months. To make things a little easier, you have a cartographer on hand to
print everything in neatly. The end product will be your personal map of
the "Alternative Structure of the Union"-your own personal "ASU".
Your personal ASU will be very much like the USA in the area where
you grew up. Furthermore, wherever your travels have chanced to lead
you, or wherever you have perused maps with interest, your ASU will have
spots of striking agreement with the USA: a few small towns in North
Dakota or Montana, perhaps, or the whole of metropolitan New York,
might be quite faithfully reproduced in your ASU.
A Surprise ReversalWhen your ASU is done, a surprise takes place. Magically, the country you
have designed comes into being, and you are transported there. A friendly
committee presents you with your favorite kind of automobile, and ex-
plains that, "As a reward for your designing efforts, you may now enjoy an
all-expense-paid trip, at a leisurely pace, around the good old A. S. of U.
You may go wherever you want, do whatever you wish to do, taking as long
as you wish-compliments of the Geographical Society of the ASU.
And-to guide you around-here is a road atlas." To your surprise, you
are given not the atlas which you de:;igned, but a regular road atlas of the
USA.
When you embark on your trip, all sorts of curious incidents will take
place. A road atlas is being used to guide you through a country which it
only partially fits. As long as you stick to major freeways, you will probably
be able to cross the country without gross confusions. But the moment you
wander off into the byways of New Mexico or rural Arkansas, there will be
adventure in store for you. The locals will not recognize any of the towns
you're looking for, nor will they know the roads you're asking about. They
will only know the large cities you name, and even then the routes to those
cities will not be the same as are indicated on your map. It will happen
occasionally that some of the cities which are considered huge by the locals
are nonexistent on your map of the USA; or perhaps they exist, but their
population according to the atlas is wrong by an order of magnitude.Centrality and UniversalityWhat makes an ASU and the USA, which are so different in some ways,
nevertheless so similar? It is that their most important cities and routes of
communication can be mapped onto each other. The differences between
them are found in the less frequently traveled routes, the cities of smaller
size, and so on. Notice that this cannot be characterized either as a local or a
global isomorphism. Some correspondences do extend down to the very
local level-for instance, in both New Yorks, the main street may be Fifth
Avenue, and there may be a Times Square in both as well-yet there may
not be a single town that is found in both Montanas. So the local-global(^374) Minds and Thoughts