Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  Beyond the muddy edges of town, there was never any question about the horizon’s meaning. The horizon was an encroaching wilderness, unmaking. Blackboard Jungle. Dragnet. The Man with the Golden Arm. The War of the Worlds. Frankenstein. Psycho. The barely inhabited West was where sociopaths roamed, where Gabby Hayes minced around in an apron, and mountain men bedded doe-eyed Indian maidens who had hearts of wampum, but would never live to wear-um gingham. The confrontation with wildness was the coming attraction, more of the same. Onward, onward would the pioneers move—westward—west toward Burbank.

  Hollywood began putting the brakes on cowboy movies in the late fifties; Burbank was enveloped by smog.

  In the 1930s, that quintessential New Yorker, Edmund Wilson, took his chilly brain on tour. He discovered here, in the Far West—in temperate San Diego—the highest number of suicides in the country; the highest rate of depression. “You seem to see the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure. Here our people, so long told to ‘go West’ to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight.”

  What Edmund Wilson knew would not yet alter the nation’s sense of the land and its meaning. Throughout the twentieth century, as throughout the nineteenth, Americans were famously an east-west people. We told our meaning as we told time, counterclockwise. The past lay east, the future west. Europe, the previous shore, was the Old World; we the new, the ringing moment, twelve o’clock. China, the old again, and so on.

  Some Americans once took fatal exception to the east-west narrative line. Civil War rebels invented a south-north point of view, insisting that Easterners were in fact Northerners. Beyond the slave owner’s sin, the impertinence committed by Southerners was their invention of a heterodox narrative line.

  The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once described the Mason-Dixon line as the border to Latin America. Perhaps Fuentes meant that the Old South, like the Latin South, was a culture agrarian in its ethos, baroque in its social organization; so actual in its imaginative life as to appear fantastic. Flannery O’Conner, Eudora Welty, as magical realists. And Faulkner, of course (according to García Márquez).

  In Walden, Henry David Thoreau extolled the wild goose as “more of a cosmopolite than we”—we Americans. “He breaks his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the night in a southern bayou.” The advantage of the Canadian goose, in Thoreau’s exemplum, is that Nature obliges geese to a north-south runnel.

  Thoreau was determined to take the direction of his life from Nature. But Nature, as manifest in the purlieus of Walden Pond, was not the Nature of the Wild West. Wild-eyed teenagers who left Concord for Sacramento were of a different, an adversarial, opinion regarding Nature. Thoreau was horrified by stories of the cruelty toward Nature of westering Americans—accounts of a giant redwood cut down; photographs of young men dancing upon the sawn stump. America would never have achieved temperance if westering Americans’ estimate of Nature had not been so mad; if America’s reverence for domesticity had not been so mad.

  The mid-twentieth century brought federal discontinuity to the American narrative line. The U.S. Congress brought geographical exotics—Hawaii and Alaska—two new “states” into our union. Both territories were exteriors—anti-domestic in theme, in aspect. The one forbidding, the other erotic; both compositions of water—the one frozen, the other melted sky.

  By the early 1960s, popular technologies like cheap air conditioners and jet airplanes, plastic cups and Interstates, reoriented Americans upon new migratory paths and new spiritual paths. Popular technologies ameliorated the tension of the east-west line, which was also the Judeo-Christian line, which was also the transcontinental railroad.

  Americans, for the first time, were released from the tyranny of seasons, as well as from the sympathy of seasons, as well as from any defining sense of rootedness. The country divided, in popular speech, in fashion, in fiction, into zones of cold and hot. The “rust belt” became our corrupting past—the end of the Industrial Age. The Sun Belt was a newer, more ancient history that intrigued; a zone of preference. The Sun Belt adapted folkways of Native American spirituality. The Sun Belt was at once the launching pad for modern missiles—a new age of exploration—and a prehistoric landing strip.

  The artificial breeze (popular technologies like cheap air conditioners and jet planes) lured Americans from the temperate zone, to situate a new majority of the nation within a bright Gehenna. Though they were following the trail of Thoreau’s Canadian goose southward, the jet stream pioneers were no less determined than their westering ancestors to govern Nature. The Sun Belt thermostat was fixed; it went no higher, no lower, than spring. People of the New South claimed not to feel the heat; people claimed not to think about heat because they were piped, from the air-conditioned office building to the air-conditioned car; from the car to the front door. In between, the merest intimation of an intemperate Nature.

  Today’s Michigan matron, let us say, and despite her arthritis, for which there is no cure, and despite chronic disappointment, for which there is no cure, nevertheless flies with the complacency of Thoreau’s goose. At the first sign of frost, she abandons her native thirty-two degrees for a two-hours-distant condo on a fake lagoon in Florida that used to be a lagoon. The Michigan matron, let us say, now imagines America as she imagines her life, as she imagines her garden—as bounded by seasonal borders. Between airports there is no sense of direction. There is Departure and there is Arrival. Exit autumn; enter spring. In between there is only a manageable interval of stale air.

