Only in America

Three stops to Dupont Circle. Only three but I counted them in and I counted them out. Suddenly the train jerked to a halt between Cleveland Park and Woodley Park. We must be somewhere below Connecticut Avenue, I thought to myself, while all the other passengers continued with uninterrupted slumber. Near the Uptown cinema. They’re still playing The Lord of the Rings, even though no one seems to be going these days. Cinema … confined space. Great for gas. Just like the subway.

I started reading the emergency directives: face forward, press the red button, don’t panic, walk slowly in single file. Fine for misuse: $2000 or jail. Surely they would understand. We are in an orange alert, after all. My stop. I got out, relieved. But the escalator had broken down and it was a very long walk up the steps towards the crisp blue winter sky. I got to the top and bumped into a man with a megaphone holding up a copy of the Bible: ‘We are all damned,’ he proclaimed. ‘Hell awaits every one of you!’ His voice was fuzzy. Perhaps his loudhailer was running low on batteries. The city may have been on orange alert, but my imagination was already running on red: the ‘what ifs?’ had vanquished the ‘so whats’ and I forgot to buy my grande latte.

When I got to the office London was on the phone requesting a piece about the ‘panic buying’ of duct tape and plastic sheeting. It was all over the wires. I rang one of my most reliable sources. On the mobile phone I could hardly hear Penny’s voice for all the commotion. ‘Where are you, darling?’

‘I’m at Stroessniders,’ she said. Stroessniders is our local hardware store. ‘It’s mayhem here. Everyone is fighting over plastic sheeting.’

The last time she had bought plastic sheeting was for Amelia’s birthday parties to use as a cheap picnic blanket. Now her fellow shoppers were trying to follow the ‘Homeland Security terror threat advisory’ broadcast on the news the night before. This urged people to get hold of plastic sheeting to insulate their basements from any potential chemical attacks. Penny wondered if she should join in.

I called the crew and we raced up to Stroessniders. Penny had already gone, presumably busy measuring the windows for insulation, but the shop was crammed with women. Some in tracksuits, some in furs, some in hysterics, all tearing at bags of plastic sheeting as if their lives depended on it. Which, perhaps, they did. A new load of sheeting had arrived and was greeted at the door as if it were a shipment of rice and milk powder in an Afghan refugee camp. I noticed that people weren’t filling their shopping trolleys with just duct tape and sheeting. Torches, batteries, huge bottles of water, candles and matches were all flying off the shelves as if the whole of Washington was preparing for a long stint in a fallout shelter.

Bill Hart, the store manager, didn’t know whether to be delighted or distraught. He had sold two years’ supply of plastic sheeting in one day, he told me. But he himself didn’t have a clue which room to designate as the bunker in his own house. In aisle six (Glues and Adhesives) a heated discussion was under way.

‘For Chrissake don’t turn the playroom into your panic room! It’s below grade!’ The man seemed to know what he was talking about. He had horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair. He looked respectable, knowledgeable and authoritative. But he was also wearing a blue bow tie. Was he a mad professor or just mad? In the general absence of expertise everyone else was listening as if the shopper in the bow tie held the Chair for Applied Sciences at Georgetown University. ‘Chemicals don’t rise. They fall,’ he intoned, looking round at his audience, waiting to be challenged. ‘That’s how all those Kurds died in Iraq.’ I was about to pitch in and ask about the up or down movement of radiation, bacterial agents, mustard gas … but thought the better of it. Allan, the laconic Australian cameraman, was busy filming. I was busy trying to remember my O-level chemistry, but the only thing I remembered was that I had failed.

When I returned home that night my wife had packed a bag with extra clothing for the children and nappies. There were torches in every room, enough spare batteries to illuminate the whole neighbourhood, twenty litres of mineral water and three roles of duct tape; $1000 in cash had been stuffed into a sock in a drawer. ‘The ATM machines are bound to fail,’ she explained. I told her about the scene at Stroessniders, but she refused to see the funny side.

‘How many rolls of sheeting did you get?’

‘None,’ I confessed. ‘I forgot! Too busy filming,’ I explained feebly. Penny gave me one of those looks that best translates as: ‘Don’t you care about our four children!’

‘What do you want for dinner?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t care but don’t touch the tins!’ she added sternly. ‘They’re emergency rations.’

We spent the rest of the evening working out an evacuation plan. Everyone seemed to think that prevailing winds head north. So we should head west. West Virginia. Kentucky. But we only had a map of Maryland … and that was north. The BBC had conjured up an alternative evacuation plan for the office. This would involve taking a barge down the Potomac River to the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. No one seemed to have worked out how we would get to the barge, whether the authorities would stop all river traffic, whether the good vessel would be fast enough to escape the dangers or, indeed, what would happen to our families stranded at home with rolls of duct tape, plastic sheeting and tins of baked beans.

The evacuation plan lasted about three months before it was shredded, forgotten and replaced with nothing. Nevertheless the whole experience veered somewhere between the absurd and the sobering. We didn’t have a clue and nor, it seemed, did the authorities. It soon became clear that if the Nation’s Capital was subject to another terrorist attack the only thing we could count on was mayhem. At the end of 2003 a disgruntled tobacco farmer from Virginia drove his tractor all the way up I95 into the heart of Washington, DC, and parked it in the rectangular reflector pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a protest about a rise in the tobacco tax. The secret service initially thought it might be an impending terror attack. The man was targeted by police marksmen and Washington traffic ground to a complete halt for six hours. Memorial Bridge, one of the main escape routes, was closed and the city put on a spectacular display of road rage. God help us all if there was a genuine attack. It was a sentiment shared by many that day.

That night I listened to the radio on our screened porch, enjoying a post-traumatic stress cigarette. The local station introduced one of a whole regiment of retired colonels and generals who have benefited from the extraordinary growth in terror analysis and fear-mongering. The voice of ‘our in-house terror and security consultant’ boomed with unflappable confidence. A veteran of many wars, he was now a warrior of the airwaves. A nervous caller from Arlington asked about the effects of a dirty bomb.

‘I can assure you, Gene,’ said the colonel, ‘that if a dirty bomb went off half a mile from this building, you would be doing more damage to your health if you were smoking a cigarette outside.’ I looked at my Malboro Light glowing in the dark and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So much for ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’! Roosevelt is surely spinning in his grave while today’s political masters are telling us that the only thing we need to fear is the absence of fear. Fear is good. It keeps you alert. It also sets impossibly high standards of success in the ‘war on terror’. Since we came to the United States the country has apparently thrived on being afraid. First there were the colour-coded alerts. The word TERROR still flashes across our screens in a truly terrifying whoosh, especially on Fox TV, which would be bereft if America were universally loved. There is the obvious fear of terrorists wanting to blow up New York and Washington. Oddly, though, the fear of another terrorist strike grows the further away you are from the places that were actually hit. In lower Manhattan life got back to normal almost as soon as the rubble was cleared and Ground Zero became a large hole in the ground waiting to become a construction site. Property prices in the immediate vicinity slumped for a few months before resuming their astronomical climb. A big city like New York takes tragedies in its stride. The spirit is indeed unbeatable. But go to Omaha, Nebraska, or Martinsburg, West Virginia, both places that no self-respecting terrorist would ever bother with let alone find on the map, and the population is cowering behind triple-locked doors in fear of the extremist Muslim hordes.

If it isn’t the Caliphate that’s trying to topple the American way of life, it is the ‘superbug’ that could wipe out entire school communities in a day. If you watch Lou Dobbs on CNN, an anti-immigration campaigner masquerading as a broadcaster, you would think that the flood of illegal migration across the border means that we will all be made to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish and eat tortillas instead of hamburgers. If that isn’t enough, you can always rely on the Chinese to terrify you. It was bad enough when they were taking away hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs but now they are also trying to poison our toddlers by selling us toys laced with lead paint. In the run-up to Christmas 2007 some of the cable TV networks launched campaigns helping hapless Americans spot ‘toxic toys from China’, which they might have wanted to buy for their grandchildren. And if that’s not scary enough, just remember that China also owns most of America’s debt. The Yellow Peril is drowning in a sea of greenbacks. The Chinese could sink the dollar even further by dumping it on the market. ‘Beijing has become our banker’, as one commentator put it in the New York Times. ‘And you never pick a fight with your banker!’

The many fears that stalk America these days are the flip side of the enormous successes and the social mobility the country has experienced in recent years. The booming town of Culpeper, about eighty miles south-west of Washington, is a case in point. I got to know the place at the end of 2007 because the BBC chose to adopt the town as a way of measuring the political pulse of America in the run-up to the 2008 election. Finding a representative patient in a country as vast and complex as this might seem absurd, but Culpeper embodied many of the changes yanking America in different directions. It was located in the middle of Virginia. A traditionally conservative state that had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, it had turned against the Republican Party because of a combination of factors: the unpopular war in Iraq, the President’s advocacy of immigration reform, the declining economy and a general, queasy feeling that America had lost its way. Virginia had become a bellwether state. It could swing either way during the election. Its traditional certainties had been undermined by new anxieties and it found itself in mid-transition from rural backwater to expanding exurb.

The town’s population had doubled in the last seven years. Half the new arrivals were migrant workers from Latin America, who spoke barely any English, had snuck across the border with Mexico – 1500 miles from Culpeper – and had come there in search of a job. Most of them had been employed by the construction companies turning the rolling hills of Virginia into what resembled a sprawling set for Desperate Housewives. These new, gated communities might as well be called Wisteria Lane. The houses look as real as cardboard façades in Hollywood and about as sturdy. Having ignored the town for decades, the Amtrak train to Washington, DC, now stops here to pick up a swelling number of commuters. There are now two Italian restaurants and a Thai on Main Street. At the coffee shop on Grant Street it is no longer good enough to opt for coffee with or without cream. You now have to choose between tall lattes, double-shot decaf frappuccinos and a grilled/toasted/baked panino with a bewildering choice of exotic hams and cheeses. The nineteenth-century façades of the houses in the ‘historic centre’ have been scrubbed clean and given a new lick of paint. Shops that were shuttered or empty a few years ago are now selling smart kitchen utensils, Italian designer furniture, Vietnamese throw cushions and pot-pourri. Home makeover fever has struck Culpeper, the surest sign of all that the town is booming. And yet our sample of citizens were vexed by the changes. The overriding fear was that the property prices that had shot up in recent years were now beginning to tumble. Culpeper’s new citizens were being hit on two fronts. The rise in petrol prices had made their long commute to the capital far more costly. At the same time the fall in property prices no longer allowed them to think of themselves as wealthy. The number of foreclosures had doubled to about a hundred in three months and dozens of the large newly built houses – called McMansions in the United States – remained empty and unsold. The universal fears about property helped to trigger some very particular anxieties.

Steve Jenkins, the burly football-coach-turned-town-councillor, describes himself as a son of ‘old Culpeper’. One of his ancestors was the town’s first soldier to enlist on the Confederate side. What fuels Steve’s passion today is America’s new war against illegal migration. ‘I don’t hate Mexicans,’ he explains in the last remaining diner on Main Street. (‘I don’t like that fancy cappuccino stuff.’) ‘But I can’t stand the fact that they sneak across the border illegally and then expect to be welcomed like real citizens. They don’t pay taxes and yet they fill the schools and use our hospitals.’ As he vents the muscles and veins on his oxen neck bulge and pulsate to the drumbeat of growing anger. He grinds his fists together. I am glad I have a legitimate visa, I think to myself. Steve is adamant that his anger stems from the fact that much of this migration is illegal. But it also becomes clear that, like millions of others, he’s afraid that America’s soul is being warped. ‘The illegal ones should all be deported,’ he says, thumping the counter and causing a few drops of pure American filter coffee to spill onto the stainless steel. ‘The rest need to learn English. Real good!’ Steve blamed the migrants for a whole host of ills, from a rise in the rate of burglaries to an increase in road rage. ‘The traffic is terrible here now. People used to stop for you when you crossed the street. Now they just plough through.’ On Grant Street I saw two cars driving so slowly they might have been kerb-crawling. The driving etiquette of Culpeper seemed to be a lot courtlier than anything I had encountered in Washington, let alone New York. But for Steve it was a matter of comparison with a lost era of perfect road manners, when Culpeper was smaller, poorer and everyone spoke English.

Betsy Smith, a former businesswoman turned Baptist preacher, is much less afraid of the new wave of migration. She has met quite a few Mexicans at her church. ‘They tend to be hard-working, God-fearing and law-abiding. They’re against abortion and the ones I have met are good Christians.’ What keeps Betsy up at night are the declining morals of the society that surrounds her. The first time we met her was at Halloween, clutching her five-year-old daughter who was dressed as an angel. But we didn’t find them at the traditional Halloween parade on Main Street. ‘That kind of Halloween is a celebration of evil. We don’t go in for that.’ Instead Betsy helped to organize an alternative parade, where members of her church were handing out leaflets on the Ten Commandments and Bible studies with the candy. The usual witch’s cavern and cauldron had been transformed into a crib and a manger. The fact that we were in a car park, marooned in the middle of a shopping mall next to a gun shop, didn’t seem to bother Betsy and her friends. They had carved out an alternative niche for themselves. Even in a small town like Culpeper they found the space to create their own social bubble, unbothered by the heathens around them who were themselves largely oblivious to the alternative sin-free Fall Festival Parade taking place in the church car park.

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