Only in America

Consider the wise words of Betty Jean Crocker, the sixty-year-old owner-manager of the Chateau Surprise Bed and Breakfast in Cambridge, Ohio. When I confessed to her that I lived in the Beltway she looked at me with a mixture of pity and puzzlement, as if I had been recently bereaved: ‘I’m so, so sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘You can’t be seeing much of America then!’ I replied feebly that I had already visited thirty-seven states. Had I been an American her response might have been less pitying and more judgemental. Had I been a lawyer or a lobbyist she would probably have shown me the door. Saying that you live in Washington has the same effect on people outside the city as announcing that you work in life insurance. A grimace spreads across their face like an oil slick.

What Las Vegas is to sin, Seattle to coffee, Hollywood to movies and Detroit to cars, Washington is to power. The city is – somewhat unfairly – associated with one industry alone. And that industry is the most despicable, corrupting, wasteful, unproductive and yet coveted of them all. The fact that it is vacuum-wrapped inside the Beltway makes it all the more unpleasant. Power in Washington is like a prize pickle, obscene, awe-inspiring, grotesquely nurtured beyond recognition and totally unpalatable. There is so much of it you can taste it in the air. Power is the faintly sour odour of well-scrubbed men in suits rushing to meetings. It is the shrill sound of a motorcade racing through unmenacing streets ferrying the Jordanian minister of finance to a meeting about debt relief, as if he was being rushed to hospital after an attempted assassination. It is the whirr of the President’s three helicopters: the one he actually travels on and the two decoys that accompany him just in case someone ill disposed to the leader of the free world wants to take a potshot. In Washington power rules the air and the roads. It can also dictate the way people live and eat. No one drinks at lunch time because no one wants to be caught off guard. Power even inspires the chat-up lines. ‘Would you like to see my yacht/Porsche/six pack’ is not nearly as impact-charged as ‘Do you want to come to a working breakfast with this senator or that White House deputy chief of staff?’ You can hear the pitch of power in the strained voices of parents urging on their charges at Little League soccer games: ‘Go, Tyler, GOO!’ One year the Little League supervisors even had to issue a directive asking parents to tone down their cheering from the sidelines.

Power dominates the conversation at dinner parties. At one stage a celebrated Georgetown hostess had to limit each guest to two George Bush anecdotes. Anyone who flouted the rule would forfeit dessert. And as a journalist you naturally while away your time discussing it, weighing it, dissecting it, bemoaning it, begrudging it, undermining it and yearning to have much, much more of it. This would all be purely self-indulgent were it not for the fact that the exercise of power inside the Beltway also has the tendency to ripple round the globe like a pebble in a millpond. It is, after all, not just any old power. It is hyperpower.

When I joined my Washington gym, a colleague gave me the following advice. ‘If you want to make the right contacts in this city, forget going after work or at lunch time. The people who matter go to the “six a.m. boot camp”. [Boot camps tend to be places where US Marines learn to become super-fit killing machines.] Then you go off and have breakfast at the Four Seasons. Everyone will be there!’ I tried to imagine what it would be like sidling up to the right contact while panting for my life, glistening like a pickled herring and smelling, well, like a pickled herring. Would you interrupt them on the running machine? What if they lost their balance? Would it be better to make contact in the changing rooms? Surely if I accosted them in the showers I would simply be arrested. Russians, I was told, like to conduct their business in the sauna or the hot tub after marathon vodka-drinking sessions. Americans, on the other hand, are notoriously sober, especially when they are engaged in the gruelling business of toning their abs. Saunas are meant for quietly sweating out toxins, not for conversation, let alone business. So, the 6 a.m. boot camp, I concluded, wasn’t for me.

Power may be raw, brutal and addictive. But because of that it is also clad in the straitjacket of political correctness and has spawned an industry of euphemisms. In Washington politicians don’t wield power, they ‘serve’. When Donald Rumsfeld, the knuckle-dusting Secretary of Defense, resigned from his job as the head of the most powerful military in the history of the planet, he said, humbly: ‘I thank the President for having given me the opportunity to serve!’ And thus the man who presided over the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the open-ended war on terror, established Guantanamo Bay and virtually shredded the Geneva Convention as a quaint document from a distant age of chivalry walked out of the Oval Office. He had been unceremoniously sacked, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way he waxed lyrical about public service. As a friend of mine at the Pentagon put it: ‘What he should have said was: “I thank the President for giving me the opportunity to terrify the planet!”’

