I don’t think British humorist Stephen Fry — best known on these shores for his portrayal of P.G. Wodehouses’s Jeeves in “Jeeves and Wooster” — has been reading Bill Kauffman, but he has stumbled upon localism as the best way to address America’s multiplicity in his forthcoming book and BBC 2 documentary:

… America, it has often been said, is not one country, but 50. If I wanted to avoid all the clichés, all the cheap shots and stereotypes and really see what America was, then why not make a series about those 50 countries, the actual states themselves?

It is all very well to talk about living and dying, hoping and dreaming, loving and loathing “as an American”, but what does that mean when America is divided into such distinct and diverse parcels? To live and die as a Floridian is surely very different from living and dying as a Minnesotan? The experience of hoping and dreaming as an Arizonan cannot have much in common with that of hoping and dreaming as a Rhode Islander, can it?

Fry even sounds a little paleo in his skepticism about the virtue of cosmopolitanism:

Sophistication is not a moral quality, nor is it a criterion by which one would choose one’s friends. Why do we like people? Because they are knowledgeable, cosmopolitan and sophisticated? No, because they are charming, kind, considerate, exciting to be with, amusing… there is a long list, but knowing what the capital of Kazakhstan is will not be on it.