Alister Cooke, the Englishman who had become an American citizen, was well known as the host of “Omnibus”, a fine book on the Alger Hiss case, and a long time letter on America to the BBC. Once he explained that to understand America, you had to see that America was not a nation but a continent. That quip came to my mind this week because my daughter in law drove me from Brooklyn, New York, to Salt Lake City, my daughter in law’s ancestral home and the new permanent residence for their family including me. It is the start, for me, of a great adventure, the short take of my travel showing how much its topography and agriculture certainly make America a continent. We moved from the granite rocked hills of the East, it's very filled treescapes changing with its fall colors, to a spectacular view of Iowa, flat and filled with quite clearly prosperous corn farms, their main house and farm buildings shiny and up to date, and at one point, a spectacularly sunny day having low slung clouds for a hundred miles that made the sky take up seven eights of the landscape, as if this were a Modernist painting, and then to the endless plains in Nebraska, ever more desolate and most of Wyoming unpeopled, but giving rise to spectacular and for me unfamiliar sedimentary rocks and striated hills that continued on to the Salt Lake City Basin.
Road trips are supposed to be soporific, the wheels turning endlessly, the mile signs slowly increasing distance to what has gone and decreasing to what is forward, whether Chicago or Des Moines, people coming to “drift”, which is what was said by Lawrence of Arabia in the David Lean film when he crossed a desert on a camel. I did not feel that way, largely because I was only a rider rather than Maria, my splendid driver. I also found no anguish at the Interstate Highway System which did not leave me unobservant of nature even though the roads are mostly monotonous-- again, perhaps because I wasn’t driving. There was always something new to see: the signs, the weather, the lonely houses, and so on. The Interstate Highway System, founded by Eisenhower in 1955, is a marvel, having conceived its wide and uniform lanes and signage as well as its funding of ten percent of a state to a ninety percent contribution of the Federal government, one of the great accomplishments, along with Social Security and Medicare when Conservatives claim that the government doesn’t do anything right, even though I thought it would have been better to invest in super fast trains at the time rather than buy the infrastructure to support individually supported automobiles. But it has worked out and high speed trains are still a while away. I don’t know how to today buy the right of way for the Northeast Corridor.
America is, indeed, a continent, but it is tied together, and so into a nation, by a social structure, one of which is the Interstate. Here are some of the other ways. There is the same local news that burbles on weather and sports, not many of their presenters to make it up to big city stations. There is the uniformity of motels, which sociologists sixty years ago thought that the homogenization of Holiday Inns and the rest would give familiarity for every weary traveler, and certainly accomplished that with me, the pictures on the walls adorned with muted colors and a bit of abstract design, more wallpaper than paintings. The breakfast buffets are standard and satisfying with coffee and eggs, not too heavy for a long drive. Truck stops have national chains, like Subway and Cinnabon, and so that is also restfully familiar. Even the radio is no longer required to switch over from one local station to the next one in range because Sirius XM allows going across the nation continent with whatever mixture of country to pop to classical and I decided that pop ended for me with “Fame”, when it became yelling, while the previous fad, Disco, actually had a distinctive sound, each of which, it struck me, went all the way back, every decade or so with a new sound.
The most important thing I noticed was that everyone wore masks when they entered an indoors, whether a national chain or a local one. Some removed their masks more quickly as they left a building or put them on just before entering, but don them they did, whether beefy men or thin young women. I found that comforting. I didn’t eat at a restaurant in Brooklyn or even in Chicago when heading West, but by the time of Nebraska I had relented to having a dinner where tables were adequately distanced and where the servers wore masks. Less density in the state, I said, and fewer fears, even if the plains states are on the increase of another surge of disease. Maybe only politicians in Washington seem to make an issue of whether to wear masks or not, but the two parties would disagree about which one of the two made masks a political matter. Masks seem to be part of the general courtesy, and so not political in nature at all, which may serve well enough as a definition of the political: whatever it is that is worth disputing. Governor Mike DeVine, who had been a very partisan member of Congress, has become something of a statesman as Ohio governor. He is very conscious of controlling coronavirus cases, but has not instructed people to wear masks, thinking that the citizenry will decide to do the sensible thing if the government doesn’t rile them about it, and so, I noticed in Ohio, masking does seem to work. Andrew Cuomo, the much more Liberal state of New York, had said much the same thing, that he could implore them to mask, but it had to be decided to do so by the very sensible people of New York if it were to work. That was months ago. Now the question is whether to be a bit punitive at high spots in coronavirus clusters in places like students and Hassidic Jews, who disregard what the leaders of the states mostly see as good sense.
