My wife and I also travel whenever we can afford to. But we don’t spend much time googling at the Alps, the Eiffel Tower, or the Tyrrhenian Sea. We’d rather stop and talk with the people we meet. This is often difficult when we speak different languages, but it’s almost unfailingly rewarding. And almost invariably the conversation will turn to events occurring in the United States’ spheres of influence. During the Clinton years, we were quizzed about the motives behind Congress’s apparent monomania over sexual escapades in the White House; during the Bush years, about John Wayne foreign policy and the Iraq War. And once, during the Reagan presidency, I drank (with really bad homemade wine) a toast proposed by a Catalan schoolteacher to the “besta Presidente Uniteda States ever had! – Rinaldo Reagan!” When I asked per cosa, he was pretty graphic, but the gist of it was that Reagan had restored our national testosterone supply.

So I’ve been at pains, in order to explain us, to try first to understand us – not an easy task. This has led me back to a book we were assigned in prep school in 1952, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I didn’t read it then, but recently found a copy in a book store in Brattleboro, brought it home with a sigh, and too late realized it was only Volume II. Holy Toledo! Heavy going. But I’m digging through it, like a coal miner hacking away at a seam of anthracite.

As if by coincidence, I also happened to borrow my wife’s copy of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, which she’d been urging me to read (so of course I hadn’t read it). It happened to fall open at the author’s incredible photograph of K-2, which held me for half an hour as I tried to imagine routes and camps on its various ridges, faces, and couloirs. Then, intrigued, I tackled the text, and hardly put it down for the next couple of days. The two books created a sort of harmonic convergence.

Tocqueville, a descendant of Normans who fought with William the Conqueror at Hastings in 1066, was a thoroughgoing aristocrat with liberal republican impulses who, when push came to shove in the June 1848 Paris Uprising, sided with the conservatives against the socialists. But he was a keen and evenhanded observer, and on an official French Government visit to America in 1831 to study our prison system, also produced his impressions and conclusions about our unique new nation and its citizens. He was here during the turbulent presidency of Andrew Jackson, and seems to have traveled almost everywhere and talked to everyone he met.

Among other things, he predicted a severe civil upheaval over slavery, a practice which, of course, Jackson supported. He also foretold the conflict between the United States and Russia – a pretty bright prognostication for 1835! He saw Americans as disputatious, impatient people enjoying a form of government whose value not many comprehended, as they scrabbled for economic security and dominance. He noted our frequent resort to religion and our contempt for intellectuals, aristocrats, and government authority, and feared that American-style democracy might lead to tyranny of the ignorant prejudices of an unenlightened majority. He notes several times our impatience, which Jackson, of all people, practically embodied.

Which prefigures the present, in which official United States policies both domestic and foreign, display, above all else, impatience. Got a problem? Throw lots of money at it. If that doesn’t work, shoot it. Everybody in charge seems to be looking only as far ahead as the next quarterly report, the next stockholders’ meeting, or the next election. At the same time, the blogosphere is full of incredibly stupid rantings about elitist conspiracies. (Note to Birthers: Don’t send me any more photocopies of President Obama’s “real” birth certificate. If he can do the job, I don’t care if he was born on the moon!) Tocqueville’s predictions seem to be eerily prescient.   Meanwhile, in the high, isolated mountain valleys of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Greg Mortenson, with the support of private donors to his Central Asia Institute, is building village schools, especially for girls, who in a land of madrassas for the education of boys are often ignored or suppressed – some of Mortenson’s schools have been vandalized. He has paid teachers whose government salaries have not come through, drilled wells, and built irrigation systems for waterless villages and refugee camps. His life has often been threatened, but he is making progress. Village elders from all around seek him out to plead for schools in their villages.

To read Mortenson’s description of the bombardment of a Pakistani farm village by Indian artillery is to appreciate the futility and horror of military solutions to problems. To read the story of his quixotic mission simply to build schools is to appreciate the true value of education, which is at its heart a more patient path than we have so far been willing to take. No politician can be elected in our country without a solemn pledge to protect our national security above all other interests. But for a tiny fraction of the cost of flying deadly drones over the heads of civilians and Taliban alike, we could be educating boys and girls alike and promoting economic activity. The Taliban and other insurgents thrive in the darkness of hopelessness; they must wither when the people become educated. Only then will we be truly secure. Skip Tocqueville if you like, but read this book!