“This country is too fucking big. I honestly think…in nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can’t come up with a set of rules that’s going to work for 350 million people. You’re just not. So we’re stuck. Robert Kennedy had this great quote: ’20 percent of people are against everything, all the time.’ That’s a big number now. And you know what? ‘No’ is easy. ‘No’ doesn’t require any follow-up, commitment. ‘Yes’ is hard, ‘yes’ has to be worked on. It needs a lot of people to keep it as ‘yes.’ That’s where we’re at. When I’m President, we’re going back to the Thirteen Colonies, is what we’re going to do. It’s a weird time. Because the trajectory…wow, I look around and I’m alarmed. I guess every generation feels that way, I don’t know, but I’m really alarmed. I talk to smart people who work in fields either, you know, neuro-cognition or social analysis, I go, ‘Am I going nuts or is this thing going a certain direction, really fast?’ All of them go, ‘You’re not imagining things.’ And I go, ‘What do we do?’ This could turn into Mad Max, like tomorrow. The fabric is so thin, I feel like.” — Steven Soderbergh to Esquire‘s Mike Ayers in a 7.7. posting.

How far away is “we’re going back to the Thirteen Colonies” and “this could turn into Mad Max” from my suggestion of isolating the rural, under-educated dumb-asses of the South and Midwest by allowing them to fend for themselves in a kind of Slovakia-like splinter nation? I’m not saying Soderbergh is exactly on the same page as me but he’s clearly standing inside the same alarmist ballpark and is thinking about possible solutions that might strike some as a bit radical.