Yes, there is an old, weird, America, and it is beautiful. America is just so big and diverse - it's so many countries, really. Patrician, rarefied New England with its blue bloods and white steeples, what remains of the great glittering promise and pulse of New York City, the sultry dark delta lands of the Deep South, mystical and moss-veiled, the silent watching hollers of southern Appalachia, where you feel a thousand eyes you cannot see, the brash and bare-chested big sky country of the West, the rattled-loose clown-car creativity of the West Coast, the dusty-booted Spanish-eyed Texas, the palpable generosity of the rolling Heartland, the sepulchered relics of the cradle of American civilization in the catacombs under the Mordor of the Mid-Atlantic; you could never leave these shores and still never see it all.