In a few weeks, Clay will embark on an 11,000-mile trek following the Lewis and Clark trail across the continent and back. As he loads his pickup and prepares to hit the road, Clay ponders what he has learned so far in his multi-year project to Listen to America.
I’m trying to understand America as it approaches its 250th birthday next year. That’s why I’ve been driving around the country hauling a 23-foot Airstream trailer. But how do you figure out America? You can’t just stroll an RV park at 5 p.m. thinking you will gain useful insights. “Nice slide-out.” “Thanks. I wanted a Roadtrek 190, but the wife wanted more space — for the grandchildren.”
Steinbeck called it “this monster country.” He was right. And there are so many Americas. What does a taciturn New Englander have in common with a Navajo sheep herder? What does a New Jersey hairdresser have in common with a feng shui designer from Marin County in northern California? What is Creole gumbo in northern Minnesota or lutefisk in Miami? There are still powerfully distinct regions in America with distinct accents and speaking styles. Texas is not Vermont. Nevada is not Wisconsin. The Black American experience in America is not the same as the White experience or the Hispanic, the Asian, or the Native American.
So, Where Are We Headed?
Who are we now? How did we reach this place, and where are we headed?
I’m not alone out there. There are now 11.2 million RVs in America, an all-time high thanks to three factors: the social dislocations of the Covid-19 pandemic, prosperous early retirement, and an economy that creates houselessness as well as homelessness. It is hard to count, but most estimates indicate that about a million Americans now live in vans and RVs full-time. Some people live in their vans because it is cool or romantic, others because economic forces beyond their control have displaced them.
According to Fortune magazine, approximately 44% of America’s full-time employees don’t earn a living wage. That means they have to do without some of the basic things in life. That means they must share a household to make ends meet. That means they have no rainy day fund for life’s inevitable setbacks. That’s why hundreds of thousands live in vans or cars. Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century is a fascinating study of the vehicular nomad phenomenon.
Current U.S. population: 340 million. For comparison, Canada has a population of 40 million, the UK 69 million, Germany 84 million, France 66 million, and Mexico 129 million. China and India have 1.4 billion each. The closest country to a U.S.-sized population is Indonesia, which has 285 million people. How often do Americans think about Indonesia? Or Ghana? Or Ecuador? With a population of a third of a billion people, there is no single America. There are 4.34 million Muslims in the United States and 85 million evangelical Christians. What do they have in common beyond Starbucks?
Florida is the most visited state. North Dakota is the least visited. The average American has visited 17 states. Only 2% have visited all 50. Just over 300 Americans have been to the highest point in every state. Only a handful have been in America’s 3,143 counties (or their equivalent). I’ve been to the highest points in three states: North Dakota (3,503 feet), Kansas (4,039), and California (14,505).
There are 283 million cars in the United States (one for every 1.2 Americans) but 398 million guns. There are 15,186 gun-based homicides in the U.S. per year, 12 (a dozen) in Switzerland, and statistically none in Japan, Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, etc. And that was a bad year in Switzerland. Our national refusal to face the problem of gun violence perplexes and terrifies our friends in the rest of the world. They don’t have a Second Amendment. They see ours as a national suicide pact.
As of 2023, 278 million Americans lived in urban communities, 55 million across the broad rural expanse that makes up 90% of American geography. That means that about 20% of the American people identify as rural. Most Americans live within 45 miles of a Walmart. But if you live in south central Nevada, southeastern Oregon, or northern Montana, you may have to drive 250 miles to get to one. Ah, but there is always a Dollar Store! You know the trope: Red America is the Cracker Barrel, Blue America is Whole Foods. Does this matter? Donald Trump won 75% of the counties in America with a Cracker Barrel restaurant but only 22% of those with a Whole Foods store. And they say there is no class system in America! Generally speaking, the more formal education you have had, the more likely you vote for the Democrat. Thirty seven percent of the American people have a BA or higher. Personal note: most of my Red America friends think I got too much education, and it didn’t do me a bit of good.
