“What’s going on here? Texans and South Carolinians playing kissy-face with New York City? Isn’t New York the heart of Yankeedom? Isn’t it the city southerners love to hate?”

In the days after September 11, when Americans were watching a lot of television, many of us heard a Texas man-in-the-street tell a network interviewer something like, “Being a Texan or New Yorker just isn’t very important right now. We’re all Americans.” Soon after that, we heard about some South Carolina middle-school students who raised the money to buy a truck for some Brooklyn firemen who lost theirs (along with seven comrades) at the World Trade Center.