SIX IN the morning on a late summer day in Manhattan and below my window the dense green foliage of Central Park looks like a primeval forest. The skyscrapers ranked along its edges are emerging complacently from the mist, and here and there early joggers flicker between the trees. If I open my window the rumble of traffic blends with the hum of my air-conditioning. A faint animal smell reaches me from the horse-drawn tourist cabs of the night before.
It is hard to believe that this lovable and magnificent city is in a condition of profound confusion, scepticism and intermittent paranoia. But so it is. New York is facing another day of heavily publicised anti-terrorist precautions — Orange Alert. Roadblocks and police checks are snarling up mile upon mile of traffic, and the populace now cleaning its teeth or buttering its breakfast bagels is half in jitters, half cynically stoic.
And like everywhere else in the Great Republic, this city is also in the throes of an election which is surely one of the most fateful in history. As I see it, in November the Americans will not simply be choosing between George W. Bush and John Kerry, between Republicans and Democrats. They will be deciding what kind of a people they want to be, how the rest of the world is going to think of them, whether their republic still is, as Abraham Lincoln thought, the last best hope of mankind, or whether it will turn out to be the final disillusionment of democracy.
The issues go far beyond the usual electoral matters. They concern the privilege of the American Government to launch pre-emptive attacks upon other nations, the influence of capitalism, religion and the military upon American foreign policy, stem-cell research, same-sex marriages, the fateful balance between personal rights and public security, the right of the Government to hold suspects indefinitely without charge. In all its history the US electorate has seldom had to pronounce upon matters as grave as these, reflecting the essential nature of the Republic — and since America is temporarily omnipotent, affecting the future of us all.
I went to see Michael Moore’s famously partisan film Fahrenheit 911, which deals with many of them, and as we filed out of the cinema I asked my neighbour what he thought of it. “Think of it?” he cryptically responded. “Are we expected to think?” Realising then that Manhattan, the most irrepressibly ironic and irreverent city imaginable, was hardly the right place in which to sample the national mood, I decided to go elsewhere for my pre-electoral meditations. I would potter around the States trying to hear the vox populi, but being antipathetic to demagoguery I would take care to stay away from conventions and keep well off the campaign trail . . .
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THEY SAY that Americans are almost equally divided between those who see the US primarily as the world’s self-appointed and unchallengable arbiter, and those who cherish it rather as an enlightened moral example for the rest of us. The best place to raise such abstractions is on a train. An Amtrak express is just made for vox populi inquiries, because as its aged rolling-stock creaks and rattles across the States, a genuine cross-section of middle America is cocooned inside, drinking dreadful coffee out of paper cups and dying to talk. So I went South aboard such a train, and everyone talked to me. During our prolonged conversations, when my mind wandered, my eyes sometimes strayed to the tattered newspapers that lay all about, and thus from time to time I extracted items of what was happening in the America outside our windows.
I generally began with the growth of Big Brother in America. Nearly everyone I asked felt strongly about that, although the lady from Baltimore was too excited to discuss the issue because she had never been on a train before, and couldn’t take her eyes off the landscape. The schoolteacher, on the other hand, felt it in his bones that a politico-military cabal, colluding with what one might call, or would have called, when one was younger, the Establishment, had patently shown . . .
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Item: A 74-year-old man, suffering from multiple cancers, was executed for murder by lethal injection in Alabama: his victim’s son witnessed the execution, and complained that he’d passed away too peacefully.
. . . patently shown that it was directly behind the Patriot Act of 2001, which, would you believe it, even allowed the spooks to discover what books you had taken out of the public library. Hell, what was wrong with that, demanded the retired realtor. This was a war, the whole country had to fight it, he’d been in the service himself and he knew what war was like, you didn’t go into the ring with kid gloves on. “Look at your own Winston Churchill, look at Margaret Thatcher, d’you suppose they . . .?”
Item: Letter to the Editor: “Sir, I was in the service and in my view there is no substitute for 90,000 tons of cold-steel US diplomacy.”
. . . I moved on to America’s place in the world today. The schoolmaster said that it was truly awful what had happened to our reputation. The realtor said it was more important to be respected than to be liked — had anyone liked the Romans? The lady from Baltimore said my, Oh my, whatever they say about us, I’m sure there’s nowhere more beautiful than this America of ours, and on that all were agreed.
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Well now, what about this same-sex marriage business? On this they all talked at once. It was against the will of the Lord, it was only humanity, my cousin Doreen lived, I was brought up to believe, I was in the service myself, how would you feel if . . .
Item: Staff-Sgt Christopher Ward, testifying before the Abu Ghraib abuse hearing, said it was his conception that military intelligence was “trying to create an uncomfortable environment to try to facilitate interrogations”.
