locales broken

[Haines Brown <brownh@hartford-hwp.com>]

This is an old problem I've had from the beginning under Etch, which
for some reason disappeared (I believe), but now has reappeared. I
seem to have locales defined on my system, but have no avility to
change the configuration. 

$ locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US"
LC_TIME="en_US"
LC_COLLATE="en_US"
LC_MONETARY="en_US"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US"
LC_PAPER="en_US"
LC_NAME="en_US"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US"
LC_ALL=
 
The command $ strace -eopen locale -a led me to discover that the
entire subdirectory and its contents, /usr/lib/locale/en_US/, is
missing. 

I query the version:

$ apt-show-versions locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locales/etch uptodate 2.3.6.ds1-13etch2

I tried to install locales, but couldn't for the same reason. 

Can I and should I uninstall locales and then reinstall it? Can I do
this without disabling my abililty to install packages so that it can
be re-installed?   

-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM