White House Dismisses Sovereign America’s Future

Unfortunately, moving to Australia or New Zealand doesn’t seem like a workable answer anymore.

There’s a whole lotta’ ruin(in a)nation, Smith said. So how much is that in demise? How many demises? Surprising how many measures don’t convert to other measures, or add up to final measures except retrospectively…convenient, eh?

Mise en place. Could it be that nations are demise en place cookshacks? Boil, boil, toil & trouble. Mises, Moses, let “my” people go…from pot to pan to plate…recircled, recycled, regurgitated, reiterated over & over & over again. Time is a flat plate, spinning.

As for all these cauldron ingredients from far & away (tom cruise & Nicole kidman play spunky irish immigrants – & they didn’t vote with anything but their feet), this perspective from early demo•repub•anti-federalist days ~ Jefferson & that lot ~ which seems so long ago, paints the groundhog day of the flat, spinning, plate:

“Since its inception the Robbins affair had drawn unprecedented notoriety to the rights of foreign nationals (if not yet to those of African Americans). Whatever the seaman’s origins, Republicans relentlessly insisted thjat Judge Bee had not afforded him basic rights of due process, including a trial by jury as well as the opportunity to acquire evidence & confront his accusers. The *Aurora* declared, “In the view of national independence – as it relates to our character as a nation – as it relates to the character & independence of our judiciary, it is amatter of utter insignificance whether *Jonathan Robbins* was a native of the *Irish bog*, or of the rough declivities of Connecticut.” Against the backdrop of rising numbers of Irish immigrants trumpeting the cause of alien rights, the alarming specter of Robbins’s surrender contributed powerfully to the mounting debate. During the election of 1800, it is likely that few publications achieved wider currency than the address printed in March for the citizens of states due to elect legislators for the purpose of selecting presidential electors. Widely reprinted that spring in Republican newspapers at the behest of “a number of Republican citizens,” the four-page address, signed by a “Republican Farmer,” portrayed Robbins’s extradition as the horrific consequence of the Alien Friends Act executed to its logical extreme:

“Every oppressed man was taught to believe that here he would find an asylum from tyranny & confusion – that the sacred right of jury should be preserved to him – that it should not depend on the will of any individual however important & elevated, & in whose breast was impenetrably locked the reason of [t]his procedure, to force him from this asylum, & banish him without the intervention of a jury. You did not then believe that any man found in your country, & claiming, whether this claim was true or not, to be a citizen, could be delivered to a foreign tribunal & military execution, at the request of any individual to a judge, without the trial or opinion of a jury.”

Less than a year into Jefferson’s first term, the cause of alien rights acquired growing momentum. Even sundry Federalists grudgingly embraced shifting attitudes. In time, shrewd members eager to right the party openly courted immigrant votes, including those of Irish Americans, who overwhelmingly voted republican. Any doubts about their burgeoning power were laid to rest when the nativist congressman Bayard was defeated in Delaware in 1802, reputedly by swelling numbers of Irish American voters. A delighted President Jefferson wrote the victorious Republican candidate,”Our success in defeating Bayard has mortified our *Feds* beyond expression.” Six years later, however, a “Naturalized Irishman” in a Pennsylvania paper felt the necessity to remind immigrants that their interests lay not with the “enemies to the common rights of man.” After citing, among other incidents, “Jonathan Robbins, delivered up by an infamous Pickering,” he affirmed, “Behold the same junto, the firm supporters of these men & measures, coming forward, like crawling sycophants, to ask for your suffrages.”

Numbers of Americans, in grappling with Robbins’s identity, more readily comprehended the meaning of their own. Assuming an unprecedented dynamic, the concept of nationality took on a richer significance. For Republicans, the possibility that Robbins had been Irish, not an American citizen, became steadily less consequential. The question of his identity, which had initially transfixed the public, in the end became more important for its irrelevance. Simon Slim averred, tongue in cheek, that he could not recall whether Robbins or Nash was his real name. Federalists understandably became irate at such indifference. Of Robbins’s discredited claims, a South Carolinian complained, “The Jacobins were not to be staggered by facts; they still harped upon the old key to a new tune.” If not an American by birth, Robbins was adopted posthumously. At the height of the campaign in 1800, the “Republican Farmer” proclaimed, “May the government of America never forget that the persecuted patriots of Europe have as good a right to asylum in the woods as their forefathers had.” More important than his birthplace were Robbins’s republican convictions, thereby encouraging, with unparalleled power, a broader definition of citizenship & national identity, based on belief & volition, not just the vagaries of nativity. Indeed, as a young & increasingly diverse nation of immigrants or the descendanats of immigrants, what bound most Americans together as a distinctive people was their common commitment to liberty. This recognition of national self-consciousness, this rebirth of the libertarian spirit of ’76 – recently ignited by the Alien & Sedition Acts – acquired heightened importance in Robbins’s martyrdom.

Drawing on John Locke, the attorney Michael Barrett argued vigorously for the right of any individual – “at liberty to pursue his own happiness” – to flee domestic oppression. In *The Reply of a Friend to Justice to a Friend to Propriety on the Fate of the Unfortunate Robbins,* Barrett continued, “If the persecutions exercised against our ancestors, & their prejudices against European governments, justified them in expelling the aborigines of America from their native soil, a slight recurrence to this fact ought to create, in an American sympathizing bosom, some degree of compassion towards those unfortunate men, fleeing to our shores for protection, from the most accursed tyranny that ever disgraced an unfortunate country [that is, Great Britain].” Robbins, he wrote, was “an immolated martyr at the shrine of American independence.” No less emphatic, the moderate Federalist John Steele, Adams’s comptroller of the Treasury, proclaimed in his anonymous “Letter from a Federalist”: “It is of little moment whether his name was Robbins, or Nash; whether he was a citizen, or an alien; it is enough that he was a *man* who sought asylum in an INDEPENDENT COUNTRY, whose peace he had not disturbed.” ~ American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom & National Identity in the age of Revolution – A. Roger Ekirch

When the Barry Corbin character in No Country for Old Men said “This country’s hard on people” he was viewing from his cat surrounded wheelchair, not the catbird seat. From up there, the line becomes the truer “countries are hard on people.” And not accidentally, either. Countries full of country people are hard on themselves, on each other, on anybody else they can lay hands on. “Vanity” isn’t all of it, but it is some of it. Best overarching rubric is just Fight Club crazy-self-destruction. “Sovereignty” ain’t any of it.