Thirteen coastal counties, from Los Angeles to Marin, just north of San Francisco, should become the 51st state, to be named whatever they please; the remaining 45 counties would remain simply “California”. Based on the reaction he gets at farm fairs, he reckons his recently founded organisation will easily collect enough signatures—the number required is currently around 700,000—to force the split onto the ballot by 2012. Winning, of course, would be an entirely different matter.
Mr Rogers’s idea (see map) may be fanciful, but tensions in America’s most populous state are nothing new. Proposals to split California go back almost to 1850, when it joined the union. Usually, the problems began with water, which the north of the state had and the south needed, and then spilled over into culture, which was also distinct in north and south. The most famous effort, in 1941, came close to merging California’s northernmost counties with several from Oregon to form a new state, to be named Jefferson after America’s third president just as Washington is named after its first.
In reality this is another version of the culture wars, just different issues then the ones that often take the headlines:
Now they are fed up. The final straw was a ballot measure passed last November against the close confinement of farm animals, which is just the sort of thing that the coast’s “agriculturally uneducated city dwellers” like to foist on the people who feed them, says William Maze, a former state assemblyman who now manages Mr Rogers’s organisation. They pass themselves off as “environmental stewards”, he says, but are really “unrighteous types” that have never seen a pig or cow up close.
Unfortunately for Rogers, the chances of this actually happening are slim, but a push might send a message.
0 comments:
Post a Comment