To my fellow Americans wanting to secede or flee: Kthxbuhbai

Cannot fold, spindle, mutilate, destroy or secede from. Period. Sometimes there are no words.

At least, there seem to be no pithy ones available as a quick retort to the outright ignant ignorance being displayed with the pitiful request of hundreds of thousands of United States residents that have either (a) been threatening to expatriate after the re-election of President Obama last week (b) signed (part of) their name to one of the more than 50 petitions posted at We the People asking for permission for their state of residence to peaceably secede from the United States.

(I pause before calling any of these people "citizens", in keeping with the philosophy of the late great Robert Heinlein who, in Starship Troopers noted that "citizenship an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part... and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.")

The first thing that came to mind when I realized this was not just one night's sore loser whinging, but something else, was my mother's favorite: "Don't let the door hit you where the good Lord split you". It's a handy phrase; I myself have used it at the end of several intimate relationships and friendships over the years. Yet it's a bit too long for what would be hundreds of thousands of potential conversations. You sort of have to work your way up to it by engaging in a battle royale of some type before spitting it out. Besides, a lot of people don't believe in the Good Lord anyway and I wanted a quick retort of universal application. So, I reached out into the etherware (with the help of one of my kids) and discovered that there was a short, snappy way to say at least part of what I wanted to say:  kthxbai.

There is more than one definition of kthxbai at the Urban Dictionary, but this one is my personal favorite:

9. Kthxbai

Okay, thanks, goodbye for people you really don't like. Used as a derogatory term for idiots.

Unfortunately, kthxbai is just a little too pithy. It doesn't fully convey that I am not just politely dismissing the petitioners and the threateners and moving on because I think they are idiots. No, I am pretty darned close to requesting that they all either drop dead or at a minimum STFU and let the rest of us be Americans in peace and tranquility. (Yes, I know, asking fellow Americans to drop dead or STFU may itself be rather un-American.) So I kept digging for another word, one that conveyed the full reach of my anger at, and disgust over, those Americans who so believe that the re-election of our president was the functional equivalent of being cast into all nine circles of hell in Dante's Inferno that they are saying they refuse to be part of the country he's going to be in charge of (again.)

Thanks to my millennial children who let me know that part of my problem was that I was looking for correctly spelled words, I found another term that had real potential: BuhBye.

BuhBye means, according to the Urban Dictionary, "Get the fuck out of my face."

This was much better; the impatient anger I was increasingly feeling as the numbers of "I'm leaving!" cries and secession "petitions" kept going up publicly is definitely well summed up by this phrase. However, I was raised right, and know that it's not really fair to angrily tell someone to piss off without at least explaining to them why. Thus, as tempting as it was to just choose "Buhbye", I realized that too wasn't enough.

Ultimately, I decided to combine the concepts of "Kthxbai" and "BuhBye" to create a sum greater than its parts:

Kthxbuhbai.