A Disintegrating U.S.? Critics Come Unglued

Perhaps he would discover what the acutely perceptive Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville did in the 1830s, as he wrote in "Democracy in America": that we Americans are an extravagantly creative people in how we generate social forms.

"Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations," he wrote. "In democratic countries, knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others."

Indeed, Tocqueville noted, community here was rarely the same thing as formal government.

I have never thought that North America is flying apart, or that it should. But I once talked with someone who did: Archie Green, a University of Texas professor, folklorist and regionalist.

What he liked about the observation that North America was made up of quite real, tangible and long-lived civilizations such as the breadbasket or the Pacific Northwest is that if Washington, D.C., were to slide into the Potomac tomorrow under the weight of its many burdens and crises, the result would be okay. The future would not be chaos; it would be a shift. North America would not suddenly become a strange and alien world. It would be a collection of healthy, powerful constituent parts -- for example, Dixie -- that we've known all our lives.

Green saw this as a resilient response of a tough people reaffirming their self-reliance. It's not that social contracts are dissolving; it's that new ones are being born.

Check it out, Igor. In addition to the Mississippi Delta not being Belarus, you might find these real places nothing like your imagination.