USA 1, England 1

Here's the very best part of being American:

We still have wild landscapes to visit.

Not that many wild landscapes, but at least we've got some.  Sure there's less than .01% of the original prairie left in Illinois, and Bill Cody killed over 20,000 buffalo all by himself, and we've cut down over three quarters of the original forests.  But in England it's far worse.  As an Englishman would say, you can't go anywhere without seeing the hand of man.  Every last bit of land has been stitched up, turned over, cut down, groomed,  replanted, shorn, paved over, built upon, remade, retooled, and redone.  That's what happens when western civilization settles in for centuries.  Think about it:  where has civilization been the longest?  Iraq.  What did Iraq used to be?  A forest, the land of milk and honey.  What is it now?  A desert.  That's where we're all heading, given enough time.

But for now, the young 200-year-old U.S.A. still has places like the Wind River Valley in Wyoming, where people leave footprints and take pictures and nothing else.  It's a place where the rocks, mountains, trees, and animals are still intact, for miles and miles.  The national park I know best in England is the Peak District--and I use the term "park" lightly.  What does this national park have in it?  Paved roads, houses, pubs, walls, farms, a North Face, a swimming pool, a grocery store, coffee shops, parked cars, and a train station.  That's as rustic as it gets.  In the U.S. we've still got some untouched places, and we've also got variety:  deserts, snow, sun, scrub brush, plains, forests, big mountains, medium mountains, small mountains.  In England they like to tell you about how different the landscape is from north to south, but it's about as different as northern and southern Wisconsin.  

And the countrysides have got to be a part of a nation's mindset.  In America we've always had a place to escape to--we kept heading west, and when that was settled (stolen) we decided to just move from city to city when we wanted.  And at the very least, we can always head out to some kind of wilderness if we want.  In England?  No way.  Your mind doesn't roam across possible landscapes--you're always "cabined, cribbed, confined" as Shakespeare wrote.  The whole country has been locked in like this for centuries, and the idea of escape isn't passed on because the elders and the elders' elders have been swaddled in this island papoose for a long time.

But maybe the eternal frontier isn't always a good thing.  Outer space is the only frontier where the U.S. hasn't stolen something from somebody (so far).  But across the American west?  We stole, murdered, killed, genocided, infected blankets, the whole sordid story.  We started living in someone else's house without asking.  It's rather rude.

And there's another reason the eternal frontier might not be a good thing, but we have to backtrack for a moment.  As I've said before, I'm regularly amazed by the intelligence of the average Englishman.  I play back my interviews and marvel at the articulacy, the vocabulary, the depth of the ideas, the deep critiquing--all amidst my own halting, lumbering questions in a thick American accent.  (Oh who can invent a device to erase the questioner's voice from an interview!!)  And this intellectual streak in the English exposes the anti-intellectual streak in America.  How else do you explain our Republican Party?  The Tea Party?  The U.S. is a country where more people believe in angels than they do evolution.  In England they put Darwin on their money.  Only 40% of Americans see global warming as a serious threat.  To be as unenlightened as America is takes effort, a kind of commitment ignorance, a strange pleasure in knowing nothing.  

Which leads us to the question:  does American anti-intellectualism have anything to do with our eternal frontier?  If escape is an essential part of our psychology, does it contribute to our aggressive ignorance?  When we were settling the west did we forget to read books?  Did we have to shut down our ability to think and reason because if we didn't, we couldn't for a second justify what we were doing to the Native Americans?

One of the greatest American comedians of all time was Bill Hicks.  Most every comedian I like today is derivative of him in some way, and a couple comics still outright steal his stuff.  He was virtually unknown in America--he was too smart, too sharp, too penetrating in his dissection of foreign policy, too biting in his critique of the consumerist machine.  Where did he achieve his fame and play to sold out theaters?  England.  That's another problem with anti-intellectualism America:  you miss the very people that could have saved you.  They were right in your midst.