It has been a warm, sunny afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where strangers are kind and beauty is overflowing.
Any writing reflects the author’s status aspirations. This is not a problem when one knows who the author is and whom he is trying to impress. When one knows all that, one can invert the process and learn something about what is being written about. With the proliferation of the compulsive “content creators” who have an incessant stream of things to say on social media, it is hard to keep track of authors’ identities and milieus, with all their status enhancing takes and intellectual no-go areas.
Author’s status aspirations do not interfere with his message much if his status is already so high that he has little left to prove. Such might have been reporters and journalist in days of yore, in the pre-Internet era. They graduated from elite universities, and their prestigious jobs firmly planted them in the society’s middle and upper middle class. The luxury of access to such reporters has all but vanished.
What is left, then, is to discover things for oneself. (Or maybe this is just an excuse to get out and on the road, and to live a little.) And what is there better to discover than America? Discovering America never gets old, for America never gets old. She’s always a-movin’.
What follows is a series of snapshots with impressionistic captions.
Thank you kindly.
Columbus, IN, where believing the best about people brings out the best in people.
Nashville, TN, where gender is yet to supplant sex. It is good to live in a place where people are obsessed. In a place like this, one learns the importance of finding and following one’s dream. One learns passion. One witnesses excellence. One also witnesses mediocrity and broken lives. One encounters the people who have no strength to admit they should be someone or somewhere else. American cities are specialised, by occupation, and by age, and Nashville is no exception. Within cities, there is further specialisation of residence and consumption. Cities need young people to flourish. In the past, the young were numerous when birth rates were high. Today, colleges infuse the lucky few cities with youth. The remaining cities languish.
Asheville, NC, where polarisation does not sell. Polarisation need not be bad. It is good for people to be passionate about different ideas and to experiment in different directions. Polarisation may very well be the heartbeat of America. There are two reasons why polarisation could be bad, though. One is that when people with different worldviews speak different languages, they misunderstand, and get offended by, each other. Another reason is that any kind of public good or serivice that is provided in a polarised society will not suit most people most of the time.
Savannah, GA, where memories live. The city is built on the bodies of the people who fought for the country’s independence, for survival, and for the right to cast another die. A lethal pandemic would roll through the city every 20–25 years. Wars would come and go. People died for the chance of securing the opportunity for their offspring to have a future in this land. One should not complain today about being unable to afford to buy or to rent an apartment or a house. Would one be willing to die for the right to buy or rent, as our ancestors did? It is only fair for the ancestors’ sacrifices to be priced in. Cities have memory. Harvard’s Ed Glaeser enjoins to look out for people, not cities. This is not quite right. A city’s memory is a potent coordination device. The denizen is inspired by the memory, and grows with the city. David Eagleman spoke of three deaths: “[T]he first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” Late at night, when the heat subsides, and the streets are quiet and quietly lit, barely audibly the city whispers the names of the people it loved.
Charleston, SC, feels much larger than it is because people actually live in the city centre. Residences and businesses mix with Manhattanite confidence. There is no public transportation. But people walk; the climate cooperates. What makes a town preserve its history? It it missing out on a boom? Or being poor when elsewhere is getting richer by the day? Or is it discovering new, or honouring old, ways to get rich in ways that do not require the razing of downtown for parking lots and international headquarters? Or maybe being unwelcoming to strangers, with their strange ideas and various nonreligions, limits the constituency for discarding other peoples’ past ?
Charlotte, NC, where memories are buried.
Morgantown, WV, where students roam but the obsessed dreamers to look up to are nowhere to be found. Like many a college town, Morgantown is but a pretend community with little identity. Its mission is to teach people how to be free. While ugly to behold, it is perhaps educational. If so, one has no right to ask for more.
