The clown car secedes. When I was in college, and Bush the Sequel had finally and entirely exhausted the support he received following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Blue State secession became a popular, early meme in a viral map of the United States of Canada vs. Jesusland. It was the era of Jon Stewart, back when the Religious Right was still a fount of power, and long before something like gay marriage seemed possible. This was just a couple years after the Supreme Court invalidated state laws against sodomy, which meant gay sex was illegal in 13 states as late as 2003, and so even then the notion of breaking our country apart didn’t sit well with me. At the time, I was a young gay kid in Boston, still very much in the primordial “I don’t do labels” phase of my sexuality, but fully aware of the fact that I was into guys, and while I got the joke — screw the stupid evil Christian people ha ha ha — I couldn’t help but think about the kids like me in Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. I believed in states’ rights up until the point they violated a person’s right to self, which I believed the Constitution existed to protect. It didn’t matter that I felt safe (kind of) in Boston. Every American deserved bodily autonomy. Giving up that fight — for all Americans — seemed wrong. Today, the secession meme is back:

I’ve seen a lot of recent content similar in tenor to the tweet above. But what strikes me here as interesting is how many of the replies to this tweet invoke California as a kind of glowing example for our new United States of Canada. The economy of California is referenced in particular, and with the implication America could not survive without the west coasters it presumably keeps shackled to the Union. While the notion of breaking our country apart, even if unserious, is mostly just unhelpful in ways similar to the early 2000s, the argument that California should in some way be leading any kind of charge toward a better world is frankly hard to comprehend. As a 19-year old in Boston I wasn’t entirely aware of what was going on in the Golden State, but today there’s no disagreement among sober thinking people that California is a disaster. Some clown car highlights from last week alone: the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission proposed a 60% work from home mandate to ease traffic congestion and reduce carbon emissions, which would in a sense make semi-permanent our city’s coronavirus lockdown, if for entirely unrelated reasons. Imagine: being inspired by the pandemic. From Sacramento, hot on his presidential brand building tour, Gavin Newsom attempted once again to deflect away responsibility for the wildfire crisis by proposing a ban on all gas-powered cars, prompting many raised eyebrows given our state’s present failure to keep the lights on: