PRELUDE: FIVE DAYS IN THE BELTWAY
Washington has always been a phantom to me. Its presence, whether through politics, military policy, economics or the media, has always been ubiquitous yet strangely ethereal.
Of course, like all westerners, its reputation and a degree of its nature is known to me. It is the capital of the last remaining genuine superpower (China is too inward looking to count as a real power beyond its own borders, massive as they may be) and therefore, by extrapolation, the capital of the world, a modern equivalent to ancient Rome. It may not rule directly, but its influence is always felt. It's appeared in every political thriller and high-stakes actioneer this decade. Even before getting there I could navigate from Capitol to reflecting pool with a face full of mace.
Yet it is not simply the power of Washington that is universal: there is also its spirit of rebellion, of dissidence and insurrection. Washington means something, like Rome means something or London means something, or in exactly the way that Toulouse and Bonne and Brighouse don't. They have a certain mystique, a meaning that is bound up in their origin and evolution. Yet London and Rome were capitals and seats of mighty empires before Washington was even a military stockade in a swamp. It's the whippersnapper amongst capitals, the bright new contender that has wrought havoc and carnage. While most major cities have established who they are and how they function, Washington has the enigma of youth about it. You can look at the map or study guide books but that can give you no idea about the nature of the place. Or if you'll need body armor.
There is no slower time than those moments waiting to check in at a new hotel. Everyone, no matter how well traveled or confident, has the same fear: that, somehow, this hotel has habits and traditions totally unlike any other in which you have stayed and that, when you ask for your room key, the receptionist will stare at you with the same derision that is normally reserved for duck rapists and intone, icily, "Key?"
What is most reassuring for the British traveler is that America is like Britain, but with a smile. There are very few traps and cultural peccadilloes to catch you out. Almost no American hotels require your first born as collateral against your key these days.
Which makes it more peculiar to note that it's probably more acceptable in Britain to confess that one has had Nazi war criminals over for dinner and that they're actually an OK bunch of chaps, once you look behind the Death's Head insignia, than to admit that you actually like Americans. Most Americans don't get this: after all, we've got a closer kinship then most nations. America, as it stands today and as it regards itself, is an off-shoot of the UK, even though far more of the ancestors of the modern population landed at Ellis Island than on Plymouth Rock. In the future, some theorize, the birthplace of the Modern America will be regarded as the fording points on the Mexican border, but for now Britain is effectively the tree from which the acorn of America fell. Some Americans with whom I have met consider it strange that the British would consider entering the European Union, when fulfilling the paranoid fantasies of the left wing of the 80s and becoming the 51st state of the Union would be the obvious course: the British, being by nature recidivist, greet this proposal with the same joy that they would meet scabies.
Yet, ultimately, the first impression of Washington is that it is like London but it doesn't reek of piss. Good start.
It's also surprisingly warm. Mid-November and I'm regretting packing a coat, even though it's what the locals refer to as late fall. Allegedly I've missed the best of the weather and the finest moments of the turn on the trees. It's still a palate that I've rarely seen, mainly because the Washington autumn isn't synonymous with rain. Britain is normally awash from mid-October and counting the flood warnings by now, the leaves a putrid mulch on gray tarmac that fades into an overcast horizon. Yet the blue skies here couldn't have been a finer background for the crisp oranges and yellows, flaming crimsons and magentas that still sporadically rip up in a tiny windstorm. Actually, that's one benefit of the colonial inheritance for which the Americans can thank we British. It seems that when the Crown sent the first governor out, he was instructed to set up a seat of governance and military enclave. Now, being a sensible man, the obvious pleasures of the New England winter seemed a tad too harsh for him, while the very southern most states were too much of a malaria risk. The flats on the Potomac seemed temperate enough but, most importantly, were just south enough to fall within the latitudes that the Crown considered the tropics, meaning extra pay.
To my left is the original Wright Flyer and a Gemini capsule: to my right, Rembrandts and Hoppers. At my back is the center of modern political power. Ahead of me sits, gazing through marble eyes, the great liberator, Abe Lincoln. Above me swings the Presidential helicopter. Undeniably, this is the finest child of Western civilization.
