Politics & Power Quote by William Labov

A country that can photograph Mars in high resolution but can’t be bothered to finish its own map is Labov’s kind of jab: a neat way to expose how power decides what counts as “known.” The line sounds like a simple complaint about cartography, but it’s really an argument about attention. “Unlike European countries” sets up a comparison designed to sting. Europe reads as old-world bureaucracy and thoroughness; America, by contrast, is figured as sprawling, improvised, and selectively documented. The unfinished map becomes a metaphor for an unfinished civic project.

The specificity matters: “only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there.” That’s not just geography; it’s history. The East is where the institutions, archives, and money cluster early, where infrastructure is dense and data is cheap to gather. The “spots” elsewhere evoke extractive bursts of interest: boom towns, military sites, research corridors, places worth recording because they’re profitable or strategic, not because they’re home.

Labov’s background (as a writer and, in practice, a major voice in studying everyday speech) sharpens the subtext: mapping isn’t neutral. What gets mapped gets studied; what gets studied gets legitimacy. The unmapped remainder isn’t empty, it’s unheard. Read that way, the quote isn’t nostalgia for better atlases; it’s a critique of an American habit of declaring territory “known” once the centers of power feel oriented, leaving the rest as an afterthought.