The talk of a “national divorce” is increasing. It’s as if people suddenly agreed we should have a constitutional convention, but it had to be held in Reno.

I’m sorry, that’s an archaic reference. No one goes to Reno for a divorce anymore. But as long as I’ve brought up a hoary trope, why not look to early-20th-century British crime dramas for a way to solve our current schism? Forget divorce. Let’s try arsenical poisoning!

Hear me out. Getting rid of a spouse through slow, secretive poisoning was the plot of innumerable stories and old radio shows. A solicitous husband on wife No. 5 wished to usher off his trusting bride so he could get her fortune, which was always some underwhelming sum, like a thousand pounds. He would put arsenic in her tea, producing protracted periods of agonizing stomach pain. The kindly, stupid village doctor would swing by the cottage, take the poor lass’s pulse, and then say, “Acute navel aches” or “Sternum-itis.” Or that old-fashioned standby, “Nerves.”

The wife was sometimes doubtful. “I tell you, Stanley, these pains do pierce the very pith of my being!”

“You know what the doctor said, my dear. It’s nerves! That’s why we went to the countryside, far away from your family. For your nerves, dear.”

“Yes, yes, possibly nerves, and also possibly the tea you just gave me with such a solicitous expression? I seem to have these attacks just after you give me the tea.”

“Now, now. What you need is more tea. Sit back and I’ll fetch some from the shed. I mean the kitchen. Not the shed at all! Ha, ha! That’s where one would keep poison. Yes, definitely the kitchen. Now, you look over those inconsequential legal papers I wanted you to sign, and I’ll fetch the tea.”

Eventually the spouse would surrender the ghost, and the husband would have money and freedom. Why didn’t anyone suspect? Because arsenic was once used medicinally and cosmetically. It seems as if everyone knew it was deadly but thought they could control and confine its effects.

You know, like talk of a national divorce.

It’s an accumulative poison. Except in this instance it just leaves people irritated and impatient because we’re not dissolving the country tomorrow, and the in-laws who watch (hated TV network that will be blocked in our glorious post-divorce country) don’t have to show their papers to cross state lines. Also, God bless America, greatest country ever.

But okay. Let’s say divorce is a good idea. How will this work, exactly? I guess Red and Blue get so mad at each other, there’s a big argument with slammed drawers and vitriolic recitations of long-simmering grudges.

“You just lied when you said you found a constitutional right to abortion between the sofa cushions. You just made that up!”

“Oh yeah? Well I’m trying to think of a time when you didn’t lie about the actual powers inherent in the commerce clause!”

“Lie? This is so typical. Federalism trumps the vague intentions of an overly broad statute! It’s just like you to infer broad powers where none exist!”

“You know what? I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.” (Packs bag, goes to stay with Mother England, who says, “I was never in favor of this in the first place.”)

The next morning someone calls the lawyers and changes the locks on the interstate highways.

A few months later the governors all meet at the lawyer’s office and sign the papers. A year later Red America hears that Blue America was seen hanging out with a liberal Canadian province. You know what? Fine. They were probably running around behind my back anyway.

This isn’t how some people dream about it, though. They think: Gunplay! The bad guys will come to impose a pronoun mandate, and the good guys will plink back, and then something something national divorce.

Who gets the kids? Purple areas might not want to live permanently with either Blue Mom or Red Dad. My home state of Minnesota has a cobalt-blue urban core and an arterial-blood-red outstate, but there are purplish areas of both. Purple Minnesotans might want to go live with Blue Mom when she packs up and heads off to live with Mr. Chicago, but since the blue metro area of Minneapolis has the sports teams, well, they’d have to pack up every weekend.

That’s not how it works! the pro-divorce people say. States could join whichever incomplete, pushover, traumatized pseudo-nation they wished. Or there would be no states at all, just territories with warring city-states. Fun!

It’s all incoherent. Here’s an idea: People who do not like the dominant cultural paradigm of the place where they live can rent a truck and scoot out for whatever Emerald City rises on the edge of their personal poppy field. Just like always. Or you stay and vote. Laugh at the Newspeak, scoff at the woke, reject the cut-and-run Johnny Rebs, rebuild the institutions, and continue the hard work of preserving the marvels and triumphs of the American experiment. Bonus reward: You don’t cede Alaska to Russia because there’s no one to defend it.

It’s not as much fun as dreaming of a world where everyone’s on the same page, but there is no such place. Even if there were, everyone would soon be arguing over paragraphs and sentences and inevitably descend into sectarian strife over punctuation and send you to the new gulag over your insistence on the Oxford comma. It’s the new American exceptionalism: America is great, except for the whole “America” part.