If Texas Were to Start a New War of Secession

“You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas,” shouted Davy Crockett at Tennessee, who hadn’t voted for him. He left for Fort Alamo, where he would die, to win the United States something that the United States could lose today: Texas. At the moment, the resolution by Governor Rick Perry – who threatens secession – is just a Texas bluff and a pretty pompous act by Republicans, against both Obama and the dishonest Democratic Washington, from the land that gave us two Bushes and deprived us of one Kennedy.

The possibility that the second biggest American state (after Alaska), a huge container of fields, petroleum, technology, silos, refineries, horned bulls and burly men, three times bigger than Italy, could start a second war of secession is just theoretical. Governor Perry would dare not suggest using the American flag as toilet paper (without risking a bullet between his eyes).

But underrating the potential of Texas creating the political and human mainstay of a southern and southwestern American rebellion against the federal government, and the damned Democrats who represent it, would be a mistake. The most armed people in America walk on the surface of the largest petroleum container to the south of Canada, the Permian Basin, covered by superchurches of preachers of a sulfurous Bible, and of the highways of Houston chocked by the dust of the most important refineries.

There is an army of citizens who have always tolerated, but never really loved, the control of the central government. Oswald, who shot Kennedy dead, wasn’t born in Texas, but everybody, including JFK and his Texan Vice President Johnson, knew that the visit to the Lone Star State in November 1963 would be a trip to the front.

This state, which includes both the northern mountains, where it snows over 2000 meters, and the coasts of the gulf, which could be devastated by sultry weather and hurricanes at any time, is the Fort Alamo of the extreme right wing. Here “the most radical Democrats officially join the Republican party as soon as they cross the border,” as James Carville – the electoral brain of another southern guy, Bill Clinton – used to say.

Here, Hillary easily defeated Obama in the primary election; she was voted for by Republican electors who passed over to the other party to play a trick on the colored guy. Here, whites are barely 51 percent of the population, besieged by legal Mexican immigrants and the highest number of illegals (two million). Places a hundred kilometers far are still considered part of a “neighborhood,” and the new stadium of the Dallas Cowboys, who paid 1.5 billion dollars for it, looks like a deal. The fear of a takeover by the Mexicans on the one hand and the federal bureaucrats on the other are warming up to each other.

In Texas, federalism is a true religion, built on the diffident adhesion to the United States, that in 1845 guaranteed Texas the possibility to get back its independence so that Texas might float alone between the Rio Grande to the south and the big prairies of the north. The principle stated in the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) is taken seriously and claimed today by the governor himself, who took Bush’s place when the president left for Washington in 2001. “We are different people, who think and act in a different way,” Rick Perry says, and a year from now he’ll try historically to be elected to a third term. “Don’t try to step on us.”

The circumstance that this anti-Obama anger arises from is what gave birth to America – taxation – and is completely on the same page with its national history. So far, no tax has been increased. But when the confused and scattered rest of the Republican party decided to rebel against the government and started the “Tea Party” – a rebellion like the one by the colonies against King George of England – the “Teh-jas,” the modern Texans, were the first to respond. They were the first to bring up the spectrum of secession, aware of having the seventh most powerful economy in the world, but forgetting that without someone else’s money, the military investments, NASA, and the highways built by the “federals,” it wouldn’t be so strong. Now it’s useless to try to persuade the Republicans that Texas needs the other states, as well as the fact that other states need Texas.

If the heroic adventurers behind the lines of Fort Alamo had been sensible and realistic, Texas would still be Mexico. And the United States would have been spared eight years of a George W. Bush government.