Home to mother, at last. (Devine).

TOM RIDGE, the US Secretary of Homeland Defense, says his country is more vulnerable to terrorism than most because of "the magnitude of what goes on here". Not even the most fanatic hater of America could deny it magnitude. It is a magnitude that makes good sense of the Howard government's moves towards closer association with the United States. It would have been in Australia's best interests to make this move sixty years ago, in our postwar peak of esteem for and curiosity about America. Australia has travelled down many blind alleys and lost much momentum by not choosing this path when the moment was so right.

Having lived in the USA for a quarter of my adult life, my awe at its magnitude kept under control for the long haul by God's gifts of scepticism and comic perception, I experienced a refreshment of wonder during two months spent in a fine borrowed house amidst the wintry villages and farms of southern Virginia.

My excursion there, more than a decade after my last prolonged sojourn in America, was not by any means a reportorial mission. What I was up to was an opportunistic exploitation of old friends' willingness to swap their house in Virginia for a while with mine in Sydney. This was coupled with a desire to experience a northern winter again after a lengthy wallow in endless summer, and to refresh my feeling for America. Idleness was my intended companion and it kept the tryst.

I mingled a fair bit with Americans, some I have known a long time, and nearly all not young, not poor, not "progressive", people who are pleased with their country and, generally speaking, with the way their lives have turned out. I can't, therefore, claim to have investigated a cross-section of America but my small sample illuminates, at least for me, the contribution to their nation's magnitude made by each individual, all 300 million of them, acting freely and independently in a society that seeks to place each of them above institutions.

The coincidence of my being in America while important events were playing out appealed to my weaker side as an alibi for idleness. Thus I could look busy reading the Washington Post daily and the New York Times frequently, irritated as usual by the latter for its weather-vaning search for a firm liberal stand on events that would not ultimately leave it looking like a mug. Fox and CNN and NBC constantly watched also provided an illusion of purposeful action. But having attempted no other profession than journalism, it is likely my addiction to news would have had me watching, anyway, without President Bush's State of the Union speech to hear, Colin Powell's cool unmasking of Saddam Hussein at the United Nations, Hans Blix's reports to the Security Council on the frustration of weapons inspectors in Iraq--and the heartbreaking crash of the space shuttle Columbia.

I had also stocked up on books about the American War of Independence, perhaps in an effort further to mask idleness with a pretence of scholarly research, but also--especially since I was living in Virginia, where so many events of the war unfolded--because I felt genuinely embarrassed by my flimsy grasp of the details of this seminal revolutionary struggle.

European divisions over Iraq gave a frisson to my living just down the road from Yorktown, where George Washington won his final victory over the British, and Lord Cornwallis mournfully exclaimed: "It is a world turned upside down."

It is a world that has stayed that way, too, for all the generations of European denial, yea, even unto the present one. "In its principles of action," recently wrote Regis Debray, a former adviser to Francois Mitterrand, "fundamentalist" America was "two or three centuries" behind "secular" Europe. "We are an old country," sneered the French ambassador to the UN, which, given France's foreign policy choices over the past couple of hundred years, was as relevant to the debate on Iraq as if the New Zealand ambassador had declared, "We are a muddy country." ("We are an ancient country," said the Chinese ambassador in a sleek demonstration of the Chinese talent for irony and one-upmanship). "America is like Gary Cooper's sheriff in High Noon," claimed a German commentator, Joseph Joffee, suggesting that Germans are at least two or three decades behind almost everybody in freshness of literary allusion. And, of course, there was the British opinion poll which showed Saddam Hussein to be more popular than George W. Bush.

The loftiness of manner of much European criticism of America during the Iraq countdown seemed entirely bizarre to me, as I idled in Virginia, absorbing the magnitude of America and reflecting on the reality of Comwallis's upside down being Washington's--and, as I hope it is becoming clear, Australia's--right side up.

How does one portray America's magnitude? You have magnitude when the federal government can propose tax cuts worth $670 billion. But statistics are a feeble way of describing anything and once started on them it's hard, as with consuming peanuts, to stop. You get to be tempted by the Los Angeles Times's calculation that 8,573,487 celebrity profiles were published in American periodicals in 2002.

In regard to the immense territory of the United States, magnitude is best conveyed by considering the variety of the society settled on it, as various as that of Europe. Move between America's great metropolises, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, and the contrasts that immediately confront you are no less sharp than those met on a journey from Moscow to London to Paris and Rome. This despite the common language of American cities (more or less, since such dialect variations as black, hillbilly, Texan and central Chicagoan, among others, present their special challenges).

You can make a tourist rush through the USA and jump from the crustily independent, Puritan-settled New England states ("Does it matter which of these two roads I take to Burlington?" a visitor asks a native Vermonter. "Sure as hell don't matter to me," replies the local) to the Florida Keys, thrusting scruffily into the Caribbean.

