As the US went to war, Paddy Woodworth was driving in the rural west, talking to people and listening to the radio. This is some of what he heard
Lone Pine is the kind of place George W. Bush might have had in mind when he issued his sheriff's challenge to Saddam Hussein to get out of town in 48 hours or face the righteous wrath of his blazing guns.
Standing beneath the snow-capped majesty of Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada, in eastern California, Lone Pine was a frontier post in real life, during the Indian wars. Then it got to repeat its history a second time, as fiction, when Hollywood chose it as a favourite early setting for Westerns.
Everyone from Gene Autry to John Wayne seems to have stayed in a now rather rundown motel on mainstreet. No doubt the Duke would have approved of the 21st century Texan's no-more-bullshit ultimatum to the bad guy in Baghdad.
I stopped there on Monday, en route on highway 395 between academic discussions on terrorism and state terrorism in universities in Reno and Los Angeles. As I was settling into my motel room, CNN announced the President had started the countdown to war.
News can still travel slowly out in the heartlands, however, even today. I was the last customer in the local restaurant, which earned me the service of two waitresses, both willing enough to chat as they closed up. What did they think of the news, I asked them. What news, they asked. No one in the restaurant had mentioned anything. They both held down second jobs as hospital orderlies, working 13-hour days to make ends meet, and were doing study courses as well. Keeping up with foreign affairs was a luxury. But if they weren't interested in the war, the war was intimately interested in at least one of them.
"My heart sinks to my boots," said the older one, quietly and flatly, when she heard what Bush had said. "I have two sons in the Gulf." It turned out she had a third son in the military, who should have been in the Pentagon the day of the September 11th attacks. It had taken her a week to get confirmation he was unharmed at that time. The prospect of facing such uncertainty over a much longer period was obviously grim.
"Are the French standing with us?" she asked, trying to muster a little hope. When she heard they weren't, she was puzzled. She thought Tony Blair was the French Prime Minister, and he seemed to be a nice man, really helpful to the President.
"I just hope it's over quickly," said the other woman. I suggested that, even if Baghdad collapsed overnight, large numbers of US forces were going to have to stay there a long time. I don't think they believed me, but they certainly didn't like the idea. One other thing baffled them. "Where was Osama bin Laden, and why haven't we got him yet?" They didn't claim to know much about the situation, but they were sure bin Laden was not in Iraq.
Confusion is a very understandable condition in America, especially if you spend a lot of time listening to your car radio. Travelling through the back country, you tend to be almost entirely exposed to hard-right talk shows. The language of these programmes is, by Irish standards, almost unbelievable. In his widely syndicated and appropriately named "Savage Nation", Michael Savage paints pictures of the US which are unrecognisable to anyone who knows and loves this wonderful country, but which win him great ratings.
"Every morning I ask myself," he rants, "whether I can face another day battling against the left-wing liberals who are destroying this land of ours." While lauding the Bush administration, he manages to give the impression that most US institutions, from the judiciary to the universities, are in the hands of "radical nihilists". Anyone who criticises Bush, on any issue, is by definition anti-American, therefore a traitor, and should leave the country, preferably for Iraq. "Anti-war protesters should be caged by the police, like the rabid animals they are."
His clone Denis Praeger calls European critics of the war "moral morons". He demands the "delegitimisation of the UN, so that the US may be legitimised as the great force for God and good in the world". As for this war, "we know we will win, we know Saddam is toast, and we know we will be good for the Iraqi people".
On the West Coast, liberal and even left-wing talk shows start to pop up on the frequencies. Their arguments, however, are sometimes equally crude and brutal. Last night I heard a San Francisco presenter - I could not catch his name or station - approving listeners who called in to say that Bush was a fascist dictator, and that the US needed to suffer more terrorist attacks for its own good.
More thoughtful liberals, however, are often deeply ambivalent about what is happening. The argument that, post-September 11th, the US needs a first-strike foreign policy to defend itself has struck a chord with more than a few people who would have been very critical of US foreign policy in the past. On the other hand, there is an almost total lack of visible jingoism on the routes I've travelled. There seem to be far fewer cars carrying US flags than there were after September 11th.
Even those who are most firmly opposed to the new Bush doctrine are aware they are swimming against a very powerful tide, however. My hosts in Los Angeles were the kind of liberal academics the talk-show hosts would like to deport. When I arrived, I found them hanging out Christmas lights as a protest against the war, then only hours away. They were fully aware of the inadequacy of the gesture, but they did it anyway.
Paddy Woodworth's book on terrorism and state terrorism in Spain, "Dirty War, Clean Hands", has just been published in the US.