The "Recent Unpleasantness" is more recent than you might think....

That phrase is what's known as a meosis (aka "it's me for you and euphemism") for the 1861-65 conflict that we Yankees learned about in school under the name of the "Civil War." Other versions of the conflict name range from the even more neutral ("The War Between the States") to the outright hostile ("The War Of Northern Aggression"), but I lead off with it because it's hard to ignore that the unpleasantness remains fairly top-of-mind for much of this country.

Witness the recent effort by the surviving members of Lynyrd Skynrd- about as red in the neck, in recent history, as any musicians you're likely to find- to distance themselves from the Stars and Bars as being more of an instrument of hate speech than one of pure historical symbolism. Their fans fought back with a protest that led to them reintegrating the Confederate flag (see what I did there?) into their backdrop of their live shows.

There's also a new book out which takes a very different angle on the smoldering embers of the now-sesquicentennial conflict: it's called Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession and is reviewed in this Wall Street Journal piece.  The author references, indeed relies on, all the usual suspects of stereotypes about Southern religion, race relations and even sports before concluding that we might have been better off to treat the 1865 outcome as a badly-handled call by replacement refs and let the CSA go their merry way.

My gut reaction was an Attaboy! (translations for various readers below the Mason-Dixon line: Roll Tide! Whodat! Boomer Sooner!), but fortunately, I pay more attention to more northern influences than my gut.

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It would be an easy solution, but a cheap and sleazy one, to redivide the spoils of this great nation along the lines of United States of Canada/Jesusland, as some have proposed. At first, it would seem to solve a bunch of problems. Religious influences would retreat to the red in most respects. Poles would form and the respective "nations" would gravitate to them, likely making these two "new" nations more opposed than united in even a trading-partner sense.

And, just as any effort to unify or subdivide a people always results in a new opposed minority, what would come of this one? Some of the past year's worst and strangest oppressions of traditional United Statesian democracy have come out of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which, in this model, would be assigned to the good guys in blue.  If the division of our nation would lead to me being stuck with Mittens, Scott Walker and "Frothy" Santorum, I think I'll pass, thanks.

Plus, I know too many people in Jesusland who reject the evil and oppression of the loud, shrill voices who claim to speak for them. They are educated, intelligent, reasoned and reasonable people, who hate the divisiveness and all-or-nothingness of political brinksmanship that both parties have some responsibility for having caused.  I'd hate to have to pay international phone bills to keep in touch with them.

I've heard backchatter in recent days suggesting that, if Obama is re-elected, particularly if his coattails result in gains in both Houses for Democrats, the Republican leadership will finally, finally, abandon the "no to everything" approach they will have tried and failed with over the past 2-plus years and return to the table to negotiate, to compromise, to govern. It would help immeasurably if the party selected new and different faces than Reid and Pelosi to lead those efforts; they've become too divisive and stereotyped in Jesusland and, if the Republicans will take a similar tack and get Boner and McChinless out of their leadership roles, we might actually be on the way to starting something special:

a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Nahhhhhhhh.