In the late 1990s, as politicians debated the best uses for those massive budget surpluses, newspapers were filled with voices decrying the bland conformity that had spread like margarine across America.

From sea to shining sea it seemed that everyone was eating in the same chain restaurants, shopping in the same malls, living in the same planned communities with the same cloying names -- Jolly Court! Loyal Lane! Paradise Drive!

Good grief!

Back then the word homogenization tripped blithely off the tongues of schoolchildren. Today it is once again a tongue twister -- homoge-what?

In a few short years, our vanilla nation has acquired more flavors than Baskin-Robbins. And, we're told, strawberry can't stand fudge ripple, which has a real problem with pink bubble gum.

How can we slice and dice this house divided against itself? Let us count the ways. There is, of course, the red state/blue state gap between liberals and conservatives, the growing distance between rich and poor, the battle between atheists and true believers, the gender gap, the racial divide and tension between many native-born Americans and immigrants.

While those divides have received much attention, researchers and writers examining our nation's splintering soul have found new fissures in the psyche of our body politic. Much more than in the past, they say, Americans are receding into separate worlds in which they hold increasingly different notions of what is real and what is not.

What role does a fact play?

On issues ranging from global warming and evolution to the war in Iraq, we are not just coming to different conclusions about the same set of facts, but are arguing over what exactly is and is not a fact. Hot-button issues have become Rorschach blots -- some of us see a bird, others a frog; few seem willing to admit that they might be both.

"The political divide in America is not just a material divide, as in the 'two Americas,'" according to George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at UC-Berkeley. "Nor is it just a religious divide. Nor is it just a matter of who controls power. The divide is located in our brains."

In "The Political Mind," a book that illustrates this growing division even as it seeks to explain it, the avowedly liberal professor says the cerebral separation has generated "two competing modes of thought that lead to contradictory ways of governing our country, one fundamentally democratic [i.e. liberal] and one fundamentally antidemocratic [i.e. conservatives]."

These divergent modes of thought, Lakoff argues, lead us to perceive the world in radically different ways.

While avoiding such blatant value judgments, Salon.com writer Farhad Manjoo pursues this line of thought in his new book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." He argues that the highly partisan nature of so many political Web sites, cable TV shows and talk radio programs means Americans can now choose to listen only to voices they agree with. In the Rush Limbaugh/Keith Olbermann echo chamber, fact and opinion merge into a highly charged mess.

"No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we're also holding different facts," Manjoo writes. "Increasingly, our arguments aren't over what we should be doing -- in the Iraq war, in the war on terrorism, on global warming, or about any number of controversial subjects -- but instead over what is happening."

In this mind-set, we don't seek information to expand our view of the world but seize on facts and opinions that confirm our biases.

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