justice system, and government confiscation of lawful property it all brings. I'm tired of having to ask for YOUR permission to carry a gun, speak my mind, worship as I choose and where, teach my kids, run my household and my business, travel when and where I feel like it, and defend myself in a manner I see fit. I'm sick and tired of ALL OF IT.
I want a divorce. And I aim to get one.
Copyright, 2000, LizMichael.com, www.lizmichael.com Permission to reprint granted so long as the website and the copyright remains referenced. No exclusivity may be retained by any individual or press entity which reprints.
- Published November 26, 2000
