A painfully short history of the 2004-2012 Republic of Talossa

[GV]

'A Nation Sundered' is the most-detailed retelling of the Republic's origin-story.  The big, huge thread on this forum on the 'Shocking Witt Statistics of John Woolley' gives a good deal of general history.

The first of June 2004 was a Tuesday.  As I recall, I had a gig that day and was not home, I believe, for the Noon 'changeover'.  It was exhilarating to read Witt that day, but in retrospect, again, we needed only to kill off Ben and Amy's accounts.  I've gone into that point, already.

The movers and shakers of the founding of the Republic were Kane dal Nava and Mike Loquatsch.  And we found ourselves on 1 June 2004 without a functioning constitution, but that was being remedied.  The night before, I had put together a 'Provisional Constiution' which was amended a time or two, but shockingly for how fast I wrote it, it actually allowed us to function until our permanent constitution was finished some months later.

My first four years of college, we had a brilliant, but tempramental band director.  I always got along with him, but not everyone did.  When he took a position elsewhere, our music education guru was interim for one semester.  Old band director also did jazz band, and for that interim semester, our clarinet-saxophone teacher was the interim jazz band director.  He had played with Stan Kenton in the 1970s, and we revered him, but that's another story.

One afternoon, I happened to be around the band hall.  I can't remember why, but I walked in and interim band director decided to clean up the band hall a little and roped a bunch of us into getting it done.

It turned out for many of us to be a cathartic experience.  Not only did we clean up the years of dust under the risers, we proceeded to dismantle the risers and turn the two riser arrangements (regular and jazz bands) into a single arrangement which went on to serve both bands.

The first days and weeks of the Republic of Talossa were like that, but more intense.  I know to a tiny degree what it is to have the liberation following finding out one has been in a cult for years.  The Cult of Ben Madison.

Ián Anglatzarâ was actually a really nice person.  Miestrâ Schivâ was not the horrible, repulsive creature Ben made her out to be.  The 'traitorous libs' were not the bad people.  Dan W. in my eyes was immediately vindicated.

As the atheist Kane Gruber put it to me "Jesus was Satan, and Satan was Jesus."  Miestrâ won me over with two Witt X posts.  And John Eiffler joining us was the greatest coup of all.  I think Ron Rosais was one of our citizens (yes, that Ron).

We had a blank slate.  The baroque mustiness of the 1997 Organic Law was no longer our concern.  We were saving Ben Madison's bedroom-kingdom from the one who started it.  I really cannot explain how it was in those first two months.  It was my most magical time doing Talossa.

Eventually, we began work on our constitution.  Mike Loquatsch was our first provisional head of state.  Kane might have been our first permanent head of state, but I cannot remember.

Within six months, the first people to have been citizens of the Republic without ever having been citizens of the Kingdom joined us.  Carlüs X. was the most prominent of these, and he would go on to have a career in the reunited Kingdom.

I remember Kane looking at online resources of how the United Nations helped new countries get off the ground in terms of how they structured their constitutions, and he was an immense cog in the making of our permanent constitution.  The constitution convention was begun in autumn 2004, and in the same week Benedict XVI was elected Bishop of Rome, our new Constitution was ratified. 

The Republic of Talossa should have taken off from there, but something happened to kill it off slowly: Ben Madison succeeded in alienating almost literally the entire Kingdom against him, and in August 2005, he was gone of his own accord, taking the Republic's reason to exist with him.

I've gone through why we didn't make our return to the Kingdom right then and there, but as the Kingdom became more 'SCA', we continued to be angry, the low point being the CUG's outright rejection of any input from us concerning the Talossan language and the December 2007 Arestada, which extended the duration of the Talossan Cold War by a few years.

Starting in 2008, my activity in Talossan life begins to wane.  2009 or 2010 saw me do almost nothing, and it is not an exaggeration to say had Miestrâ not harangued me for political stuff or whatever in that year, my absent mind would have fallen off the Talossan bandwagon for good.

I was at the latter part of that period invited by Miestrâ into her political party.  At some point, I was Prime Minister for the first time, but my second stint as PM was more consequential.  I was the Reunision PM, but Miestrâ did almost all the heavy lifting.  Being the most monarchist and pro-unification Republic citizen, I was useless to our interests in the negotiations for Reunision and recused myself from the process entirely, putting Distain Carlüs X. in my place on the three-person Republic side of the table.

I missed being the last President of the Republic of Talossa by one or two votes.  My joke-campaign almost came back to haunt me.  But the country elected the right person (Miestrâ) to do that job.

Today's Kingdom ZRT-caucus in the Free Democrats is the direct political descendant of the old Republic ZRT.  I've been doing politics with Miestrâ almost ten years.  hard to believe...

20 April 2012 saw the dissolution of the 2004-2012 Republic of Talossa and the return (or first coming) of a nigh-on intact Republic community. 

GV, Founding Parent of the 2004-2012 Republic of Talossa

[Miestră Schivă, UrN]

Should we add this to the New Talossan History Project?

[Baron Alexandreu Davinescu]

I have read A Nation Sundered several times, and it is a great look at that period in time.  But you skip from that point again up to 2012, pretty much.  In your narrative here, you go right from the six-month period after the Republic began, pretty much right on to the end of the Republic!  And in that time there were a ton of elections, debates about the future of the country, restructuring and reforms, and so on!  I mean, I wasn't there and you were, but the history of the Republic can't just be, "We founded it and here's that story, and then nothing worth mentioning happened until we shut the place down."  There was a whole country with an intense group of people actively interested for years, and there's got to be some history there.  Let's make it come alive again, to a new generation of Talossans!

If you have any documents or information or access to anything from the rest of that time, that'd be great.  If you can give me any leads on anyone who might, that would also be great.  Maybe I could pay for @mpf 's time, if it's not too expensive, to just round up and 7zip the relevant files together and send them to me?

[GV]

Should we add this to the New Talossan History Project?

Do so.

[GV]

I have read A Nation Sundered several times, and it is a great look at that period in time.  But you skip from that point again up to 2012, pretty much.  In your narrative here, you go right from the six-month period after the Republic began, pretty much right on to the end of the Republic!  And in that time there were a ton of elections, debates about the future of the country, restructuring and reforms, and so on!  I mean, I wasn't there and you were, but the history of the Republic can't just be, "We founded it and here's that story, and then nothing worth mentioning happened until we shut the place down."  There was a whole country with an intense group of people actively interested for years, and there's got to be some history there.  Let's make it come alive again, to a new generation of Talossans!

If you have any documents or information or access to anything from the rest of that time, that'd be great.  If you can give me any leads on anyone who might, that would also be great.  Maybe I could pay for @mpf 's time, if it's not too expensive, to just round up and 7zip the relevant files together and send them to me?

If we need to pay for MPF's time, let's talk to him about that.  Yeah, I left all of that out because I barely remember any of it.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN]

Should we add this to the New Talossan History Project?

Do so.

No, you do so, you have equal rights as I do :D