Jargogled Impressions.

The more history we know, the more complex the story of our past becomes and the more realistic we can be about it.

Travelogues are curious accounts of writing. They reveal as much about the eyes of the traveler as they do about the object in question. Destinations, in many of these travelogues occupy a distant place and are moot in so many more respects. For others, its mostly the destination, or the sense of achievement in having reached one that matters.

Places change. Cities change. As men change. Over time.

Writing about places then, in a manner of traveling through them, is opening yourself up to petty generalizations or statistically thin tail observations. Robert Kaplan, in his account “Earning the Rockies”, attempts to trace a journey he undertook 40 years back, and a journey his father undertook during the heydays of the Great Depression. This comparative approach to chronicling the inner caves of American geography is expected to be expository with surprise as the expected outcome.

Published in 2016, before the election that changed everything, this book became popular owing to its predictions that predated the outcome and that a number of pundits subsequently expostulated to provide a logical explanation for the surprise of 2016.

“The middle class for a long time now has been slowly dissolving into a working class precariously on the verge of slipping into outright poverty, and also in the other direction into a smaller, upper-middle, global elite.”

Traveling through such places as Wheeling, Marietta, Bloomington Kaplan’s razor sharp observations on the real meaning of globalization takes root in its continental setting. As the author encounters people in these cities, he observes their friendly and polite gesture while feeling that undercurrent of militant Americanism inside.

“Leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone, or else we will hunt you down wherever you are.”

Traveling west, the journey is an attempt to unshackle the vista of the country from its colonial roots, from the elitist east, from a region of cities with a network of rivers running and irrigating it throughout.  We learn how the unique geography of America led to its steep climb as the dominant neo-colonial power and how, despite the seemingly inward looking citizens the country has hesitantly taken up the mantle of leading the world.

“America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.”

“Earning the Rockies” is a meditative read for those who want to understand the precise role of America’s geographical frontiers in its state of being today. Beyond soft colonial power, populist jingoism, reductionism, and militant avenger America is what it is owing to these out and back towns where commerce and the older ways of living collide to create a simulacrum of a nation. As this nation struggles, yet again, to find a narrative that is its truly own and distinct, as it tries to find a moral grounding on what constitutes ethically correct when it comes to drawing boundaries on the older and the new ways of life, as it balances itself between the extremes it finds itself in, running through this condensed 180 pages of wisdom would serve it well.

“The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.”