Re:Generator Magazine

Governor Rick Perry, I’d like to take you up on your, and by extension, the entire state of Texas’ threat (offer?) to secede from the union. It may have felt like political theater to you, telling angry, almost-uniformly middle-aged white people what they wanted to hear. But they took what you said very seriously, because many of them have been thinking it for years. And to be honest, the rest of the union has given it a great deal of thought, even if it didn’t mention anything to the Lone Star State’s face. If you’re serious about what you said, let’s make this happen, and then Texas can be that Republic or country that’s wedged between Mexico and the socialist dictatorship that is the Obama’s America, and is always in the throes of a moral panic as a result.

If you weren’t just shamelessly pandering, we’ll allow our soon-to-be-ex-state to disembark without any complications, and it can go its own way. There will, of course, be conditions to be met and concessions given first, because this is, for the time being, America, and we’ll take everything we think we can get away with and then some.

Our conditions:

Texas can keep its massive stockpiles of guns, but if we get one whiff of drunken citizen militias trying to invade our sovereign soil, we’ll “accidentally” drop a nuke on the other side of the border.

You have to agree to keep certain individuals, like former governors who later went on to do bigger, if not better, things in high positions of power, aging action stars who aren’t as handsome and brilliant as they think they are and rock stars who haven’t had a hit since Cat Scratch Fever inside your country at all times.

You agree to a trade agreement that sounds mutually beneficial, but screws Texas over to our advantage. Quit whining, this is standard operating procedure.

Your concessions:

We get Austin. And a quarter of Houston. One of the good quarters, mind you. That city’s so big you’ll hardly even notice it’s missing. And we want them moved into U.S. territory, unharmed. We don’t care how you do it as long as you do. Oh, and that includes any people who live there and choose to remain citizens of our great, much larger country.

It almost goes without saying that you’re to allow anything NASA-related to come with us. We have important plans, like colonizing Mars and finally almost getting the star wars program right.

No American citizen will be asked to “remember the Alamo” any longer. It wasn’t all that impressive to begin with. And everyone, even John Wayne, died! Depressing.

Think it over. If that old fighting spirit still drives you to agitate for independence, you can have your beers and your steers. For their own safety, we’ll take the queers, who will be great people to party with at SXSW, to be held in Austin, Oklahoma in the spring of 2010.