America the crazy lady who breaks your heart...sounds about right.

At close to your age I too find the longer patterns becoming visible, and suggesting how the future will probably unfold. I agree that America is probably past the tipping point.

As you know, part of the emerging tapestry for me is understanding "the conservative mind", which is the quest for understanding how we got into this mess. Looking into the history of the Right as a political movement, I've come to realize that it's barely older than me, and was always there as a backdrop to my life. With some of that perspective now, I have to define "rightwinger" this way: Somebody successfully terrorized by Osama bin Laden.

I can't imagine the evil bastard understood America well enough to know where to strike to produce the maximum fracturing, but nevertheless, the intended psychological effects of the attacks of 9/11 fell on fertile soil. Soil plowed and fertilized for several decades by a rightwing infrastructure designed for the sole purpose of frightening and alienating a vulnerable part of the population to turn them into a pliant electoral weapon for wealthy interests.

I don't think that the Koch Bros and their ilk set out to destroy America; they wouldn't want to kill the goose that laid such golden eggs for them. But in their blind greed and ideological fanaticism, they handed bin Laden a powerful weapon to use against America. And now we're reaping the whirlwind.

Maybe I shouldn't say that there's no hope for America; maybe it's more accurate to say that a large part of the population is lost, and trying to drag the rest of America down with them.

Part of the landscape we see is that the Confederacy still lives, if not in name, certainly in spirit. There are Tea Party cells across the country, but one of their defining common features is that they're all reactionary white Southerners in spirit.

So maybe the only way out for America is to recognize that the Civil War didn't end, there's just been a truce for a century and a half, and maybe it's time to let the South go. Let them have their Confederacy with antebellum vision of a white aristocracy living the good life on the backs of invisible peasants.

I don't mean that fighting the Civil War was a bad idea. Slavery had to be ended, and the Union had to be preserved because logically, how could the US end slavery in a South no longer under its jurisdiction? But we never won their hearts and minds. Today I'd favor a new Confederacy as a sink to drain off the poison in American society. Let all the tea baggers and racists and general reactionaries move there.

I'd want conditions on the new Confederacy, because among other things, I sure as hell wouldn't condone setting up a situation which allowed them bring back slavery. Their Constitution should, in part, be a contract with the US guaranteeing their adherence to principles such as no slavery and free emigration. And I certainly would think twice about arming those barbarians with advanced military hardware. It's hardly a utopian vision, but maybe cutting out the cancer this way is the only option we have left.

I should remember I'm basically proposing to dump all those people on you, down there near the tip of America's...never mind, we all know what the map looks like. Anyway, I know it'd be asking a lot of you, but don't you think you could take one for America?