Dear HCN,
Dispatch To the Kingdom
of Paonia:
Without dwelling on the thesis of
This Sovereign Land and the view that the
federal government must transfer the power over federal lands into
local hands, presuming there is some legal, structural and
socio-political basis for this action, I would like to submit a
comment on Ed Marston’s review statement that, “We’re not
first-rate, because we lack major private institutions of higher
learning …” (HCN, 2/4/02: The West can govern
itself).
First, without a clear definition of the
West from the Kingdom of Paonia, it is difficult to know the region
of which Marston speaks. I would submit the formulation of the West
in Michael Johnson’s New Westers: The West in Contemporary
American Culture for that
definition.
It is agreed that we lack a Harvard,
a Brown, a Princeton, a Yale or even a Dartmouth, and that they
have made great contributions to nation-building and the
edification of a portion of the public. But we do possess great
state universities – Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas, Arizona,
California, Oregon, Washington – in the West as I define it, and
those institutions have contributed greatly to the education and
development of the West and continue to do so in an extremely
important manner. And we are the better for that, not worse off.
Such a blanket statement by Marston in the publication does,
however, in a journalistic sense, confirm his statement that “we
lack first-rate media,” HCN
included.
And, if Kemmis “understands” that the
region is in the grip of powerful, self-interested political
machines, he has failed to grasp that central political truth
spoken by that great political realist with the words, “We have met
the enemy and he is us!”
However, if we are to
have a Constitutional Convention to dismantle the representative
structure and process of the nation to permit the West to govern
itself, let it be held in the Kingdom of Paonia, where truth is
eternal.
Where do I apply for the position of
secretary of State?
John
Hall
Evergreen, Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Where is the Kingdom of Paonia?.
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