Five Before Chaos

I know, what am I talking about?  Douches? Secession? If you’re not a longtime reader, just skip this one. You’ll be glad you did. It’s really quite cranky and somewhat silly.

You longtime FBC’ers know about that whole Second Vermont Republic brouhaha a few years back. There’s a ton of it out there; just google “Thomas Naylor, SPLC, white supremacist, Second Vermont Republic, racist”, or any mixture of those phrases. Our state’s novelty of a secessionist group, led by an unrepentant, unreconstructed Confederate lunatic by the name of Thomas Naylor, got into a bit of hot water with the so-called “Vermont Left”, when me and a couple of other bloggers (admittedly, I had very little to do with it other than spreading the word and some relentless taunting) spread the word about SVR’s connections with some shady white supremacists groups such as the League of the South. Naylor popped his gasket, dug in his heels and showed his true colors, and two or three some-odd years later, the only attention SVR gets (aside from the Southern Poverty Law Center, who have done a ton of great work on SVR’s racist ties) seems to be from out-of-state press that haven’t done their homework and caught on to the fact that SVR is no more than a joke back home in Vermont, and that Naylor is a crank that nobody takes seriously, other than maybe Glenn Beck and those guys who wear the pointy white  hoods.

Naylor’s biggest fanboy is Rob Williams, who runs a little indy paper and blog called “Vermont Commons”, SVR’s “sister” organization (mostly comprised of men, as far as I can tell). By and large, it’s a pretty benign, well-intentioned affair; once and a while there’s some great stuff in there about self-sufficiency and all the evil, rotten things the U.S. government does. Unfortunately, it’s tainted by that same whole “secession is a possibility right around the corner – and it keeps gaining in popularity, too! Yay! ” pipe dream that kinda makes it a bit hard to take seriously.

I’m not necessarily anti-secession. I’m just realistic (or pragmatic, or reality-based, or whatever). I occasionally leave my little house in the woods and see that there are a ton of mainstream people in this state who pretty much live like people everywhere else, and aren’t going to think twice about leaving the U.S., as noble an endeavor as it may seem. Not to mention that there’s that whole U.S. military thing to contend with, but we’re not discussing reality here,  just possibilities and maybe rainbows and ponies, too. I’m still contending with the fact that we have an evil, stupid party and an incompetent, stupid party running things in Washington, so I’m still trying to find a realistic solution to that dilemma. Quitting just seems so Sarah Palin-esque to me at this point.

Anyways, back to Mr. Williams. By all accounts, he seems like an intelligent, well-meaning guy, if you take away the hard-on for secession that’s sometimes makes him look more like the crazy guy standing on the corner with a placard than the respected academic that Williams is. But, Rob’s hard-on, like so many other men’s hard-ons, gives him a problem, in that when the SVR story broke, instead of distancing himself from Naylor (like many others were smart enough to do), he dug in his heels.  His ever-engorged tumescence for all things secession unfortunately put the love of the  lost cause against what was right, when he said, when asked about some of the shady racists on the SVR advisory board, said “Is he a racist? I dont know. And frankly, it is none of my damn business, at a personal level.” Yes, he said that, with such stunning  moral clarity. Hey, maybe my dentist is also a serial killer or child molester, but gawdammit, he cleans my teeth well…none of my damn business!

Even with all this, even with a teary-eyed, whiny meeting with one of us bloggers who was not me, Williams has never bothered to engage in any sort of discussion with me, telling me where I’m supposedly wrong, whatever. Instead, every so often, he writes a blog post over at VT Commons whining about me and the other mean bloggers. See, all that blood that’s engorged him has starved his brain of the vital oxygen; he seems convinced somehow that we fabricated all this well-documented stuff because we’re all just agents of the status quo (I’m still waiting for him to call us “Zionists” like his buddy Naylor did) and we “fear” this ever-looming non-reality of secession. M’okay. Nice dodge, if people still cared, Rob. He even gave me a name once, J.D. “Grindhouse” Ryan. But he still won’t engage me. Or defend the indefensible – it’s easier just to play the perpetual victim, which he does well. If people still cared, that is. And he still won’t let it go:

He’s the fellow who made a point of repeatedly attacking the Vermont independence effort in cyberspace (along with his trusty sidekick, J.D. “Grindhouse” Ryan) a few years back – anonymously, at first, so they didn’t have to take responsibility for their allegations, before “breaking” their charges at GMD – quick skillful, those two. Tag team in the snark pit that is the blogosphere.

Yeah, Rob. We (Odum and I) didn’t “break anything anonymously”. That would be Thomas Rowley, who was able to back up every allegation against you people with facts, not whining and crazy conspiracy jibber-jabber like you seem to do. And this “tag team in the snark pit that is the blogosphere” bitch-slapped your whiny-ass League-of-the-South-lovin’ organization into the big-ol’ dumpster of crank movements, too, too irrelevant to even call it a punchline at this stage of the game. So there. Time to get over it and move on, Rob.