Brooks & Caldwell get me laughing on the looks at Mesa, AZ, Henderson, NV, Bethesda, MD (Brooks), Gaithersburg, MD, and the North Shore (Caldwell). I know these places, especially Bethesda, whose now posh streets I once roamed with fellow adolescent fools looking for something to break. I was in college when Bethesda started its ascent to Caldwell's hell, "restaurants with subtitles" and a hometown you won't recognize, and I saw then, as now, that I wished I'd had Sugar Ray Leonard's money and advisers: 'twas a good time to buy.
I spent a couple days in Phoenix on this summer trip; it looks distressingly like Dade County, although I can't figure where all the water comes from (a whole 'nuther matter, eh?). Had that been my only view of Phoenix, driving around, checking out the Capitol, Mesa, & Scottsdale (speaking of: anyone seen "O.C. & Stiggs""? -- still the greatest movie of the post-Animal House period) I'd never understand it. To know Phoenix is to see it from the air (and I'm still convinced that PHX airport has worlds longest taxiing ramps). Btw, Phoenix has a most apt name.
Henderson, NV: best I can tell it's a city of fallen Mormans, I mean the border is smack downtown; the drunken need merely stumble over the line. Perhaps they trip on it. We didn't stop, and I wish we had, but we were late to arrive to Salt Lake, and the cross winds were blowing us all over the desert. Oh, and speaking of managing dissent and creating "space," Utah has done a masterful job of channelling sin into small pockets, like the "private clubs" one "joins" for a drink, and, I'm thinking, Henderson, Nevada.
I wonder when the sprawl crawls across the desert to Lovelock, NV? Hopefully not too soon, for it's a charming place, what with the solitary Exxon with one pump and three slot machines. The unusually pretty girl at the counter gave me a marvelous, toothless smile that I'll never forget. Indeed, I may not ever get over it.
As bad as is the sprawl, and although there's not much room left in the Phoenix valley, there's plenty of room for expansion around Lovelock, Nevada. I'd add most of PA, especially Chester, which could use some serious gentrification.
I get some bad nostalgia, and sad, in places like Chester, or Poughkipsie, NY. Americans just move on, leaving the helpless behind. And so it must be. Tocqueville wrote,
It seldom happens that an American farmer settles for good upon the land which he occupies: especially in the districts of the far West, he brings land into tillage in order to sell it again, and not to farm it. He builds a farm-house on the speculation, that... a good price may be obtained for it.Caldwell is wrong about the North Shore. After the Depression and the War and the Income Tax, his kind, the working class, the Boston teachers and professionals took the North Shore from previous invadors who earlier shocked Bostonians the way Caldwell is shocked today. When Henry Clay Frick (and other new-money, "western" undesirables) built his summer palace the turn-of-the-century (1900s) Brahmins shuddered. They also came running whenever he blew a whistle.
Today's Bethesda makes me laugh. (Gaithersburg makes me cry). I can hardly imagine the torture that poor fool Brooks quoted who left Bethesda because it's become too sophisticated. My, my. Bethesda, Maryland, home of the Davis farm, the man who saw the expanding metropolis and -- such a nice man -- gave the county land for a high school and a library. He put the Montgomery Mall next door. His farm is today HQ for Martin-Marrietta and Marriott, among the paying tenants.
I marvel at the nation's concrete, and, coming off this tour, I'm amazed how much more room for it there yet is. If I could predict anything, it'd be that the expansion will return inward as inner suburbia deteriorates. I'm scanning Tocqueville now for advice, and I don't find anything other than the generally good lesson that whatever it'll be, it'll be because someone's making a buck. Tocqueville saw it all, long before anyone realized the business of America is business:
I believe that ambitious men in democracies are less engrossed than any others with the interests and judgment of posterity; the present moment engages and absorbs them. They are more apt to complete a number of undertakings with rapidity, than to raise lasting monuments fo their achievements; and they care much more for success than for fame. What they most ask of men is obedience, what they most covet is empire.Oh: he also predicted the McMansion. He continues:
Their manners have, in almost all cases, remained below their station; the consequence is, that they frequently carry low tastes into their extraordinary fortunes, and that they seem to have acquired the supreme power only to minister to their coarse or paltry pleasures.
BTW, one of America's first summer colonies was on the peninsula of Nahant, and it attracted many wealthy Bostonians. As Nahant grew so did the neighboring industrial city of Lynn. The only way too and from Nahant was through Lynn, a thought which amused and amuses the inhabitants of that now-decayed industrial city.
I don't know how accurate Caldwell's picture of globetrotting millionaires is, as the same dynamic is going on in any upscale suburb. Maybe water makes the difference, though.
It looks like every suburb or rural area is either going to go "up" or "down" -- either become a preserve for the rich or be given over to "sprawl." Sometimes it's hard for the unpracticed eye to tell the difference, though. The nearer, older suburbs see their own share of McMansions and luxury condos, and even picturesque, affluent villages, get a cookie-cutter quality of their own, if you see enough of them. They will be turning out quaint storefronts in the future as they do malls now.
Some architects turn out standard, uniform malls, others flee mallishness. But the big trends now seem to blur the difference. Postmodernism seems to do this very well -- or very poorly. The McMansion aims at or apes distinctiveness but doesn't achieve it. The condos in new towns achieve the same mix of uniqueness and conformity without quite so many pretensions.
The thing about talk of social class in America, is that it's hard to tell if it means a great deal or scarcely anything. Of course it does matter whether you are driven from your home by toxic waste dumps or high taxes or not. And there are a lot of city neighborhoods or suburbs in name only that one would flee at all costs.
But the chief charm of the richer suburbs seems to be what's not there, rather than what is. It's pretty enough, and one can daydream about how wonderful it would be to live there, but what do they really do with it? They don't escape economic headaches or mass culture. The children are less likely to get arrested or pregnant, but may fall into other troubles and it's not entirely clear that families are closer. It's not really another world, when I can drive five or ten miles from a crummy industrial suburb in name only to the really leafy one. I'm not saying there's no difference. It's just that sometimes it's hard to tell how much of a difference there is. You can escape the negatives, but do you really find the positive, valuable thing?
You might appreciate this. It looks very confused and rambling now, but it was moving the first time I read it. It fascinates me that FDR's America, the Hudson River Valley, seems never to have escaped from the depression. The same is true of those mill and mine towns that gave him his highest vote counts.
I don't think Fallaci is the new Tocqueville, but she does have some interesting comments about America, rather in the line of Tom Wolfe, in substance and in style. Europe was always talking about freeing the proles, but only America did.
The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)
What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Thomas Paines and the John Adamses and the George Washingtons and so on? These weren’t the small-time lawyers ("avvocaticchi" as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren’t the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it "Toscano".) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled "Of Crimes and Punishments." As for the self-taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution. Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine and massacres in the Vendee. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty-or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. "We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..." And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, "Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s an old-school monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s balls, he’s no longer a man." He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death.
Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there. White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors! Crude, ill-mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo, that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication. In spite of the money they waste on clothes, for example, they’re so inelegant as to make the Queen of England look chic by comparison. But they are freed, by God. And in this world there is nothing stronger or more powerful than freed plebes. You will always get your skull cracked when you go up against the Freed Plebe. And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. "Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!" The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand.
For better or worse, Oriana is back. I don't think she's too accurate about the influence of the Enlightenment on 18th century Europe, but it's too bad Gilda Radner won't be around to imitate her this time.
About Arizona and Nevada: I heard all the states along the Colorado get equal amounts of Colorado river water. I don't know if this is true, but it looks like a stroke of genius to make what were large empty tracks of desert states and give them parity with megastate California.