The ideals of America (that is, the spiritual America, not the geographical domain) are typified by the center of the capital. Like most of the world, much of Washington was already familiar to me through film and television. Who hasn't seen Mulder and Scully storm out of the FBI building, or seen Redford and Hoffman stare with betrayed offence at the Capitol Building, or watched the White House be blown up again. And again. And again. Washington is familiar to everyone but until it is visited, it's impossible to appreciate how compact it truly is. The core of the city, of the Federal government, of American society, is wedged between two roads, Constitution and Independence. Built around a strip of grass and ponds about two miles long and half a mile wide, called the Mall, there is most of what the word Washington signifies. At the top end sit Congress and Senate, atop Capitol Hill: at the far end a giant marble Lincoln gazes from above the Potomac. In between are all the various museums gathered under the Smithsonian banner, probably comprising the greatest square mile of cultural history ever collected. One street over, on Pennsylvania Avenue, are situated all the major offices of state: the naval offices, the trade commission, the FBI, the patent offices, embassies, archives and everything that is required for the operation of a modern state.
It seems an odd decision, to place all of the reins of power in such a small area. A limited nuclear burst, straight over the Washington monument, would leave America a decapitated superpower. But in a sense, that's the point. Most capitals were organic, selected and designed by accident and incident, accreting power rather than winning it. Washington is under three centuries old, its position as a capital only two-thirds of that period and so there has been the opportunity to create a unified scheme and too little time to despoil it. It is often compared to Paris, its contemporary and its kin, as an example of capital design, intended as a city for the use of its citizens, representing the best revolutionary and humanist ideals of the enlightenment. Yet Paris, modern Paris, was the brainchild of Napoleon, an autocrat who briefly clothed himself as a democrat. The old slums of the ancien regime were torn down and replaced with the lengthy vistas and open boulevards of his architectural advisor Haussman, perfect for the people to walk down freely. In reality, they were the zenith of anti- insurrectionary design: the urban populace was moved out of the city center, away from the real organs of power. They could march in discontent along the boulevards but their routes could be blocked by easily mobilized troops, who could move en masse down the streets, forcing the mob into the many large but easily sealed Places that form junctions for the city's arteries, crushing all rebellion, while the generals gazed down from a handful of domineering overviews. Even if the mob did storm a government building, they were so scattered within the city that it would merely give them a last redoubt, rather than a springboard.
Central Washington is indefensible, a series of wide streets that lead straight to the core of the administration: Nixon was so aware of this that when he was faced with half a million unarmed and definitionally peaceful anti-Vietnam demonstrators, he mobilized not merely the DC police force but also the National Guard, the Marines and the Army. If gunships were required to cow a simple demonstration, imagine how easily the Capitol would fall to a determined offensive. Designed by Haussman's contemporary, Pierre L'enfant, to a single unified theme, it is the model of democratic architecture that Paris claims to be. It begs to be stormed by an angry militia and indeed leaves itself open: after all, America was founded because the citizens believed that it was time for the old government to go. The design of Washington neatly compresses and presents their chosen government, making it easily removable if events so required.
Yet the angry mob, screeching for presidential blood, could not tear down the White House gates without going past the reflecting pool, commemorating US war dead. They couldn't storm the Capitol building without walking in the shadow of the Washington monument. Storm the IRS offices and they would be aware that the capsules from the moon missions for which they paid are proudly displayed in the Air and Space Museum at their backs. Washington seems to say to its people that they can destroy it if they must, but not without considering all that it has given them. Indeed, Americans seem incredibly aware of their history, in a way that the British aren't. Visit the British museum someday and find an artifact that is absolutely British: it's not as easy as you'd think. Egyptian, yes. Abysinian, absolutely. Babylonian, for sure. Indian, African, French, without a doubt. Anywhere we invaded and stayed more than a fortnight, not a problem. Objects galore. But nothing British. It's quite possibly an overhang of empire but that wouldn't explain why most British people believe that Caeser was actually a Londoner: that's just arrogance and cultural theft. Visit the museum of American History and you'll actually find a museum about America, not Zimbabwe. Everything from Washington's Tent to Clinton's instrument (his sax, you sick, sick fool) is stored here. It is true, America may not have much history but what it lacks in scale it makes up for in fascination. It's not all self-congratulatory: one of the finest exhibitions was on the Nisei internment camps, in which all American citizens of Japanese extraction were imprisoned during World War two. Can you honestly imagine a British museum dedicating a wing to the concentration camps in South Africa, run by the British during the Boer war?
