Poor Dickens, Dylan Thomas and Malcolm Bradbury, and all the other Englishmen who have written about visits to the USA, for now I follow feebly after them.
And much of what I say has been said before, and I suspect in more elegant style by many others. But the great thing about blogging is that, since I don’t give a fig for the world’s good opinion, I can inflict unoriginal and hackneyed reflections on the American counter-revolution on the world. These are little to do with the MLA conference and I must make clear no criticism of my hosts, who were the soul of grace and hospitality.
1. Politics: encouraging signs of opposition to Bush, posters everywhere calling for a major demonstration against the occupation of Iraq in June. People in the streets leaflet for the overthrow of Bush in the presidential election. Indeed the point of the Democrat’s campaign with tactical astuteness, that their candidate’s virtues (or lack of them) is not the point, but that their candidate is not Bush. Capital cities are like this: I was reminded, reading the obituaries of Reagan, that DC was one of the only areas not to go Republican in one of his election years, just as London’s Greater London Council defied the Thatcher government in the 1980s, so that she abolished it.
2. American television. Naturally I was partly prepared for this, but I had not grasped the full horror, not only the banality of the programmes but the moronic advertisements. Words cannot describe my response to a Viagra advertisement (why do they have to advertise the stuff? Surely Pfizer’s marketing people must realise that one product they don’t need to tell an uninformed public about is Viagra). And the radio was unbelievably awful: with so many stations, surely they can come up with something listenable?
3. American newspapers: I read the Washington Post and the New York Times while in the country ands found, apart form their maddening number of separate sections, that they lacked the intellectual stature I would expect, even compared to the British press which has gone badly downhill.
4. I was astonished at how, in service industries at least, most of the time I dealt with people who were as much of strangers to the place as me I. The whole place runs on migrant labour. In a café two black men talking French served me. I asked where they were form, to which the answer was the Ivory Coast. We discussed America and the Americans in French, secure in the knowledge that few would understand us. I saw a huddle of Mexican men early in the morning a coupe of hundred metres form the White House, waiting to be picked up for casual building work, precisely as when I came to London in the 1970s, the days of lump labour, I would see Irish men on Cricklewood Broadway waiting outside cafes and boarding houses to see if they would work that day.
5. The much-vaunted American service seemed to me not terribly much in evidence, and combined with geographic illiteracy, lead to frustrating encounters. An example:
Me: “Good evening. What beers do you have, something like an English bitter?” (I acknowledge it is uncultured to try to drink the beer one drinks at home in a foreign country).
Barman: “We have a Czech beer, Pilsner Urquell.”
Me: “Yes, I’m familiar with that, but it’s a lager.”
Barman says nothing, gazing uncomprehendingly at me. Does this crazy tourist not realise that the Czech republic is as near England as to make no difference, he thinks to himself? I order the Urquell, finding out later that it is the most expensive beer they sell.
I have never heard the expression, “Excuse me”, which I always thought should be spoken in an apologetic tone, said with more aggression than by an American who thinks you’re in his or her way.
6. It’s curious how the mobile (or cell as they call it) phone revolution seems to have passed them by. Though advertising suggests that ownership is growing (or that advertisers want it to), there’s nothing like the ubiquity of texting one sees in British streets, in cafes or in queues.
7. How typical is Washington DC of the US in any case? It strikes me that, as with all capital cities, it must be in some senses different. Where I stayed seemed to be in the quartier diplomatique, which must make a difference.
8. Sightseeing: I must record that, as well as conference related excursions such as that to the National Library of Medicine, I visited and enjoyed the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art (where I saw an exhibition of early Diego Rivera paintings, from his cubist period, before and during the First World War, curious, particularly given his later political positions, that he seemed to be a great supported of this imperialist war). An interesting point on the Library of Congress: it sits in a far more genteel area than our on national library. Where are the drug dealers and prostitutes I am so used to in King’s Cross? There was an entertaining video of Groucho Marx being interviewed about leaving his archive to the library and a display on school segregation, it being the 50th anniversary of a court decision of significance in that struggle.
9. Food: the hotel food was dire, and it seems generally to be a poor place to find good wine, but I and colleagues had good meals at Il Tomate, le Bistrot du Coin and I found the drink, if not the food, enjoyable at the Hawk and Dove. This last place discriminates furiously against lone customers though, who are forbidden to occupy tables outside. I resent this, as I often pay much more for a meal for one than any couples would. The USA is not friendly to the solitary.
10. Apart from the grounds of the National Library of Medicine, I didn’t see cicadas in the vast numbers I had been lead to expect.
11. The currency: how on earth can they justify the existence of the dollar bill, worth less than the pound note which we said goodbye to years ago. And why such a mad sales tax system? I was baffled when m buying a copy of the New York Times form a shop and offering the price printed on the cover and the lady behind the counter continued to demand more money from me.
12. Wildlife: didn’t see much of this apart from the American Robin, which, it is true, is nothing like a robin.
13. Running: I ran most mornings, early at 6 or 630 which it was still relatively cool and not too humid (the temperature was in the low 90s for most of my time there). This was a splendid way to see the city, and there were large numbers of people doing the same thing. One morning I ran to the Lincoln memorial, to find its steps seething with runners, many of them young men with very short haircuts whom I took to be servicemen.
14. Architecture: I was not impressed by most of the public buildings. They were large and grand, but over-rhetorical, buildings in the style of Mussolini’s Rome or Speer and Hitler’s Berlin. By contrast the metro, with its deep tunnels and wide vaults, reminded me of Stalin’s Moscow Metro and I wonder if its construction was a direct reply to the Soviet achievement. Stalin called for a combination of “ Russian revolutionary sweep and American efficiency” and the Soviet Union certainly took the USA as a model for industrialisation, though not of course wishing to reproduce American property relations. Did it happen the other way round? Did Roosevelt call on the USA to emulate the USSR?
15. Size: I leave this to last but must record it, though it is a commonplace, for the size of the country, its people, their motor-cars and their meals is the single most striking feature of the country. Is this as purely quantitative as it might seem? No, for here quantity transforms itself in to quality. Because the language bears some resemblance to English as I speak it, the normal differences of abroad for the visitor are replaced by difference of scale.