DON'T GO WEST

...Ethan Seltzer, the director of Portland State University's Center for Urban Studies, told Kaplan, "We seek a mythic, native adaptation to place...

...In Kaplan's mind the religious Right is on an equal footing with Greyhound bus passengers and Vietnamese-American restaurateurs...

...Kaplan and Kemmis share coffee while the former bemoans "the Aspen-Santa Fe phenomenon" that has come to Missoula (though he likes the fact that he can now get the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal...

...These facts are among the many found in An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan...

...In a book that is interesting for its look at how we live today, Robert D. Kaplan ultimately gets it wrong...

...Canada interests Kaplan, but doesn't alarm him in the way Mexico does...

...are going to start thinking too...

...He comes to the conclusion that, though the pastor represented a stabilizing moral force with which I felt comfortable, give his or any other religious group too much power and, as the Founding Fathers warned, the fragile consensus holding together a democratic society passing through one technological transformation after another could shred...

...These people are unwashed, they don't read, and they eat candy for breakfast...

...Says Clark, apocalyptically: "If everyone gets twenty acres, then we all might as well be dead...

...it can only be the civic culture in each locale...

...In Amarillo, Kaplan discovers the existence of three-hundred local churches, high-school football, and Pantex, the nation's sole assembler and disassembler of nuclear weapons...

...Cars for us are evil," says Mike Car-nahan, of the World Affairs Council, an organization bent on improving Portland's already-strong global business ties...

...Here," Nguyen declares, "you work on your own initiative or you drown—and that's good...

...Just across the northern border, citizens of Vancouver joke that the Japanese want to buy their city, but the Chinese won't sell it...

...And since the multibillion-dollar cross-border narcotics trade accounts for such a large slice of the economy, he thinks the Mexican army will become "the world's most efficient drug dealer...

...and then let's do it my way...

...Nguyen, after spending the winter of 1981 sleeping in a car and working in a hog-packing house, has become one of Garden City's most prosperous businessmen, owning a restaurant, a car-body shop, and two laundries...

...While many of Kaplan's ruminations about Mexico and Canada are plausible, his view of his native America proves entirely jaundiced...

...The environmentalists love tourists until they build a house down the road...

...He compares the reservation archipelago on a map of Arizona to the Balkans, leaving the reader to draw the implication...

...To add to our misery, he notes that the Texas Panhandle is "conservative" and in 1964 rejected homestater Lyndon Johnson in favor of "right-wing Republican" Barry Gold-water...

...Kaplan believes that a quasianarchy exists in Mexico already and that the army will play a large role in the country's future...

...The Evangelical Christianity I saw in the Nebraska county was raw and literal, as if Jesus had just died on the cross last week and the story was spreading by word of mouth, with an intensity that overwhelmed other faiths and opinions...

...The endemic and surreal poverty of Mexico elicits his disgust, and, indeed, from an American point of view, Mexican history is an epic nightmare...

...Of course, Clark doesn't mention (though Miles does) the largest landowners in the Bozeman area: Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, generous supporters of environmental organizations...

...At the end of a tedious lecture about the future of the American West, Kemmis concludes: "Neither the state nor the federal government can make things work...

...Evangelical Christians annoy him, and he indulges an amusing theory that the uniform landscape of the Great Plains encourages like-minded thought among its inhabitants...

...Kaplan is intrigued by Ernest Cal-lenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia, which has sold 650,000 copies in the Northwest, and promotes the idea of "Cas-cadia," a fictional nation-state comprising Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia (roughly the nineteenth-century Oregon Territory as disputed by British and Americans...

...my, coupled with apolitical regional ethnicities, will make superfluous our traditional notions of liberal democracy and the structure of the modern nation-state...

...Kaplan informs us that Mike Clark, despite living in a humble apartment in town, is enough of an insider that with one phone call he "got me onto Ted Turner's ranch...

...The writing of An Empire Wilderness required of Kaplan a roaming, Tocqueville-like, through Mexico, Canada, and the American West...

...Nationalism will wane as small city-states—with, say, Renaissance Venice as a model— pursue economic self-interest and require of the federal power only bought-and-paid-for military security...

...A distinguished foreign correspondent and contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan contends in his new travelogue that the twenty-first century's global econoBill Croke, who last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, is a writer living in Choteau, Montana...

...A friend who used to live in Missoula told me that Kemmis's mayoral style consisted of: "Let's have a meeting...

...Kaplan concludes An Empire Wilderness where he began, among military officers at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas...

...Those trophy ranches for the rich really are the pinnacles of death...

...He often pauses to decry the "wanton individualism" he encounters in the West, and he seems to look for "militia crazies" under every rock...

...Kaplan accompanies a group of them on a four-day field trip to the battlefields of Vicksburg...

...Nguyen, whose English is fluent, now studies Spanish in order to serve more effectively his new customers, the Mexican employees of an expanding local meat-packing industry...

...Also while in Bozeman, Kaplan chats with Mike Clark, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, who worries that—though 82 percent of the "Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" (Yellowstone National Park and a half-dozen surrounding national forests) is federal land—it's just not enough for the vast herds of bison and elk...

...Kemmis gives him the latest lowdown on Missoula, a combination of natural beauty, the presence of the University of Montana, and "highly skilled entrepreneurial types who excel at experimentation...

