Even months before this war started, most of us already were wondering about afterward. How do you repair a country that is so badly fractured by political and religious dissension? What do you do when half the people are being called murderers, and the other half are called traitors? Will we have to redraw the borders entirely?

Not in Iraq. In America.

For Iraq, I'm sure there's some plan in the works. But how do we reconcile the Americans who stopped talking to each other after fighting about the war and the last presidential election? What of the roommates, classmates and other mates who have cordoned off sections of the apartment, classroom or bed that those with differing opinions may not cross?

Things being how they are, you just know they'll all want their own homelands.

Setting that up may have been simple enough 150 years ago. You could divide the country pretty neatly between North and South. But now the chasm lies, for example, between Philadelphia and 30 miles outside of Philadelphia, between urban and rural – between those who live out of soup kitchens and those who receive farm subsidies, between those who say George W. Bush isn't their president and those who say Bill Clinton wasn't theirs.

I have a proposal for where to put up the walls. But it's just a first draft. If just one vegetarian, graduate “women's studies” major turns up in South Carolina, the whole system falls apart and we all have to live in hamster cages.

First, Hollywood. It's easy enough to make people there into their own country; don't tell them they aren't already.

For similar reasons, it's easy to nationalize the religious right. Instead of saying they're not Americans, we tell them they're the only ones who are. “I knew it!” they'll cry, as we go on to explain that everyone else actually lives in a big, horrible country called “Abortion Land,” or maybe “Berkeley.”

Once you've told the religious right it's the real America, say the same thing to Texas.

Certain professions other than show business can be grouped together as well. Graduate-level academics could teach each other, journalists could write stories about other journalists and athletes could live in a world in which they rarely experienced anything beyond sports. We can achieve all this by very cleverly changing nothing.

And if you work for a large corporation, you could be deeded to your employer as a serf. The difference between that and the way you live now? As a serf, you would not periodically have to attend classes in team-building.

But then it gets complicated. San Francisco also would have to be its own nation. You might think it should be in the same country as Hollywood, but the relationship northern California has with southern California is similar to what South Jersey has with North Jersey, western Pennsylvania has with eastern Pennsylvania, northern Connecticut has with southern Connecticut and France has with everybody: Los Angeles and San Francisco are pitted in a bitter, to-the-death competition that Los Angeles (which is winning) doesn't know about.

Then there's New York City. It's not enough to say it's its own country. You have to realize that lower Manhattan between 23rd and 29th streets and Second and Third avenues is its own country, completely distinct in culture, history and language from lower Manhattan between 14th and 18th streets and Fourth and Fifth avenues. The pizza tastes different. The news racks carry different porn.

I can think of only two comprehensive plans to cover all this. One is that every individual gets his or her own government, border guards and intruder alert that shouts, for example, “Warning! You have illegally entered the sovereign confederacy of Fred Siegel!”

The other plan is for people of differing outlooks to show some modicum of respect for each other. I may be the only person who believes this anymore, but I still think you need a right wing and a left wing to get off the ground.