Secede! Secede!

Keith Olbermann made me laugh last night. I was walking through the living room on my way to somewhere else and my husband was flipping through channels and had hit Olbermann talking to Howard Fineman about the Tea Parties. I stopped to listen and at the end of their discussion, Olbermann (in a brief aside that is not in the video at his site) sneered at Texas Governor Rick Perry for advocating for secession while dishonestly claiming he wasn’t seriously contemplating it.

I cracked up. This has nothing to do with dishonesty and everything to do with being Texan. I lived in Texas during the 1970s. Texas was furious with most of the rest of the country - especially the North and I think especially Michigan - during that period for reasons I no longer remember clearly: something to do with them using petroleum like there was no tomorrow and at the same time saying ugly things about the oil and gas industry. The oil embargo was a source of great hope for Texans - despite the fact that we had to wait in the same long lines as everybody else - because we figured now the rest of the country would realize that Texas’ oil and gas were valuable commodities rather than the root of all evil. (Obviously we were wrong about that.)

Anyhow true to form, Texans went big with their unhappiness. A columnist for the Houston Post (Lynn Ashby if I remember correctly) suggested (facetiously, humorless people on the left) that Texas increase its power within the country by exercising its right to split into five different states - and that it do so by splitting into five concentric Texas-shaped states. And I personally owned a T-shirt with the Texas flag on the front on it stamped: Secede! Secede!

Chill, Keith. This is just Texas being Texas.