A vision of America on the highway
I wrote the other day that in escaping the airport, I felt again a free man. This is in part because I came under the influence of my driver, who seemed almost an older cousin, taking me under his wing, with humor & firmness, to teach me about the American dream, as well as to suggest what man's eternal destiny might be. Reader, in the half hour it takes to get from Dulles to the sleepy suburbs of DC, which although they are not stately they are full of the unshakeable confidence that wealth is a shield from unpleasantness & indeed mortality, I almost became a capitalist. I certainly became an admirer of these fellows whose success is premised on their willingness, even eagerness, to achieve such things as our institutions tell us the great innumerable people out there in America demand, if they are to have comfort & contentment. Servants of their fellow men, they work for a living, even philanthropists, I would go so far as to call them, these fellows are more hopeful about America than anyone else I have met. They would honestly prefer it if civilization survived.
My app indicated that I was to wait for a white Honda, one of these new cars that I have been told are made for women, no longer sedans, but not yet SUVs, it's not quite a family car, a station wagon, they used to say, but it's not a man's car, at least, but it is somehow a mix of all these things that used to articulate American civilization, since an American's car is somehow his home. Another like it was waiting in the parking lot, in the pickup area, & I had time to look it over & wonder whether it was made so because gas is expected to be very cheap, or also because there's an expectation that one would prefer to survive some inevitable crash into some other, hopefully smaller vehicle, or also because these uglier, taller cabins somehow reassure drivers of some comfort by making them forget about cars, engines, horsepower... As & when the app indicated, the car arrived & I forgot these things. My driver let me know, I came in on the wide wings of autumn, whose great shadow cooled DC a good twenty degrees overnight, restoring the natural delights of that land after the evils of summer, encouraging mankind to be civil again, though all innocence was lost.
Then night fell, we followed the giant strips & canyons of the highway system, the elegant lines of the belts connecting the highways, designed to encourage men to fly, slightly tilted to contain the forces we unleashed with the invention of internal combustion engines, an architecture as abstract as it is our own, following from the demands we make for the exercise of the disciplined, scientific will—aiming at objects to which we build the way, & starting from the end to go to that beginning where we think we will understand ourselves, guided by the navigation machines that measure our way there, our eyes following paths lit by lights of our own design, our confidence the sum of the successes of millions of others like ourselves each day experimenting, every deed a scientific truth...
So there was nothing left to do but talk as we supervised the machines that were supervising our situation. My Indian driver started telling me about America & India. The app had indicated he had driven some five thousand other people before, which astonished me—all these people who had depended on him & rated him five stars, like a general, out of their neediness becoming somehow his sheep to shepherd on their way. I'm not sure I drove but a few people in my time, & I'm the same middle age as him, but as green as he is seasoned. This he knew as soon as he looked at me. He said, he was driving because there was nothing else to do, since his wife was in India just then. This struck me as infinitely romantic. I had asked him what the driving was like, with gas prices & every other part of our recession economy… He laughed it off, it's a bad situation, & contemptible, but it is nothing to the one who possesses the art of arts, which guarantees success. I saw suddenly that America had been mad to elect Biden president instead of someone like my driver, since the decrepit Biden isn't even able to worry this astonishing fellow with the power of the state behind his failing flesh... Alone, out there in the country, in Virginia, I listened to the story of his life.
He said he considers Americans fools for arguing with one another all the time & despising their own country. He was proudly amused by the weak, hysterical complaints of black & white Americans, who neither see that they are headed for disaster, nor that they are making it worse by their harshness, nor yet that they encourage laziness or enervation or madness in their progeny by their obsession with the past. He said he had got himself a cheap education at Texas A&M, in computer science, in the grad school, even though he paid out-of-state tuition. It was hardly more than twenty thousand dollars, he had then made this much in the first two months of work after graduation, as a software engineer. He said stem courses, science, tech, engineering, math, are the cheapest, yet Americans don't take them. His wife, whom he had met there, was also a teaching assistant in the program, so in fact she was paid by the college to study, & was a shining success. He said nothing of the professors. They two considered the deal a bargain, a steal, & were very content to have taken it. In the comparison, he held himself in contempt, for his previous Masters degree had been in mechanical engineering. Her hands had ever been clean, I surmised. Their partnership made them not only debt-free, but assured them happiness, twin souls modestly protecting themselves from the environing fools. To be married is to be sensible. He never uttered a word to suggest a complaint about his life. But he did not say go Aggies. He said a young man he had recently driven had told him about volunteering for crushing student debt to study some musical subject, because it was his passion. My driver despised this as slavery. He told me that passion dies in poverty. He said he had been born poor in India, nearabouts Hyderabad, the entire family living in a room, cramped & not infrequently hungry. His mother would buy a gallon of milk & dilute it with gallons of water, they, the children, pretending that they do not know, & yet full of respect for their mother because they already understood that there was no more to be had. He did not dwell on this matter. He said that if you make the right choices, you succeed. He said he owned a house in Virginia, outside DC, worth almost two million dollars. He was pleased, but free of vanity, as one who would continue in his path as so many others diverge from it.
My driver said two more things, first that he was Army reserve. He had deployed previously. He did not talk much about serving in the military, perhaps out of modesty. The subject came up in his discussion of American politics, his experience of the problems that made him go mind his own business: Lectures or seminars on extremism in the army & critical race theory, of course. He said some condescending white lady wanted to do HR exercises with him trying to get him to understand extremism & he made a fool of her in front of the men, because he did not like being treated as inferior. He insisted his English was better than hers & so was his understanding of American politics. He told her America is a funny place where all the pro-life people are against vaccines & are taking quite some risks with their lives, but all the pro-choice people are for mandatory vaccines & seem quite ready to take away everyone’s freedom, so it’s no use trying to call just one party extremist, they are all crazy. He said, his CO had warned the lady not to mess with him because he’s the cleverest man in the unit, & that the men respect him for his education, & yet the white lady wanted to explain white privilege to him. He was proud that although he always obeyed his officers, he’d do things his own way & think about a problem before he started to execute orders, & he would always make fun of people trying to boss him around. Above all, he was contemptuous of the people who talk about extremism in the army. He said he that thinks that when the white people get angry, it will be impossible for anyone else to live in the country.
He contrasted America with India, which he said had been enslaved for centuries by Muslims, who tried to force their religion from the invading elites on to the people, & then conquered by the British Empire, but was not endlessly angry about the past or vengeful. He said that the Indians had learned some lessons & would never be conquered again, but were otherwise pleased to become wealthy & powerful rather than fractious. Then he explained his admiration of PM Modi at length. He said he was the first man to make the Indians proud, because before his time, the party of the Congress, Gandhi / Nehru, was elitist & so everyone who could not speak English was despised, but now with Modi, those who only speak Indian languages are proud. He said Modi’s popularity was incomparable with any other world leader, above 80%, & the only reasons it’s not much higher is the Muslims, who really don’t like him. He said, the national parties, the Congress Party & Modi’s BJP (Indian People’s Party), used to be much weaker in the South, but now BJP is incredibly strong, winning every election, & if Modi has ten more years of life, he will transform & modernize the country. He said his enemies & the international press hoped he would lose the most 2019 elections because of his many shocking changes, but they were all proven wrong & he won the greatest victory in Indian politics. He added that the same voices are now hoping he will lose in 2024, because of COVID, but the polls prove they are wrong. He said with great satisfaction that Modi always proves people wrong—he does something, they think it will fail, & then he succeeds. He explained that Modi had forced all Indians to change their banknotes recently & it was a great trouble to many people, long queues for weeks at banks, but in the end the satisfaction was great, first because all the corrupt rich people who had vast quantities of cash they could not legally justified were thwarted by Modi’s prudence & then because he secured the country against the Pakistani enemies, since before Modi, India bought the paper for printing money in Pakistan, which helped people there counterfeit rupees & flood Kashmir with fake money to pay for terrorism, which had since gone down by 90%. I was astonished to hear this latter feat, but as to the former, I thought I could understand why Indian populism is so successful. He said, Modi also forced everyone to get a digital identity tied to a bank account & therefore take the country beyond cash payments in the very near future, again, in the face of much criticism & skepticism, yet he did it very successfully & Indians adapted to the new technology very quickly, which helps commerce & small businesses. So in all these ways Modi was a hero of the people & his success against entrenched Indian elites & international opposition came from his ability to make up his own mind & stand up for himself on the world stage, the first Indian leader to be famous everywhere. He concluded with an almost resigned expression: In ten years, India & America will be enemies because the liberals in America hate Modi & are always complaining about Hindu nationalism.