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My travels in early 2001: Andrew Hodges Out We$t |
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Gran Canaria: pages 1 | 2 | 3 America (east): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 America (west): pages 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 and page 10 More pages will follow. | |
In February 2001 I made a first visit for many years to the United States — starting here. Then I got some more invitations so I arranged another short trip.
Tuesday 10 April 2001
This time I arrive from London at O'Hare airport, Chicago, so starting right in the heartland of America, where much of the modern world was invented with its industrial-scale animal slaughter. This cheery thought arises
because I'm coming from Britain at its peak of the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic.
 | The immigration hall is full of warnings, but it's still in the nineteenth century world of DNA control. Luckily I haven't been on a British ranch.
As I trek across the gigantic airport, I reflect that a twenty-first century agribusiness with GM organisms now lies behind the mid-West economy. And a deepening trade war with the European Union over what human beings may eat and, ultimately, what their bodies can be. |
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I wait for the connecting flight. It turns out be packed solid with humanity and its over-the-top baggage, and weaves through tremendous stacked storm clouds to St Louis. My destination is McKendree College, Lebanon, Illinois, a small liberal arts college. Bryan Ross, who is temporarily teaching in its Computer Science department, meets me at St Louis airport. But he has to go immediately to Las Vegas for his doctoral viva. So his partner Litzco takes over. She drives me through downtown St Louis... | |
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| ...across the Mississippi into Illinois and through East St Louis... | ... and twenty miles out to Lebanon, one of the oldest towns in Illinois (1804). |
| Lebanon is what I would call a village. It has proudly restored some houses of what Americans oddly call the Victorian period. Charles Dickens stayed in 1842. This is it. | |
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It's not exactly Las Vegas, but as long as I use plenty of imagination this view from the porch of the Bed and Breakfast reminds me of the wonderful dusks of the West when the urban strips come to life with neon lights.
The landlady studies the bible on her computer. I whisper to myself, www.landoverbaptist.org, as I stumble in the dark along muddy verges to the pizza restaurant down the road, enormous trucks hurtling past in close succession.
Wednesday 11 April 2001
On breakfast TV I see that yesterday's storm was serious: baseball-sized hailstones have trashed condos. Gemütlich folk offer household tips on cleaning and pet care and want to witness Timothy McVeigh being killed.The outgoing chair of the Computer Science department, Gary Newell, meets me and takes me to the campus. We discuss:
- McKendree students are mostly from Illinois, and many of them have never been out of the state, some never outside the local counties.
- Computer science students have it made: if they learn current applications they can walk into jobs with well over $60,000 salaries. (Gary's new department in North Kentucky University makes a point of this.)
- There aren't nearly enough US applicants to fill the vacancies for US teachers of computer science: they have to come from the rest of the world.
- Soccer is coming into US campuses with Latin American students leading the game.
My talk about Alan Turing fits into an inter-disciplinary series run by a Canadian sociologist, Stephen Muzzatti, a big guy who studies the life of the kids in East St Louis, the poorest city in the United States. I see he helps Students Against Social Injustice.
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Lunch in a diner. I love American diners. And the college is being really generous to me: it cheerfully pays the equivalent of a month of my Oxford salary to cover the costs of this visit.
I give another talk, this time on fundamental physics. I don't try to explain twistors but I do indicate some scepticism about whether superstrings are the answer to everything.
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Gary takes care of me. His wife Ann senses me as a 1968-er who wouldn't fit in this suburban prairie. She's right. She has seen my mathematical physique pictures and thinks I might like to go to the gym. She is right! Gary takes me to the local Y and we both work out. | |
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The equipment is much better than what I use in Oxford. And I have a swim. This is a cool academic visit. I have always admired the way US life works so well for the 75% who are not poor or in jail: robust, high-quality, 24/7 can-do attitude, everything works. But I also begin to sense the anger of middle-class professionals who feel themselves squeezed by super-rich fraudsters, and an anxiety that hard work will not guarantee economic security. |
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| Driving under a dull sky, over a featureless landscape, Gary gives me some background about its history: the railroad workers, the redundant Mid-America airport, the Scott Air Force base. | ||
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| Then to a shopping mall, to eat. Here are Gary, Bryan and Litzco. Bryan is just back from Las Vegas. We're joined by the sociology faculty. I feel such a warm welcome, with such plain speaking and strong feeling about people and ideas of all kinds. No college in Brit-land is like this. | We all go on to a bar in Lebanon main street. It's not like a Brit campus bar: the faculty outnumber students. The few cute short-haired lads are all ROTC. We play pool. Gary is a champ, with trophies in his office. Bryan has only one arm, but he beats me. | |
Thursday 12 April 2001
In a bright dawn, the landlady watches me eat breakfast. She has no idea from my accent that I am British and is amazed to hear that I am now going to California.Bryan drives me single-handed to St Louis airport through commuter traffic on fast six-lane highways, while asking me about how I met Stephen Hawking. This is an extremely exciting drive but...
...I like trams.
| Soon I'm off on Southwest Air. In a few hours I shall cover the conquests of the nineteenth century: |  |
 my Second Home Page |
Fly over: |
 my images |
A D V E R T I S I N G
