Kitabı oku: «Only in America», sayfa 2

ONE Beltway Blues

For many years my morning commute was regularly enlivened by an encounter with the American Vice President, Dick Cheney. He lives in a secure compound next to the British Embassy that also houses the United States Naval Observatory. Does Cheney wander over to the giant telescope in the dead of night to try and catch a glimpse of distant stars and imagine alien civilizations? I doubt it. His gaze is firmly fixed on the terrestrial.

At 7.30 a.m. precisely the traffic is stopped in a surprisingly elaborate ceremony that is Washington’s equivalent of the Changing of the Guard. At first nimble policemen on mountain bikes wearing aerodynamic pod-shaped bicycle helmets pop out of the undergrowth and flag down the traffic. Then their less trim cousins emerge from police cars humming with more lights than a funfair attraction. They block the flow. Finally the super-sized outriders on their Harley-Davidsons park right across the street. The man-meets-machine road block is in place.

The wait begins. The curtain is about to be raised on a vintage Washington spectacle. We all sit in traffic, fiddling with our steering wheels, making unnecessary calls on our phones and waiting for the main event. Then the gates of the Naval Observatory swing open, the bomb barriers are swallowed up by the road and more policemen on Harleys appear with screeching sirens. They gesticulate furiously, guns in hand, reinforcing a point that has already been made eloquently and unambiguously by the grunts preceding them. Next, two black secret service vans appear, followed by an armoured stretch limo – the decoy – followed by the real one, in which the Vice President can briefly be spotted, sitting in the back, squinting at the ungrateful world outside. We always make eye contact.

Then there’s another secret service van. This one is open at the back and displays two agents looking at potential assassins through the sights of M16 rifles. At this stage I always take my hands off the wheel, just in case I make an involuntary move that could get me shot. I resist the urge to scratch the back of my head. Then there’s the obligatory ambulance. It follows dutifully in case the Vice President, who had the first of his four heart attacks when he was only thirty-six, doesn’t survive the six-minute commute to the White House. Finally there is the tail escort, another three howling Harleys. So, just to recap: two armoured stretch limos, three vans, one ambulance, six motorbikes, three mountain bikes and, oh yes, a helicopter keeping an eye on everything from above. All this just to get one old man to the office.

This is all part of the theatre of power that is Washington’s only real industry. It is what defines life inside the so-called Beltway, the ring road that circles the capital and which has become a metaphor for the insularity of the world’s most powerful capital.

No one I know has anything good to say about the Beltway. And I’m not just talking about the people stuck in one of its twelve almost permanently congested lanes. At night the Capitol Beltway, also known more formally as Interstate 495, looks like an oozing river of red and yellow dots. Whether you’re travelling clockwise or anti-clockwise you’re almost always moving at a snail’s pace. But the Beltway conjures up much more than the M25 around London or Paris’s Périphérique. The humble 495 is seen as the membrane around a political cocoon, the frosted glass encasing the hothouse, the cordon sanitaire which separates those who dwell within from the world outside.

‘Inside the Beltway’ has become shorthand for the insularity of the American capital. It was first coined in 1983 by Mike Causey, a columnist for the Washington Post. Today the phrase is received by the rest of America with a mixture of awe and disgust. Mainly the latter. It evokes a shadowy world of Byzantine machinations and deceit. It lends itself to unflattering alliteration. The Beltway Boys is a TV talk show on the FOX News Channel whose content sounds distinctly kinky but which offers nothing more titillating than pundits chewing the political cud. In Washington politics is sex. Here power has its own brand of pornography. ‘Beltway Bile’ was the name of a column in a local Maryland newspaper. ‘Beltway Bosoms’ was the name of an unsuccessful lap-dancing bar on the seedy Florida Avenue and perhaps the only time that the notions of intercourse and interstate have merged in one name. The one word you never, ever, hear in conjunction with the Beltway is ‘wholesome’. And that is unfortunate because most of America cherishes ‘wholesome’. No other capital city of a great nation has allowed itself to be defined by its ring road. But, then, no other capital city worth reckoning with has ever been created solely for the pursuit of politics.

