BENJAMIN EDWARDS  WRITINGS   To the Convenient Landscape and Back: The Effects of Mobility, 1997 
I. Expansion    II. The Rational Services The Romantic    III. Resistance is Futile    IV. Taxonomy, Classification, Analysis    V. Thematics    VI. Collapse    VII. The Welcome      Bibliography

Expansion

The foundation of the American Experience has been a constant faith in the freedom of the infinite. Its history is one of movement and consumption, driven by the will to escape, and mixed with a demand for convenience; it is a tradition of the visionary and the ever-looking, sometimes to the future, sometimes to the past, often simultaneously, always nostalgically, in anticipation and in flux--
a tradition of the not-here.
This history has its roots in the great American ideals of Freedom and Opportunity, embodied in the models of the Puritans and the Pioneers, imbued with a mandate to move from God. Behind Manifest Destiny was an economic drive to consume the land: movement westward was not only a freedom but a duty. The continent was considered so vast, so empty, that it was infinitely consumable.
A Romantic escapism pervades the American tradition, in part a vestige of the elsewhere inclination of its founders, but more so, a reaction to the consequences of industrialism. As the ill effects of the Industrial Revolution began to choke its beneficiaries, the cycle of escape-consume-exhaust propelled itself, driving a nostalgic search for pure, unspoiled Nature. The first rugged-individualist pioneer of escapism was the Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who in 1845 sought spiritual truth and purity of living at Walden Pond, just outside the bounds of a corrupted society, yet still close enough to civilization to reap its benefits. Around the same time, the Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole presented the American landscape mythologically in its unadulterated form, populated only by representatives of the bucolic life, perhaps a shepherd or a fairy-tale castle or a Greek temple. Later in the nineteenth century, Albert Bierstadt's paintings romanticized the wilderness of the American West, exaggerating the grandeur of the landscape, virtually advertising westward expansion, but with an ironic sense of loss.
This backward quest for Arcadia as Utopia represents a contradictory escapism which looked to the past for the virtues of pre-industrial life while simultaneously looking to the future, to the frontier, for the means of escape. The contradiction lies in the inevitability of industrialism, commercialism, and convenience following the pioneers of the escape: quickly trailing the suburbanite has always been a support system for movement which facilitates the growth and spread of that which prompted the initial flight, the effects of urbanization. The cycle of escape-consume-exhaust thus perpetuated itself through the development and expansion of industrial progress, emblematized by the railroad pushing the frontier into virgin territory.
If the story of American movement through the nineteenth century can be illustrated by the infinity of one-point perspective, the progress of the Iron Road reaching westward, this century has seen that uni-directional movement ricochet back into itself to form a more pure, wandering movement, in the infinite web of the American roadway. Through the individual mobility which it allowed, the automobile came to represent freedom, and with its spread in the 1920s came the novelty of the drive for its own pleasure, not necessarily to go somewhere, but simply to go, not to escape in any particular direction, rather escape as an end in itself. By the 1950s, the convenience of the automobile grew along with the middle class, the interstate highway system was begun, and the continent was being covered by a federally sponsored infrastructure of convenient mobility, a vast circulatory system connecting cities and passing through emptiness and the unknown. The underside of this rational infrastructure of convenience, meant to fuel the consumer-driven economy, is an escapist Romanticism which is as directionless, aimless, and purposeless as the tangle of the road, a nomadic, On The Road mobility for its own sake. In the automobile, the individual moves easily and anonymously through the endless flow-- the escape of infinite circulation.
Mobility is liquid consumption, and the American ideal of Freedom is now the pure escape, tempered by convenience, offered by joining the flow. Freedom is now the ability to move away from a place, away from a moment, to move from here to there, wherever that happens to be, not in a progressive direction as in the nineteenth century, but in the form of a snarled Manifest Destiny to move and consume, turned infinitely onto its own aims. If the goal of Industrial American movement was to traverse, the mobility of today can only serve to saturate.
The American history and tradition of the not-here has become the ubiquitous American condition of no-place and the transitional.