Secession

By Spencer MM Wertheimer

Things occur so quickly in the United States that a mere mortal has difficulty keeping up. Everyday a new crisis occurs; indictments, gun rights, environment, immigration, wars and support for the combatants, approvals of a budget and marches on the Capitol. One thing that is clear is that the disagreemen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publisher Avenue
• Release date: Mar 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798869216304

Book preview

Sucession

Dividing The States

Spencer M. Wertheimer

Copyright © 2023 by Spencer M. Wertheimer

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

Dedication

Thanks to Terry Welsh, my terrific editor, Celine Carter and Theresa Davillio my hardworking transcribers and my boys Josh and Jacob.

Preface

Things occur so quickly in the United States that a mere mortal has difficulty keeping up. Everyday a new crisis occurs; indictments, gun rights, environment, immigration, wars and support for the combatants, approvals of a budget and marches on the Capitol. One thing that is clear is that the disagreements dividing the United States into rival camps continue and will continue into the future. These divisions have long existed in the form of the Ku Klux Klan; John Birch Society and the anti-immigrant America First group of the 1930s which was supported by the likes of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. The recent presidential election has allowed these groups to come out of the shadows and into prominence.

The country seems hopelessly divided between city and rural, educated elites vs working man, whites vs people of color, and wishes for democracy and autocracy. These divisions are notably apparent in the Red States vs Blue States. It is clear that a reckoning must occur, possibly in the next decade. The 250-year-old Constitution the founding fathers presented us with has begun to appear hopelessly dated allowing minority rule to become the rule rather than the exception. Most of the recent presidents have achieved less votes than their opponents. It is hard to imagine that a democratic country can continue to survive this way and a probable separation between Blue and Red States is needed.

"It’s alright, it’s alright.

We’ve lived so well, so long.

We can’t be forever blessed.

Still when I think of the road we are travelling on I wonder what’s gone wrong.

I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong."

Paul Simon

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

The Constitution of the Democratic Republic of America

About The Author

Chapter 1

S

eptember 2034 was warm for Philadelphia. Michael Greene made his way through the ivy-encrusted urban campus of the University of Pennsylvania with the confidence befitting a recently tenured professor in both the history and political science departments.

He was of average height and weight, in his late forties, with dark hair and clear skin. His nose was long, but some people might at least find him average looking. He wore khakis with a jacket over a black t-shirt that was a bit oversized to hide a growing paunch, that work out as he might, began to overtake him.

The University was called by some the ghetto Ivy due to its bordering the city’s West Philly neighborhood. Other Ivy League schools were in green, suburban areas like Princeton, gated like Columbia, or proximate to a city like Harvard. But Penn was embedded in Philadelphia. If you went deeply into the campus, the University had created areas of green and had seized huge stretches of land for sports fields on either side of the expressway that divided the city. These fields were basically off-limits for non-students.

On the edge of the campus, Walnut Street connected the school to what was called Center City. To one side of the street were the two-hundred-fifty-year-old University buildings, and on the other were trendy stores and fast-food spots.

He heard the shouts of the two women as he crossed the street, heading for a burger place. He had seen one of the ladies on many occasions on that corner. She was short, bulky, and plain-looking. She wore a sweatshirt with a Temple University insignia. He had noticed her before because she had asked for money on that important corner, often wearing a sign that read God will destroy you if you touch me.

She was his favorite street person. He often kept dollar bills in his pocket so that when he handed one out, he wouldn’t be forced to vulnerably take his billfold out. He reserved his gifts to women. Greene could barely imagine the indignities they suffered being homeless on the street. He had often sought her out, probably giving her a dollar three or four times a week.

He had first seen the 50-ish year-old woman a year ago. She appeared pregnant then, but he noticed her stomach never grew larger, so he decided that it was a ruse. The falsehood didn’t bother him. He understood the desperation the homeless faced. The argument today was apparently about who had the rights to that valuable corner at 34th and Walnut where the neighborhood met the University.

