Every day we hear references to North, South, East, and West, to Midwest and Southwest, to Pacific Northwest and, lo, even to Ozarkia, Cascadia, and Siskiyou. All of us speak or write of these geographical areas as if they had narrowly prescribed boundaries readily meaningful to everyone. Yet in reality these designations, as Humpty Dumpty would say, mean only what we want them to mean, “no more and no less.” No geographer wishing to retain his reputation would dare print a map of the United States with the various regions given exact boundaries.

I recall from years ago an acquaintance who had grown up in Brownsville, Texas. He had the narrowest definition of what constituted the South that I have ever encountered. He would drawl, “Why, the way I have it figured, anyone from north of the Nueces River is nothin’ but a Damnyankee” (the Nueces empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi).

However we define a region, most of us would agree that regionalism has played a major role in American history. In fact, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian better known for his “frontier thesis,” gave a series of lectures in 1918 in which he argued, “It was in the conflict and compromise between the sections that Americanism was formed.” Still later he would write, “We in America are in reality a federation of sections rather than of states. State sovereignty was never influential except as a constitutional shield for the section.”

Arguments about “constitutional shields” are meaningless to average Americans, but most would agree with Turner that the sections of the United States have contributed much to American culture. The Southwest is the strum of a guitar, a bowl of chili con carne, place names breathing with the romance of Andalusia, Castille, and Leon. The Old South is a fiddled hoedown, fried chicken or a bowl of grits, and an accent as soft as magnolias. New England is clam chowder, laconic suspiciousness of outsiders, maple syrup, and hardy independence. And the Midwest, the Northwest, and California have their foods, their attitudes, and their culture.

Our recognition of regionalism is tacitly expressed in the stock characters of television commercials: the Texas sheriff, the New England fisherman, the Southern hillbilly, the Western cowboy, the Californian laid back in his hot tub. Fads in regionalism ebb and flow thanks to these commercials and to other conduits of popular culture. Suddenly everyone has to wear turquoise jewelry, which all too soon is replaced by Stetson hat and cowboy boots. During the era of the Urban Cowboy, the biggest lie in New York City was, “Why, I’ve worn cowboy boots all my life.”

Yet hearing a true New England or Southern accent can be pure pleasure to someone in the Midwest, and anyone who turns up his nose at chicken fried steak, cream gravy, and fried potatoes while in Texas is fit only for treasons and stratagems.

Regionalism indeed has contributed much to the richness and diversity of America, to say nothing of its contribution to our bill of fare in restaurants. But regionalism is, sad to say, on the wane.

First, regionalism is threatened by being trivialized to death. Fast-food places claiming to serve Mexican dishes bear little relationship to what actually is cooked in the Southwest, just as the Colonel does a great disservice to that Southern tradition of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, biscuits, and gravy. Nor do waitresses dressed in pirate garb inside a restaurant built to resemble a ship serve real New England clam chowder. Much of this food is not regional but rather a plastic replica intended to turn a high profit.

Second, regionalism is being diminished by the architecture of our great chain motels, service stations, and restaurants. A McDonald’s in Bangor, Maine, looks the same as one in Capistrano, California, just as a weary traveler gets the same plastic cubicle in a Holiday Inn in Del Rio, Texas, as in Juneau, Alaska. No doubt, there are great savings to be had from building a thousand Texaco service stations from the same set of architectural drawings, but this does little to distinguish Virginia from Oregon or to enhance our appreciation of either.

Another perpetrator of the slow murder of regionalism is the shopping mall. Downtown merchants find it impossible to stay healthy when these leviathans sprout up out of the ground. The growth of a shopping mall generally signals death for businesses in the old central core of most cities. Most Americans, if blindfolded and transported to the middle of almost any giant mall, would be unable on being released to say with certainty if they were in Houston or St. Louis or Seattle or even Toronto. Even to see a name like Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s or Marshall Field’s is not to guarantee where one is, for these stores once associated only with New York or Chicago now anchor malls in Dallas and Houston, Atlanta and Denver. Every mall, no matter where located, has its three or four anchor department stores, its boutiques selling clothes, its record stores with ear-blasting music, its toy emporiums and food kiosks. There is nothing to distinguish one from another to any noticeable degree. Even the seasonal Christmas decorations seem to move from one small mall to the next.

And finally, radio and television inexorably are killing regionalism. Our local announcers, newscasters, and weathermen—”talking hairdos” who are just smart enough to read from a teleprompter—move about from city to city. Gradually they lose the regional accent with which they started their careers. A red-necked Texan like Dan Rather, by the time he becomes anchorman for the CBS evening news, must speak with a broad national accent, just as that radio newsman who spoke with an Oklahoma accent changed his accent at the same time he was changing his name to Paul Harvey and moving to Chicago. The pervasive influence of national radio and television personalities will eventually have us all talking like Tom Brokaw, as we order our “cajun” chicken from the mall restaurant.