BUSHSPEAK.

The roadkill on the highway west of El Paso, our southernmost interstate, is mostly jackrabbits and coyotes. For miles, the blacktop is hemmed by cattle pens, and the smell of sunbaked dung sweetens the air. Beneath the near-hundred-degree heat of a cloudless late-summer sky, the scrubby West Texas landscape is ash-dry, except in the startlingly green oases created by irrigation or the flat muddy cuts of the Rio Grande. Everything about the place--"out here," as people say, or "down here"--announces itself, totemically, as belonging to America's southwestern border and seems to imply a set of choices and attitudes, a particular way of life. But those choices and attitudes ...