The euphemism of power is part of the euphemistic plague that has sapped modern American English. Daily discourse is littered with well-known examples. Black Americans have become African Americans. An abortion is called a termination. When people are sacked they are laid off, as if there was anything horizontal and comforting about the act of losing a job. Companies downsize. Shellshock has become post-traumatic stress syndrome. In war dead civilians are collateral damage. In the interrogation manual of the Pentagon torture is now called stress position. Trigger-happy GIs with dodgy aim are described as agents of ‘friendly fire’: is there anything remotely friendly about being ‘pink-misted’ by your own side, to use a particularly blood-curdling and descriptive euphemism from the era of precision-guided, high-velocity weaponry? Old people’s homes are not even called retirement homes any more. They have become ‘active adult communities’. The inactive ones used to be called mortuaries.

As a malleable language that feasts on idioms and disdains the strictures of grammar, English lends itself beautifully to euphemisms. It is eminently suggestive and conveniently ambiguous. Euphemisms are metaphors born of cowardice. The culture of political correctness has given rise to their birth. The internet has encouraged their wide usage. Like unwanted furniture that clutters a cramped apartment, most eventually become part of the inventory. But in America the euphemisms surrounding the exercise of power predate the recent craze for political correctness. They were created more than two centuries ago at a time when the founding fathers were grappling with an unprecedented challenge: to create an idealistic society that turned its back on Europe and its royal families and lived up to their egalitarian principles while at the same time equipping its leaders to run a nascent, fractious country in a time of war. A glance at the scribbled annotations, corrections, additions and furious crossings out on the draft documents that became the Bill of Rights or the Constitution reflects a debate between the founding fathers that was frequently bitter and always fraught. Thomas Jefferson had lived in France at the time of the Revolution and admired the bloodletting of the guillotine. ‘From time to time, the tree of liberty must be irrigated by the blood of tyrants.’ (The same quote appeared on the T-shirt worn by Timothy McVeigh, the man who bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1994, thus perpetrating America’s worst act of home-grown terrorism.) George Washington, on the other hand, was terrified of the plebeian powers unleashed by the French Revolution and favoured a far more monarchical role for the job he was destined to occupy.

The birth of America was as messy and as stressful as the drafting of the documents that defined it. The mere fact that the amendments to the Constitution are as famous and as important as the Constitution itself points to a process riddled with afterthoughts and contention. The founding fathers were like survivors from a shipwreck who had managed to salvage the best ideas and principles from the sinking vessel of eighteenth-century Europe and transplant them to the virgin territories of the New World. It was an extraordinary social experiment and what is so compelling is the journey between those incipient ideals and the reality of American power today. America is a pilgrim’s colony that has morphed into the mightiest military superpower the world has ever seen. It has gained strength and influence not because of its might but because of the ideas it embodies.

It is the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan famously described it (misquoting Benjamin Franklin), but the city has become surrounded by ramparts and gun turrets. Can America be both an empire, determined to smite enemies sworn to its destruction, and an open democracy? Is there still a link between the annotations of the Bill of Rights and the 2002 Patriot Act, which has given this administration unprecedented power to interfere with the lives of its citizens? Has Guantanamo Bay killed the Gettysburg Address? Has the idea of America been trampled by the reality of power? These are the questions that keep Washington awake today, first as a whisper and now as a roar. This is the debate that underpins the most open and unpredictable election campaign in at least half a century. America is scratching its head, chewing its nails and peering uneasily into its soul. The country is on the psychiatrist’s couch, taking a collective ‘emotional inventory’. The fleeting certainties forged in the heat of revenge after 9/11 have become brittle.

The Iraq war is increasingly being compared to the debacle of Vietnam, where creeping defeat created feverish self-doubt and introversion. Today’s experience could arguably turn out to be worse. There’s the potential of meltdown in Iraq spreading to the region. The impact on oil prices; the spectre of a Sunni – Shia civil war tearing the Middle East apart. And then there’s the self-inflicted wound on America. As the sole remaining superpower the United States no longer has the luxury of icing failure with comparisons to the Red Soviet peril. Since the end of the Cold War it has been judged alone on the basis of its own merits and failures and not someone else’s. And whatever you say about America, the people who call this country home are far happier being loved than feared. America was, after all, born to please.

The disdain that many Americans feel for the Beltway tends to melt away when they actually visit the Nation’s Capital and wander awe-struck among its monuments. The spinal cord of monumental Washington is the Mall, a mile-long runway of manicured grass, shallow reflection pools and war memorials that extends from the foot of Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. It is a showcase, made for parades and gatherings of a million people, at the very least. Most days it is circled by tour buses rather than chariots, trampled by joggers and not horses. The architectural scale is Roman and imperial. The activity is distinctly American. The joggers, of whom there are thousands, are lean, taut and grimacing with determination. Presumably these are alpha people who run the most powerful city in the world, replenishing their endorphins, working off some of that imperial rage. Those not jogging are probably tourists who have come to marvel at the theatre of power.

The focal point of the Mall is the 555-foot-high obelisk of the Washington Monument. This is the white needle at the heart of the city. On a clear day you can see it for miles before you land at the capital’s airport. After sunset two red lights blink at the approaching aircraft and the needle looks suspiciously like an emaciated member of the Ku Klux Klan with conjunctivitis. On one side of the monument, set back among trees and a small park, is the White House. On the other sits the brooding Smithsonian Castle, the institution that was founded in 1861 thanks to a bequest by the Englishman James Smithson. Its architecture can best be described as Gothic Victorian. Resembling a red brick teacher training college in Middle England, it looks out of place amid the neoclassical splendour of Washington. Smithson was a scientist who made a fortune, loved the idea of America but never actually went there. The seed money from his foundation has funded all the great museums that line the Mall and, astonishingly for America, charge no entry fee.

At the Virginia end of the Mall, Abraham Lincoln slumps on his throne surrounded by marble columns and stone slabs, etched with quotes from the Gettysburg Address. The expression on his bearded face is a curious mixture of resignation and wisdom. It’s what you might expect from a gloomy fellow who suffered severe bouts of depression and steered his country through the bloodiest conflict America has ever fought. Irreverent pigeons congregate on his head and use it as a lavatory. At the other end, straddling the hill it is named after, sits the Capitol, the tallest building in Washington, above which no other edifice is allowed to rise. After two hundred years it still dominates the skyline and has avoided being dwarfed by the corporate spires that define virtually every other American city. White and resplendent, the Capitol sits like a huge, domed wedding cake on top of a pedestal. It is both a monument celebrating ‘the greatest democracy on earth’, as the tour guides put it, and a living, breathing, lunching, legislating parliament. Most Americans admire the building and what it stands for but have a very dim view of the electors who toil inside it. Opinion polls repeatedly give the assembly of congressmen and senators pitifully low marks of approval. In fact it’s hardly surprising that Washington, DC, is so hated. It is after all the favourite haunt of America’s three most loathed professions: lawyers, politicians and lobbyists. The latter are particularly despised: a lobbyist is an amalgam of the first two enriched by huge fees. Eighty per cent of congressmen and women end up working for lobby firms. The city boasts an astonishing 32,000 lobbyists, compared to 8000 policemen and 3000 teachers.

Every four years, in the middle of January, the American public is prepared to turn its gaze away from the entrails of government and the Capitol becomes a giant stage for the celebration of the presidency. Think of it as an arranged wedding that finally takes place after months of wrangling over the dowry, fights among the family factions and arguments about the cost of the party. Presidential election campaigns are marathons of mutual malice. The inauguration of the winner is an opportunity for everyone to kiss and make up and celebrate the commander-in-chief before the next round of mud-slinging. Even after George W. Bush won the bruising Florida recount in 2000 and was hoisted across the finishing line by the Supreme Court, the bile and acrimony were suspended for a day as Al Gore, the former Vice President, graciously congratulated his opponent and President Bush took the oath of office.