Once past the beltway, architecture becomes more sparse, implying a nation in constant Diaspora. It does explain the dependence upon the car, although the joy of the ultra-clean, ultra-fast but still scenic metro system means that it is advisable to use public transport to get into and out off the city itself. Once out of the Beltway (imagine the M25 with real traffic) the distinction between town, suburb and countryside is virtually non-existent. Even here, in the supposedly over-developed East, there's so much space that it's far from surprising to see the sharpened delta of a turkey vulture out of your back window, or a white tailed deer grazing by a major road.
9-25 am. There's milky Force Flake crumbs in the bowl, pulp and residue at the bottom of a glass, an abandoned half-round of pineapple and three remaining rounds from a quartet of rye bread toast gently curling up in the rack. The Latino busboy who is old enough to be, if not my father, then at least his younger sibling, cleans up around me, pausing only to dust the crumbs off the funny pages of my Washington Post. As he returns to the kitchen, the same waitress that has obviously been working at least a five hour shift before I even dragged my worthless channel-hopping behind out of bed. She fills my coffee cup without prompting and then heads off to another table.
When the average Briton thinks about the average American, three words come to mind: fat, stupid, racist. Somehow the nation that produced Woody Guthrie, Woody Allen, the Hughes brothers, Malcolm X, Abraham Lincoln, Maya Angelou, Jello Biafra, Michael Moore, Frank Zappa, J.D. Salinger, Martin Luther King, Isaac Hayes, William S. Burroughs, Spike Lee and Hunter S. Thomson is only known as the birthplace of the KKK or, for the better informed, David Duke. Britons imagine the average Yank to be at least a first cousin to Rod Steiger's good ol' boy from In The Heat Of The Night.
It's true, America is extremely racially divided and that's impossible to ignore. Not just at the higher levels of power, where the numbers are obvious and much commented upon, but also in the menial and service trades. At the hotel, the serving staff were generally Latino, but the desk staff were White: at most take-out joints, Latino or Black staff but at restaurants and diners, primarily White. In museums and galleries, the more senior the staff, the more likely they were to be white. I didn't see a single white beggar but several black ones. That's not to say that there are no blurrings of this line but it is to say that it seems an indicator.
It's also true that the overwhelming majority of Americans could stand to shed a few pounds. Simple truth.
But, in a sense, neither of these are bad things.
Let me explain.
Never have I visited anywhere that is so aware of its short-comings. Bizarre, considering that Americans are supposed to be two steps short of actually retarded, but that can be stacked with all the other Old World phobias and bigotries, to be burnt at a later date. America, whilst being extremely divided over race, is also the most integrated nation on the planet. True, African Americans may not have the best jobs in the museums, but find a British museum with black staff at any level other than as cleaners.
An argument that I have heard and to which I give some credence is that Americans are not more racist than most other nations but they are more aware of race than most: ever met an American that couldn't give you a full ethnographic lineage? This is in no small part due to the fact that America was, as a whole, despicable on the issue of race for almost a century: then, in places, it improved and in others it maintained institutionalized racism, which is like giving judicial respectability to dendrophobia. It was a long, slow fight which was bound up with the birth and development of America. In most other states, racism has been a result of a dominant indigenous race oppressing migrants: in America, the dominant race, the Western Europeans, migrated with the dominated Africans in tow, then imported Chinese labor within two generations of the birth of the Republic. Cultural and ethnic diversity is a reality whose existence America accepts. True, it may not have solved it but at least it's aware, which is fare better than most countries. It gets a bad rap for being too right-wing, too dominated by reactionary views but which country hasn't been open to such allegations. True, it was the country that handed Newt Gingrich the right to butcher society under his insane Contract With (On) America policy document: but the Republicans only took the Senate of 1994 by a total majority of 39,000 votes across the entirety of America. My local MP has a majority almost that large in an electoral borough of approximately a hundred and twenty thousand. It was scarcely a landslide but it meant that every Americans was described as a bible-bashing, anti-liberal homo-hater for the next five years.
