A Clouded Crystal Ball
Robert Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness
Valerie Zander
January 1, 1999
An Empire Wilderness, Travels Into America's Future by Robert D. Kaplan, 393 pp., Random House All of us are fascinated with the unknown, and, paradoxically, want to know the future. We want financiers to predict the future of the stock market, and we want sociologists to prepare us for the turn of the millennium. We all have our pseudo-crystal balls, whether they be "end times" prophecies or tabloid predictions. Robert D. Kaplan is no stranger to this all-too-human drive. Modestly billing himself as a travel writer, Kaplan says that "travel has always been about stimulat[ing his] thinking about the future." He became a best-selling author in 1993 when he predicted the violent breakdown of Yugoslavia in his book, Balkan Ghosts. In 1995, Kaplan's attention shifted to his own country. Kaplan began a two-year journey through the United States that culminated in 1998's An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future. Kaplan had already demonstrated unusual prescience in his portrait of the former Yugoslavia. What would his vision of the future of the United States of America be? The answer: not so different from Yugoslavia. Kaplan concludes that the nation-state known as the United States is dissolving into regional city-states ("post-urban pods") checkered with racial and class enclaves. A global materialism drives this dissolution much more powerfully than politics or ideology. Disheartened by the greed he sees behind these changes, as well as by the abandonment of our "most needy citizens," Kaplan concludes that a frenetic isolation into financial bubbles (as opposed to neighborhoods) is the lot of future middle, upper-middle, and upper classes. Where did Kaplan go to see the beginning of this future? He visited out-of-the-way ...
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