Pod People

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, 393 pp., $27.50)

ASKED by an Oregon basket-weaver what the book he was researching was about, Robert D. Kaplan replied that it had to do with the question of whether Americans will be moved a half-century from now by the music of John Philip Sousa played on Inauguration Day. After months spent on the road-in automobiles and commercial buses; between Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Portland, Oregon; Mexico City, and Vancouver, British Columbia-Kaplan foresees a future in which Sousa's marches have been forgotten completely and the composer himself is remembered as Dr. John Philip Seussa, the long-dead author of a series of amusing children's books.

Supposedly reaffirmed and strengthened, like broken bones, by the Civil War, the bonds of American union are loosening, Kaplan believes, in a process of denationalization. The result may be something like James Madison's vision of the United States as a huge geographical expanse governed constitutionally but without patriotic awareness.

This country once possessed a unique culture and identity, but is today devolving (insensibly, as Gibbon would have said) into a congeries of city-states and combining into regional associations like the long- foreseen conglomerate nations of Cascadia or Mex-America. The leviathan state of Franklin Roosevelt's, Harry Truman's, and Dwight Eisenhower's day is, Kaplan suspects, finished; likely it will be replaced by a "flexible, lightweight" Federal Government entrusted with the responsibility for guarding America's nuclear arsenal, regulating water development in the West, and managing the federal lands. Behind these changes, Kaplan discerns the rise of a "rooted cosmopolitan class" segregated in "urban pods" like Omaha, Nebraska, or Orange County, California: "a network of vast suburban blotches separated by empty spaces," connected by satellite to similar pods in the United States as well as to the great foreign capitals.

Inhabitants of the pods will be Americans no longer but only "resident expatriates." No agreement on culture will exist, but the primacy of economic gain will be as much a matter of revered consensus as "diversity" is today. Tradition and civic virtue will be dead words, libertarian individualism rampant. Civic government will be replaced by corporate government. The rich, locked away in gated communities protected by private police, will be more concerned for the well-being of their counterparts overseas than for that of their less fortunate "compatriots" a few miles away. Meanwhile the underclass will continue to self-segregate and grow, tranquilized by gambling, spectator sports, and freedom below-the-belt.

Democratic institutions will thus wither. Waves of impoverished Latinos, pouring across the Southwest border, will push Mexico to the north, while the knitting of the elite class in British Columbia with that of Portland and Seattle will draw Canada slowly southward. The old East-West continental axis, created largely by America's white European middle class, will be replaced by a North-South one dominated in the North by whites and Asians and, in the South, by Mexicans, Indians, and mestizos. As Canada comes apart, New England might shack up with Quebec. And the absorption of Florida into the Caribbean Basin could result, as has already happened with Miami. Christianity-and other traditional religions -will grow increasingly attenuated as the religious impulse itself, influenced by environmentalists in the big Western cities, turns to nature-worship as in the pagan world of the ancients.

Ten years ago, I began work on a book making essentially the same predictions, which I never completed. I knew what I thought of this not-so-distant future, but it isn't at all clear how Kaplan-like many another prophet-feels about what he has witnessed, or intuited. For him, it seems to be in part the happy dream of a time when we will all look like Tiger Woods, in part a nightmare of a continent rebarbarized.

In the end, Kaplan can describe the collapse of American civilization, but he fails to explain it. He is a man who has spent much of his career away from home as a foreign reporter, and it shows. The United States is in a sense a foreign country to him. By now, all but the sort of well-heeled Americans who have no idea what a quart of milk costs at the supermarket have some experience of that subset of the underclass that rides America's Greyhounds. Yet Robert Kaplan, traveling by bus between Albuquerque and Amarillo, was appalled at the behavior he saw in neighboring seats. It seems not to have occurred to him that the "global materialism" of his Pod People is only a polite and polished reflection of the moral anarchy of the Bus People, the two having arisen from what amounts essentially to a belief in nothing-or possibly, as Chesterton put it, a belief in anything.

Mr. Williamson is the author of The Immigration Mystique: America's False Conscience (Basic).

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