On that occasion, too, the grand terrace in front of Capitol Hill was decked with red, white and blue bunting. Giant flags were draped over the sides. An arena of seats rose out of the ground and the Mall was packed with tourists and local citizens watching the ceremony on super-sized video screens and hundreds of policemen and secret service agents watching the audience. If the President is the bride on Inauguration Day, the Constitution is the groom. Every presidency is a continuation of the sacred covenant between the elected leader and the founding fathers, who framed the Constitution. No wonder this is an occasion when arch rhetoric is pushing at an open door. George Bush may not be known for his articulacy but after his re-election in 2004 he and his principal speech writer, a fellow born-again Christian called Michael Gerson, worked tirelessly to earn their place in The Book of Great Quotations. On a freezing day, while thousands shivered in the snow, George Bush mounted the podium under leaden skies and talked about America’s mission ‘to end tyranny on our earth’, the ‘universal God-given right to liberty’ and the nation’s burden to help bestow this gift on the less fortunate inhabitants of this planet. The reality of a bruising, failing war in Iraq, a mounting body count, Osama bin Laden on the loose and the blatant unwillingness of many countries to have Lady Liberty thrust upon them barely impinged on the audience. They were hooked. On occasions patriotic rhetoric seems like a benign opium of the masses. It encourages them once again to believe and for a brief moment it’s as if the entire nation was entranced by the ritual being enacted before their eyes.

I was standing next to Tom and Amy from Missouri. Like so many on the Mall they had timed their visit to the Nation’s Capital to coincide with the inauguration. They had not voted for George Bush. In fact, they didn’t much like him. But they really wanted to see an American President say the oath of office on the altar of democracy. Amy was wrapped up like an Arctic explorer and she and her husband had stood outside for two hours before the President started his speech. In the gap between hat and scarf I detected a tear running down a red cheek as the commander-in-chief promised to expand the horizons of liberty. When the national anthem was played everyone around me solemnly laid their right hands on their chests and sang along. I fumbled nervously with my scarf, wishing I had a large sign on my hat declaring: ‘This isn’t treason. I am a foreigner!’ Even if Americans don’t like the reality of the President who is running their country, they are head over heels in love with the idea of the presidency.

If America is a nation founded on the ideas of liberty and equality, Washington is the temple that keeps the ideas preserved in aspic. If those ideas had been embodied in a man or a woman he or she would be embalmed in an air-conditioned mausoleum, as Mao or Lenin once were. Instead, Washington offers a tour of monuments, memorials and institutions that hammers home the gist of America with relentless rhetorical force. There is nothing subtle about this. In fact, the only other capital I know where the official architecture feels this didactic is Beijing. The giant red banners in Tiananmen Square, extolling the virtues of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat, the huge portrait of Mao over the gate of the Forbidden City are as crass as the cult of liberty trumpeted by Washington. The equivalent of the workers’ delegation shuffling awe-struck through the Great Hall of the People is the thousands of school tours that pay homage to the Nation’s Capital and the founding fathers every week.

On a warm spring day, when the cherry blossom fills the trees around the Tidal Basin with pink cotton candy and when the air is filled with the sweet scent of jasmine, the Mall is a truly delightful place to hang out. I joined a group of eighth-grade teenagers from a high school in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who were being shepherded around the capital by their history teacher. The students were a mixture of African American, Hispanic and Caucasian. Apart from one boy named Lester, none of them had been to Washington before. A meticulously scrubbed offspring of military parents, Harrison Howard had one of those American names that seem to work better backwards. He also had the annoying habit of interrupting the history teacher in the prime of his passion and the flow of rhetoric about our great founding fathers. Mr Wyeth sported a disconcerting goatee and a Paisley bow tie, which he twisted as if it was a wind-up key. He wore the kind of Stars and Stripes lapel badges that became the fashion in the White House after 9/11. He spoke fluently and passionately about the Gettysburg Address, the Bill of Rights and the numerous wars fought to defend liberty. ‘The war on terror started long before our homeland was attacked,’ he concluded at one point. His jaded audience fiddled longingly with their silent iPods.

There were twenty students in the group, only ten of whom had ever been outside their home state. What most of them really wanted to do – and who could blame them? – was to visit Disneyworld in Florida, see Hollywood or gawp at Times Square in New York. Instead they found themselves on a gruelling tour of Washington that sounded like an intensive refresher course in patriotism and sacrifice. On Monday they went to see the Jefferson Memorial, which is a splendid dome, modelled on the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson. America’s first Secretary of State, drafter of the Declaration of Independence stands twenty feet tall, looking sternly towards the horizon or perhaps the kebab van on the other side of the Tidal Basin, one can’t be sure which. Then the class trekked over to the new World War II memorial, which is an unabashed celebration of the war that secured America’s dominance on the international stage. Gurgling fountains veil heroic quotations about the struggle for freedom. Every state is represented by a square granite column, festooned with copper wreaths. There are 4014 gold stars, each representing a hundred fallen soldiers, and two giant arches commemorating the victories in the Pacific and the Atlantic. For a monument that celebrates America’s victory over fascism it has an oddly square-jawed appearance. It’s as if Albert Speer had been asked to redesign Stonehenge.

The sheer number of war memorials is surprising. There are an astonishing 246 in Washington. Anyone who has ever led a battle charge is commemorated on a plinth somewhere in the city. They range from the puny bronze of Colonel Blassier, the commander of the 3rd Iowa Rifles, standing to attention like a stranded tourist looking for directions, to the extraordinarily tasteless ‘Flaming Sword’ near the White House. A seventeen-foot-high frilly phallus, covered in gold plate and clutched by two interlocking hands, it celebrates the sacrifices of the US Second Army Division in World War I. Stylistically it belongs to the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. The uncanny thing about these war memorials is that many of them reflect the nature of the conflicts they commemorate. The World War II monument is unambiguously triumphant and celebrates a conflict that changed the rest of the world. The famous Vietnam Memorial is a stark black granite wall. This sombre slab bears the names of the fallen – all 56,400 of them – and forces you to remember a war that cowed America and gave birth to a syndrome. Even the students from Arkansas, exhausted by thoughts of sacrifice and nobility, were stunned into reverential silence as they ran their fingers over some of the engraved names. At first they didn’t even notice the bearded amputee who manoeuvred his wheelchair next to the shiny wall and rested his hand on a group of names. He sobbed quietly, oblivious to the other visitors, lost in the memories of some distant battle. When they did notice him many of the students looked embarrassed and walked away. Mr Wyeth was lost for words. Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps because Vietnam was a war that most Americans would rather forget. It strayed from the heroic narrative of the country’s other conflicts. It served no obvious purpose. The Vietnam Memorial is simple and intimate. The shiny black granite reflects your face, pockmarked by the engraved names. It remembers a failed war that had virtually no impact on geopolitics but tortured the individuals who fought in it and the soul of the nation that sent them there. It is a black slab devoid of heroism, bleating with introspection.

It stands in stark contrast to the Korean War Memorial which features life-sized soldiers traipsing up a mountain in the bitter Korean winter. Huddled against the freezing wind, these silvery figures look flash-frozen in a moment of history. What better monument to remind people of a largely forgotten, indecisive war that ended not in victory or defeat but in an inconclusive truce. Even today America is still officially at war with North Korea. The students liked this one. Looking at the petrified men they tried to imagine what battle felt like. Again Mr Wyeth was anxious to move on. He didn’t want his charges to get worn out before they reached the apex of his tour: the Iwo Jima Memorial on the other side of the Potomac in Virginia, perhaps the most famous of them all. It displays the six Marines who hoisted the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during the Pacific war. It has inspired countless books and a Clint Eastwood movie and Mr Wyeth choked back the tears as he launched into a monologue about sacrifice and liberty. The monument, which has a commanding view over the Mall, was circled by a group of silver-haired veterans and their wives. They said nothing; one reached up to touch the cast-iron boot of a soldier.