'Texas would saunter into the global community bigger than Australia, Greece or Bolivia'

From Governor Perry's Tantrum: So What If Texas Secedes? by Nancy Gibbs (TIME)

Happily, it is still possible to visit Texas without a passport — even though the governor seems to be taking the state's tagline more seriously than ever: "Texas: it's like a whole other country."

Governor Rick Perry didn't actually endorse secession when he spoke at an antitax tea party at Austin city hall. But you could forgive people for misunderstanding, since he's been railing against an overreaching Federal Government, rejected stimulus spending and quoted Sam Houston's declaration that "Texas has yet to learn submission to any oppression." Perry, who faces a tight re-election campaign against that notorious Washington insider "Kay Bailout Hutchinson," observed that he thought the U.S. was still a "great union," but "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that?" (See pictures of tea-party tax protests across the country.)

Credit Lincoln for our visceral revulsion at secessionist movements; he committed such eloquence to the argument for the Union remaining whole that to entertain any other notion, whatever the grievance, seems disrespectful to our bravest President and the rights he fought to defend. But what would happen if, after decades of indulging Texas' need to be the biggest and baddest and enduring all sorts of T shirts ("On the 8th Day, God Created Texas") designed to remind the rump 49 of our general inferiority, we called Perry's Lone Star bluff?

We'd still visit, of course; relations might not be quite as friendly as with Canada, but certainly warmer than with, say, Cuba. NCAA offcials would have to grant an exception for foreign participation in college bowl games, but I'm betting they'd agree. American Airlines might decide to move out of Dallas, but I'd be O.K. with leaving NASA behind and letting Texans decide if they could afford to return to the moon. Border-patrol costs would be steep, but I'm sure Texas' application to join NAFTA would be favorably received. And it would get a vote at the U.N. and the right for its diplomats to park wherever they wanted on the streets of Manhattan. Texas would saunter into the global community bigger than Australia, Greece or Bolivia...