Are they nuts?

Coming from the south as I am, and being a decendent of Confederate veterans that fell at Shiloh, I find this kind of talk crazy and dangerous:

STUNG BY DEFEAT, puzzled and adrift, Democrats spent much of the past week turning to history, looking back at the great many-colored tapestry of the American past, in order to find where we--the people--find ourselves, now that George W. Bush has been reelected. And after consulting textbooks, and opening biographical dictionaries, and talking to some of the most renowned figures in the American academy, they have settled on an answer: America is on the brink of civil war.

"Not since the Civil War," Columbia University professor and noted art critic Simon Schama wrote in the Manchester Guardian on Sunday, "has the fault line between [America's] two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable."

Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz agrees. He told Dean Murphy in Sunday's New York Times that there are only "two instances in history" when the American electorate has been so divided. "They are kind of scary examples," Wilentz said. "One is 1860, and we know what happened after that one . . ."

Yeah...the Union came through and burned everything to the ground. Looted, murdered and pilaged. Neighbors turned against neighbor. Right here in my backyard.