Out Takes
by Edd Merritt

Sometimes I Would Rather Be on the Outside Looking In

"Only to be set in motion again by the first young wildeye able to sucker the old man into listening to his dreams. Admit; you knew that look even then; by the first frog-voiced young foot-itcher able to get Pop to believing that they could outdo this sticker patch by moving farther west. Be all set in plodding restless motion again, you knew that look and could have saved us the heartache . . . like animals driven by a drought, by an unquenchable thirst – but you didn’t – driven by a dream of a place where the water tastes like wine.”
Ken Kesey,
Sometimes a Great Notion

I understand there were several discussions around Vermont recently about the state’s movement toward independence. I missed them, as I happened to be “down south” in Providence (How strange would it feel to say, “I’d left the country for a spell?”). So I’m not certain how the speakers touched the subject of the Second Vermont Republic. However, a couple of items on my bedside table sparked my curiosity about the topic once more. The notion of governmental separation is one that, by the way, hides quietly in my mind until something I see, hear, read or experience pops it back into consciousness.
Just when I think I’ve resolved things – usually by a quietly exhaled, “Nah, it’s crazy to believe we could become independent of the United States. This Empire has held itself together for over 230 years” — I’m bopped on the head by an incident that makes me believe we not only could, but, in fact, should, blow this joint. Often the precipitating factor is a sudden awareness of disconnection between myself and those who claim to speak for the empire.
It’s when I try to place my day-to-day existence within the context of what they’re suggesting, that I feel like a prairie dog who popped out of his hole expecting Kansas and found himself in Antartica. It’s then I want to collect my friends and relations and form Prairie Dog Nation – where people don’t talk funny and what they say impacts me as well as Beltway patrons and oil companies.
I don’t remember the precise trigger to my recent thoughts on an independent Vermont, but a couple of readings aided the process.
Thomas Naylor regularly sends me his “Vermont Village Green,” a publication, usually an essay of a page or two, that he or a colleague in the movement for independence has written. Kirkpatrick Sale, Director of the Middlebury Institute, reported recently on surveys showing a growing support for secession. His source of information, Zogby International pollsters, interviewed their sample by phone in mid-July, so it’s quite current.
Two telling figures struck me in response to a question that asked whether the interviewee agreed with the statement, “The United States’ system is broken and cannot be fixed by traditional two-party politics and elections.” 44.3 percent of the respondents agreed strongly or moderately; fewer than 30 percent disagreed strongly.
It leads me to believe there are quite a number of bodies out there feeling a sense of unease with -- or at least uncertainty about the empire. In his new book entitled Secession, Naylor questions his readers in a similar fashion, asking whether the United States has become “unsustainable, ungovernable, and, therefore, unfixable.” Darth Vader, where are you now that we need you?
I had also recently come across a well-worn copy of Dee Brown’s classic about the Indian wars, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Many years had passed since I started but never finished the book, so I thought I’d give it another crack. Having grown up where the Santee Sioux uprisings that he describes in an early chapter occurred helped me get a feel for the events. The names Faribault, Mankato, Shakopee, Wabasha, Sibley, New Ulm and Fort Ridgely have real meaning for me. Names of places located within a 50-mile radius of my hometown, they all bring pictures to mind. My grandfather lived there. I can visualize the land Brown describes. Members of both sides of my family were party to transgressing on treaties.
Just before we moved back to Vermont 20 years ago, three generations of Merritts piled into a van to visit Fort Ridgely on our way to the Badlands and Black Hills of Dakota. The fort symbolized the takeover by white people of Indian land and the game that they relied on for their sustenance. The fort is still standing 120 years later. I saw where the Sioux clustered outside the walls prior to attacking the families inside.
But it really wasn’t until I had read the book completely that I realized what stirred the conflict: the empirebuilding that occurred through the white man’s western movement in this country. The Indians were a tribal society based on each group’s relationship with the immediate land. They fed themselves from it and led themselves locally, living as collections of small countries. Indian nations were loosely defined and not tightly governed, according to Brown’s account. Most of the chiefs practiced leadership by relying on “followership” to accomplish their ends – not the command-and-obey mentality that we often delude ourselves into calling leadership in our culture.
In the Dakotas and other parts of the western U.S. the empire didn’t so much encompass the Indians as move them around in order to gain control of what it needed at the time – land, minerals, water.
The modern bumper sticker asking, “Got enough?” wasn’t in their vocabulary. Nor was the understanding of other cultures – “Black Hills, smack hills. I’m after the rocks, not the ancestral spirits.”
So, four short years after declaring these Dakota peaks to be meaningless to the federal government and, thus, posting them off limits to whites without Indian permission, rumors of gold flipped this country’s reasoning 180 degrees.
The miners arrived. The Indians said goodbye to their sacred land.
The initial success of expansion took on a life of its own. We said, “Hey, this land is my land, and we’ll simply move things around on it around to suit our needs.” Easy as Wild Bill Hickock, John Wayne, George Bush.
After all, Native American tribes were small potatoes, there for the picking. The Santees were only the beginning. It became “Westward Ho!” until we reached the coast. Let no one halt the migration. Lay tracks to pave the way. File the tribes under desert. Once the attraction of the current place wore thin, it was time to move on.
Eventually, however, the empire grew incomprehensible to many. As the incomprehension grew, so, too, did the dissatisfaction with it. Perhaps now we need to once again take stock of our situation, quit expanding and focus locally. We may just discover that there is a great deal that meets and is pleasing to the eye right here around us.
I recommend Bill Mckibben’s essay in the July 23r Seven Days in which he suggests that “functional independence” is the proper first step. Let’s look to see what it would take us Vermonters to stand on our own two feet. He suggests that agriculture is a good and obvious beginning. A few local crops can provide positive incentive for more.
I know that I’m at a point in my own life where selfhood and independent sustainability are more important to me than climbing up through a corporate world that requires ever-increasing expansion in order to maintain itself. I tested that sphere, and it tested me in return. We were incompatible, probably to the betterment of both. Forced to live together in harmony, I would have been the slug on the steamroller, dead before I knew what squished me.
Maybe it is vain to want to try secession. But what the hell is life all about if you don’t push the envelope? You get your grainy picture in the obituary column wearing a Vietnam Navy uniform. Not for me, thanks. Let our draft-dodging president dirty his flight jacket for a change.

If riches were there,
Whatever it was would light up
Like a bonfire through an eyelid
And begin to be words
That would go with the sound of the rails.
­- James Dickey, “A Folk Singer of the Thirties”