When I saw the “Absolute Obama” cartoon at STACLU and MM, I immediately thought of a comment Carin made here at PW recently (but which I am at a loss to find now), resulting in a map of the alt-historical North American Disunion:
After all, the NAFTA flap has done nothing to diminish Barack Obama’s popularity with Canadian voters. A President Obama might like to have Mexifornia in the fold, but he lacks support among Hispanics and might fear that an influx of Hispanics would trigger secession by the bitter state of Pennsylvania. Besides, he’s a lover not a fighter.
* This map is a derivative of a file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the map under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.
I think Alaska ought to get a corridor running through British Columbia that connects them to Idaho.
See how Karl is? He said he’d credit me, and there it is.
I think most of Michigan is gonna be upset that they’re not part of Jesusland. The UP will prolly revolt.
Fifty-Four Forty or Fight !
Point of order…
The Quebecians still don’t get their own country under this plan. That’s what they get for speaking French.
Also, I’m pretty sure Texas is going to have something to say about this.
Azatlan gets Vangenberg, and is immediately a space-faring nation. Oh, and also has the ability to manufacture nukes at Lawrence Livermore. If they don’t apply the reverse Midas touch, an almost inevitability.
The United States of Canada has Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and is therefore werll on the way to being an economic basket case. Oh, and what about Quebec? France still has St. Pierre, Miquelon and Langlade, so Quebec might as well be part of “New France”. Truth be told, if the Canadians could give Quebec, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia to Jesusland, they probably would.
You can bet your ass on that, EG. They can take Texas out of “Aztlan” right now, as Texas was never Mexico’s to lose.
That RoC flag is one fugly piece of cloth. Sorry, but it is.
Cave Bear, would you care to expand upon your suggestion that Texas was never Mexico’s? I’m curious.
The Republic of Cascadia flag….
Shouldn’t you have marijuana instead of a pine cone in the middle?
As PJ O’ Rourke once said, most Mexicans aren’t mad that the US stole half of their country; they’re only mad we took the half with all the good roads.
Carin,
I’m not sure Michigan will be upset it’s not part of Jesusland. At the risk of irritating Debbie Schlussel, should it be part of Dearbornistan?
Cave Bear is both right and wrong. Texas did belong to Mexico prior to the Houston Coup, but the theoretical boundaries were much larger and the real ones smaller. For the real ones, representing actual administration, start at about the midpoint of the Texas coast and strike a line at forty-five degrees North and West all the way through Colorado.
As for the theoretical boundaries, here is what the U. S. State Department thought in 1844. The official boundaries were the Gulf Coast, the Sabine, Red, and Arkansas Rivers, and the Rio Grande/Bravo “to the headwaters” — which are not far from Cheyenne, Wyoming — plus straight connecting lines where necessary. If those were the modern borders, and Texas decided to charge tolls, it would collect on every East-West Interstate except I90.
As with Mexico, there was never any administrative presence of the Texas Republic over huge swaths of that, which is why Austin, Travis, Houston, et. al. were so readily willing to give up what is now the richest half of New Mexico, a substantial part of Colorado, and a little chunk of Wyoming in exchange for paying off the Revolution’s debts.
Regards,
Ric
Addendum: This map of the Republic of Texas is the State Department’s definitions (above) superimposed on a modern map with everything it its correct place. The Web site showing it is well named, BTW.
Regards,
Ric
As a gesture of goodwill, how about we give them back East L.A.?
You know, with the exception of Texas (and it’s a whole ‘nother country anyhow) that map looks ok to me.
PT
By the way, if you don’t know Joel Garreau you should make his acquaintance. His maps make a lot of sense to me; I just wish somebody would produce a Web-accessible version other than a fairly small scan of the cover of the book.
Regards,
Ric
Alberta wants into Jesusland as well
As a gesture of goodwill, how about we give them back East L.A.?
We paid good money for territory ceded under the Treaty of Guadelupe Hildago. I’m willing to *sell* back to them certain parts of California, but we need to get the money. And they have to promise to take both Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer.
California gets its own color I think.
Mauve.