Pizza: America’s Favorite Food?
Turn on television for a weekend, and what do you learn about America? You can lose weight, but it will cost you money. If you buy a new Jeep, you will soon be tooling around in the backcountry around Monument Valley. Arby’s has the meats. You can now buy quilted toilet paper that is equal to any challenge. America is a very violent country. On any given day, you can watch a score of cop and law shows: NCIS, Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, Law and Order, The Rookie, 9-1-1, — and, if you like nostalgia, Matlock, Mannix, Columbo, NYPD Blues, Charley’s Angels, and The Fugitive.
Erectile Dysfunction is common — don’t be ashamed — and you don’t have to see a doctor about it anymore. The heartbreak of Psoriasis, Peyronie’s Disease, Thyroid Eye Disease, and Toe Fungus. My goodness, America loves sports. You can watch sports talk shows 24 hours a day on a dozen platforms. Whether LeBron has another season in him can dominate sports talk for days. Ratings are always high for beach women’s volleyball. Violent cage fights proliferate. You can watch Hallmark Christmas dramas for about half the year now. They are always the same. An overworked 35-year-old New York book agent returns to Bugtail, Mississippi, to help her ailing father through a back operation. There, she runs into her old high school boyfriend, whom she broke up with because he wouldn’t grow up and had no ambition. At first, they bicker, but soon enough … . The late-night talk shows are now overtly political — the Culture Wars have kidnapped them — and the guests are usually actors you’ve never or rarely heard of telling not-very-funny anecdotes and promoting their latest Netflix series.
The sad vulgarization of the English language is on full display on TV, especially cable, where the F-word has taken root; George Carlin would have a harder time getting traction for his Seven Words monologue today. The silo news cable channels make it clear that we are teetering on the edge of Armageddon, and the Other side is, well, un-American.
Pizza must be America’s favorite food because the ads are ubiquitous: double cheese, cheese-infused crusts, and meat eaters.
I’m not sure my extensive travels have made me wiser, though they have weaned me from television. They have made me much happier — I have fallen in love with America over and over again — but I am having a tough time determining if we are still one America or two or more or many. What I mostly sense out there is bewilderment and uncertainty. The social and technological fabric of the country has been changing so fast in the last few decades that all we can do is grab on and ride the wave, trying to avoid drowning from overstimulation, rancor, rage, and a sense that there is no foundation to stand on anymore. The first website was put up in 1995. Today, there are 350 million registered websites in the United States. I see countless people scrolling through video reels, not because they are especially interesting or informative but because a: everyone is doing it, and b: they are, in their way, addictive. We like to see humanity in trainwreck mode.
Everyone can publish now, and as William Butler Yeats saw it, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The emperor Nero fiddled (actually, he played a cithara) while Rome burned in 64 CE. We toggle through Instagram.
A Bewildered National Narrative
My biggest concern now — from a lifetime of reading in the humanities, emphasizing the collapse of the Roman Republic (100 BCE – 27 BCE) — is that we Americans no longer have an agreed-upon national narrative. It used to be something like this (in the shortest possible compass):
— Columbus bumps into America
— Exploration and colonization
— American Revolution, an Enlightenment Nation
— The Frontier Movement
— Conestoga Wagons
— The “Indian Wars”
— Gold rushes
— America overcomes slavery
— Industrialization of America: Railroads
— The Gilded Age of Robber Barons
— America reluctantly becomes a world power
— America becomes the hegemon
— America transforms into a service economy
— A new Gilded Age
Most Red State Americans still see our history more or less like this: that we are a very great country that has been and still is the class act of the world; that we are the most generous of all nations; that we protect and prop up the rest of the world and they take advantage of us; and we are on the whole, with a few exceptions, a force for good in a dangerous world.