. . . what about the unfortunate children, think what the lawyers will make out of it, the Bible tells us straight out, sometimes it’s cruel to be kind, oh, just look at those trees out there, don’t they make you think of happier things?
Item: After 58 years the Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan has moved to new premises. It will have more room, said its owner, for its hundreds of thousand of books, belovedly disorganised, plus Tom the resident cat.
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And so, two hours late, the train deposited me that night at the deserted station of Charleston, South Carolina, ten miles out of town. There a trio of angels, disguised as two sisters and a delightfully loquacious 3-year-old called Graham, observed me morosely, wondering how in the hell I was going to find a taxi. Instantly they made room for me in their car and whisked me direct to my hotel. “Thanks for the ride, Graham,” said I when we parted. His reply was courteous, but not being fluent myself in three-year-old Southern American, for the life of me I couldn’t understand a word of it.
OH, THAT’S nothing unusual,” said an acquaintance of mine when I told him about that angelic intervention. “We’re all very nice in Charleston.” Actually they weren’t always, as I remember too well from my first visit to the place, back in the 1950s heyday of segregation and southern racism, but now it does seem to be true that this most classy of American cities has found, as it were, kindness.
It was a Sunday morning, and its lovely streets were immaculate, its citizens all smiles, its very dogs fastidious, as I made my way to morning service at St Michael’s Episcopalian Church. I had repeatedly been reminded that this Presidential election was in many ways a spiritual exercise, which would depend largely upon Christian conviction, so I thought it my professional duty to go to church.
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I should really have gone somewhere more extreme. I should have gone to a Catholic church and been told that it would be a sin to vote for any pro-abortion candidate. I should have joined an Evangelical congregation and had a dose of right-wing fundamentalism. But I chose St Michael’s sure that nobody would be electioneering either way, and I was right. The service seemed to me a very exhibition of American restraint. There was a minimum of passion of any kind, politics was not mentioned and the Reverend Richard Belser’s sermon was a model parable about marital relationships, with no references to abortion or stem-cells.
The congregation was discreetly dressed, of course, conversant with the ritual and not at all effusive during the Welcoming. The music was fine, and I was delighted to find tucked into my hymn book the printed programme of a recent wedding at the church, listing in antique italics the names of the seven Groomsmen, the Flower Girl, the two Greeters, the Grandmothers of the Bride and the Ring Bearer (Howard Wilson Glasgow IV, whose daddy Howard Wilson Glasgow III had been one of the Groomsmen). Could anything be more reassuring? How remote I felt from the campaign trail, and how warmly I hoped the happy couple were living happily ever after!
When we emerged into the sunshine, too, Charleston seemed almost like a propaganda mock-up of an American city. The market brightly bustled, yachts raced off-shore, margaritas evidently flowed and among the ambling crowds there were not a few interracial couples — imagine that, here in the greatest of the slave ports, within sight of Fort Sumter where the Civil War began! It was like a dream. I had an introduction to one of the most beautiful of the seashore houses, currently being restored, and found its owner and her mother awaiting me rather as in a Winslow Homer painting, all sunlit on their balcony above the glistening sea,.
They didn’t mention the election. They didn’t mention Iraq. They said how delightful their inter-ethnic workmen were, and told me how skilful and dedicated were the Charleston craftsmen. They weren’t in the least surprised to hear about the angels at the railway station. They had a blind dog called Chloe. They gave me iced tea and sent me away not exactly rejoicing, as Mr Belser might have put it, but decidedly comforted to find this enclave of the ideal in the midst of reality. Before I left that night I had a couple of margaritas myself, to prolong the effect.
BUT BANG! Next day I was in California, and the Presidential election was seething all around me. Here it was, though, an election sui generis, because California is so big, so rich and so different that national issues here are inextricably entangled with issues peculiar to the Golden State.
Mind you, feelings ran high enough on the Bush-Kerry contest. California is overwhelmingly Democratic, and I made straight for San Francisco, that old hotbed of radicalism, where a large proportion of the citizenry would undoubtedly like to pelt the incumbent President with rotten eggs. They don’t mind saying so, either. “I hate him, hate him, hate him, HATE HIM,” cried a civilised acquaintance of mine at the bar of the Pan-Pacific Hotel, and nobody even looked up.
Still, an almost hallucinatory profusion of local paradoxes and ambiguities swirls around the presidential elections, sometimes enough to make my head swim — rather like trying to understand 3-year-old Graham. For a start the Governor of the State is the charismatically macho film actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he doesn’t elucidate matters by being a Republican — and not just an almost iconically Republican Governor of a vehemently Democratic State but an immensely popular one too. Then hardly had I arrived here than the California Supreme Court declared illegal the granting of licences for single-sex marriages by the glamorously popular Democratic Mayor of San Francisco. He had started authorising them six months before, and since then 3,955 gay couples, men and women, had pledged their vows at City Hall.
