Declarations and Digestions: When Sovereignty Becomes Supper.

FROM THE DESK OF MRS. BEGONIA CONTRETEMPS.

Esteemed Readers,

It has come to my attention—while observing an unassuming, if rather primeval, spectacle of a garter snake devouring a frog in your pastoral grass—that America is a land of selective sympathies.(See photo below, if you have the fortitude.)

Today, you celebrate your singular Independence Day, replete with flags, fireworks, and the perfunctory declarations of liberty’s triumph. Yet I am reminded (as a foreigner prone to reading footnotes) that there were, in fact, other Independence Days here—eleven of them, to be precise:

South Carolina, December 20, 1860 Mississippi, January 9, 1861 Florida, January 10, 1861 Alabama, January 11, 1861 Georgia, January 19, 1861 Louisiana, January 26, 1861 Texas, February 1, 1861 Virginia, April 17, 1861 Arkansas, May 6, 1861 North Carolina, May 20, 1861 Tennessee, June 8, 1861

Not all declarations of sovereignty were deemed worthy of celebration. Some, as your textbooks demur to mention, were summarily quashed—swallowed whole, one might say, by the very Union that fancies itself the champion of freedom.

Not all separations end in liberty. Some end in digestion.

This photograph of the snake consuming the frog strikes me as a modest parable: an organism, infinitely confident in its natural right to devour another, oblivious to the onlookers who may question the fairness of the arrangement.

The Council is indebted to our resident photographer, Mr. Lefoto “Lee” Sfocato, who—ever the attentive provincial—submitted this vivid tableau from a quiet pond somewhere in your countryside. I confess I have a certain fondness for Mr. Sfocato, whose inexhaustible curiosity (and whose companionship, in both professional and rather more personal capacities) never fails to delight me. I am assured by him that such spectacles are, in his words, “common enough if you bother to look, though not everybody, eh, they have the stomach to watch when sovereignty, she get digested in real time.”

And so, with Mr. Sfocato’s image fresh in mind, we return to the larger question of how nations—like creatures—so often proclaim universal ideals while practicing selective appetites.

One cannot help but note the historical irony: a nation born in secession from an empire, later denying that same principle to its own regions when inconvenient. The doctrine of self-determination, so loudly proclaimed in Philadelphia, was quietly set aside when applied closer to home.

It seems that all independent states are equal in principle—but in practice, their independence is tolerated only when it suits the appetites of a larger power.

Do forgive the observation. We British are constitutionally inclined to notice these ironies.

Yours in quiet, respectful bemusement,

Mrs. Begonia Contretemps

Correspondent from the Nouvelle Vague Zwischenshaft, the European branch of the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists