LETTER FROM NEBRASKA: A middle-aged white trio, a married couple and a single man, make their way into the Sky Box restaurant in Chicago airport's F pier.
"This is an eight-dollar hamburger place," the single man says doubtfully. "Airport prices," says the other man. "Don't worry, I'll pay".
They take seats behind me alongside the main concourse, where a scattered group of air force cadets, fresh from graduation, is making its way towards the departure gates.
"Where are you headed, son?" asks the man who'll pay the bill, calling over a black cadet who is passing by. "Florida," says the cadet, pausing beside them.
"Where are you going next?"
"Iraq, I guess," comes the reply, half shy, half proud.
"You stay safe out there, and guard our country," says the seated man. "Don't let us down now."
"I'll do my best, sir," says the cadet, smiling warmly, and begins to move on, but the conversation is not over.
"Hey, son, don't forget to take Jesus with you, and stand up for him when you're out there," says the customer.
"I sure will, sir," says the cadet, formal now, clearly wanting to rejoin his buddies. But he does not seem in the least surprised or embarrassed by the patriotic and religious injunctions from the complacent armchair warrior seated behind me.
Patriotism and religion are ubiquitous in the US heartlands in a way which has no parallel in modern Europe except, perhaps, in Belfast. It's easy, if you spend most of your time in America in New York or San Francisco, to think otherwise. But go to the mid-west, or the Bible Belt, or even more apparently sophisticated places, and you'll find that many people really are entirely comfortable with ultra-traditional values of church, family and country. They find President Bush's staff prayer meetings reassuring, not scary, and absolutely not hypocritical. Showing the flag is not just a metaphor in the rolling cornfields of Iowa or Nebraska, where every second house flies Old Glory, and you may see an entire barn painted in the stars and stripes.
My flight from Chicago, as it happened, took me to Atlanta, Georgia, where I was the only passenger in a shuttle car to Augusta. The driver lost no time in telling me he was a Christian. He proceeded to give me a vivid, minutely detailed preview of Armageddon, which was as immediate and real to him as the highway we were driving, possibly more so.
After 45 minutes of this, I said I was beginning to feel just a little bit preached at. With gracious, and genuine, southern courtesy he apologised for imposing his views on me. Our talk switched to non-contentious issues such as politics.
But religion, inevitably, crept back in. Al Gore, he said, did not get elected president in 2000 because he had only cared about the environment, and wanted to close every factory in the country to save it. "What that poor man don't understand," said the driver, "is that there ain't nothing we can do to save this poor lil' old fallen world until Jesus comes again." So that's why Bush didn't sign the Kyoto protocol on global warming, I thought, but kept the thought to myself.
Over the next 36 hours, I met an accomplished university professor who, while critical of the born-again Christians from a Catholic viewpoint, argued that homosexuality was probably a chronic psychiatric disorder and that homosexual practices were certainly an "abomination to God". And then I met a mainstream Presbyterian philosophy professor who rejected the entire legacy of the European Enlightenment. "Man is not perfectible, he is a fallen being," he said.
Both men, it must be said, were more than willing to take opposing points of view seriously, and obviously enjoyed a good debate. This was not the case with a Catholic priest I spoke to in Connecticut a couple of days later. This man, a former army chaplain, asked me about the Northern Irish peace process, but then quickly dismissed its complexities.
"The only solution," he said in ex- cathedra tones, "is to tell the unionists to accept a united Ireland, or go back where they came from." That would probably mean, I pointed out, a civil war of Bosnian proportions. "Well," he said, smiling contentedly over his lunch, "you may just have to go through with that you know, to get it over with." I was tempted to ask him which side would be able to take Jesus with them into battle, but I don't think he would have got the point.