Land of plenty.(On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense)(Book Review)

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, by David Brooks (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25)

IT'S Big Map season again.

Art departments in every newspaper and TV station are humming with activity, as designers try to come up with this election's simplistic graphic metaphor. Red states and blue states, I think we'll all agree, have been done to death. The challenge now is to create something new, but equally pointless, in time for Election Night.

Because that night, in front of all of those Big Maps, in new suits and ties and smiling knowingly, will come the Parade of the Pretenders--experts and "strategists" and "consultants"--who will say things like, "Tom, Ohio is a state that's been hit hard by the reverse productivity boom of the past three years," or "Judy, West Virginia is a state in transition with a surprising number of progressive tendencies," or "Peter, Pennsylvania is really three states, each with its own problems adapting to the new global economy." It's all blather, of course. For most of those talking heads, a trip though the McDonald's drive-thru on the way to the summer house is about all the America they can handle. They toss around phrases like "soccer mom" and "new economy," but the patter rings hollow. America, for them, is a place you visit, like Costa Rica or Prague: colorful, complicated, surprisingly religious, interesting food, that sort of thing.

Still, they know that something is happening in America; something big. Population patterns, family structures, neighborhood aspirations--these are all shifting quietly and massively. Things are changing out there, west of Riverside Drive and east of Wilshire Boulevard, but the Big Maps don't show it. They depict--and the network windbags will wheeze about--what Donald Rumsfeld might call Old America.

For a discussion of New America, you've got to turn to David Brooks, whose new book, On Paradise Drive, is a lively, deft, and breezy answer to the question that vexes the Big Map Makers: Who are we? Who are we really?

On Paradise Drive has a lot of different answers to that question.