The New Yorker of October 9 has a story by Mark Singer about an American convict, Richard McNair, who constantly escapes from prison. A tip takes our author to British Columbia. He rents a car in Vancouver and drives inland to Penticton.
Penticton surprises him. He discovers the city is not "an outpost in wild, inhospitable territory."
Singer has followed his subject to places like Minot, North Dakota, Ball, Louisiana, and Duncan, Oklahoma. He's been to the sinkholes of American primitivism and backwardness. And yet his astonishment is clear. Imagine, he exclaims, civilization north of the border!
What is the source of this bone-deep ignorance Americans have?
