Eighty-one languages are spoken in Los Angeles. In California’s Orange County, where self-absorption reigns and philanthropy is rare, people who shop in high-toned malls are soothed by the sounds of live string quartets. In booming Tucson, Arizona, a public referendum concerning a badly needed water project caught the attention of only one in four Tucson voters. Just across the southern border, in Culiacan, Mexico, there is an ersatz shrine dedicated to “El Nar-cosanton,” the Narco Saint, a criminal named Jesus Malverde hanged in 1909 and reputed to be the patron saint of Mexican drug lords. Just across the northern border, citizens of Vancouver joke that the Japanese want to buy their city, but the Chinese won’t sell it.
These facts are among the many found in An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America’s Future by Robert D. Kaplan. A distinguished foreign correspondent and contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan contends in his new travelogue that the twenty-first century’s global economy, coupled with apolitical regional ethnicities, will make superfluous our traditional notions of liberal democracy and the structure of the modern nation-state. Nationalism will wane as small city-states — with, say, Renaissance Venice as a model — pursue economic self-interest and require of the federal power only bought-and-paid-for military security.
Kaplan posits that the most successful of these new emerging denizens of the West will inhabit upscale “posturban pods” (Johnson County in Kansas, Orange County, north Tucson, north Santa Fe), living in security-minded, gated communities designed to keep the underclass out: a modern version of the ancient and medieval city wall. In North America, a new “North-South reorientation” will replace the old East-West one. The cities and capitals of the East — Washington, New York, Ottawa — will become bit players in this new global arrangement.
The writing of An Empire Wilderness required of Kaplan a roaming, Tocqueville-like, through Mexico, Canada, and the American West. The endemic and surreal poverty of Mexico elicits his disgust, and, indeed, from an American point of view, Mexican history is an epic nightmare. Kaplan believes that a quasianarchy exists in Mexico already and that the army will play a large role in the country’s future. And since the multibillion-dollar cross-border narcotics trade accounts for such a large slice of the economy, he thinks the Mexican army will become “the world’s most efficient drug dealer.”
Canada interests Kaplan, but doesn’t alarm him in the way Mexico does. Vancouver is an economic powerhouse (real estate, the cruise-ship industry, and one of the biggest bulk ports in North American for the shipping of timber and agricultural products), with more ties to Hong Kong, Singapore, Seattle, and Portland than to Ottawa. Vancouver businessmen see the American/Canadian border as nothing more than a hindrance in their business dealings with the prosperous American Pacific Northwest.
Kaplan is intrigued by Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia, which has sold 650,000 copies in the North-west, and promotes the idea of “Cascadia,” a fictional nation-state comprising Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (roughly the nine-teenth-century Oregon Territory as disputed by British and Americans). Consider that, along with the volatile separatist movement in Quebec, and you have a Vancouver city official telling Kaplan: “If the nation-state on your northern border comes apart, you in the U.S. are going to start thinking too.”
While many of Kaplan’s ruminations about Mexico and Canada are plausible, his view of his native America proves entirely jaundiced. He brings an establishment liberal’s prejudices to his travels in the Americans West. Evangelical Christians annoy him, and he includes an amusing theory that the uniform landscape of the Great Plains encourages like-minded thought among its inhabitants. He often pauses to decry the “wanton individualism” he encounters in the West, and he seems to look for “militia crazies” under every rock. In “Indian country” he sees parallels between the ongoing tensions of Navajo and Hopi and his own experience as a foreign correspondent among Serb and Croat. He compares the reservation archipelago on a map of Arizona to the Balkans, leaving the reader to draw the implication.
Modern western conservatives and the marginalized underclass who were once called “white trash” are equally objects of Kaplan’s scorn. Always trendy, Kaplan sits in a sweatlodge with a Navajo named Cayce Boone, who tells him about his job as a cable-TV line installer who finds in Tucson’s trailer parks nothing but functional illiterates with “no culture,” drinking and watching the tube all day. Kaplan nods in agreement and follows up this secondhand look with a first-hand one: a five-hour Greyhound bus ride from Albuquerque to Amarillo, in which he sits beside the rootless and the deranged. These people are unwashed, they don’t read, and they eat candy for breakfast. The bus “was like a prison van, transporting people from one urban poverty zone to another,” and he pities the driver for having to “go through this every day.” Kaplan wonders: “Can democracy flourish among people like this?”
In Amarillo, Kaplan discovers the existence of three-hundred local churches, high-school football, and Pantex, the nation’s sole assembler and disassembler of nuclear weapons. To add to our misery, he notes that the Texas Panhandle is “conservative” and in 1964 rejected homestater Lyndon Johnson in favor of “right-wing Republican” Barry Gold-water.
Traveling on to Garden City, Kansas (Greyhound sociological study complete — rental car this time), Kaplan meets Quang Naguyen, Vietnamese boatperson and American success story. Nguyen, after spending the winter of 1981 sleeping in a car and working in a hog-packing house, has become one of Garden City’s most prosperous businessmen, owning a restaurant, a car-body shop, and two laundries. Nguyen, whose English is fluent, now studies Spanish in order to serve more effectively his new customers, the Mexican employees of an expanding local meat-packing industry. “Here,” Nguyen declares, “you work on your own initiative or you drown — and that’s good.” And Kaplan mourns.
