posted on Oct, 20 2004 @ 02:03 PM
I'm inclined to think that if there's any copying involved that it's "Titor" copying Billy, since either way you slice it -- Titor's from the
future (which I am not inclined to believe), or from now -- he's still born a long time after Mr. Meier, and given the trouble Mr. Titor took to
appear to fit in with the various conspiratorial threads running around the interent, I would guess he'd wind up at least familiarizing himself with
Meier, also.
That being said: the 5-way split actually does make a lot of sense if you take the trouble to map out how the union would break down; you've got 3
geographically-separated major states--California, Texas, and Florida--the northeast corridor, and the northern midwest. So, in the event that the US
was splitting apart, it's not hard to see it breaking down like this:
A) Northeast corridor: New England, maybe as far south as annapolis, possibly as far west as chicago, although that's pushing their luck
B) Southeast: essentially Florida's sphere of influence, probably north to whereever A) stops and then west until whereever Texas's sphere of
influence starts
C) Greater Texas: Texas, plus New Mexico, maybe parts of Colorado and Utah, also possibly Oklahoma and Arkansas
D) Greater California: California, possibly the rest of the west coast + Alaska, maybe stuff east of the rocky mountains like Nevada and Arizona, or
parts thereof
E) The Norhtern Midwest: everything else, really, that's not in A)-D).
It's really easy to see this if you draw it out on a map: you've got the 3 majorly-influential states evenly spread out along the bottom of the map,
one major sphere of influence in the northeast, and lastly the leftover region in the midwest. In such a scenario, it's also not hard to see Titor's
claim of a capital in Omaha (I think that's right, I'm not really into Titor) playing out, because the midwest region'd be too big for any of the
other 4 to decisively hold, but it's the only domestic agricultural region capable of feeding the other 4 regions if our economy craps out to the
point we can't easily be importing food.
So, the point is if you're going to assume the US falls apart into a bunch of warring (or at least rivalrous) territories, then the 5 above seem
reasonable, and so it's not impossible that Meier and/or Titor arrived at them independently by trying to come up with plausible-sounding prophecies.
Has anyone here read "A Canticle for Leibowitz"? It's postapocalyptic fiction set in North America a few hundred years after a nuclear holocaust,
and I remember it had some kind of similar division of the country into a bunch of subcountries; there's probably also a lot of "alternate history"
fiction that's thought this through in better detail, I hope, and any of those kinds of work could be a similar source for Titor's predictions (and
maybe even for Meier, I'd have to check the dates).
One last aside:
gazrok: agreed on the 2 american civil wars thing -- one would be more than enough in my lifetime. There's a bit of a flaw in your reasoning
though: if the new civil war is a rehash of the old civil war, with some of the states (trying to) pull out of the union, they'll get slapped down
really quick, I'm sure, but if the new civil war is some kind of guerilla war than I'm not so sure the US's military translates into much of
anything.
If what you've got is essentially some kind of insurgency or guerillas mixed in with the ordinary populace, it'll be hard to use our fancy planes
and bombs on the rebels, because the collateral damage would be enormous; moreover, even though most of the likely rebels--either the militia types or
a resurgent weather underground type of movement--would be poorly trained vis a vis even a standard army grunt ( and would be pitiful compared to a
marine, let alone a green beret/seal/what have you), if the rebels can blend easily into crowds they'd wind up always having the advantage of
surprise, and thus always being able to draw first blood; in that scenario, also, the advantage goes to the rebels, despite the far superior training
and quality of the US troops.
If the rebels were to win a war, it wouldn't be a military victory so much as a hearts-and-minds victory, like this:
a) rebels blow something up
b) US retaliation overreacts messily, angering non-rebel populace
c) repeat
until the populace is more sympathetic to the rebels than to the US; in that case, what might emerge is some kind of negotiated settlement or truce,
as per what's still going on in Northern Ireland. Granted, that's not going so well, but for the IRA and its supporters being at the negotiating
table is a lot better than not being there, and definitely the IRA never had any chance of a military victory over the rest of the UK.
I think this scenario would make for good sci-fi (or "alternate history" fiction I guess, I don't read a lot of fiction), but I'd hate to live
through it or anything similar; thankfully, though, I'd rate the actual odds pretty low (I think I'm more likely to win publisher's clearinghouse
than I am to see an organized insurgency within the US during my lifetime).