The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

And in a way, they are honorable monuments to the idea that wars would involve direct confrontation and that the United States would face the dangers it imposed on other nations.

That their desert camouflage only made them stand out and that the threats to the bridge were sketchy and remote, while the men with semiautomatic weapons were evident and unnerving, articulates something about war as a state of being.

The new American cities trade in information, entertainment, tourism, software, finance. They are abstract.

Country music is a complex beast, sometimes in resistance to or mockery of the mainstream and the rural South, sometimes a mirror of or hymn to it, the product of many voices over many eras, arisen from a culture that was never pure anything, including white. (And its current listening territory includes much of the English-speaking world.)

But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

If, at the start of this story, the great divide was manifest in musical taste and distaste, that too has begun to close, as musical genres bleed into each other and no longer provide the airtight identities they once did.

I worry about the withdrawal from public space and public life. Democracy was always a bodily experience, claimed and fought for and celebrated in actual places. You must be present to win.

My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story.