The Tulip King

I'm kind of a shy, timid person," David Nash told me from his home just outside of Amherst, VA. "Strange as it sounds, I'm not a publicity hound."

Yet during the second week of November, 2004, the following small item appeared at the bottom of the New York Press Crime Blotter:

Democracy proved itself alive and well at least for a few minutes on Nov. 2, when 41-year-old Virginian David Nash flopped ashore on Governors Island. Nash, who was wearing a wetsuit, raised a pirate flag and attempted to claim the misbegotten rock in the name of the Blue Tulip Party. As soldiers led Nash quietly away to Bellevue, his mother admitted to reporters that he is, yes, a little touched in the head.

The story made most of the local papers, hundreds of blog sites, and "News of the Weird" columns throughout the country. But the events surrounding that incident were a bit more complicated than had been reported.

Nash is a friendly, unassuming man with a sharp drawl who's spent most of his adult life working part-time construction jobs. He founded the Blue Tulip Party in 1999, taking the name from a Grateful Dead song. Not surprisingly, the Party's initial goal was the legalization of marijuana. The ideas and goals of the Blue Tulip Party, of which Nash remains the only official member, have evolved considerably since then. He's run for political office on several occasions, from sheriff to president, but has yet to win.

This question immediately comes to mind: Why would a man born and raised in rural Virginia set his sights on, of all places, Governors Island?

The island was decommissioned as a military base in 2003, and control was passed from the federal government to New York City and state. Nash couldn't help but notice that, a year after the transfer, it wasn't being used for anything, and figured it would make a perfect headquarters for his Blue Tulip Kingdom. (Back in 1964, the historically minded may recall, a group of Lakota Indians occupied Alcatraz using a similar argument.)

The primary use Nash had in mind, he explained, involved various African slave reparation projects.

"The eventual evolution of my idea would culminate in an African slavery heritage museum. I think that's consistent with Liberty Island, Ellis Island and the Holocaust Museum."

It sounds like a reasonable enough plan. But one has to wonder why Nash, instead of going through more traditional channels to get a museum built-grants, foundations and the like-felt it necessary to storm the island alone, clutching a pirate flag.

The original notion for that, he said, began with a comedy sketch he'd written and mailed to Al Sharpton in 2003, hoping Sharpton would perform it while hosting Saturday Night Live. In the sketch, Sharpton leads a flotilla of sailboats and yachts across the harbor to Governors Island, where he plants a pirate flag in the sand and claims the island for slave-reparation purposes.

"The idea evolved from that. When nobody else did it, I decided that I had to do it." At the time, Nash was making his second presidential bid under the Blue Tulip banner and looking to get his ideas a little exposure.

"It took a little while to plan the swim over," he said. "It's pretty dangerous out there in the harbor. I was worried about the currents sweeping me away from the island, and having to tie off to a buoy or something?I had to study the tide charts and the currents to see how risky it would be. It finally took a lot of just deciding to do it."

In the wee hours of Nov. 2, David Nash, in a full wetsuit and black camouflage facepaint, entered the chill waters off Brooklyn, and made the roughly 800-yard swim.

Shortly before seven o'clock that morning, workmen couldn't help but notice the trespasser on the beach-the one who was hoisting an enormous blue skull-and-crossbones flag. The skull had a neat bullet hole between its two red eyes, and the legend "Blue Tulip Party" had been embroidered beneath it. The workmen, figuring this sort of thing was a bit out of their jurisdiction, called the NYPD.

"I was very surprised that I was just slapped on the wrist," Nash said of the trespassing charges filed against him. "Ron Kuby and Curtis Sliwa said on their [early-morning WABC radio] show that I'd embarrassed the NYPD and the Coast Guard because I'd managed to swim over there and infiltrate the island undetected. All this talk about the billions of dollars being spent on homeland security, and they couldn't keep one man from doing that. I was really surprised that I wasn't charged with anything more."

