Fiction: "Statesville: the unintended consequences"

It began with a filibuster, sort of. For decades there had been a fight brewing in Texas over the content of public school history textbooks.

In the wake of rebellions and civic unrest all over the Middle East that had ultimately resulted in the strengthening of totalitarian regimes and the emergence of even worse ones, an irresistible spirit of protest roaming the world had reached the Lone Star capital, in the form of teachers and parents out in the streets demanding the inclusion of certain references to events in Mexican history in the teaching of the history of the Texas rebellion against Santa Anna and the advent of the Texas Republic.

Most, but not all, of the protesters were Latino, and this had produced a backlash of hostility toward the rapidly expanding Spanish-speaking population all over the Southwest that had never been seen before. Democratic legislators hastily assembled a bill demanding the appointment of a textbook committee with racial quotas included in the selection process, and one liberal lawmaker after another held the floor for days expounding on the need for racial equality in the State’s school curricula. As the filibuster wore on the rhetoric, in the legislature and out in the streets, grew into a referendum on racial justice across the State’s entire public sector.

Republican legislators ritually walked out one day, into a wolf pack of reporters and protesters, and the situation exploded into a full-scale ethnic showdown in Texas politics that touched on every area of public employment. Soon Austin was filled with everything from janitors to civil engineers of Mexican, Cuban, Filipino, Vietnamese, Haitian and many other international heritages. Their demands were vague and disjointed, and there was nothing like a leadership or any form of central organizing principle. The sentiment seemed to average out into a general exhausted frustration, and the slogan most seen in the streets was “This Far and No Further”.

Talk-radio and cable TV pundits had a field day, rabidly denouncing everything from the ACLU to gay marriage and referring continually to the “pandemic of liberalism” that threatened the Judeo-Christian moral roots of American life.

The Republican governor called out the National Guard to establish order in the streets, and the Democratic President promptly called a press conference in Washington denouncing the deployment, promising to assign the full resources of the Justice Department to proving in the Supreme Court that the use of the troops was against the Constitution. In Austin the Guard units began to experience large numbers of desertions by nonwhite soldiers, many of whom had served in the Middle East wars, and in one instance an entire platoon, mostly Mexican-American, threw down their riot gear and joined the protesters in full view of the international media.

Angry exchanges between Austin and Washington heated to the boiling point. New crowds appeared in Austin to shout down the original protesters, and the nights pulsated with a cacophony of “This far, no farther!” and strains of “We Shall Overcome”, competing for volume and intensity with chants of “Remem-ber the Al-a-mo!” and repeated choruses of “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You”.

Then, a new slogan began to appear, not on protest signs but on billboards and spray-painted on walls and in large red letters on right-wing websites, consisting of but a single word: “SECEDE”.

It was noticed, in the media and on the streets, that the governor had stopped making public appearances, but the significance of this was not deeply pondered in the press. Requests for interviews were tersely denied by his staff, while images from the streets and White House press releases dominated the news. When orders went out from his office expanding the Guard deployments to include key highway crossings all along hundreds of miles of the Texas state line, it was assumed, amid the general melee, that the governor, a right-wing darling with no lack of public secession-innuendo to his credit, had issued them.

Suddenly, the news from inside Texas became vague and contradictory. Social media accounts began to emerge of news teams being taken into custody or having their power and satellite feeds cut. The networks began to use cell-phone videos and glitchy-sounding phone calls to speculate on what was happening, and the picture of events in the Lone Star State became very murky.

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In early April the US Navy moved into the Gulf of Mexico and began blockading Texas ports, stopping all shipping going in or out, boarding merchant vessels with armed teams, and inspecting cargoes. Texas had no seagoing military forces to speak of, and the Coast Guard, one of the oldest and most traditional agencies in the Federal government, had early on declared unswerving allegiance to Washington. Most units had been transferred wholesale to Louisiana as a force protection measure, leaving Texas with fishing fleets and freighters as their only outlet to the world by water. The blockade put an overnight end to that, and the “New Republic” was land-locked.

The rules of engagement allowed the Navy to pass all humanitarian cargo through, and to some extent even allow Texas to conduct trade with the outside world of its own wares, but a long and not very specific list of cargo was ordered seized. Any weapons or ordnance, of course, were held by the Fleet, and some shipments of raw materials depending on their origins and destinations. The Navy was faced with the same vagueness in its instructions from above as every other public agency in the crisis, and tensions mounted accordingly.

In one spectacular incident a Texan helicopter pilot on a guided missile cruiser organized a hijacking of his Navy chopper, with several Texas sailors on board, and flew the ship all the way into Galveston. Though, legally speaking, this was potentially everything from piracy and desertion to treason and even an act of war, hesitation was the Navy’s general response. No orders were issued to fire on the machine or seek to impede its flight in any way. The newly formed Texas Republic Broadcast Corporation (TRBC) greeted the sailors upon landing as conquering heroes, and images from the incident became iconic to the secession movement, not at all diminished by the fact that, years before, the pilot had named his ship the Alamo.

Not at all clear, on water, air, or land, were the rules regarding Texas residents who had been outside the State when secession was declared by Austin. Each situation was essentially handled at the discretion of whoever was in charge, and in some places, such as New York City and Los Angeles, there began to be hundreds of displaced Texans - men, women, children, elderly, disabled, sick, and more than a few returning veterans - held like cattle in warehouses and military hangars; the rhetoric heated up around these settings and was spread all over the world by the media and the Internet.

More than any other aspect of the secession crisis, the plight of these repatriates began to coalesce world opinion against the US government, and the matter reached the floor of the United Nations General Assembly. In dozens of languages, the term “homeland” was thrown around like an undeniable defense of a universal right. Every country in the world facing its own separatist movements was forced in its diplomatic response to walk a razor’s edge between this new opportunity to denounce America and their natural sympathy toward any nation seeking to defend its territorial integrity.

Internet servers and cell phone providers around the world began to experience overloads and temporary blackouts. The amount of debate and emergency correspondence was simply overwhelming the world’s communications systems, and this was multiplied exponentially by the repatriation issue. Texans all around the planet began to be held in custody by governments not sure what to do with them when they sought to cross borders and make their way home. The actions undertaken by Austin, according to the US State Department, had rendered their passports invalid until further notice, pending a case-by-case review of each traveler’s or expatriate’s actions in regard to what the Justice Department was beginning to refer to as “a policy of treason”. The secession phenomenon as a whole posed a monumental dilemma to every government in the world, as it soon became obvious that any official decision that touched on any aspect of the crisis would amount to a de facto endorsement of one side or the other, and the resulting communications overload quickly threatened to be an even bigger crisis than the question of Texas independence.

Information from inside Texas itself began to be more incomplete, contradictory and disjointed. Rumors abounded on the Internet: that thousands of non-Texan Americans were being herded into football stadiums, that stores and warehouses were running out of food, that rioting sparked by loyalists opposed to the secession was escalating into a status of near civil war inside the Lone Star republic, that gasoline was selling at twenty and thirty dollars a quart with attendant violence, that mosques, synagogues and Buddhist temples were being looted, burned or bombed, that Mexicans were being driven like cattle across the Rio Grande by angry mobs - none of these accounts could be corroborated by any of the world’s media, because the United States government would not allow any reporters to cross into Texas, and one side or the other seemed to be jamming every form of electronic media coming out that it could.

But it was not until a private jet carrying intensive-care patients, trying to make its way from Dallas to Oklahoma City, was shot down by a US Air Force drone, that the crisis began to take on the tension and resolve of an impending war.