Well known writer James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, will be the keynote speaker at the Second Vermont Independence Convention to be held in the Vermont State House in Montpelier on 7 November 2008, three days after the presidential election. The convention will be sponsored by the Second Vermont Republic – a nonviolent citizens network and think tank opposed to the tyranny of Corporate America and the U.S. government and committed to the return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic and more broadly to the dissolution of the Union.
The theme of this years convention is “The Vermont Village Green: Alternative to Empire.” The objective of the convention is to stage a village green where a collage of radical music, art, theater, circus, conversation, politics, and community gives birth to a Genteel Revolution against the Empire.
The convention master of ceremonies will The Irreverend Ben Matchstick, who combines the characteristics of a circus master, a stump politician, a revival minister, and an old-fashioned traveling medicine man.
Other speakers include Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente, Middlebury Institute Director Kirkpatrick Sale, Dartmouth Medical School Professor Sharon McDonnell, and educators Ron Miller and Susan Ohanian. Fiddler Pete Sutherland and the Clayfoot Strutters will play the Vermont Secession Song, “Two Hundred Years Is Long Enough.” Musicians, artists, and other performers from Bread & Puppet Theater will also participate.
Jim Kunstler’s riveting new novel, World Made By Hand, is set in the “post-oil” future. His portrayal of life without oil in a small town on the New York – Vermont border is a real barn burner.
In The Long Emergency Kunstler warned that “the end of the cheap fossil fuel era” will lead to “the most serious challenge to our collective identity, economy, culture, and security since the Civil War.” That “turbulence will be the rule,” that “all bets will be off for politics, economics, and social cohesion,” and that “the Federal Government will be impotent and ineffectual.”
He predicted that American life will become intensely and profoundly local, that we will have to grow a lot more of our food in the regions where we live, and that we are going to have to reconstruct local economies and local networks of interdependency. We will have no other choice than to simplify, downshift, and decentralize our lives and return to small towns, small businesses, small schools, and small communities.
America desperately needs a new metaphor, an alternative to empire. Vermont stands ready to provide such a metaphor, the Vermont village green. Village greens are small communities devoted to life, liberty, land, and locality rather than death, doom, and destruction of the planet earth. America could use a lot more village greens and far fewer cruise missiles, 747s, and SUVs.
For additional information please contact Thomas Naylor at 802-425-4133.