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Three or four years ago a monster storm swept across the centre of the united states and wrapped the land in a coat of ice. From an aeroplane a few days later, the country looked enamelled. Beneath the creamy porcelain the patterns of life in Oklahoma and Missouri revealed themselves in minimal relief: the grids of towns and suburbs, the linking roads, the gigantic circles marking crops. In this immense stillness and silence, suggesting a nuclear winter or a new ice age, the lines etched in the rime took on exaggerated meaning, as if they might contain essential facts about a lost civilisation.

The fact of the automobile for instance; and Big Oil, which fuelled it; and the strip malls, which made the car indispensable to commerce, including commerce in food; and agribusiness, which made the greater part of United States farming a state-subsidised vertically integrated corporate industry and an alarmingly large number of American citizens obese. Those lines etched in the ice were the sinews of power and influence, though a great many of the people down in the ice would say that they were there by God’s will. Either way, something in their design suggested that, for all the clamour and glory of its suburbs and satellites, poetry and bars, more than just the will of the people and the tenets of the Constitution underlay American democracy.