The Lawyers Guns and Money blog -- a bunch of historians, but in US election years the blog is all local politics all the time, as now -- has a note about a couple of recent novels about how the United States splits into rival states along ideological grounds. One they mention is by Emily St.John Mandel, whom we claim as Canadian -- and Omar El Akkad, also Canadian, made his name with a new-civil-war novel. I think there was a movie too for about five minutes.
It's been my theory for years that all that really holds the United States together is ruling the world. Absent that, what do Oregon and Texas and Minnesota and Florida and South Dakota have in common? Some fiction writers are awakening to the possibilities.
Instead of busily negotiating another surrender to the almighty United States, as we seem to be doing again this week, maybe we should just wait out the completion of these novelistic predictions.
