You Gonna Use That State?

The Economist has an article about the economic success of South Dakota.  The article isn't that interesting; here, I'll sum it up for you: taxes, regulation and unions, all bad.

What I found interesting was their referring to South Dakota as "a neglected state."  That's an accurate way of describing it, and it's the sort of subtlety of American culture that often escapes foreign journalists.  Really, there's four levels of state fame:

• The superstar states (California, New York, Texas, maybe Florida) where everything happens
• The popular states (Georgia, Ohio, Arizona, etc.) where people are from
• The but-of-joke states (Iowa, Oklahoma, Utah, etc.) which enter the public consciousness only as caricatures
• States that just fill out the flag (Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Vermont, Delaware, New Mexico, Wyoming, Maine & Rhode Island)

A fair number of people do live there; several of those states have over a million people. But it's pretty surprising how seldom they get mentioned. Even I mentioned a while back that I had trouble coming up with Idaho stereotypes.

Of course, we in Canada can relate to the problem of getting ignored by the United States.  So I was thinking, you remember that map that was passed around a few years ago, where they created the United States of Canada (Canada plus the Blue States) and Jesusland (the Red States)?  Well maybe that was misguided.  After all, If Canada has a defining attribute, it is not liberalism, it is being invisible to the U.S.  So we should adopt some of those neglected states.  New Mexico would be better of with Mexico, and they can keep Delaware and Rhode Island since they'd be off on their own.  But we'll also take upstate Michigan and New York, since they're as ignored as any state.

Obviously, for this to work, we'd have to reciprocate and give the Americans everything in Canada that Americans don't ignore.  That would be just Rob Ford and Justin Bieber.  Sounds good to me, what do you think?