The Left Coast

As Thomas Jefferson so presciently foresaw more than two centuries ago, the lands that lie along the Pacific Coast of America are geographically and culturally far too distinct, self-identified and utterly dissimilar from the rest of the United States to constitute anything other than their own, admittedly rather peculiar, country.  And so--with (1) the signal failure of the Mob/Mafia to take control of local government (as it has throughout the United States east of the Mississippi), anywhere in the West but in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and in Southern California; and with (2) the absence in the West of anything like the massive under-class that hangs inert and crushingly dependent on the society and economy of the Eastern United States; and with (3) a consistently high regional standard of free and compulsory education; and, not least, with (4) the populist/popular regional legalization of cannabis--the self-actualization of the Pacific states envisaged by Jefferson proceeds apace.  Several things, however, yet impede the full and sovereign realization of what must one day be, in its glory, from Juneau to Santa Barbara, the free and independent Bioregional Republic of Cascadia: Chiefest among these impeding things being the (vampire-in-a-bloodbank, or zombie-in-a-charnel-house) remorseless voracity of the Federal and Corporate Higher Powers of the Evil Empire, which will not cease to extort the revenues in taxes which flow from the incomparably richer Far Western States to the impoverished remainder of the country.  But hardly less frustrating, to the achievement of the rational and deserved autonomy of the West, is the inability of Far Westerners themselves to come to a consensus about, or even explicitly to acknowledge, the issues which unite them, and which must, eventually, dissever them, forever and forever, from the evil, violent and corrupt oligarchic prison-state into which the rest of America has devolved.

An especially annoying regressive current in the philosophy of even those Far Westerners who seek to found an anarchist/socialist bioregional republic (endemic perhaps in the historical Far Western culture of Vigilantism and Rugged Individualism), is a sentimental neo-primitivism or neo-Luddism--a mistrust of technology and of modern urban civilization, and a preference for a wished-for, imaginary, pre-industrial, bucolic, spuriously "Native American" ecology and society: This in a society that has invented the Personal Computer and the Internet, and is likely soon to master the technology of Nuclear Fusion, and within whose geographical boundaries lie five or six of the loveliest and liveliest cities in the world.  There is even among some a nostalgic effort to revive the Chinook Jargon as a lingua franca--in a region where, as it happens, English is spoken, and written, with unparalleled correctness and clarity, effortlessly, as the First Language of those who are,  beyond question, the most literate and best educated people on the planet.