Free Southie: Starting the world again, one red neck at a time

by Bernie Quigley

For The HIll on 4/8/13

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car at night?” - Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957

I’m not sure why it hasn’t caught on yet since revolutionaries like Ron Paul have gone from outlander to center stage hero, that an original Irish outlaw, like Whitey Bolger, did not claim sovereignty for South Boston. Truth is, Whitey was motivated by a sense of tribal Southie. He could be seen as a political operative gone amok and without a plan or following. His anger is pure. But suppose Whitey had called for a separate state back then: Southie as the 51st state or better yet, an independent entity like a red neck Switzerland, using the Rumsfeld/Kerry model. You declare Irish Southie to be a sovereign state in a “New New England” and bring in sympathizers - maybe in Texas or County Cork where we still have a few cousins - and separatist Scots, Quebecois, Croats and Catalonians - then claim a new federation, as Rumsfeld declared a “New Europe” of his made up friends in old Europe and Kerry attempts today to bond Hamas with Turkey in a New Middle East, united by a common antipathy of  Jews and Israelis. Rumsfeld/Kerry do not really believe in political boundaries. No one  does.

Ron Paul today has begun his own home schooling system. It is a good one, featuring Austrian economics, constitutional government and Bible-based ethics. Glenn Beck has one too and has even started his own utopian paradise in Texas. It is only a matter of time that this thinking is adopted as “alternative curriculum” in like-minded states and regions. We may be at the end of the rope again as Lucky and Pozzo were in the 1950s; waiting, waiting, but the heartland states will wait no longer.

A headline in the Washington Post over the weekend, declared that we are at “the end of everything.” But it is only the externals of the post-war, meaning World War II period, that are falling away – even Joe Biden’s speech this week got that right. Of course, his solution was imperial. Biden, like Bush, uses the utopian socialist H.G. Wells’ phrase: He says we need to form now a “new world order.” But we don’t form order. It rises incrementally through generations then suddenly awakens in time.

We experience today in America writers – David Chase, Matthew Weiner, J.S. Abrams, Kurt Sutter - of the quality and dark rising and awakening kind that Russia experienced with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. They speak to us of the end and the beginning here in the center of the world rising. We will go with them into the night and awaken again in the morning. All of the top down stuff from Bush/Biden/Rumsfeld/Kerry will fall away.