The woman she was shouting at was blond, almost six feet tall. Her face was pretty with the troubled complexion, right or wrong, that Michael identified with drug use. She was wearing a loose-fitting green sweater, probably heavier than the weather called for, but logical because Greene had noticed that the vagrants wore all of their clothing at once as they had little opportunity to change.

Students had gathered around secretly hoping that an actual fist fight would break out. The women were beginning to push each other, and the shorter woman seemed to be gaining the upper hand, having propelled the other woman into the street.

To the dismay of the onlookers, Greene stepped between them. As a professor, he somehow felt he should show authority, and the confrontation was becoming so aesthetically ugly that he could neither step away nor watch any longer. The bulky woman recognized him and stopped pushing. Michael actually took his wallet out and gave each woman five dollars. Speaking to the taller woman, who appeared to be about twenty-five years old, he led her to Chestnut Street, which was the next corner. She looked as if she could have been a student, but her ragged clothing made it certain that she was not. The crowd around them applauded, Greene felt derisively. I was there first. I know, he answered, giving her another five-dollar bill and walked back to get food. She looked at him, saying This is a Dickensian era.

How did she come up with that? None of his students would understand the truth in that statement. He saw streaks of dirt on her face and hands and was almost aroused by her. It was a predilection of his to be attracted to the odd, deformed, or hopeless. He blamed it on his time in Paris. He was a track athlete in college and had been invited to a meet in France. He felt he should spend his spare time reading Henry Miller, and those were the women who attracted Miller. He was about to invite her to his apartment for a needed shower but noticed students watching him, so he walked away.

Greene realized he had lived a blessed life. He had, after all, been born white, smart, and in the USA. While having been raised in modest circumstances, he parlayed that and some modest athletic abilities into a scholarship to an Ivy League college. He did, however, have the misfortune of needing lunch money and accepted an advanced ROTC spot, which paid him while still in school.

There was no real war when he signed up, but there was one when he graduated. To stay out of it, he enrolled in graduate school, but the conflict continued. One of America’s endless confrontations and the Army waited him out. He was sent to the Middle East.

Greene had a romantic streak in him. He almost wanted a gun. He kept repeating his favorite Shakespeare from Henry V at Agincourt. We in it shall be remembered, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers, and gentlemen in England now abed, think themselves accursed that they were not here; and hold their manhood’s cheap while any speaks.

He repeated the Shakespearian verse all the way over to the desert. Once, an IED exploded, blowing up the jeep in front of him and he quickly dispelled any thought of glory and placed himself in as little harm’s way as possible for the remainder of his tour.

When he returned home, he couldn’t find anyone who hadn’t gone finding their manhood cheap.

Sometimes he thought of his dad’s trip to the Honolulu whore houses en route to the Pacific in World War II, grandpa’s visits to Paris in World War I, and his uncle’s trysts in Saigon during Vietnam, resulting in his Eurasian cousin. There were no available women in Iraq. Between the lack of sex and having seen a friend blown up, his romantic streak was over.

Those Army years were a blank for green. Others called it exhilarating and that life was a bore after they came home, but to him, it was a blank. As a historian, he remembered dates as places in his own life; where he was when he heard about 9/11, or where he was when the Phillies won the World Series, or who his date was at the millennium. But those Army years disappeared in his mind like they never existed. A hole in his memory: Movies, and music, and sports went on. But not with him. In his memory, it was as if they never existed.

Upon returning, he tried to atone for the years of celibacy, mostly failing and in his mind succeeding only when he had something to trade with a woman: money, a passing grade, youth, entre to dazzling faculty parties. Certainly, no one wanted his mediocre look or average penis. And so, as he moved up the faculty ladder, he never believed a woman really liked him or that he had ever really loved a woman. He went to graduate school and married briefly, but the Army had changed him, and the relationship soon crumbled and made true people’s claims that he had become solipsistic. He never understood that when a woman came home with him, it was simply for the sex and not necessarily for future.

To him, relationships were simply a zero-sum game. I win, you lose. Or a trade. You are nice to me and you can share in my well-earned prestige. He thought everyone was like that and that men sought success so they could trade it with women. He knew it wasn’t right and was certainly unfair. He realized that it was a poor way to do things and he wanted to change but still he knew his attitude was working. He was smart and witty. He had a good job. He didn’t feel renowned, but he rationalized that his life was good.

