Our Founding, As Told by the Founder's Book

Beric'ht Talossan is proud to offer this Independence Day selection from former King Robert I's (Robert Ben Madison) The History of the Kingdom of Talossa (also known as "The Big History"):

At 7:00 PM on Wednesday, 26 December 1979, Harry Madison, his sister Margie Mathis and her husband Shelby from Birmingham, Alabama, as well as Ben's grandmother Hattie Madison from Memphis, Tennessee, plus Ben's sister and cat, assembled in the living room at his Prospect Avenue home - now Vuode Palace - in the United States of America. The white-green-red of Talossa's national banner was draped across the coffee table.

Then, two figures entered the room. First was Gary Lee Cone, a friend of Ben's and the first designated United States Ambassador to the Kingdom of Talossa, acting on behalf of the United States of America. Then entered Robert Ben Madison, dressed in the blue business-suit he wore to debate competitions, decorated with paper medals he had designed, and carrying beside him a sheaf of papers and a hat - an old Milwaukee fire department dress hat which he had bought at a used book shop for $3.00 but which Dan Lorentz derided once as the "Romanian train conductor's hat. " Madison set the hat down on the table and began to read from the paper, with dignity and solemnity.

Firstly, he read a bried speech about his intention to create a new nation; this speech, to the great loss of posterity, has been lost and forgotten. Then, in his first official Act of State, Robert Ben Madison, the 14-year-old High School sophomore, read the following Declaration of Independence which he had written earlier that day:

 I, Robert the First, His Royal Me, proclaim the Kingdom of Talossä [sic] to be an independent unit in the master plan of World Singular Secession. In doing so, I am seceding from the United States of America.

Madison set the paper down upon the table and took the blue "Romanian Train Conductor's Hat" with both hands, solemnly placing it upon his own head as Napoléon had done 176 years earlier. With that act, Robert Ben Madison became His Majesty Robert I, King of Talossa, and a humble bedroom on the second floor of a Milwaukee home slipped out of the grasp of the United States of America for ever as the free and independent Kingdom of Talossa.

The Kingdom of Talossa had become a sovereign nation by the will of its inhabitants, and King Robert, who described his rule as a "democratic dictatorship, " where one man makes all the rules, yet all men do, signed into law that day Talossa's fundamental law, the 1979 Constitution:

ARTICLE ONE: All power oflaw, finance and anything  else is vested in the King.

ARTICLE TWO: This constitution is perfect and shall have no need of amendment.