When it comes to food, I'll tell you why, in one short sentence, Americans are generally overweight these days. American food is good. Scratch that, American food is great. It partially explains why Americans always complain about the food in Britain: it is shit by comparison and mortgage-level expensive. Take a for instance: a few days ago I took a friend of mine for dinner. Four of us had food, a main course a piece, a couple of drinks, coming to a total of fifty pounds: to economize, we bought pudding from a supermarket on the way home. It was a place we knew and had tried before, so we felt it worth the money. While passing through the colonial town of Leesburg, about thirty miles outside of the Beltway, my travelling companion and I stopped, picked a restaurant at random and risked lunch. In the spirit of the town, it specialized in eighteenth century cuisine, featuring contemporary ingredients and dishes. Between us we had a couple of drinks, a main course and two slices of the sweetest, lightest strawberry chiffon pie I've tried in my (admittedly limited, extremely limited) chiffon-scoffing career. Sixteen dollars. Total. We were so typically British and embarrassed that we had been, well, not ripped off mercilessly by farmer, wholesaler and restaurateur, that we left a fifty per cent tip, even though the waitress got the order consistently wrong. The most hellish experience of my life to date was realizing that I had left the land of the breaded shrimp, the enormous steak and a breakfast slightly bigger than the average British car, to be confronted by airline food. Shoot me, shoot me now. Now!
Yet this isn't really defending Americans: not that I'm here to do so. They have a wonderful tradition of doing that themselves, just ask the Vietnamese, Panamanians, Grenedans and so forth and so on. But it's true, food and race are a significant part of American culture: the same is true of the French but in a different way. America has McDonalds and Rodney King, for both of which it has the good grace to apologize: France has the self-aggrandizement of the Michelin system and the riot squad regularly beating seven shades out of Moroccan buskers, with nary a hair turned in the press. What America does have is fantastic TV. It's true, flick through the cable channels and you'll take ten minutes to hit the same piece of shit twice: and true, statistically and proportionately, there is as much dirge on US TV as there is on UK TV but that's just proportions. On a normal night in the UK (i.e. one spent wedged in front of the TV), the five terrestrial channels mean that I'm lucky to find a news slot that doesn't make me feel violated, never mind a worthwhile program. Hunkered down in my hotel room, with naught but a bottle of bourbon, a chilled Pepsi max and a TV remote for companionship, I was torn between The X-Files, a Homicide re-run and three news channels. Still lousy for a hundred channels but that's a week's good viewing in the UK.
What it comes down to is choice: America has it, the UK doesn't. True, their political parties can be indistinguishable, but so can ours. Their economic policy is still business-friendly to the point of inhumanity, but we've got the toughest anti-union legislation in the world. At least Americans can bitch about their lot over a good coffee and a fine tuna steak, whilst actually being informed as to how they are being screwed. It's not that the information is obvious, but three rolling national and international news channels, plus the business news, plus local stations, means that the determined at least have a chance of becoming better informed. All Britain has is equally fat-ass motherfuckers stuffing their piggy Thatcherite faces with reconstituted simulated pork-a-like super-hydrated luncheon slices on nine pound a slice supa-bleeched fiber-free bread-effect card: street level morons convinced that The Sun (a daily skin mag with headlines) passes for a real newspaper, while pseuds with two A-levels and a corked cab sauv are convinced that a printed organ with an editorial line that the death of some ancient violin mangler is more important than three new NATO members further dismantling the European status quo is good: god, where did the grammar of hat go. Anyway, Britain has just as many idiots per thousand guzzling on the cretin hose and fewer that get pissed about it. For data frontiersmen like myself with a prediliction for good pizza and room service, the US is truly living the dream.
