My Own Private East Pakistan

“America first!” they shout. “Also: Death to the United States!”

The politics of “national divorce” are distinctly daffy.

It should not surprise us very much that House Republicans under the leadership of the hobbled Trump sycophant Kevin McCarthy have installed on the Homeland Security Committee such a figure as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who likes to call herself a “patriot.” She also calls for the political annihilation of the United States of America, dividing the “red states” from the “blue states” as though the entire country were not composed of conservative-leaning “red” rural areas dotted by progressive-leaning “blue” cities. The most predictable thing in the world was that the people who cheered the attempted coup d’état of January 6 would continue attempting to overthrow the government and void the Constitution.

Why call it “national divorce”? There already is something a lot like divorce for people who have come to believe they have irreconcilable differences with their native country: It is called “emigration,” and, for all their bellyaching, dissatisfied Americans very rarely do it. We should instead call this imbecilic idea—which is not really an idea or a policy proposal as much as it is a temper tantrum—what it actually is (or would be) and use the term that carries with it some historic weight: partition.