How I feel about America, for Yellow Dog...

Blog award-winner Yellow Dog is asking for a little love from his new Australian audience, hoping to get some response from Australians on how they feel about America these days.

I don't like to think of the US as one country anymore. Like the Roman empire before it fell, the US is now really at least two separate nations, geographically adjacent but culturally, economically and politically light years apart.

I'm speaking of course of the Red States and the Blue States, which couldn't be more different if there were an Atlantic Ocean in between them. I'm headed to California on business this coming January, and I know while I'm there that I see eye-to-eye with most university-educated Californians on almost any issue you can name from birth control to Kyoto Protocol or foreign policy. We eat the same, look the same, consume the same media and entertainment, want the same things for our kids, and increasingly speak the same language.

Sooner or later us enlightened citizens in the US, Australia, NZ, Canada and elsewhere should use the internet to cobble-together some kind of virtual city state that we can all belong to. We'll pay taxes into a common fund so that the virtual state can pay our various geographical states for the public infrastructure we use (even negotiating on our behalf for a better deal), we'll get ourselves a UN seat and an OPEC seat, and those geographical nations that really piss us off will find we can buy them out for more than it will cost them to go to war with us.