States' Rights

Much as British patriots have supplemented Mr Churchill's winning of the Second World War with an earlier generation's abolition of the slave trade, a patriot in the Christian state of Texas is reaching back beyond the late unpleasantness to re-ignite the glories of the eighteen-thirties and -forties. A rather new and dim lone star in the Texas house of representatives has proposed annexing some counties from the neighbouring state of New Mexico, which was stolen from Mexico when Texas declared independence and which the USA did not deign to restore when Texas surrendered that independence ten years later. Although the New Mexico governor's office has derided the proposal as not serious, there are apparently legislators in Texas who have nothing better to do than study its potential; and it would surely be imprudent to imagine that there is no man-baby or head-tribble in the USA at present who might benefit from the distraction of a civil war breaking out in Dixie.