Nuts!

When most people (which means few people) think of Jim Hogue, they focus on his reenactor fetishism for Ethan Allen. I've seen his bit and, now this is just my personal opinion, the performance is fucking boring.
He plays to small venues that are often comprised of Vermont secessionist fellow travelers but he's really just the athlete's foot fungus of the secesher movement - a long term itch but not much more. This video is a good example; he gets a turnout of six people for a promoted event and complains about that fact but has no insight as to why. He's stunningly boring and Vermonters aren't interested in the secesher cause, yet he claims more than 111,000 Vermonters (18%) are supporters of secession (NB: When seceshers put forward a gubernatorial candidate in 2010, 99.24% of Vermonters voted for someone other than the secesher candidate). Of the six attendees, at least 3 of whom are recognized Second Vermont Republic principals, notably the baas of SVR, Thomas H. Naylor and his handpicked fall guy for the ill-fated 2010 Vermont gubernatorial run, Connecticut native Dennis Steele. If you start to fall asleep, scroll to the 2:58 minute mark to hear Hogue's complaint about attendance:

Ambassador, indeed. Expect more of the same when Hogue puts on his performance at the secesher "convention" next week.

Despite all his talk of peacefulness, Hogue has his dark side. He was one of the earliest members of the seceshers "super secret" Free Vermont listserv. He joined in many of the vengeance oriented conversations or received the communications without voicing objection to the excesses expressed, like one where the likelihood of holding a mass trial of Vermont's law enforcement community, particularly the Vermont State Police, for having collaborated with "the Empire." During these discussions he wrote:

"I propose that, if you are proposing something (and Madame Guillotine is fine with me) that you keep in mind that small is beautiful, and that these scum could not have done what they did if the states were sovereign, as they could not have raped and pillaged the US so successfully without the massive power to corrupt and be corrupted."
Jim Hogue, Free Vermont listserv, December 31, 2009

If you've any doubt though, it's clear that Hogue is no angel. He was one of the few Vermonters that I witnessed to be present at the notorious North-South Secession Summit where I "bumped into" the baas himself. The Southern Poverty Law Center covered the secesher summit here. In short, it was an occasion where Vermont seceshers and white supremacists associated with the League of the South rubbed shoulders. In fact, I sat adjacent to one Southern National Congress bigwig who spoke loudly in front of of the Capitol Plaza lobby fireplace about being in the frigid "Green Mountain capital."

But the point of this post isn't to re-till the soil of the murderous musings of the seceshers on their Free Vermont listserv or the Stalinism-light confiscatory economic proposals by several of the listserv participants (seizure of private property, income caps, asset caps, etc.) or of individual seceshers attempt to harm the personal livelihood of Vermonters that they despise. I just want to mention that Hogue will be a presenter at their upcoming convention next week. Perhaps he'll do something from his 2010 election year play "Mixed Nuts" that from what I can find was, like their electoral try out, a flop.

"Mixed Nuts" is a theatrical ripoff of the movie "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" except that instead of a remarkable protagonist in the form of Jack Nicholson we get an uninspiring, semi-plagiaristic, dopey, incompetent attempt to make secession appealing. Thing is, as is so laughably apparent, you'd have to be nuts to buy into the secesher bull presented in Hogue's amateurish ploy, er, play.

My humble recommendation to Hogue is that he remember and have a modicum of respect for where he is next Friday, the Vermont Statehouse, and not indulge in quite so much cleavage as he did in the play. It doesn't work at his age and, really Jim, think of the children.

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