You can hustle to the heart of Dixie, where the food is mostly terrible (hominy grits and the hush puppy constituting a pre-emptive strike against Epicureanism) and where some Southerners still choose to take the sting out of distant setbacks by referring to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression". You zoom through Texas, across wide empty spaces to match Western Australia's, kicking up equally comparable clouds of red dust, noting almost instinctively the innumerable signs of Texas's having been part of Mexico until separated by armed rebellion. The influence of Spain trails you through the South-West, in the form of domestic architecture featuring inner courtyards and adobe construction, a style raised to high chic in the smarter cities of Arizona. You thread your way through the joggers of Southern California, hardly less ubiquitous than the cane toads of Queensland, and take a scenically dazzling Pacific road into the Eden-like valleys where Northern California's wine grapes are grown. If you press on into the forests of Oregon, or across to northern Wyoming, where the road ahead may be temporarily blocked by a cattle herd driven by an authentic cowboy on horseback, you probably won't have time for the Grand Canyon, the world's greatest natural wonder.

Amidst such magnitude one can easily imagine a French tourist exclaiming: "Zis is Vendredi so we must be in Kansas City."

Through the blur of movement, however, it is impossible not to be aware of the way climate and topography, local history and politics, economic boom and bust and the rhythm of immigration flows have created scores, if not hundreds, of regions and communities of unique character. In the old world they might have been deemed principalities. Here they are bound indivisibly by a set of ideas. C'est formidable.

A second major expression of the magnitude of America is its efflorescence of talent and skill. Silicon Valley may spring to mind--but which Silicon Valley, the California one or the Massachusetts one? "Space shuttle" is now so commonplace a phrase that it has shed much of its meaning and become a label. But the idea of a vehicle that shuttles on a regular route beyond earth's gravity is awesome. American talent and expertise will undoubtedly shape our future journeys to the furthermost frontier.

America identifies and nurtures talent more methodically than any society I have heard about. In their fourth year at high school all American children sit a Preliminary Standard Aptitude Test (PSAT), followed in their final year by the big one, the SAT. Computers start talking to computers and university talent scouts to school principals at the PSAT. Young men and women who have made the brightest blips on the screen will find themselves almost pestered by famous universities competing to claim them. Lack of money and unfashionable background are no barrier. They can even be an advantage. I recall the high school gang of one of my daughters chanting at an appropriately qualified friend: "Oh, to be young and bright and poor and Puerto Rican."

Nor are the bright hampered by ideological fantasies about all universities being equal. There is Harvard, MIT, Chicago and the prodigious University of California, and many other good ones in a relatively clear-cut descending order. The best teachers and the best facilities are clustered at the leading universities. There exceptional talent matures and flourishes.

Britain once had the capacity to duchess Australians. The American equivalent, were it interested in duchessing, would be admission to postgraduate courses. Americans should be encouraged to want to duchess us.

The third important aspect of American magnitude is the totality of its democracy. Here vesting power in the people is reality, not theory or cant. To possess information of value and interest to the people and not disclose it is considered not only dangerous but dishonourable. The vigour and openness of the debate in America about Iraq, fuelled by a flow of information from officials and political leaders (foreign intelligence chiefs must be kicking themselves for having paid spies to collect it) would, sad to say, astonish most Australians.

Some deride the American practice of electing everybody from garbage collector to president. But I have recently observed how elected library boards and school boards and town planning authorities give the electors pride of possession and confer a visible sense of obligation on board members and employees. I think the system is productive.

ON FEBRUARY 9, Tom Friedman, of the New York Times, wrote an astute analysis of the general world situation. We live now in a world as sharply in conflict as it was during the Cold War, Friedman says. However, the conflict is no longer between capitalism and communism, or between East and West. It is

   between the World of Order--anchored by
   America, the E.U.-Russia, India, China and Japan
   and joined by scores of smaller nations--and the
   World of Disorder. Disorder is dominated by
   rogue regimes like Iraq and North Korea and the
   various global terrorist networks that feed off the
   troubled string of states stretching from the
   Middle East [through Africa] to Indonesia.

This is a situation that, in one of its aspects, comes close to duplicating the situation that existed during and immediately after the Second World War, when Australia's circumstances dictated a strong dependence on the United States.

On the first occasion we made the wrong choice, returning to the arms of a Motherland that had lost the capacity and, indeed, much of its enthusiasm for mothering. In doing this we turned away from a potential foster mother of awesome magnitude. Britain was well aware of the temptation Australians might have to follow America. The grotesque monopoly English publishers established over Australian rights to American books, effectively screening what we read, had the full backing, perhaps the planning, of Whitehall. With hindsight, the panoply of postwar royal visits (including a royal duke at Yarralumla) can be seen as a defence against Americanisation.

Had we given some impetus to a popular drift towards America--extensive study of American history in Australian schools, and a few first-rate courses in our handful of universities would have been enough to get the ball rolling--we would have gained several advantages.

We would have got nearly fifteen years start on making our way in the world rather than having the captaincy of our destiny thrust suddenly upon us when Britain moved to Europe. The dollar would probably have been floated much earlier than it was. The republican option would have been more closely and usefully examined. The ruinous, un-Australian class distortions of the union movement--whose spokesmen are still disproportionately heard in British provincial accents--would have been eliminated. The more obstructionist forms of anti-Americanism, shaped largely by parroting of European envy and illusions of superiority, would never have taken hold in Australia. The American concept of democracy would certainly have influenced our politics beneficially.

It's hard to say how keen America would be on fostering, let alone mothering us. But given that the uneasy world pictured by Tom Friedman is likely to persist for a long time, it seems opportune for us to try and make up for time lost sixty years ago. This being a pretty democratic country, a national policy of forging an intimate American relationship would not even deprive individuals of the freedom to be anti-American.