Dispatch from Colorado Springs

It is early October 2010, and I am in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on my way to a session about planning city budgets, at not quite six in the evening. The sun has just set behind Pikes Peak, and the dying light throws a purple glow off the mountain. This is the same luminescence that Katharine Lee Bates noted in 1893 when she lived here and taught English at The Colorado College—the same department and university that employ me now—and that she remembered two years later in her famous poem about majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain. It is because of that mountain—America’s mountain, as it is sometimes called—that people come here, to see for themselves the inarguable natural beauty of this place.

It is a warm evening and I have the radio tuned to the six o’clock news on NPR. The news tonight is all out of Europe, where mass protests have erupted in response to sweeping...