Washington was founded in a malarial swamp by a general-turned-president in 1790. He liked the spot on the Potomac River mainly because it was only seven miles from his plantation at Mount Vernon. It was convenient enough to reach after a two-hour ride but far enough to keep the riff-raff at a distance. He then named the tiny settlement of shacks after himself, appointed a French architect called Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital of the New World on the drawing board and designated its shape as a 110-square-mile diamond. Early Washington was really no more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern Dubai, without the sand, the bling, the excellent duty-free shopping and the Russian hookers. When L’Enfant suggested that the city should be named ‘Washingtonople’, which he considered a little less crass than just ‘Washington’, he was promptly sacked.

All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a city that has never been much loved. Not even the residents who enjoyed their flirtation with destiny here have had nice things to say about it. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House crippled by the Vietnam war and unwilling to run for re-election, he told his audience: ‘I’m going home to Texas where people notice if you’re sick and care if you die!’ A former mayor of New York once quipped: ‘It’s half the size of the Queens cemetery and twice as dead!’ Fred Thompson, the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor-turned-presidential candidate, once compared the capital of power to the capital of movies: ‘Washington has all the veneer of Hollywood,’ he said with a drawl that rolled like one of his favourite Cuban cigars, ‘but none of its sincerity!’

And then there is the ultimate litmus test of the computer age. How many Google entries does Washington, DC, get? New York has 4500. Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, as it likes on occasion to be called, only a pathetic 111. Des Moines, Iowa, America’s capital of flat, rural tedium, isn’t far behind with 84. Middle Americans are disgusted by Washington, whose politics they see as the corruption of everything noble America stands for. When things go wrong it is easy to blame Beltway bile and equally easy to forget that it was the voters who originally made it happen. For its part Hollywood despises Washington like a movie gone wrong. The script had such potential, they mutter over their soy lattes. But they keep changing director. The actors aren’t up to much either. The set is stodgy. If only Steven, George or Marty could get their hands on Project Washington. The doyens of Silicon Valley look at it with the same anthropological marvel reserved for ancient, outdated hardware. Bill Gates and his philanthropic entourage descend on the city at regular intervals to appear before some congressional committee and to remind the politicians that he alone spends more money on solving AIDS and battling TB than they ever will. And yet there are those who have the opposite problem, those who fall hopelessly but discreetly in love with Washington, realizing that theirs is a love that dare not speak its name. It is the grubby and infectious love of power and it is felt most keenly by those who never exercise it. It is the love of eunuchs, a species that includes academics, lobbyists, policy wonks, economists, diplomats and think-tank types, many of whom have dipped their toes into the waters of influence by serving in an administration. It also includes the ultimate low lifes: journalists. I don’t think I have ever heard any of the above say they dislike Washington. I look around my daughter’s school playground and it is full of parents gossiping feverishly about who is in and out while vigorously pushing swings or egging on children dangling from monkey bars. Once you have examined the entrails of Washington any other form of vivisection seems dull.

The newspaper and broadcasting editors of the world recognize the fatal attraction of Washington. ‘Frei, you must not get stuck in the Beltway’ was an exhortation I heard repeatedly from my bosses when they dispatched me to the United States. ‘Of course not!’ I replied earnestly and I meant it. But a year later the magnetic pull of the capital worked its magic, the ring road became like a force field I didn’t dare crash into and I found more and more excuses not to leave. George Bush, his wars, his scandals and his determination to reshape the world are a great help, admittedly. This is, after all, vintage ‘Inside the Beltway’ material. Even my bosses wouldn’t want me to miss it. And yet whenever I manage to escape they celebrate the fact as if I was a child learning to walk. ‘Great to see that you’ve managed – finally – to get out of the Beltway!’ is one of the highest compliments paid to any correspondent resident in the city.

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.