She leaned forward, pleading her case. “Texas has energy to sell to the world, a great banking system, world-class hospitals, automobile factories, cutting-edge high-tech industries, a solid agricultural base, and we’re on the Gulf Coast so we can import and export. Texas has an annual GDP of 1.6 trillion dollars. That is a larger economy than the state of New York, just a little less than California. Texas generates roughly ten percent of the economic activity in the United States. Our Texas economy is a third larger than Mexico’s, just ten percent behind the United Kingdom’s. If Texas were an independent nation, ours would be the twelfth-largest economy on earth, a smidgen less than Canada, but more than Australia, Spain, or Switzerland. And you think Texas couldn’t go it alone?”
Jack Hays eyed his wife coldly. “I didn’t know you were an independence crackpot.”
“I’m not. But the people of Texas will not live in a dictatorship. Will not.”
“The United States won’t let us go without a fight.”
“We’re heading for a fight regardless,” Nadine said flatly. “Even if independence isn’t your end game, it might give you leverage to demand a return to constitutional government on the federal level. Texas has a hell of a lot better hand than you think.”
Jack Hays took a swig from his drink and sat staring at his wife. “We could seal the border,” he suggested. “Demand the Mexican government stop allowing drug smugglers and illegals to cross. We could seal the border so tight a bat couldn’t get across.”
Nadine put her hand on his arm. “Sure you could, but you’d need to make it clear that no one is against immigration per se, from Mexico or anywhere else. The problem is illegal immigrants; they’re swarming in faster than we can absorb them in the schools or in the labor force or with social services. When illegal, unskilled laborers flood the market, it’s our own low-skilled citizens — black, white, brown — who pay the price. People understand that, and they understand that it’s high time someone stood up for them. So sure, seal the border, cut off all trade to Mexico if necessary, and force Mexico to patrol its own borders and crush the drug trade that does even more harm to Mexico than it does to us. Make Mexico an offer it can’t refuse. Not a single dollar, truck, railroad car, or immigrant, legal or illegal, crosses the border until Mexico cleans up its own house.”
“That might precipitate a revolution in Mexico,” Jack Hays said. “Or Mexico might declare war on us.”
“Another Mexican revolution or another Mexican-Texas war, let it come,” Nadine shot back. She had steel in her.
Jack Hays wasn’t sure he bought all that. And yet, “We’ve been Mexico’s safety valve for a long, long time,” he admitted.
“Think about it,” Nadine said, and finished her wine. “I’m sorry about your uncle. His was a needless, useless death. And as long as we leave that border open to drug gangs and criminals, we’ll have more needless, useless deaths. I’m going to bed. I’ve had all I can take today.”
Jack Hays was tired too, but he sat in the silent house thinking. About his uncle. About the possibilities of a free Texas, out from under the yoke of Barry Soetoro, Washington bureaucrats, and a feckless Congress stymied by cries of racism. Was freedom worth all the blood it would take to reap the benefits? No one but God knew how much blood freedom would cost.
His thoughts drifted back to the American Revolution. The revolutionaries then knew the British would fight. Great Britain had the finest navy in the world and a solid, although small, professional army. All the colonists had were farmers and a dream.
And yet, who today would argue that the lives of American patriots killed during the revolution had been squandered? Or the lives of the Texans who fought at the Alamo and at San Jacinto? Sometimes those half-seen, fog-shrouded dreams of national destiny and the unpredictable future must be anointed with blood to make them reality. Not someone else’s blood, but yours. Or your son’s or daughter’s. Your blood is your gift to future generations.
He was thinking of the Texans at the Alamo who knew they were doomed but fought to the last man. Then the telephone rang. He looked at the number before he answered it. A 301 area code. The Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. There was no one in Washington he wanted to talk to at that hour of the night. After ten rings the phone fell silent.
Perhaps he should think of independence as a maneuver, not an end in itself. The name of the game is bettering the lot of your constituents. Nadine was right: in politics there is always an end game. You say you want A, the opposition offers E or F, and all of you settle for C. Or B or D. Something in the middle. The real problem, as Jack Hays saw it from Austin, was that Barry Soetoro refused to settle for anything less than the whole enchilada, everything he wanted, which in a democratic republic is simply impossible. He was the prophet, the messiah, and he was driving a stake through the heart of the Great Republic.
Jack Hays was a good working politician. All he wanted was to move the needle in his direction. He well knew that every political question is not black or white, but some shade of gray. He still believed that most Americans were well-meaning people, not ideological crazies, and that compromise was possible.
The telephone rang again. He looked at the number and saw that it was the state director of the Department of Public Safety, Colonel Frank Tenney. The man wanted to talk about the riot in Houston. Hays listened carefully, grunted twice, said yes three times, then hung up.
After he finished his drink, he turned off the lights in the living room and stretched out on the couch.
Jake Grafton was wide awake at four in the morning. The camp was lit only by floodlights on the perimeter fences, yet there was just enough illumination leaking through the front flap of the tent to see by. All the cots were occupied. It was August and hot and the cicadas outside, and the farting, snoring, deep-breathing sleepers inside made it anything but silent.
Grafton had spent the evening talking to his fellow detainees. They were almost all white and perhaps forty years old or older. Some had been arrested at home and allowed to bring their medications; others had been arrested at their places of business or in restaurants or golf clubs or bars. The police or federal agents knew whom they wanted, and they came and cuffed them and led them away without much fuss or bother. Several said they were pretty liquored up and loudly denouncing Soetoro and the feds, but the cops treated them decently anyway. Maybe the fact that they were spouting anti-government sentiments when arrested made a deeper impression on the witnesses.
The detainees were small-business men, middle or senior managers or officers in major enterprises, civil servants, state or county politicians, a few preachers, a lot of military and civil retirees. A couple of sheriffs. Basically, the feds had taken a large sample of white America. Apparently federal officers had taken a similar sample from the female population; the women were housed in other tents at Camp Dawson, and males and females mingled inside the compound until lights out was called. The detainees were a talkative bunch, gathering in ever-shifting groups, talking, talking, talking. They also gabbled endlessly on cell phones to the folks at home.
A lot of these people needed medications, and they didn’t have them. Grafton thought this meant the detention was intended to be only for a short period, or whoever had planned it had planned it poorly. After many years spent in large bureaucracies, he suspected the latter was the case.
Grafton got up from his cot and headed for the latrine. Once outside the tent, he pulled the cell phone from his pocket and turned it on. In a moment the device locked onto the network. Still had a charge.