No, Ric. In a practical sense, Texas never was Mexico’s to lose. Spain had a problem with Texas, in that they could not settle it. Every settlement they established within Texas died out to the last man, woman and child (with the exception of right along the Rio Grande, and the area around what is now San Antonio), due to disease, starvation or marauding Indians.
It was so bad that their own people flatly refused to go there. Thing is, if you own a piece of real estate like that, especially in those days of empire, you stood to lose it. The Spaniards were worried that if they didn’t have some of their own people living on it, the French, Brits, Americans, whomever would just scoop it up and tell Spain to go pound sand and make it stick.
Along comes Moses and Stephen F. Austin, and Spain cut a deal with them to bring in American settlers to Texas, and there were plenty of takers among the American “borderers”, who liked living out on the edge, as it were. And Texas was about as “edgy” as it got in those days.
So the American settlers came in and did what the Spanish and Mexicans were unable to do, which was to settle the region known as Texas. All they had to do was swear they’d be loyal to Spain, and since the Spaniards were just absentee landlords anyway, this was no big deal to them.
Mexico, after their revolution which ran off the Spaniards, inherited the paper on Texas, so to speak, but by then the gringos had already settled in. The same thing can be said for the rest of the American Southwest; Mexico got it by default after Spain pulled out, at least insofar as who owned what and when.
But it was Texas that was actually settled by Americans, and before Mexico ever became an independent nation.
You can talk about the “Houston Coup” (it was all a big e-vil white male conspiracy between Houston and Andy Jackson to take Texas away from the poor, put-upon Mexicans, etc, etc), what maps showed what and when, and who did or did not control this or that area and when. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.
This is why I stated that Texas was never Mexico’s to lose. And it’s also why I maintain that those “La Raza” assholes can take their “reconquista” and shove it up their collective ass. If push comes to shove, we kicked their asses once, and we can do it again if need be.
BTW, I bought that 1845 Texas map for my father’s birthday a couple of years ago. He really got a kick out of it, and it’s interesting to look at the details it shows.
Hey! I Live in the small part of L.A. County that wants in on Jesusland! And I’m pretty sure most of Orange County (okay, maybe not Santa Ana) and San Diego are willing to negotiate to get out of this Aztlan deal.
Cave Bear, if you’ll look back at my post you’ll see that I basically agree with your analysis. The bit about the “Houston Coup” was intended as jocularity, although it does have a basis in fact. Austin & Co. fully intended to do what was eventually done and were not particularly shy about saying so, at least out of the direct public eye.
Spanish, and later Mexican, settlement of Texas was confined to the area south and west of the Brazos and south of Comanche territory, more or less defined by the Llano. Except for San Antonio and a few places along the Rio Grande, it was sparse and did not include the military units necessary for colonization in those days. It is a classic example of the difference between lines on maps in libraries in the capitals and the facts on the ground (cf. “Iraq”). As you say, Spain thought they were getting colonists who would cement their possession of the territory. The colonists themselves had entirely different ideas.
Regards,
Ric
Ric, I’ve not read anything that would indicate that Austin was in on the “coup” thing. It appears that he and his father just saw all this open, empty land and thought it would be a great place for people with that itch to move west to settle. The Spanish did not have it, not in any practical sense (as in “possession is nine tenths of the law”), because with the exceptions already cited, none of their colonization efforts had worked. This was why they made the deal with Austin and his father to bring in the Anglo settlers. And it was the Americans who settled Texas, not the Spanish, let alone the Mexicans.
Legend has it that there was a plan, hatched by The Raven (that’s Sam Houston for those of you not into Texas history) and Andrew Jackson, to bring Texas into the Union after the Texas Revolution. So far as I know, there’s no “smoking gun” in the way of documentation to prove this, although it did turn out that way. Houston, certainly in his later years, was very much a Unionist. He gave a three hour speech from a balcony of the Moody Hotel in Galveston just before Texas seceded from the Union at the start of the Civil War, on why doing this (joining the Confederacy) would be a huge mistake. Turned out to be right, too.
I’m surprised there’s no Deseret on the map. That extra ‘Atzlan’ territory is shrinking rather quickly…
Keep in mind that the Democrat Convention will use 48 star flags this year. That is because the vote of Michigan and Florida won’t count.