I just finished an amusing, fascinating and much too short article in the New Yorker's Jan. 26, 2009 issue called "The Dystopians," by Ben McGrath. It's about the doom-sayers and dystopians who are now getting thrills from the apparent breakdown of the economy that they've been predicting. Unfortunately, only the abstract is available on the New Yorker's site; the read the entire article you need to get a digital account or pick up a hard copy.
But toward the end of the piece, the writer travels to Montpelier to witness a rally of Vermont separatists, a bunch of woolly haired yak farmers who want Vermont to break away from the rest of the US, then begin an expansionist movement to annex Maine and some of Canada. There's not much in the article, though, about why -- why are these yak farmers agitating to remove Vermont from the US? There's a hint that it might be because they fear turmoil from the US when the country, in their view, inevitably descends into social and economic chaos, but it's not spelled out.
In the piece, retired Duke economics professor Thomas Naylor, who is the founder of the Second Vermont Republic, says, "Vermont has nothing, O.K.? We have no big cities. We have no big buildings. We have nothing." So then why leave the union? Doesn't really seem like a compelling argument.
