Epistemographer

Along with everyone else I know, I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened on Nov. 2, and how to move forward after it. Leaving aside my tinfoil-hat indulgences and million-to-one fantasies about ballot turnarounds in Ohio, a common theme since I walked into work on Nov. 3rd has been the idea of secession.

Secession, of course, can take many forms: there’s the literal secession of states from the union, which isn’t really a viable option (these graphics aside). There’s the personal secession of moving to Canada or elsewhere, regardless of how difficult that might be in practice. For me, however, the idea I can’t seem to shake is a more theoretical secession, stepping back from the image of the United States of America as a single, unified whole and moving toward a more vision of heterogeneous states tied by a loose and scaled-back federal government.

I’ve been hearing rudimentary forms of this argument for close to two weeks now, ranging from a colleague and I arguing that the best plan would be to cut Red State welfare like farm subsidies to a friend’s vow that she’d stop worrying about abortion being kept legal throughout the country, and that instead she’d simply work to make sure that it stays legal where she lives. This makes sense – we’re all retrenching, moving back to more stable ground after an unsettling defeat, and there’s an element of reactionary anger underlying much of this rhetoric; a sort of “Alright, fuck you, I’m taking my ball and going home.”

The Seattle paper The Stranger has made a similar argument, using the city rather than the state as the unit of analysis:

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion—New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too—a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland “values” like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country.

The thing that makes their manifesto required reading, however, is the fact that this secessionary rhetoric is funneled into constructive action. Leaving aside a few cheap shots, this essay is the clearest, most straightforward statement of my values that I’ve seen in recent political discourse. I’m an unabashed urbanist, and would love to see the Democratic Party embrace this philosophy explicitly.

Some choice excerpts after the jump…

So, most of the freelance writing I’ve been doing in the past two years has been in the form of unsigned reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, but I’m pleased to report that the very first published chunk of my dissertation has appeared on newsstands across the U.S. this month: the November issue of The Believer contains a lovely one-page essay on the blinking 12:00 and its cultural significance…

Spent the last week or two lost in several programming projects, one involving a Flash interface to some of the tools we’ve developed at the Center, the other involving a MediaWiki implementation inside of the current ECHO site. Throw in a few days of post-election funk (which I’m still shaking off), and you get a sorely-neglected blog.

Those of you who actually see this site, as opposed to simply reading the RSS feed, will notice some changes…at long last, I’ve updated the site to Movable Type 3.0, dynamic pages and all. The dissertation counter along the right sidebar has stopped for good, finally removed a good three months after my defense (for anybody interested, the final word count was 69,043, coming in at 265 pages). In its place are a few experiments, including a del.icio.us feed as well as my most recent media consumption. Still to come are an updated blogroll and some other bells and whistles (not to mention actually coming up with a usable category scheme), but it seems better to just get a new version up and running than to wait for everything to be finished – as a good friend recently noted, the site was well past embarassingly out of date.

That in mind, the new subhead speaks volumes…one of the things I’ve been learning in my new job is that though I can do many things well, design is sadly not one of them. Thus, I’m defaulting to one of the basic MT 3.0 templates for the moment, until I either develop a designer’s eye, or sucker someone who’s got one into helping me out. Feh.