This equinox marks the beginning of another changing season, recalling back to our minds the events of the previous season and making us think again about what is to come. Summer 2019 was an eventful period during which we kept up the excitement from the momentous occasion of Sandus’s tenth anniversary. Sandum citizens took part in many compassionate activities in the last three months, while some of our leading citizens represented our modest country on the large-scale international stage at MicroCon 2019. Sandum and social leaders met with our friends and allies, including with the hope of concluding a new treaty for a community associated with the Social System, and it was the Sanôba’s first official occasion on the intermicronational stage—and this happened all before the royal couple’s affirmed their love and commitment to one another. This summer also marked the first time the Central People’s Government has shaken up its cabinet and the first time the Three Grand State Officials met in weekly (and now biweekly) meetings. In all, Summer 2019 was an eventful time—the perfect comparison between 2009 and 2019.
If Sandus had a hygge concept, it would be Autumn—around Armilustrium time.
Sôgmô C. Soergel Publicola
Autumn 2019 will be even more eventful. This season is one of much activity in Sandus as our citizens return to work or to school, but also when Sandus prepares for its most important cultural holiday—the Armilustrium—and for the CPS Party Congress. This season, too, will see a lot of work done toward securing the future of our country: at the Citizens’ Party of Sandus Party Congress in November, Party members will approve the list of candidates submitted by Caucus of the Quinque Interreges and they will listen to the government’s plan for a Common Economy as a part of the Social System.
Autumn has always been thought of the season of inward-turning in Sandus. One citizen said that he associates it with both the beauty of the changing seasons and also with “the excitement of renewing academic work.”
All these things, and more, will be the highlight of the Autumn—reminding us that, while it is getting colder outside, we are getting more active!
Charity Taxes: Still Coming In
At the moment, only three citizens have submitted their charity contributions. Out of them, $480.84 USD have been donated to charity including to church and other charity organisations and causes. Sandum citizens have volunteered 142 hours to charity to such things as school, church, community, elderly, and ecological groups.
It is too early to tell, but the numbers appear to be down from $754.48 in Spring and sharply down from $1,628.71 this time last year.
Caucus of Quinque Interreges Publishes Shortlist of Heir Candidates
The Caucus of Quinque Interreges has published its report and shortlist of heir candidates. Or, rather, heir candidate. There is only one.
The caucus was comprised of the Three Grand State Officers—the Sôgmô, the Party Secretary, and the Facilitator of the Council—who also appointed two other interreges from citizens at large—Civis Sisenna Melville and Peregrinus Jan DeWitt. After a Spring of gathering a long list of candidates that added up to only five, the Summer was spent considering the nominees and interviewing one of them. In the end, consensus of the caucus was to select only one candidate.
That candidate is Jan DeWitt, the Sôgmô’s colleague at the University of Michigan who studies Roman constitutionalism and constitutional theory generally. He has been a citizen since May but has now taken part in Sandum holidays for the past two years and is an active citizen. If he is approved by the Party in November and is elected by a national vote of all Sandum citizens in December, Comrade Citizen DeWitt will become the country’s first heir.
The caucus’s list now heads to the Party’s November Party Congress, where the Party has the power to approve the caucus’s work and certify the list ahead of the Winter Solstice election in December. At this point, it is likely that Citizen DeWitt will become the first heir of the State of Sandus, a position that was created by the May 2018 Law on the Succession of the Sôgmô.
The caucus’s report also highlighted two suggestions for the future, since this process is planned to happen every five years. Members recommended that members in the future be deputised to work on behalf of the caucus and also to have regularly scheduled meetings: all things in an effort to have a more thorough and engaged process in the future.
Fiançailles: Sôgmô, Sanôba engaged in July
After the Royal Couple’s trip to MicroCon 2019, where both the Sôgmô and Sanôba met and visited with close friends and allies across the micronational world, they both visited New England in the United States. It was on the shores of the Atlantic, too, on 26 July, when the Sanôba decided to pose the question to the Sôgmô—if they would like to marry him.
They, of course, said yes.
Over the next few days, both began to tell their friends and family until the news was made public on 29 July 2019. Micronationalists from around the world congratulated the Royal Couple and the State of Sandus’s media broadcast images and announcements imbued in coral, the Pantone colour of 2019.
The engagement was astoundingly egalitarian. Both had discussed engagement for months before the Sanôba proposed, and the Sôgmô had bought both rose gold wedding bands in anticipation for þess planned date of 4 August, or Chökhor Düchen. Instead of an engagement ring, a traditional that both considered insufficient for a queer relationship like theirs, both wear each other’s ring on a rose gold chain necklace.