Politics was everywhere. There were Trump billboards in New Jersey, though I am not sure why, given the likelihood of Biden winning that. There were also Biden posters, small and perhaps put up by an independent sort so as to fly his flag, in places that will go Republican, and perhaps for the same reason as the national Trump billboards in New Jersey, just to let it know that they are in the game. A national election is proceeding. The local news in Toledo, Ohio had a clip of Biden showing up in the area, and that certainly is free coverage, though I am not sure that press the flesh occasions, or whatever is its equivalent, does not matter very much, just the general impression that leaders are engaged, Trump complaining that Biden had spent so much time in his basement. I have heard that posters and dorr bell visits are not as important as they once were, and not only because of the coronavirus. These devices are petering out, just as the very long political torch light rallies that were part of nineteenth century politics, because the main deal, so the pundits say, perhaps because they are so involved themselves in debates and in the media. Its the demographics, stupid, and so get out that vote or the difficult assessment of which vote is teetering from one political allegiance to another. Every election is a surprise in that groups of people decide not to vote or vote differently than they had in previous votes, and not just whether people are increasing, such as Hispanics, or moving to North Carolina from Democratic friendly Northerners. I think of voting as an exciting but a calming presence in that every person has to say to themselves what they are doing, how each person is making a free choice, and we will all sort it out when the election is over. The peaceful succession has gone on since 1792 and I think people like it that way because it is the way to settle things and go about forthwith to their other businesses than politics, such as work and love.
There is another national binding that is taking place, which is the probabilistic nature of the coronavirus. While living in Brooklyn, I went on two different walks during my daily constitutional. I would wait for people to go past me rather than come close, even if they are wearing masks, though some are not, I decided when to turn off about halfway of my route to change course. On one of my last walks in Brooklyn there were a number of people congregating even though they were all masked, and so I decided on the alternative route. That meant that there was an infinitesimal lesser chance of getting coronavirus, but I did alter my route, playing the probabilities, and everyone, I think, makes such calculations. Moreover, our level of concern as to how cautious to be is mediated by the national public agenda. People told me that they were more cautious about avoiding crowds when Trump was hospitalized, the superspreader of the Rose Garden meeting with Amy Coney Barrett warning us all, whether we wanted to be aware of it or not, to be a trifle less foolhardy than is the President.
What is interesting about this is that the calculations change for virtually imperceptible effects as a result of overt and public events, and each change seems to make the current practice as the correct and inevitable way to do things. I had discovered a social process that I had long discarded, which is the idea of a social norm, which means classically-- which means according to Durkheim-- that people violate expectations as those are established by the statistical frequency of a practice. Do something unusual and you will get clobbered for being a homosexual or a female philanderer or being too outspoken, I never like the idea because it just resulted in inevitable punishment and a straightjacket on how people are supposed to behave. But we can redefine the terms in a way that makes more neutral sense. Rather than norms based on expectations and of very long standing, think of norms as the shifting consensus that results from the response to actual, documented, events. The President gets sick; people fine tune their response to what is the new comfortable. Whatever is the new level of comfort is the norm even if some people are more anxious than others about getting coronavirus and even some people identifying with Trump and so becoming counterphobic as a political or moral statement. Everyone in the nation, whether rural or urban, Eastern or Mountain State, is subject to the collective imperative, while, I would suggest, Macron modulates how the French population deals with its own coronavirus crisis. Our institutions and especially our media make the whole thing of a nation into a single whole.