Spanner R4 Extra Update: Cascadia Has A Real Flag!

I read this article on the soccer fans of Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, and how they've been bringing out the Cascadian flag. Well, guess what? Cascadia really does have its own flag! In fact, you can buy one!

The site where you can buy the flag defines Cascadia as the entire Pacific Northwest envisioned as a potentially independent nation. My definition in Spanner is considerably smaller, basically western Washington and Oregon combined with southwestern British Columbia, set apart as a sort of Indian reservation for liberals by the Conservative Revolutionary federal government, essentially the Cascadia of Ernest Callenbach's utopian novel Ecotopia without the California part that Callenbach was focused on.

But guess what? Even this "rump" Cascadia is still secessionist and rallies under the Douglas Fir flag a.k.a. "The Doug". That body of water in the northern part of the state, around which the urban heart of Cascadia nestles, is still called by Cascadians the Salish Sea. And the entire theme of "legal in Cascadia but not in America" just has to carry the implication of "Cascadia wants to be independent of the American Empire", and so do all those references to the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement that I threw into the Third Revision last year as they happened. And what could Chapters 21-23, the last three chapters of Spanner Book 1, be about but Cascadia trying to be independent, with the Doug waving throughout the aspiring nation?

I slapped my forehead and cried out, "But of course!"

EDIT: It turns out Cascadia has a Native American name as well: Chinook Illahee. And Illahee just happens to be the name of a neighbourhood in Bremerton, come to think of it...

America as a Fanatic Cult: Inside Spanner Book 2

The article: Nihilism Comes To America (CounterOrder)

The trope: EagleLand. It comes in two flavors, positive and negative. The positive one is the official doctrine of a cult, known variously as the Civil Religion and Americanism. The negative one, for those unseduced by the religion's siren song and who therefore remain objective, is the reality.

Face it: the United States of America is not and has never been a democracy, and was never intended to be one. An offshoot of the British Empire, it is an elitist representative republic founded by slaveholding aristocrats whose desire to rise within the English nobility was blocked by the established nobles themselves. This aristocratic republic was designed by and for aristocrats who wanted to build an empire, and did so. The empire it was intended from the beginning to replace was, of course, the British.

The problem: the Imperial Paradox — external expansion leads, directly and invariably, to internal decline.

The solution: save the American Empire by overthrowing the liberal oligarchic republic with a conservative dictatorship based on the cult of the nation. In other words, the Empire overthrows the Republic. In the Spanner backstory, this is called the Conservative Revolution. Its stronghold is the white-dominated rural "flyover country" sentimentalized as the Ideal by the national cult. Its predominantly urban opponents simply call it "the coup".

The cult does not just claim that the United States Federal Government is the Second Coming of Christ. It deifies a national narcissism that has its individual counterpart in the narcissism celebrated by the cult of celebrity as relentlessly marketed by the "fashion-industrial complex" (FIC). Spanner Book 2's "Pretty City Arc" focuses on the FIC and what it stands for.

The name of Book 2 is "Rage of the Prophets". This is what happens when the two factions of the all-powerful Conservative Revolutionary Party start feuding over which elite "is" America: the Empire's Corporate owners, or the priesthood of the Church of America, the national cult? The article linked above will help you understand the underlying issues. So will this article, in which Chris Hedges explains that the narcissistic American cult of "Rugged Individualism" is incompatible with not just freedom but America's survival itself. The Empire is destroying the nation.

This is part of the background of Spanner Book 2. I'm finishing the first draft for JulNoWriMo '11, and I'll post the first installment on October 23. Watch for it!