A Futuristic Achilles of American Chaos
As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion...it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
-- Joel Barlow, Treaty of Tripoli
The hodgepodge of ideas for my latest short story, “The Cascadiad,” loosely follows the creation of Joel Barlow's national epics in early America following the War of Independence/Revolution: The Columbiad and The Anarchiad. Why Barlow? His atheism, for one, makes him important. So too, his ideas about the realities of unions between states.
While the former refers to the epic of the foundation of “America” (read as “United States”) and the later (and the more interesting) points to “national anxiety” over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, “The Cascadiad” deals with the creation of a “Californian-led union” and the problem with the nature of Californian hegemony on the West Coast (as expressed by members of a union: Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Nevada -- and California).
There is really no reason to think why California would expand into other territories. The areas in question -- namely the Pacific Northwest -- explain my reason for writing the “The Cascadiad.” Rather than a story like "The Illiad,” which deals with the decorum of battle, my short story is about the failure to create a more perfect union out of the states of the Pacific Coast.
Instead, the major idea is the fallacy of the nation-state, as defined by systems and ideologies that cannot be explained outside of human nature. The California Commonwealth is a superstate defined by a physical infrastructure ruled by a "hydrological elite." In “The Cascadiad,” California uses state-power to control the waters of the Pacific Slope on the Sierra Nevadas. The kinetic energy from manipulated deluges of water are channeled into a serie ns of “pneumatic pistons.” The end result of all this: power to boil the water in lakes at ludicrous productions of electrical currents. The cities of the Pacific Metropole -- the Capital (San Francisco) and the Emerald City (Portland-Seattle-Vancouver) harvest the energies of the machine-like deluges.
Doing this erases the 15 year long Blackout, works to further isolate the West Coast from the political machinations in eastern America, and makes the Commonwealth a major player to inherit the post-US vacuum on the North American continent.
