Sex, Drugs, and Secession in Vermont
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Bernie Quigley offers this observation of Vermont as a sort of petri dish where hip, startling new ideas transition from the avant garde to the mainstream in this essay for The Hill’s pundits blog.
Thanks to the Vermont legislature’s bold move to make legally sanctioned same-sex marriage the law of the land, says Quigley, the other blue states are sure to follow suit. Could the modern secessionist movement, which began here in response to the Iraq War, gain traction as well? Are liberal Vermonters truly the tastemakers of the American left?
The hippies were fun, but the conversation improved markedly when the huge gay scene arrived in the mid-Eighties. The tenor and sophistication of the choirs in the decrepit old Puritan churches did as well and so did the buildings. At least half of the 18th- and 19th-century buildings on my common here in northern New Hampshire were restored to top historical standards in that period. But most of the macho originals who brought with them elegance, élan and big cash have moved back to the city at least ten years ago. Too boring up here. A few remain, but usually keep a town and country thing between here and New York or Boston.
Each of these originals brought with them an idea whose time had come and when they left, that idea went forward without them of its own accord on a new level of management. It is a classic arc in the life cycle of an idea. Once it reaches a wider audience it has the needs of acculturation, sociology and institutionalization. At that point, phase two, the monkey gods who thought it up and embodied the idea, his and her work complete, return to the forest.
This week, when the Vermont legislature brought overriding victory to the idea of gay marriage after more than a decade of conversation, debate, acculturation and institutionalization, and countered Gov. Jim Douglas’s veto, the original idea reached its apogee in phase two and entered phase three; entrance of the fully formed concept to the outer world. Now the other states will instinctively take it up.
Now that it has received the Vermont imprimatur, the issue faces a high likelihood of success elsewhere. 20 years hence gay marriage will likely be as uncontroversial as marijuana where in California today it is available to “almost anyone who tells a willing physician he would feel better if he smoked,” as The Washington Post reports this week. This happens barely more than four decades since friends of Kerouac on Vespa motor scooters with little pointy beards and black glasses first arrived up here, detouring from the Newport Jazz Festival back to New York, with beautiful dark-haired girls in pony tails and toreador pants riding behind, lighting up jumbos on main street.