  Easterners and Midwesterners who moved south into the Sun Belt found themselves living alongside Hispanics whose habit was to describe the United States as “el norte,” describing their journey. That description became my father’s habit as well—California as el norte—though my father’s impulse was ironic and was meant, as were most of my father’s utterances, to mark my father’s distance from American perspective. El norte became my father’s gloss on the gringo’s sense of history, the gringo’s compass, but also the Mexican grudge, but also the Mexican infantilism (clinging to Mother Mexico), but also my father’s disappointment with his own placement in the world. But also his son’s optimism (my inclination to be buoyed by the weightless optimism of the West). I had no history. I was born in the West.

  One morning my father announced: “We came north to live in the American West, Mama,” as if this were the script for an American movie about our family. My mother was oblivious of the joke, which was directed, anyway, at my ambition. For, you see, my father understood my ambition. My father had no past in Mexico. He had been an orphan. He left Mexico as one leaves a cold room.

  My family knew many Mexican men who came to el norte only to work. They came north in order to sustain the dream of a complete and enduring life elsewhere. Never did these Mexican men speak of having left the past behind, as Westerners in Sacramento spoke of having left the past behind them, or as my father spoke of the past as beneath him. These Mexican men worked to sustain the past; they sent money to the past every Saturday. From the Mexican migrants’ point of view, California was a commute.

  The Mexican ambition for el norte has changed since my childhood, insofar as it has become a predominantly metropolitan ambition. Most peasants who now travel north follow rumors of cities of gold, where there are dishes that need washing, beds that need making, roofs that need mending, swimming pools that need cleaning. From the Mexican migrants’ point of view, el norte remains a robust ambition, a robust way of looking at the American West. El norte remains a viable term.

  At academic conferences on the American West (Whither the American West?), I now find myself auditing the proceeding with something of my father’s sensibility, something of his humor. Professors in cowboy boots speak of the fragility of the American West. The future is a danger to the American West, no longe
r its point. Ecologists, historians, call for intervention; speak of Indians needing protection (not the gambling tribes); they speak of streams, trees, salmon, wetlands—wilderness—as needing protection.

  What is endangered in America is the notion of the West. In the late 1950s, at the same time that California became the most populous state, Alaska became a new horizon—an albino hope, a gray-rolled cumulus, a glacial obsession—like Melville’s great whale. Alaska absorbed all the nouns that lay bleaching along the Oregon Trail. Solitude. Vacancy. Wilderness.

  Several states now cluster under the white belly of Alaska: Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, Oregon, northern portions of Colorado and Utah. In something like the way the East Coast invented the West, California has invented a rectified North. From the perspective of California, Oregon is a northern state; Seattle is a northern city. Vancouver becomes a part of the continuum without regard to international borders.

  Many Americans already need an escape from the overpopulated cities of the sun. The new North is where environmentalists seek a purer air or stream, a less crowded freeway. The disenchanted seek simplicity. The new North is where militiamen seek an older, whiter, elbow-roomier America. The new North is where nostalgic skinheads pursue the Norman Rock-well idyll, fleeing Hispanics who swarm the construction sites in L.A.

  In the new nation of el norte, where we are all destined to live, the limits of our anthem will no longer be from sea to shining sea, as in the Katharine Lee Bates lyric. A newer America opens to extremes of weather and landscape and discontent—hot and cold—as in the Irving Berlin lyric: Dreaming of snow in Beverly Hills.

  The dilemma of California remains as Edmund Wilson described it. We have built right up to the edge of the sea. It is also that the soil and the air promote contesting legends. The earth in California is finite, animate, unreliable—the earth quakes, burns, slides into the sea. The tiniest houses cost a million dollars. But the air is temperate—light and vast—a stepping-off place, and we have only recently discovered how.

  Even as I write, American migratory paths are digitally scrambling. The Internet is everywhere advertised as an advance to equal the opening of the Northwest Territory or the transcontinental railway. American business is in a frenzy to leave the earth, following restless Californian imagination “on-line.”

  California has found an aperture, which is not up or down or sideways but rather is a race without a goal, an application without a purpose; speed without distance; infinitude without place. A revolution—yes, everyone agrees it is a revolution—without a point.

  For purposes of this book, the digital divide is between the Few and the Many. The Few will continue to disport themselves within their exception, as is their custom. For purposes of this book, the Many are many more than they were. They sleep in shanties. They shit in holes. They give birth from their bodies, incorrigibly. They move in real time upon the real surface of the earth. They are moving from South to North.

  When Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Canadian and the Mexican politely acknowledged each other, as rumors sometimes do upon meeting. Haut shook hands with Sur. A vertical alignment, yes, but Nafta signified more than a meeting of basement and balcony. The surprise was mezzo. President William Jefferson Clinton rose to welcome Canada and Mexico into “the American future”—words blazing like northern lights on an Eskimo Pie packet.

  The American imagination—that is, the U.S. imagination—stood to change most by the agreement. The American future, which had always lain westward, was rhetorically recalibrated that day to north and south. Henceforward, the American future will not be reckoned a sunrise; decline will not be reckoned a sunset. We will need a vocabulary appropriate to people of the middle.

