Then I think about Steve Case. The low road beckons.

Earlier this year, the AOL chieftain participated in a meeting with Gov. Jim Gilmore during which he and other tech execs vented their frustration with his no-new-taxes response to their transportation dilemma. What would Gilmore do, he asked, if Northern Virginia seceded? He’d send in the National Guard, the governor retorted. It was a good response, and it put Case in his place.

Case wasn’t making a threat. He has no serious interest in creating a People’s Republic of Northern Virginia. He was challenging Gilmore to think, "What would you do without us?" The answer went without saying: We Northern Virginians could solve our problems without you, but you would be in a world of hurt. We’re rich, we’re smart and we move fast. You’re poor, stupid and slow. We get it. You’re stuck in the Old Economy. We’re holding you up; you’re holding us back. Case would never choose those words, of course, but that’s the unspoken sub-text of his question.

Boy, does that make my blood boil. Case may be inventing the online communities of the 21st century, but he obviously doesn’t know much about the real live, flesh-and-blood community he actually lives in. Blaming the yokels down south for Northern Virginia’s problems is so easy. It allows him to avoid coming to grips with the fact that he is the problem.

One reason that Northern Virginia suffers from transportation gridlock and other growth-related problems is that major employers – like AOL — build huge office campuses in the middle of nowhere, where the land is cheap and buildings go up quickly. This thoughtless approach only makes for grinding commutes along roads ill-prepared for the surge in traffic. When workers try to find housing nearby, it’s scarce and expensive, and the local government is not prepared to handle exploding school enrollments. All this could have been easily anticipated: The same pattern has been repeating itself for decades or more in Northern Virginia.

Apparently, AOL was moving too fast, doing business on Internet time, to pay attention to such subtleties. Too bad. If AOL had been serious about pioneering "community building" for the 21st century, it could have tackled the mundane but painstaking task of integrating a large corporate presence into the existing urban fabric. Instead of concentrating its employees in a bland suburban gulag, AOL could have been a force for urban/suburban renewal: redeveloping and revitalizing old neighborhoods. It could have used collaborative Internet technologies to facilitate work in diverse locations, and devised new commuting strategies to ease the stress on the transportation system.

But a Master of the Universe like Steve Case can’t very well admit to having bungled the location of AOL’s main employment center. No, he must blame someone else, someone alien – someone downstate resembling the inbred goons from the movie "Deliverance." And, despite his company’s $100 billion market capitalization, he looks to the same squinty-eyed hayseeds south of the Rappahannock to bail him out from a dreadful business decision. Build more roads to the metropolitan periphery (where his office park is located). Build new schools in the outer suburbs (where his employees are moving to). In short, spend other peoples’ money.

We downstaters may not be billionaires, but we’re pretty crafty in our straw-sucking, sod-kicking kind of way. We can see through the pious, high-tech hustle. What’s good for AOL is not necessarily good for Virginia.