Hey, it's a thought Texas By Thomas E. Ricks For decades, Texans have been clamoring about leaving the Union. Letting the Lone Star State secede would set a bad precedent. (See the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.) But what about expelling it instead? There is promise in that. Ive been thinking about this ever since I stood at the ruins of Fort Jesup, a U.S. Army base built in 1822 by Lt. Col. Zachary Taylor on the western edge of Louisiana to guard the Sabine River, which formed the international border between the United States and Texas, then part of Mexico. Why not go back to that situation? It worked then. After all, what has Texas given us? Without it, we might have avoided the presidents who gave us two of our longest and least necessary wars Vietnam and Iraq and John F. Kennedy might still be alive. We wouldnt have the Dallas Cowboys, nor the right-wing oilmen the state seems to produce. Of course, we would also lose Gov. Rick Perry, who already is making the split easier with his talk of moving the roughly $1 billion in Texas gold reserves, now in a vault in New York, back into the state. Theres a lot of great music out of Texas, from Lightnin Hopkins and Bob Wills to Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Lyle Lovett and Archie Bell & the Drells. But we could still listen to them, just as we enjoy the sounds of such Canadian crooners as Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Feist. Sure, there would be some problems. It would be harder to drive from New Orleans to Tucson. Perhaps we could hold on to the interstate highways through the former state we built them, after all. They could be like the corridors for driving to West Berlin back in the days of the Soviet empire. Having Texas floating free could be destabilizing for Mexico but we could probably build some fences to help handle that. Texans have that Lone Star flag all set. I think theyre ready to fly solo and lonely once again. Let them go. Thomas E. Ricks, a former defense reporter for The Washington Post, is the author of five books about the U.S. military, most recently The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/outlook/spring-cleaning-2013/