In Broken Bow, Nebraska, Kaplan attends an evangelical church service that “reminded me of a kibbutz meeting,” and asked worshipers questions like: “What is an evangelical?” He comes to the conclusion that, though the pastor
represented a stabilizing moral force with which I felt comfortable, give his or any other religious group too much power and, as the Founding Fathers warned, the fragile consensus holding together a democratic society passing through one technological transformation after another could shred. The Evangelical Christianity I saw in the Nebraska county was raw and literal, as if Jesus had just died on the cross last week and the story was spreading by word of mouth, with an intensity that overwhelmed other faiths and opinions.
In Kaplan’s mind the religious Right is on an equal footing with Greyhound bus passengers and Vietnamese-American restaurateurs.
He is more at home among Montana’s eco-warriors. In Bozeman, he meets Mike Miles, a soft-spoken ex-Jesuit, who angrily reports: “The land rush is on. The yellow pages are full of real estate agents.” Miles doesn’t mention that it was he himself and his ilk who helped start the “ranchette” boom in the West through litigation against the government and the extractive logging, mining, and ranching industries, and through encouraging “eco-tourism.” The environmentalists love tourists until they build a house down the road.
Also while in Bozeman, Kaplan chats with Mike Clark, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, who worries that — through 82 percent of the “Greater Yellow-stone Ecosystem” (Yellowstone National Park and a half-dozen surrounding national forests) is federal land — it’s just not enough for the vast herds of bison and elk. Says Clark, apocalyptically: “If everyone gets twenty acres, then we all might as well be dead. Those trophy ranches for the rich really are the pinnacles of death.”
Of course, Clark doesn’t mention (though Miles does) the largest landowners in the Bozeman area: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, generous supporters of environmental organizations. Kaplan informs us that Mike Clark, despite living in a humble apartment in town, is enough of an insider that with one phone call he “got me onto Ted Turner’s ranch.” (Kaplan doesn’t seems to have learned that Clark’s call was unnecessary: The Gallatin National Forest maintains a right-of-way easement, a dirt road across Turner’s hundred-thousand-acre Flying D Ranch, so that ordinary folks and freelance writers have access to the admirable trail system in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness.)
The tour of northern-Rockies politically correct hotspots continues as Kaplan journeys to Missoula and hooks up with Dan Kemmis, ex-may-or and local political gadfly, whose crowning achievement in six years of occupying the mayor’s office was the installation of a hand-carved wooden carousel in a Missoula city park. Kaplan and Kemmis share coffee while the former bemoans “the Aspen-Santa Fe phenomenon” that has come to Missoula (though he likes the fact that he can now get the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal). Kemmis gives him the latest lowdown on Missoula, a combination of natural beauty, the presence of the University of Montana, and “highly skilled entrepreneurial types who excel at experimentation.” He tells Kaplan that uniquely in Missoula, “geography is absolutely present and critical in politics every second of the day.”
At the end of a tedious lecture about the future of the American West, Kemmis concludes: “Neither the state nor the federal government can make things work; it can only be the civic culture in each locale.” (A friend who used to live in Missoula told me that Kemmis’s mayoral style consisted of: “Let’s have a meeting; let’s have another meeting; and then let’s do it my way.”)
In Portland, Oregon — to his delight — Kaplan finds a city that is “a kind of open air museum” with “view corridors” that keep new downtown construction from blotting out the sumptuous Cascade vistas. Portland, the gushes, “evinces the political-cultural atmosphere of a Scandinavian country, where almost everyone shares the same background and values and, for the sake of preserving them, trusts the centralizing, controlling force, or local government.”
Kaplan feels right at home in squeaky-clean Portland, with its trolley system, sidewalk flowerpots, geometric parks, and few cars (and mostly late-model foreign ones, at that). “Cars for us are evil,” says Mike Carnahan, of the World Affairs Council, an organization bent on improving Portland’s already-strong global business ties. Ethan Seltzer, the director of Portland State University’s Center for Urban Studies, told Kaplan, “We seek a mythic, native adaptation to place.”
Kaplan concludes An Empire Wilderness where he began, among military officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. These are the hightech warriors who endlessly map strategies in anticipation of the sort of small, localized conflicts that will occupy the future American military. Kaplan accompanies a group of them on a four-day field trip to the battle-fields of Vicksburg. There, in a chapter full of Civil War history, he speculates that “for a large class of prosperous Americans, a new world community is beginning to shred the bonds of union the Civil War firmly established.” In the end, Kaplan writes America off: “But if we can pass out of our history slowly and gracefully, carrying on a global struggle for human rights and economic opportunity (backed up by military force) until an authentic planetary civil society emerges, America will have accomplished more than it ever did in the Homeric age of the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War combined.”
In a book that is interesting for its look at how we live today, Robert D. Kaplan ultimately gets it wrong. You only have to visit the hallowed ground of a Civil War cemetery — or any other where lie the bones of Americans who made the final sacrifice — to know that.
Bill Croke, who last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is a writer living in Choteau, Montana.
