Jack of Harts

There are several key differences between our United States of America and the one that Jack grows up in. The one most people would notice first is that there is no Federal Income Tax. The States had gotten sick and tired of having their money taken out of their State and then only given back if they did what the Feds told them to do. So they debated repealing that Amendment during the reformation of the Federal Government. Yes, there was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the whole thing, but it was mostly politicians and network types who were doing the screaming. And the Americans who survived the Second Great Depression, the Islamic Jihad, and the Cybernetic Wars didn’t have many sympathies left for the sensibilities of Federal politicians or their very good friends in the national networks. So they told the Feds to go pound sand and repealed that Amendment with prejudice. They’re still debating whether or not that was a good move in Jack’s time, but the repeal has held against multiple attempts to break it, most recently during The Shang War. You will note that I don’t say exactly how many. That’s writer speak for “I don’t want to contradict myself by accident sometime in the future.” 😉

The American flag in Jack’s day is one that has not changed in over two centuries, even as new States and territories have been added. The reasons are twofold, and more. The first is that I didn’t want to have to make a lot of different flags for use in art. I’m lazy, cheap, and a perfectionist. Which means I wanted a single flag. But America has this policy of changing our flag every time we get a new State. And America in Jack’s day has…a LOT of States. So I did a lot of research on flags. And one day, while researching, I realized something. Forty-Nine States reformed the Federal Government in my writing. And we have a 49 star flag on record. It was a very short-lived flag, but we do have it, and it’s public domain. And so the flag that Jack knows with 13 stripes for the original colonies and 49 stars for the States that reformed the Union was born.

The United States of America when Jack grew up was different from the nation we live in now. Three centuries had passed. Political alliances like the Republic of California, Republic of Texas, the Indian Nations, and the Confederation of Dixie had arisen. Those pseudo-sovereign alliances of States maintained many of their own policies and generally ignored the Federal Government’s wishes as long as it didn’t try to interfere with them. I draw much inspiration from Pre-Civil War America in that way, where people were Minnesotans or Texans first, and Americans second. Jack was proud to grow up a Minnesotan on the wilderness border with Canada, acting as a tour guide for rich city slickers. America was a highly divided nation in many ways, but when the Shang attacked and killed millions of Americans all over the Western half of the nation, they united the United States of America in a way that only an outside threat can. Much like after our own 9/11, America stood back up and challenged all comers to come get some. That is the America Jack grew up in, and the America he volunteered to defend.