Recently I wrote of my five day visit to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. I was surprised to find an American city of 30,000 with 13,000 off-island workers. The humans were deliberately segregated into exclusive residential/recreational “plantations.” Americans all across the land who can afford security guards and tolerate restrictive covenants are said to be choosing to live in such gated, restricted access communities. Not even Beverly Hills is so exclusive.

America is becoming increasingly fragmented and Hilton Headed. On the one hand There are Americans who advocate that rich and poor should live close together, with their children attending the same public schools. There are others who choose to live surrounded by fellow golfers or boat owners or shuffle board enthusiasts. Others want their children to be tutored at home or otherwise delivered from temptation and bad example of children and teachers with values different from their own homes. Is America’s center  holding?  The USA is large and rich and can afford to experiment internally with all kinds of communities: egalitarian, stratified by income, or based on love of the same sport, the same politics, the same religion, etc..

But can America afford to become one big Hilton Head Island in the midst of  a very different wider world? Perhaps America can. Read on.

My nephew  in Brisbane, Australia  recently introduced to me the firm Strategic Forecasting L.L.C. in Austin, Texas with web site at www.stratfor.com.  I have just read Strategic Forecasting’s “Annual Forecast for 1998”: a tour d’horizon of the entire world.

Were the Forecast’s authors talking about a nation well on the way to becoming Hilton Head writ large when they assessed America’s position in the world? Judge for yourself. Here are some excerpts from that report:

--”The United States appears oblivious to world events because it has become so powerful that those events are of little consequence to it.”

--”The United States does not provide leadership because its power has grown so enormous that it genuinely does not feel it requires followers. It does what it wants as it wants.”

--”The fact is that, sooner or later, virtually every nation in the world must deal with the United States on matters that are of fundamental interest to it, but about which the United States is indifferent.”

--”This is a situation that is increasingly intolerable to the rest of the world. Consequently, nations are seeking to discover levers with which to manipulate the United States--or at the very least, to get its undivided attention.” 
(End of excerpts.)

A second metaphor. In my first column about Hilton Head, I  described the 1973 British film “ZARDOZ,” starring Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling. In a post-cataclysmic Ireland a superior, now immortal, remnant had set themselves up securely behind a force field to live lives of sybaritic indulgence and soft headed philosophizing. Outside their dome, however, the ground down peasants of Ireland supplied needed provisions to the latter day Lotus Eaters.  In the end the inferiors  overthrew  this gated community and plunged its effete inhabitants back into mortal realities.  

I ask now: Can America afford to live like the pampered, oblivious savants of ZARDOZ? Within our borders there is surely room for thousands of  monasteries, Camelots, Hilton Heads and the like: most, let us pray, hard working, but some dedicated only to ease. Can the nation as a whole play Hilton Head to the world? If the excerpts above from Strategic Forecasting are correct, we are already trying out that role. 

A third comparison. Do you recall the cartoon about people in the bow of a rowboat simply enjoying the view and preening? Meanwhile the stern is going under the waves despite people in the stern baling out the water. One of the oblivious, complacent passengers in the bow yawns, “Deuced nasty leak in the back. Lucky it’s not at our end of the boat!”

Three images: Hilton Head, ZARDOZ and a boat whose stern will sink but its bow will not. Will America’s cosmic future  be made up of the worst, most unrealistic elements of these three scenarios? 

If so, then we have seen America’s future and it will not work. 

As I typed these lines, an Associated Press breaking news bulletin came over the internet, “Toll Era Rolls Onto Hilton Head.”  On January 16, 1998 a ribbon was cut officially  opening the $81 million Cross Island Parkway which will whisk cars for a dollar into the heart of the island. It is a boon to the 13,000 less affluent who live off island but work there. For they can save up to 50 minutes of on-island driving during peak tourist seasons. AP also reported that residents requested and got a more upscale name for the new toll road than the proposed “Cross Island Expressway.” This scaling upwards was editorialized to be “not surprising in a town that once required the Red Roof Inn to install a brown roof.”

On Hilton Head Island sits a beautiful, clean, exciting city of which residents are rightfully proud. But can the United States of America afford to become the Hilton Head Island of Planet Earth? Some Americans do dream of this kind of USA: one where we close our borders to the poor and unskilled who have no pre-existing family ties here, cut back on most forms of unskilled legal immigration, especially of non-Europeans, and heap unending scorn on the United Nations which Americans once created in our own image. “The world is too much with us,” we sometimes lament. 

For a little island to become Camelot is one thing. Can an entire continental republic wrap a force field of exclusion around itself? I think not. America is rich but not so rich that it can afford to ignore those "deuced nasty leaks" in the farther reaches of Rowboat Earth. 
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