Were the justices right? Of course they were — they were merely upholding the constitution. Of course they weren’t — had they no sense of natural justice? They were pandering to the evangelical Right. They were showing that the law cannot be flouted even by trendy celebrities. Either way, 7,910 unhappy citizens were left in a legal limbo.
My vox populi at the Pan-Pacific was appalled, but Cissie Bonini and Lora Pertie were philosophical about it, so the San Francisco Chronicle told me, as they hung their matching wedding dresses on their bedroom wall. “Said Cissie, 38: ‘We’ll be married as many times as we need to for it to be legal.’ ”
The plethora of local excitements almost pushes the election off California’s front pages. There have been political scams and scandals. There has been a fierce debate about the labelling of canned tuna. There have been endemically Californian arguments about protecting the environment, climate-change, whales, eco-systems, bio-regions and such. All over the State Indian tribes have been building, wanting to build or vociferously arguing their right to build gigantic gambling casinos. A couple of high-profile murder cases have been running well, there were the inevitable forest fires, a prisoner died in Solano State Prison after the removal of a wisdom tooth, a shark killed a diver, Michael Jackson appeared all in white in court at Santa Barbara and enigmatic in the middle of it all was Arnie Schwarzenegger.
Ah, California! Sail on, sail on, O ship of this particular State — for my money it’s above all upon the American-ness you represent, wise and frivolous, kind and disputatious, on the whole trying so earnestly to be good, that humanity with all its fears, with all its hopes of future years, hangs breathless now . . .
I HAVE ended up, all the same, in Washington DC. Where else? I am eating a picnic sandwich, and above me the Capitol building seems to have grown since I saw it last. It was always a great hefty thing, up there on its eponymous Hill, but now it appears to have been piled up somehow, stacked up inside itself, made more loftily separate. Today, on a hot dark afternoon, it suggests to me a towering citadel, surrounded as it is by concrete barricades, attended by countless police cars. Its terraces are like so many fortified breastworks, and on every level sentries watchfully stand, higher and higher up the flank of it, toting their weapons.
Perhaps it’s partly in the mind, and it would be wrong to suggest that Washington itself is all warlike suspicion, despite its maze of check- points and closed-off streets. Those sentries are charming if you can get close enough to test their manners. Every other policeman wears a smile, and through the railings of the White House gardens children still feed nuts to the red squirrels inside. I don’t doubt that we are all under inspection from one device or another, as we eat our packed lunches and gawp at the monuments (they tell me spotting the rooftop snipers is a popular new game for the kids), but in general this metropolis of the Orange Alert seems to me disarmingly amiable.
Even so, this is the focal point of the election, and it is an election under arms. A war president, Bush calls himself, and John Kerry ardently promotes his own warrior credentials. Warlike matters dominate the contest: Iraq enters every debate and the threat of terrorism has become a political tool. Just as Washington is heavy with symbolisms of conflict, writhing groups of battling soldiery, ensigns and war memorials all over the place, so the Republic, in this Presidential election of 2004, itself implicitly honours martial idioms and attitudes.
This disquieting instinct spans party, class and profession, so that today’s iconic representatives of the American Way are po-faced portly generals and admirals, plastered with more medal ribbons than a Napoleon could imagine. Elsewhere in the civilised world, military images are beginning to seem insensitive, or are softened into quaint anachronism. Here they are more contemporarily assertive than ever. The cowboy is no longer the All-American hero: it is the camouflaged Marine now, with his gun, his goggles and the steel helmet sinister over his brow.
Even in Lincoln’s day Americans were already boasting that theirs would one day be the greatest of all military powers. Since then military ways of thinking have always been persuasive in America, and today this strikes me as the great defining difference between the United States of America and the rest of the Western world: that this is an organically militarist nation, proud of its power, ready to use it and comfortable with its allegories.
Americans of all sorts recognise that it is the alliance of their unrivalled military clout with corporational capitalism and fervent evangelical zeal that has brought the US to its historic climax now, unique among the nations. They are proud of their status — who wouldn’t be? How to use their dominance is what divides them. Evidently about half of them are perfectly happy with the Republic’s present moral stance and isolation, so the future of democracy itself must depend upon a few hundred thousand voters ready in November to swing the national emphasis from unenviable pre-eminence to enlightened example.
“Unenviable pre-eminence? Who said it was unenviable? What’s unenviable about it?” Well, forgive me, General, but surely nobody wants to be almost universally feared and disliked, as the United States has become now that it is at the pinnacle of its supremacy — the one Power in the entire history of the world that can do exactly what it likes. Surely that way hubris lies, wouldn’t you say?
“Huh. Until this election’s over, lady, you think your way, I’ll think mine.”