True, most Americans don't take advantage of this incredible potential for information mining and all the long-expressed concerns about the agendas of modern media tycoons and tyrants still hold true but it's the potential that is almost as important as what is done with it. American's understand this, that there is, or at least should be some sense of opportunity. The core tenet upon which most Americans believe from which their state was born (whether this is true or not) is that domination should not be tolerated and that good will, somehow, out. That's what's most amazing about Americans, their relentless cheerfulness. The British, it is said, are reserved. What they actually are really is whining, depressed, miserable swine that never got over losing the Empire. Somehow, Americans make you feel welcome when you're standing in a queue.
Fried pastrami: sliced thin, dry fried, piled inch deep and served a foot long on a thick roll, with a huge pickle beside: that's my lunch from a particularly fine sandwich store/deli opposite the national archive. Apart from the staff, however, I'm the only one here not in a suit. Two minutes walk from the FBI, slightly farther from both Whitehouse and Capitol, this is an eatery for backroom power players and legislators. They're easy to spot: the suits are expensive, but the money has gone on durability, not style. They hang, rather than fit. The real giveaway is that no-one wears shoes. Everyone is in trainers.
Strangely, the exercise of power is not as obvious as in many towns. Possibly because it is so omnipresent that there is no need for pretense: everyone on the mall is either a powerbroker or a tourist, so there's no need for expensive cars (that is, even if you could find a parking bay) to impress the neighbors and the rivals. It doesn't swelter under the stench of reptilian skin-sloughing greed as displayed in London. In fact, for a nation that is so regularly accused of being purely about power, at its highest levels the ordinary guy and guyette still root for the underdog. Power earned, America believes, is well earned: power abused is intolerable. This risk of power abused is sufficient to warrant sever censure: a curious balance for the last superpower.
It was curiously displayed in two court cases, in both of which the government, traditionally the oppressor, was the popular victim. On the day I arrived, the Microsoft hearings were in full tilt and somehow the threat of Bill's evil empire was perceived as greater than the threat of state intervention in commerce. Rending it in half was being seriously considered by many, an idea that would be viewed as insanity and intolerable by most British 'liberals'. Meanwhile, half a mile away, Ken Starr was being derided as a partisan and scurrilous scoundrel by many as he presented his evidence to the House Judiciary committee: as many an American said to me that day, give me the FBI and unlimited funds and I could get dirt on any person here, never mind on a man once known as the least corrupt man in the most corrupt state in the Union.
For a country that so many people feel is power-hungry, the sense of rebellion to which Americans aspire means that power is strangely mistrusted. Aside from the whole Clinton debacle, which proved if nothing else that democracy at least has the organs, if not the motivation, toward just action, another significant case was beginning, just down the street from the Senate hearings. In a courtroom just down the way, Microsoft was facing the opening salvos in the Justice Department's anti-trust action. It seems perverse to some that a country so dedicated to the rights of the individual would savage a company for being too successful but it comes down to that whole 'do what thou will shall be the whole of the law". It's fine to do what you want as long as it doesn't affect others. Of course, this idea fails in many circumstances but it still means that America has arguably the most rigorous anti-monopoly legislation known in the western world. It's the pre-programmed resistance to an obvious dictator that means that Americans will only take so much before getting a bit more interventionist than they would like to admit to themselves.
That's the real truth, if there is one to be found. If there was a real spirit to America and if Washington truly represented it, then it was a long way from what outsiders may want to believe about it. True, many Americans may be ill informed but there is the option to learn and the facilities available. Americans may be fat but that's got to be better than being too thin to eat. They may appear reactionary but underneath they are as warm and as quietly, almost unexpectedly liberal as most people. They may think that they are the greatest nation on earth but, accidentally, they may well be on the way there.
Just remember. This may be the country that regularly wails on the ACLU, but it's also the country that formed the ACLU.
RMW