A Landside View

Sasabe, Arizona Everyone has seen, in a Sunday newspaper or child’s playbook, those puzzles that consist of a rectangular outline enclosing 50 or 100 numbered dots scattered in what seems a meaningless confusion. When, following instructions, you start drawing with your pencil from dot #1 to #2, #3 and so on in sequence, there miraculously emerges a picture of Christmas at Grandpa’s, the Old Barn Yard, or an Afternoon at the Circus. Our country as known through jet planes becomes abstracted into one of those rectangles as it appears before the line is penciled in. The un-patterned dots are the big cities with jet ports. Between them is the unfeatured meaninglessness of the empty flight at 40,000 feet.

For pencil you’ve got to take the train—if there is still passenger service between this dot and the next— or more usually, nowadays, a car— preferably avoiding, however, the turnpikes and interstate highways that stretch through a kind of anonymous nth dimension. A long trek by train or car at least reminds you that between dots there is human stuffing: that there are lots of people doing lots of things in lots of ways in lots of places.

JB

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James Burnham

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Barry Goldwater

Sasabe, Arizona Everyone has seen, in a Sunday newspaper or child’s playbook, those puzzles that consist of a rectangular outline enclosing 50 or 100 numbered dots scattered in what seems a meaningless confusion. When, following instructions, you start drawing with your pencil from dot #1 to #2, #3 and so on in sequence, there miraculously emerges a picture of Christmas at Grandpa’s, the Old Barn Yard, or an Afternoon at the Circus. Our country as known through jet planes becomes abstracted into one of those rectangles as it appears before the line is penciled in. The un-patterned dots are the big cities with jet ports. Between them is the unfeatured meaninglessness of the empty flight at 40,000 feet.

For pencil you’ve got to take the train—if there is still passenger service between this dot and the next— or more usually, nowadays, a car— preferably avoiding, however, the turnpikes and interstate highways that stretch through a kind of anonymous nth dimension. A long trek by train or car at least reminds you that between dots there is human stuffing: that there are lots of people doing lots of things in lots of ways in lots of places.