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There goes the neighbourhood: Paul James finds an insidious underside to the culture of neighbourliness in the United States.

Article Excerpt
Here in St Louis, Garrison Keilor's Prairie Home Companion radio show is on Sundays around lunch-time. I did not recognise his voice at first--he used to be syndicated on ABC radio in Australia until funding cuts meant that our national broadcaster could not afford the public-radio rates--I thought the program was another of the many religious homily shows that dominates the airways. Across the dial here, both on AM and FM, all that it is possible to find on Sundays is sport or religion, and I'm not sure why I stopped on this station.

Garrison Keilor's voice has become mellow with age, but his gentle satire about hometown America continues, as does his obvious revelling in the banal, loving details of place. The episode from Kansas City had him and others singing praises to the flatlands--the sense of space that comes from a landscape that stretches across the plains for miles without a hill or valley--while expressing gentle concern about the takeover of flatland life by cell phones and the invasions of the Evangelites.com.

Religious evangelism is being keenly debated across the airwaves, and the latest public discussion in the United States is about whether or not there was 'intelligent design' in the universe. This became the context for Garrison Keilor to throw his concern into the conversation that the chaos after Katrina 'sort of challenges the notion of "intelligent design" in New Orleans'--or at least it seems, says Garrison, that George W Bush and his team might have missed out on that aspect of God's work. Different perspectives on how the federal and state governments handled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are splitting the nation, but one thing continues to hold the country together: neighbourhood is important. Everybody is in favour of good neighbourliness as long as it does not cost too much.

Signs of neighbourhood figure everywhere. Seventh-day Adventists come to the front door and say 'Hello neighbour, we'd like to introduce ourselves, and share with you your thoughts. We were wondering in the aftermath...

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