  When Canada, Mexico, and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, I was reminded of Thoreau’s recommended cosmopolitanism, an antidote to the New York provincialism that daily rankles. I was as quickly reminded of Octavio Paz and Marshall McLuhan.

  Canada and Mexico have produced North American intellectuals a generation ahead of the United States. U.S. intellectuals of the middleweight New York school continue to uphold the east-to-west custom of intellectual property in order to maintain their authority as critics. East Coast intellectuals continue to contest with the Old World, especially the notorious tag team of England and France.

  Mexico and Canada are alike north-south countries. In Mexican history, marauding hordes descend upon the capital from the North. Mexican mothers fear losing their children to jobs in the North. The Mexican North is little distinct from the United States, whereas the South in Mexico reassures; stones of Indian civilization litter the jungle floor.

  Octavio Paz, the greatest writer of his Mexican generation, wrote of the larger world as only someone not born at the center of any map can. Paz wrote of Hindu spirituality, French painting, Yankee pot roast. Paz lived for a time in the United States and returned frequently in his writing to the dialectic posed by the proximity of the United States and Mexico—their shared difference.

  In Canada, the North represents continuity, the unchanging aspect of the nation. Old-timers in autumn speak of the winter as the North—the North is coming, they say. Whereas the Canadian south is little distinct from the United States.

  Marshall McLuhan is as distinct from Paz as is wit from romance. McLuhan is the other writer of the last century whose work seems to me comparably North American. A scholar of Renaissance rhetoric at the University of Toronto, McLuhan employed antinomy to decode new technologies that would shorten the attention span of the postwar world. McLuhan read the future as he would read an arcane text. McLuhan lived close enough to the American boom box to suffer its concussion; far enough removed to consider objectively the effect of American culture on civilization. And incidentally, to regret. In his stoic regard of a future he found deplorable, McLuhan never asked (as Mexico invariably will ask) why things have to go the American way. His thesis is plain: Things will.

  It was Octavio Paz’s vanity, as a Mexican of the old school, to assume his nation’s cultural imperishability. He could not have anticipated, so soon after his death, that Mexico would elect a Coca-Cola cowboy to the presidency, a president who would express in English his wish for a borderless future.

  Even after Nafta, Paz continued to refer to citizens of the United States as “norteamericanos,” an old Mexican habit. But, of course, the Mexican is as much a norteamericano as the gringo is—more so, I think, since so many Mexican peasants commute up and down, as easy with one version of themselves as with another. What that might mean for Mexico’s notion of an unchanging South, Paz never let himself imagine before he turned into a postage stamp.

  If history is male, as Octavio Paz was male—as intractable, I mean—then power, influence, conquest belongs only to the stronger contestant. One buck vanquishes all other currency.

  Farewell, old Paz. Mexicans drink more Coca-Cola than Americans drink.

  President Vicente Fox is the first Americanized president of Mexico. President George W. Bush is America’s first Hispanic president. And Canada is already brown. Vancouver has become an Anglo-Chinese city, for example. What if history is female, and as permeable as McLuhan’s eye and ear? Marshall McLuhan observed the moment America’s culture becomes the culture of the world it is no longer American culture. What if victory can sometimes belong to the nation or people who most readily absorb a foreign culture? Capitalism flourishes in Vietnam. The elegancies of the English language are formid ably sustained by Jane Austens in Sri Lanka. The Japanese stole the manufacture of the automobile from Detroit, because the Japanese were preoccupied with refining what they admired. If history is male, there is no way to understand such subversions.

  Canada has never been much of an idea for Americans. We like Canada. Our good neighbor. Never hear them. Tidy.

  Downstairs . . . well, so many people come and go. What can they be up to? Mexico is a brown idea w
e would rather not discuss.

  To the extent Americans wish to believe ourselves a people of temperance, Canada disturbs us. Canada is more orderly than we Americans know ourselves to be.

  It interests Americans that Canada is clean and empty and unimplicating; the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist. Without distinct music or food or capacity for rudeness— less rich, less angry, less complicated, less neurotic, less dark, less brilliant. Canadians live among us rather as spies do. They are ideologically at some remove from complete compliance with us as regards the American adventure. And yet they are indistinguishable (by us) from us. Whereas Mexicans are so easily distinguishable, we think. We do not always, in speech, distinguish Mexican Americans from Mexicans.

  On my way in from the airport, the Toronto cabbie was too discreet to ask outright about my face. He tried by indirection to reconcile my—Arab?—features with the academic American accent. My answer to his tentative “Which flight did you take?” evidently did not satisfy. (New York.) Emboldened, then: “Is that where you live?” (No.) Finally: “Where do you live?” (California.) At which point, he safely commenced a disquisition about guns and the psychological disorder south of the border. (The headline in the morning’s Globe and Mail described mass murder at a U.S. high school.) And yet he must wonder (blue eyes filled the rearview mirror): Does wildness rise?

  American politicians, American classrooms turn to Canada for an idea of orderly civic life. The saving idea is called “multiculturalism.” Multiculturalism became Canadian policy in 1971 when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government elaborated a solution for French Canada’s coexistence within the English-speaking union.