It's a contrived analogy, mainly because - as Simon points out in the article:

> Their eyes glaze...It's too much. Too much to contemplate the idea that the whole country might be actually connected.

It seems to me that people struggle to deal with this issue when scaled out to a population beyond their immediate social circle. That's one of the problems.

The other is, as soon as you scale it back to a comprehensible size, people shout "straw man!" and the debate goes nowhere.