a rant (with a foamy mouthful of links)

You know who I'm mad at? Abraham Lincoln, that's who. Abe had the chance to just let the damned South go - but no, he had to be all idealistic and preserve-the-Union and fight to keep 'em in. What he should've done is say, okay, fine, go ahead and form your own little pretend country - and then invade the Confederacy, free all the slaves (who'd emigrate under armed protection to the USA, because in this counter-history Lincoln's even more enlightened than he was...), and sit back and laugh: "Ha - good luck with yer feudal economy now. Oh - and since you can't spell, I'll help you out: 'feudal economy' - that's spelled 'f-u-t-i-l-e.'" So there'd be a third-world nation whose chief export is korn likker (they'd evolve their own spelling, I'm sure) and rusted-out pickup trucks - instead of the same people being part of the US and voting for their favorite idiot. Too bad no one thought to put in Dale Earnhardt on the ballot - yeah, I know he's dead, but they'd probably've voted for him anyway. Plus, fewer divorces after shotgun weddings at which the groom realizes, hey, yer pappy is my pappy too!

You know who else I'm mad at? Willis Carrier. Who's that? Willis Carrier is the guy who invented the air conditioner (contrary to popular rumor, air conditioning was not invented by three guys named Max, Hi, and Norm). Yes, on the handful of stupid-hot days we get around here, which invariably feature equally stupid, shirt-liquifying humidity, I'm grateful for A/C...but it made possible the further peopling of the South, since otherwise everyone would be too tired to do anything down there except sit on their porches and drunkenly shoot their guns into the heat haze.

You know who else I'm mad at? Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic bastard... His damned assembly lines and cheaper, mass-produced cars allowed anti-social people who hate everyone who isn't like them to move out to gerrymandered suburbs and into the middle of deep nowhere like the huge, depopulated Red Zone stretching from deepest Nowhere, Texas, all the up to North Nowhere, Idaho, where it's no wonder Ernest Hemingway blew his skull to bits what with all the nothing there. Oakland? Gertrude Stein never tried driving across Montana.

(Thanks to TomDispatch, from which I cribbed most of the map links.)