There's also the possibility, Nash points out, that the authorities didn't want to call more attention to the incident than was necessary.

"We both know that there was all this hype about terrorist activity during the Republican Convention. So certainly on Election Day when I'm over there raising a pirate flag, they didn't know what was going on, and the police really thought I was a terrorist. It certainly could've been a diversion to draw them out?One of the SWAT team members said, 'Is there anyone else with you?-because we've got 72 guys over here.' If they called out that kind of a response to Governors Island, then all of these other terror-response protocols were enacted-the whole city probably came to full alert-and they got some practice. It was not a drill, so their response was real and genuine. I don't expect to get a medal for that, but it did kind of help them a bit."

He insists that was never his intention, however. Nor did he plan to storm the island on Election Day. He had to wait until the tide was right. And given his presidential run, he knew he had to do it on or before the second of the month. Things just worked out that way.

"I finally had to do it out of personal integrity and honor," he said. "If I hadn't done it, my integrity and honor would have suffered."

A search of the island revealed that Nash had no guns, no explosives, no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Just a change of clothes, a sports drink, the pirate flag and a half-eaten apple. It was clear almost immediately that he didn't pose any sort of serious threat to national security.

The police took him straight to Bellevue, where he was locked up for a week as he underwent a psychiatric evaluation.

"When I was arraigned," Nash told me, "the Bellevue psychiatrist wanted me to be civilly committed for further observation. Luckily the judge let me out on my own recognizance."

After talking with him, I must say that Nash is a very charming, intelligent and well-spoken man. He has a lot of very interesting and original ideas. Unfortunately, when it comes to getting his ideas out there, he's often the victim of some pretty miserable judgment calls.

After being released from Bellevue, Nash returned home and began planning a defense strategy for his March 10 hearing. The result was a six-page "plea agreement" that read more like a Blue Tulip manifesto. It was addressed to "The People of the State of New York, the County of New York, and New York City."

For the first three pages, Nash describes himself by means of hundreds of short phrases ranging from "eye of the hurricane, rider on the storm" to "spooker of the Secret Service of Presidents" to "garlic eater," "author of an absurd, comical global economic plan for peace," "unskilled artist," "designer of the Acme Universal Lever System," "newspaper deliveryman," "United States Army almost-enlisted," and "megalomaniac alcoholic hallucinogen-abusing bipolar obsessive-compulsive."

After letting us know what kind of person we were dealing with (sort of), Nash goes on to outline the conditions of his plea agreement. Instead of taking the usual tack of simply pleading guilty or not guilty to criminal-trespassing charges, Nash turned things around, insisting that the people of New York plead guilty to him on charges of false arrest, wrongful imprisonment, failure to obey a sign (the pirate flag), failure to comply by the Rules of the Game, interference with the divine right of a king (him), failure to obey the verbal proclamation of a king and so on. There are 16 charges against us in all-including trespassing-and in each Nash reaffirms that he is to be considered "a king by grace bestowed by the Creator, Nature's God" (a phrase borrowed from the Constitution).

Upon submitting the document to the DA's office, it was recommended that Nash undergo another psychiatric evaluation before his hearing progressed any further.

I spoke with him the day after he returned to Virginia following the evaluation. He made it perfectly clear that he did not want to be considered "crazy" or "emotionally disturbed."

"Basically, people are skeptical of what I'm trying to do. To me, since I know the history of my ideas and I'm most familiar with them, they seem self-evident."

He certainly has a point-history's greatest thinkers have often been misunderstood. Still, I mentioned, if he's going to insist that he's a king by divine right in a Manhattan court, he's got to expect a few raised eyebrows.

"What is a king?" he asked in response. "Kings are political leaders and they have sovereignty over a nation or a people. I certainly don't have any of that. But we also use the term to describe the King of Rock and Roll, or the King of the Football Field. It's basically a title of excellence. I think that my ideas are original, good ideas, and show a certain amount of leadership. I think they're noble-though I don't mean to toot my own horn like that-I'm not really that kind of person."