But the intellectual elites — the faculties of the great universities, the activist minority groups, many of the foundations, and think tanks — are no longer OK with that narrative. They see America as radically unfinished, a nation that talks like Jefferson and behaves like Henry Kissinger (or Andrew Jackson), whose lofty Founding Goals have been subverted by greed and a thirst for power no different from every other empire in history. They see an abundance of lingering racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, indifference, and a ruinous maldistribution of wealth in the wealthiest country in history. They even wonder if the vision of the Founders is not finally hollow at the core — they were slaveholders, after all, and when Abigail Adams urged her husband John and his fellow male revolutionaries to “remember the Ladies” as they reconfigured the American polity, he laughed her off. One revolution at a time, said he. “As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh … rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject Us to the Despotism of the Peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight.”
If we don’t have an agreed-upon national narrative — where we came from, who we are, what we value, how we got here, where we should be heading — how can we accomplish great things at home and in the world? Imagine trying to persuade Congress to create the Interstate Highway System today. Or to go to the moon within 10 years? Or to pass the Marshall Plan? In the face of bewilderment, escapism and radical individualism grow like weeds.
Building a Society to Match the Scenery
I tend to see the glass as three-quarters full, but you can’t study our history now without being acutely aware of “the cost of America.” You might even say the staggering cost of America. The cost to the 12.5 million Africans we brought here in chains to do that hard physical work of building the country. The cost to Native Americans who were minding their own western hemispheric business until 1492, and since then have been systematically dispossessed of 95% of their sovereign land base, often by way of genocidal dynamics. Indigenous population in 1492: somewhere between 5 and 15 million. Indigenous population in 1900: about 200,000. The cost to Mexico and Mexicans. The cost to the environment and — now — the planet. You cannot wander through the incredible scenic landscapes of America without wondering if we have built (or can still build), as Wallace Stegner put it, “a society to match the scenery.”
Coming to terms with the more complicated, darker, more nuanced, more inclusive history of America doesn’t have to make you a critic of our national enterprise. Still, it surely does sober you up in a hurry. Thanks to the “cultural revolution” of the last 60 years, we now know too much about our tangled, often tragic, story to be unambiguously cheerful about it.
Here’s my dilemma. Unless we come to terms with the less admirable episodes and impulses of American history, we cannot heal and move forward as something like a unified nation, and it is clear to me that we desperately need to find a healthy and just path forward. That begins with an acknowledgment of complicity. And yet — we must not wallow in grief or guilt or fail to recognize and celebrate what is good and great about America — and what can be made better and greater about America as we lurch forward.
Being Dis-illusioned Without Becoming Disillusioned
Put it this way: we all need to be dis-illusioned without becoming disillusioned, if that makes any sense. We must no longer be carrying forward simpleton illusions, narratives that favored white and indeed white male America and regarded everyone else as bit players. Everyone needs to be at the table when the new history is written. A more honest, just, and inclusive American history will be less rosy, less satisfying, and sometimes deeply troubling. Less tidy.
We must have a national conversation about the Idea of America as we approach our 250th birthday. For me, that means reading, watching documentary films, listening to the best podcasts, traveling the country listening (genuinely listening), putting myself in slightly uncomfortable situations, drinking in the sublimity of our landscape, trying to remember whose land it once was and at what cost it was Euro-Americanized. And trying to imagine what a 21st-century American Renaissance would look like with each of us contributing.
As I sit in my Airstream in the cool of the evening under Devils Tower or high in the Cascades or along the banks of the San Juan River, I’m trying to locate and then read every book that helps explain this critical uneasy moment in our national destiny. If you have recommendations, I am eager to hear them. I’m also re-reading American classics — Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, Roughing It, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Notes of a Native Son, Black Elk Speaks, Walden, The Yellow Wallpaper, Catcher in the Rye, Beloved … — and trying to read them, if possible, with fresh eyes, wearing the new lenses we now have to reevaluate our past.
We cannot afford to linger in numbness, bewilderment, and rage. China hovers around the American vacuum. We must find a careful path through our glorious and troubled past to a new awakening of unified American purpose. It may be too late. I don’t think so.
I know this much. I am more likely to find answers on the road than in the loneliness of my home study.