...He is more at home among Montana's eco-warriors...

...The yellow pages are full of real estate agents...

...Kaplan doesn't seem to have learned that Clark's call was unnecessary: The Gallatin National Forest maintains a right-of-way easement, a dirt road across Turner's hundred-thousand-acre Flying D Ranch, so that ordinary folks and freelance writers have access to the admirable trail system in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness...

...Always trendy, Kaplan sits in a sweatlodge with a Navajo named Cayce Boone, who tells him about his job as a cable-TV line installer who finds in Tucson's trailer parks nothing but functional illiterates with "no culture," drinking and watching the tube all day...

...In Bozeman, he meets Mike Miles, a soft-spoken ex-Jesuit, who angrily reports: "The land rush is on...

...The tour of northern-Rockies politically correct hotspots continues as Kaplan journeys to Missoula and hooks up with Dan Kemmis, ex-mayor and local political gadfly, whose crowning achievement in six years of occupying the mayor's office was the installation of a hand-carved wooden carousel in a Missoula city park...

...Kaplan nods in agreement and follows up this secondhand look with a firsthand one: a five-hour Greyhound bus ride from Albuquerque to Amarillo, in which he sits beside the rootless and the deranged...

...And Kaplan mourns...

...Kaplan feels right at home in squeaky-clean Portland, with its trolley system, sidewalk flowerpots, geometric parks, and few cars (and mostly late-model foreign ones, at that...

...In the end, Kaplan writes America off: "But if we can pass out of our history slowly and gracefully, carrying on a global struggle for human rights and economic opportunity (backed up by military force) until an authentic planetary civil society emerges, America will have accomplished more than it ever did in the Homeric age of the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War combined...

...In Broken Bow, Nebraska, Kaplan attends an evangelical church service that "reminded me of a kibbutz meeting," and asked worshipers questions like: "What is an evangelical...

...Kaplan wonders: "Can democracy flourish among people like this...

...In "Indian country" he sees parallels between the ongoing tensions of Navajo and Hopi and his own experience as a foreign correspondent among Serb and Croat...

...Consider that, along with the volatile separatist movement in Quebec, and you have a Vancouver city official telling Kaplan: "If the nation-state on your northern border comes apart, you in the U.S...

...There, in a chapter full of Civil War history, he speculates that "for a large class of prosperous Americans, a new world community is beginning to shred the bonds of union the Civil War firmly established...

...He tells Kaplan that uniquely in Mis-soula, "geography is absolutely present and critical in politics every second of the day...

...In California's Orange County, where self-absorption reigns and philanthropy is rare, people who shop in high-toned malls are soothed by the sounds of live string quartets...

...Just across the southern border, in Culiacan, Mexico, there is an ersatz shrine dedicated to "El Nar-cosanton," the Narco Saint, a criminal named Jesus Malverde hanged in 1909 and reputed to be the patron saint of Mexican drug lords...

...Traveling on to Garden City, Kansas (Greyhound sociological study complete—rental car this time), Kaplan meets Quang Nguyen, Vietnamese boatperson and American success story...

...Kaplan posits that the most successful of these new emerging denizens of the West will inhabit upscale "posturban pods" (Johnson County in Kansas, Orange County, north Tucson, north Santa Fe), living in security-minded, gated communities designed to keep the underclass out: a modern version of the ancient and medieval city wall...

...These are the hightech warriors who endlessly map strategies in anticipation of the sort of small, localized conflicts that will occupy the future American military...

...let's have another meeting...

...In Portland, Oregon—to his delight—Kaplan finds a city that is "a kind of open air museum" with "view corridors" that keep new downtown construction from blotting out the sumptuous Cascade vistas...

...Vancouver is an economic powerhouse (real estate, the cruise-ship industry, and one of the biggest bulk ports in North America for the shipping of timber and agricultural products), with more ties to Hong Kong, Singapore, Seattle, and Portland than to Ottawa...

...Miles doesn't mention that it was he himself and his ilk who helped start the "ranchette" boom in the West through litigation against the government and the extractive logging, mining, and ranching industries, and through encouraging "eco-tourism...

...Vancouver businessmen see the American/Canadian border as nothing more than a hindrance in their business dealings with the prosperous American Pacific Northwest...

...He brings an establishment liberal's prejudices to his travels in the American West...

...In booming Tucson, Arizona, a public referendum concerning a badly needed water project caught the attention of only one in four Tucson voters...

...The cities and capitals of the East—Washington, New York, Ottawa—will become bit players in this new global arrangement...

...The bus "was like a prison van, transporting people from one urban poverty zone to another," and he pities the driver for having to "go through this every day...

...Modern western conservatives and the marginalized underclass who were once called "white trash" are equally objects of Kaplan's scorn...

...In North America, a new "North-South reorientation" will replace the old East-West one...

...You only have to visit the hallowed ground of a Civil War cemetery—or any other where lie the bones of Americans who made the final sacrifice—to know that...

...Portland, he gushes, "evinces the political-cultural atmosphere of a Scandinavian country, where almost everyone shares the same background and values and, for the sake of preserving them, trusts the centralizing, controlling force, or local government...