Chapter 2

T

wo days later, it was 90 degrees and humid as Greene walked along up the long stairway to Philadelphia’s Museum of Art, the same climb Rocky had made famous. It was beginning to rain as it always did when unseasonable weather hit the city.

He had spent the previous night in a casual tryst in the suburbs. After a late lunch and walk, he drove down the city’s glorious Kelly Drive, named after John B., father of Grace, the actress, her dad, and brother, both Olympians. He drove by Boathouse Row, the center of the city’s rowing tradition, passing the colorful clubhouses with their boats and sculls bordering the Schuylkill River. At night, these houses were illuminated in various, often seasonal, colors, making the drive among the most beautiful of avenues. One of the clubs, Kelly Jr’s. Vesper's team had been the last club team to win an Olympic title. The road led to Philadelphia’s Art Museum.

The building was a monument to the past, created to emulate a Greek temple and built in 1928. Still, it was elegant, located atop a hill, and was the centerpiece of roads out of the city, making it a memorable landmark.

The evening was marking the Museum’s first Outsider Art show, a celebration of unschooled artists, and was a clear contrast to the Institution’s permanent collection, which included dozens of Cézannes and Matisses comprising one of the world’s great accumulations of Impressionist paintings. A few years earlier, the Museum had loaned the Cézannes to a show in Paris. The French were astonished, wondering how these works were allowed out of their country.

It seemed that many of the city’s elites had come to the show as people were happy to escape the reins of the fifth pandemic of the last fifteen years. Greene was happy just to see maskless people again and match women’s faces with their revealing clothing.

He also wanted to see the show. He was a fan of figurative painting, and much of the show was just that. He had even begun to collect some of the work, previously described as primitive or, in Europe, brut art.

He had known little about visual art but noticed, as a long-time single man, that women’s apartments, regardless of income, were nicer than his. He wasn’t about to emulate their penchant for wallpaper and window treatments, so he began filling his walls with paintings.

The least expensive at that time were the Outsiders, and Greene made it a hobby to visit painters in their homes and even travel into the South, chasing artists he admired. His own collection became extensive enough that, as Outsider art became popular, people asked to see what he had collected. He walked through the exhibit nodding to acquaintances, zeroing in on work by the southern preacher, Howard Finster. Greene loved his multi-layered religious works and was happy to see the paintings extolled and now included. He was pleased that he owned two of Finster’s works. In a sense, he felt it verified that he had acquired an eye. Experts told him that they had value in a sale, but it made no difference to him. How broke would he ever have to be to be forced to sell off his art? He looked, and he collected, because he liked them and the occasionally eccentric artists that he met.

As a university professor now with an active interest in art, Greene was on the list of people always invited to all of the museum and gallery openings. He often attended as much for the pretty women and servings of shrimp and wine as for the paintings. It had meant that as a bachelor, he needn’t cook that night, although he did notice that he was beginning to develop an allergy to shellfish. Greene rarely met a promising woman at these events or engaged in more than aimless small talk.

The gathering was no longer shocked by the turn the country had taken. The past week had seen an 18-year-old come into a school with an M-16, shooting eight children. His excuse was that they were infected by the devil. It was the third mass shooting of that very normal week, generating more discussion than the act itself. One side of the political spectrum called for thoughts and prayers while the other begged, to no avail, for a change in the law.

People here were the hated elites closing their eyes and just hoping that they and their children would survive. Scattered among the Philadelphians at the event were several homeless people who used these openings as an opportunity to scoop up the free wine and veggies and somehow had found their way in sans invitation. They seemed almost indistinguishable from the students and artists in attendance with their jeans and backpacks. As Greene peered into one corner, he thought he saw the tall woman from the dispute two days earlier with a plastic cup of wine in her hand, looking at a Darger painting of children. Darger was a true outsider whose work was discovered upon his death. He had rarely left his Chicago apartment and had never seen a woman, thus leading to his