Despite the media's unending stream of patriotic talk about 'America', one occasionally has a sense of the country's disunity, its unmanageable extremes, the foreignness of some of its parts to other parts. Riding the Broadway bus recently, I was struck by the driver's almost beatific reaction to a passenger's rudeness to him. Instead of screaming back at the offending person, he smiled gently, saying with an air of contentment: 'Scream all you like. That's OK. In California they don't just argue - they shoot each other.' He was referring to the spate of freeway incidents near Los Angeles, in which impatient or stalled commuters picked each other off with rifles and handguns in the midst of the vast traffic jams.

LRB 10 December 1987 | PDF Download