Better Off Without ''Em INTRODUCTION Divided We Stand (Sort Of) Hang out in my living room on any national election night and at some point in the evening, usually around 7 p.m. Pacific time, you''re almost certain to hear me scream something like: "Why in the hell does the United States-and by extension the entire free world, capitalist dominion, and all of Christendom-allow its government to be held hostage by a coalition of bought-and-paid-for political swamp scum from the most uneducated, morbidly obese, racist, morally indigent, xenophobic, socially stunted, and generally ass-backwards part of the country?" Catch me after some earnest academic with Cambridge and Ivy credentials has to appear on NPR to defend evolution against the latest onslaught on public education from Book of Dipshits creationists, and you''ll likely bear witness to a Thompson rage-gasm along the lines of: "What in Christ''s name happened to that confederation of Mason-Dixon mouth breathers that got them so intimidated by science and facts and book larnin'' that they can''t even walk past a library or look through a microscope without quoting Habakkuk and Deuteronomy to each other until the threat of intellectual enlightenment goes away?" Crack a beer in my TV room on any autumn Sunday when the BCS college football rankings come out or, God help you, kick back on my sofa the week the annual bowl game matchups are announced and the Southeastern Conference is once again gifted a national championship opportunity based on some rigged illusion of the down-home gridiron greatness of a conference that wouldn''t know its latest recruiting violation from a kicking tee if it ever left home after September to play in the snow, sleet, or any genuine football temperatures, and you''ll definitely need to stop me from slashing my wrists before hearing me wail in agonized sports martyrdom: "Vanderbilt? Kentucky? Mississippi State? You call that strength of schedule? You''re honestly standing there and telling me with a straight face that nonconference wins against Troy State, Charleston Southern, and Florida International, at fucking home, are legitimate?" Stop by when a brain-dead zealot is yammering her way through a hypocrisy-laden justification for simultaneously being pro-life and pro-death penalty while some mewling cipher of a FOX "News" "reporter" bobs his head in vacant acquiescence and . well, you already know how the rest of this Stars and Bars tangent goes. And you already know how it goes because (a) You''ve said or felt pretty much the same things yourself about the slave states at some point or (b) you''re from the South, have people there, or otherwise possess a degree of affection for the region such that you''re sick and tired of its honor being traduced and its culture blamed for every American malady by hillbilly-bashing, know-it-all knob polishers such as myself (however impressively informed and well intentioned we might be). You already know most of the other backwoods-bumpkin insults that I could layer into this opening salvo because if there''s one thought that at one time or another has connected American minds from Seattle to Savannah it is this: It''s too bad we didn''t just let the South secede when we had the chance. - - - A short time ago, I began scribbling down notes for a book with the working title "The Divided States of America." I''d gotten the idea from a brilliant website of regional/tribal drumbeating that lays out the case for something called the Republic of Cascadia.

The site is the brainchild of a guy named Lyle Zapato, a mystery man who refuses to be interviewed by anyone other than Daljit Dhaliwal, the semi-hot, bob-haired London-born Punjabi Sikh former host of PBS''s Worldfocus. Zapato''s Republic of Cascadia is an imaginary place that combines the "former" American states of Oregon and Washington and the "former" Canadian province of British Columbia into a sovereign nation consisting of 330,411 square miles and fifteen million inhabitants generating an annual GDP of $515 billion.1 Rather than being tied to the vagaries of a federal government with an agenda that, beyond national defense, rarely lines up with local needs, the more or less like-minded residents of Cascadia live in a paradise of mist-shrouded mountains and mossy forests; a utopia of organic composting and innovative light-rail transportation where all the cows are grass-fed, all the chickens roam free, many of the herbs are smokable, plastic bags are outlawed, citizens mail their post-consumer-waste commitment-ceremony announcements with Cascadian Postal Authority stamps honoring such cultural touchstones as proper kayaking protocol, and nonobese children salute a flag emblazoned with a pinecone resting on a field of tolerant rainbow colors. The philosophical underpinning of Cascadia is simple: shared values, cultural norms, and manageable geography-not the chance tentacles of history and insatiable federal bureaucracy-are what unite, or at least what should unite, a given population. Cascadia works in the imagination because to a large degree it already exists in real life. That imaginary beer you were drinking during my BCS football meltdown? An "uncompromised, unfiltered" golden wheat Widmer Hefeweizen brewed, bottled, and sucked down like teat milk every day by the masses in Portland, Oregon. Better still, the concept is eminently transferable. With Cascadia as inspiration, I began imagining the U.

S. map carved into similarly cohesive cultural blocs. Heartlandia, for example, would stretch from the area east of the Rockies in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado across the breadbasket to the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Mormonia would claim all of Utah and adjacent parts of Idaho and Nevada. Biblestan would cut a massive swath across the lower half of the existing United States, but also include noncontiguous pockets of Heartlandia, claiming dominion over chunks of Missouri, Kansas, and the rural Southwest (which, if you don''t know, is a lot more Bible-thumpy than all the adobe and golf courses lead you to imagine). The Northeast would be rechristened Greater Soxany. Like Singapore and the Vatican, New York and Los Angeles would be conferred city-state status. Mexifornia would stay Mexifornia.

Tracing new national boundaries out of obsolete American states got me excited about writing a bestselling travel book from the point of view of a first-time visitor to each of these culturally united lands. As I shifted my attention from the map and started compiling imaginary atlas statistics, however, the broader limitations of my redistricting project quickly became apparent. With its national seal bearing the image of a man in overalls pointing toward an endless horizon of corn syrup and thank-you notes for "nice visits" with aging relatives, Heartlandia possessed an undeniable appeal. But was life there really all that different from the day-to-day grind in Biblestan or Mormonia? Sure, the people of Greater Soxany and the Federated Boroughs of New York had their differences, but one loudmouth is pretty much like any other, and hipsters get just as uppity about recycling in Burlington as they do in Brooklyn. And when you got into the nitty-gritty details of pinecone politics, Cascadia felt an awful lot like old Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, right down to the organic spunk of damp wool, flax brownies, and $1,200 Restoration Hardware couches covered in dog hair at the well-attended neighborhood association meetings. Anyone wanting to blow holes in my gerrymandering could see as plain as prairie that half a century of Interstate travel, mass media, and nacho cheese flavoring had done its grim work. Every region of the country has its own natural splendors and personality ticks, but aside from a few wacky religious differences and all that goddamn salad dressing they insist on drowning their iceberg lettuce with in the Midwest, I realized that life in These Homogenized States wasn''t all that dissimilar from sea to warming sea. With one exception: The South.

The Confederacy. The Rebel states. The land of pickled pig knuckles, prison farms, coon-hunting conservatives, NASCAR tailgaters, prayer warriors, and guys who build million-dollar careers out of bass fishing. The more I looked at my map and considered each "new" republic, the more the South stood out as the only truly exotic region left in America, the only nation within a nation, the only place separated from the rest by its own impenetrable morality, worldview, politics, religion, personality, and even language. Grits, Gravy, and Gumbo: An Unauthorized Definition After abandoning the idea of redrawing the social and political boundaries of the entire United States in favor of a more thoroughgoing examination of the South, the first issue I had to address was defining my subject. This turned out to be unexpectedly tricky. When forming a mental picture of "the South," the first impulse is to recall the original Confederate States of America, that farsighted group that voted to secede from the Union in 1861, thereby touching off the Civil War. Using history as a guide, today''s South would logically seem to follow the imprimatur of the proudly seditious and eternally defeated states of the C.

S.A.