A few years ago, as I was out doing my midnight shopping for windshield
wiper blades at the local Super Wal-Mart, I chanced to meet a man who was
a member of the Republic of Texas. This was before the secessionist group
went nuts and partook in an armed standoff with Texas' state troopers. It was
a strange encounter: he followed me throughout the store for nearly an hour,
regaling me with bizarre theories about how Texas never formally rejoined
the Union after the Civil War and therefore is still its own independent
nation - the usual sort of nonsensical declamations that freakish, delusional
paranoids use as a safety valve to keep themselves from going over the edge
and into doomed activism. Or armed standoffs. For several days afterwards,
he called me at work (I was editor of a university newspaper at the time) to
try and convince me to run a giant feature article on how Texas should
declare its independence, before he finally realized that I was entirely too
sane to bother with (or, from his perspective, too deeply within the control of
The Man).