As of now, the Royal Couple do not plan to marry until 2021.
On the Road to October: Party prepares for an eventful Party Congress
The Party Secretary and the Politburo of the Citizens’ Party of Sandus has announced that the Ninth Party Congress will happen on 9 November 2019. and will meet under the slogan «Approaching the Common Economy».
The agenda of the Party Congress will cover such agenda items as the Common Economy associated with the Social System and formed between Sandus and Überstadt, the approval of the shortlist of heir candidates from the Five Interreges’ Caucus, and the Borean Community—a community of Left-wing micronations located in northern North America that the State of Sandus will establish with our partners in Überstadt and in Saint-Castin.
prole•nounce to revolutionise Sandum aesthetics
The State Media Cooperative in the last season announced the creation of prole•nounce, an avant-garde art & design journal meant to revolutionise Sandum aesthetics. Its mission is summarised in the journal’s tagline: «no missions, no objectives». The group, which lacks a traditional editorial-writer hierarchy, has since gotten articles on a wide range of ideas with others in the van. Its ultimate purpose is meant to shake up complacency in Sandus with its radically democratic and queer approach to such things as art, satire, comedy, poetry, and prose.
For example, one key break from the Veritum Sandus style guide, the journal has eschewed majuscule letters, i.e. capital letters. Well, almost entirely eschewed: the only word capitalised is Sandus.
The journal’s opening announcement, playfully called “it’s pronounced,” makes sure you know what the group is about: sharing fun and uplifting but also serious content “purposefully avant-garde and proletarian : [the journal] represents our interests, our being, and our politics as sandum citizens.”
we share content of every medium, of every official language without translation, of every genre.
poetry : prose
comedy : satire : tragedy
art : music : video : gamesbut we especially appreciate content and grammata that reflects who we are as a micronation and what brings us together. we focus on suffering, but also on the personal and social way to overcome it. we want to uplift each other, while also giving each other the space to grow and declare our own
it’s pronounced
liber -ty, -ation, -ality.
The journal has since created something of a grass-roots art movement in Sandus endearingly called “Sandhaus Realism,” a portmanteau of Sandus, the 20th century German art movement “Bauhaus,” and Sandum Realism.
Sandhaus Realism—an art movement to save a nation!
The journal quickly followed up its announcement by publishing an artistic manifesto declaring a new epoch in Sandus: the epoch of revolutionary art under the aegis of Sandhaus Realism. That movement combines both a radical (post)modernist approach in art to Realist principles about the world and society.
Working within the philosophical tradition of Bauhaus, Sandhaus Realism maintains the vision of play with light, texture, and material; of maximising utilitarian design with modernist art and industrial design; and of making art a part of the daily lives of all working class peoples. But Sandhaus Realism rejects (1) the stark rupture Bauhaus posited with the past—a past that now includes and coerces the movement—and instead advocates for a middle way between tradition and novelty, and (2) the contemporary bourgeois principles and profit-oriented economics of the art school whose students have given up on those forlorn socialist values.
the school’s rupture with the past was an admirable purpose in the nihilistic age after the great war, and it still is in a world where violence and warfare exist. but we are never free of our pasts. it is idealistic and has run into failure in the real world. even now, bauhaus is the past.
we can never escape it.we can instead free ourselves by living in the present, mixed between past and future. historicism can rupture the past’s hold on our lives, but with a recognition it still holds sway over our society, our culture, our politics. ourselves. our psyche. this is artistic realism.
we encourage realist and class-conscious attitudes toward material. we cannot live beyond our contemporary modernist livelihoods in this age of late stage capitalism. we can, however, work to combine art and utility in our daily life through our own means. we can encourage both light and the use of colour in our lives. these principles have the capacity to change our lives, to encourage us to learn proletarian pragmatism and to raise class-consciousness, while also improving our common and individual weal as the sandum philosophy encourages us to do. they call upon us to reconsider everything sandum, from style to art, from home to national. this design manifesto will change everything from typeface to tabletops, logos to facebook profiles. in this great cultural moment of ours, we have only one thing left to do: break our chains and make a mockery of them.
sandhaus realism: artistic manifesto
The journal behind the art movement is always looking for submissions. Feel free to contact the group at the contact page “pronounce!” on prole•nounce’s website.
sandus.org 