(It should probably be noted here that in a letter to his lawyer, Nash referred to himself as an "exceptional genius," and claimed that his trial would be the "third most important trial in history," following those of Socrates and Jesus.)

Nash admits, however, that his ideas "may take a while to be accepted if they ever are accepted."

For example, the "king by grace of the Creator" business he speaks of, he told me, was based on genetics, not religion.

"There's all sort of genes that do this and do that-it's possible there is a king gene. I'm just speculating on that. And maybe over time that gene expresses itself. I think in my case, there's been an expression of a certain set of genes that may have led me to do what I have done."

While he's fully aware that his "king" notions won't go over very well and may indeed prove his downfall in court, Nash still sees it as an opportunity to get his ideas into the public record.

"Well, obviously," he said, "our country fought for independence from a king. The Constitution says, 'The United States shall not confer a title of nobility.' But there's also been a lot of political discussion over the centuries over what sovereignty is. Is sovereignty in the people, and do we give that irrevocably to the executive and legislative branches? I basically said I'm a sovereign individual, and I'm declaring my independence, and I want to establish a kingdom on Governor's Island. It does sound absurd and outrageous-I agree with that?but I am trying to separate myself from the United States. I'm not so smart on this political theory, but it's my goal to set up a kingdom to pursue these ideas I have."

The final part of the manifesto he submitted to the DA outlines some of the plans he has for Governors Island once it officially becomes the Blue Tulip Kingdom.

Most of the plans are fairly basic. On the island's 172 acres, Nash intends to establish shipping lanes; tv, radio and movie studios; a publishing house; a textile manufacturing plant; schools; and the slavery museum.

Once it was all up and running, the Kingdom would "be a Spectacle to delight History down through the Ages."

Along with the planned museum, the Kingdom's Department of African-American Affairs would also establish a chain of private prisons across Africa.

"If I was an African-American sitting in a prison," Nash explained, "I would much rather go to an African prison colony than be stuck in America in a private prison corporation working for Whitey. That would be my attitude. What I would like to do is have treaties with these African countries, and set up private prison corporations in different parts of Africa, and then screen American prisoners, train them, then send them to these private prison corporations. They wouldn't be real prisons, like here. They would be more like working colonies. They would just spend their sentence in Africa. Hopefully they would be rehabilitated, they would have job training. If they wanted to, they could be married to indigenous Africans. Then they could come back as rehabilitated citizens."

He then added, "I think it would be quite a spiritual journey for them. It would be reversing all the slave trips that were made from Africa. To go back on ships would be kind of liberating. I think it would have a profound effect, not just on African Americans, but on the world in general. It's kind of like trying to reverse the course of history."

I asked Nash if he had bounced some of these ideas off people, just to get their response.

"Well," he said, "I told one African-American woman in Manhattan back in the summer, and she thought it was a bad idea. It just wasn't in accord with her own conceptions of what needed to be done. I really haven't told too many people. I basically just write, send this stuff out, and hope for the best?I started this journey in 1999, and it just keeps evolving. I have to keep doing things."

David Nash returns to New York on March 25 to hear the results of his latest psychiatric evaluation.

In spite of all his talk of kings and divine right, in spite of the occasional lapses into post-hallucinogen babble, there remained something uniquely and innately American about David Nash. Absurd as it could seem at times, he embodied that sense of supreme hope so long missing from the American political scene. Of course what he attempted on Election Day was impossible and doomed to failure, but that's why it was so important. He tried to take a stand, to stake a claim by and for himself, and did so armed only with a pirate flag and a sense of whimsy. He's an audacious individualist, a 21st-century frontiersman who doesn't seem driven by lust and greed. He's a Don Quixote for our times-a man who should, if there is any justice in the world, become a folk legend, and not dismissed as a simple nutcase. David Nash may be the last honest revolutionary patriot the country has left.