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I can’t say that the removal of the Confederate Memorial in Arlingtin National Cemetery was my last straw. For some thirty years, I have grown increasingly ambivalent about the United States, its greedy, morally debased government class, its declining empire and, frankly, the whole concept of being American, playing into the idea of Lincoln’s propositional nationhood as it was initially espoused by him and subsequently has been refined and updated by succeeding presidents and sundry public intellectuals.

In fact, reflecting back across the veil of time, which, as I should stress is exceedingly thick at this juncture in my life, I recall one especially jarring encounter on a chartered bus in June, 1977, en route to West Point after a daylong tour of New York City. We were on the bus with other families whose husbands and fathers, all Reserve Army officers, served as recruiters for the military academy.

During the ride back, a neatly coiffed, very refined young lady approached my mother, an equally attractive and refined lady, apparently on the basis of my mother’s very noticeable Southern drawl. Upon learning that we were Alabamians, she proceeded to heap scorn on Alabama and my mother, apparently simply for her summoning the temerity to live and to raise her sons in such a despicable place.

My mother, who played classical piano, and quoted and wrote reams of poetry and who also held a graduate degree, handled it with her characteristic grace.

For my part, I never forgot it, and it was my first lesson in propositional nationalism – how such a weak form of nationalism necessarily requires a foil and how the South necessarily has supplied this foil.

Perhaps my rambling here is somewhat fraught with irony. As I have pointed out before, the bulk of my forebears were Southern Unionists and even Southern Unionist soldiers, one of whom even had a hand in the burning of Atlanta.

While I readily identify far more as an Alabamian and a Southerner than an American, I am not driven by any burning desire to resurrect the old Confederacy. Yes, I remain a steadfast admirer of the Permanent Confederate Constitution for how it further refined the role of the general government and safeguarded the role of states and even introduced some aspects of the British Westminster Model to the American constitutional system. Yet, despite my strong Southern cultural and political proclivities, I harbor no intention of raising the Stainless Banner above Richmond.

Yet, the fact cannot be denied that this country was rebuilt and a measure of national unity established on the basis of the valor of the Southern fighting man and the post-bellum U.S. Government’s determimation, however initially reluctant, to honor this valor, even as the plutocrats who took the reins after Appomattox succeeded in turning the South into a huge resource-extraction zone as well as capitalizing on Southern martial traditions to build the rudiments of what has become, certainly within the last generation, a corrupt empire.

What we are witnessing today with this monument removal and the widely reported removal and incineration of the Lee Monument is the foreshadowing of a reckoning, which some of the left have likened to the unconditional surrender imposed on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945.

This only serves to underscore the degree to which the cultural and political elites who run this regime despise the South and the rest of the red heartland with which this region shares so many cultural and historical affinities.

These are all reasons why I and growing numbers of Southerners and other residents of the vast red heartland have grown increasingly sympathetic to some form of national divorce.

We are governed by a morally-debased corrupt plutocracy that, in employing empty terms such as “our democracy,” simply serve to underscore how the snake oil of propositional nationalism no longer supplies any form of national palliative. What remains of American national identity is squeaking under the strain of wokeness and leftist rot in general, and it behooves us to begin imagining what must follow, which, hopefully will, to one degree or another, harken back to the vision of our Founding Founders.