All Gone to Look for America (48 page)

And that goes for the other icons of the development of flight hanging over my head: Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis, the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic, the Bell X-1, in which Chuck Yeager back in 1947 became the first man to break the speed of sound, and the SpaceShipOne, the first privately-funded spacecraft, paid for by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, which in 2004 won the X-prize for carrying three people to space (defined as 100 kilometres above the earth). These – and I have to pinch myself as I look up at them – are not models; these are the real things! And most remarkable of all is that all three of these aircraft, each of which defines a milestone in human flight, are not just much, much tinier than I had imagined, but are incredibly similar in size, human in scale.

Two other objects against the far wall are far more sinister and yet, united here, strangely reassuring: a Pershing (yep, him again) missile and a Soviet SS-20, the two weapons of mass destruction that became totems for either side, poised against each other from the Urals to Greenham Common. In my days reporting that parlous stage of the superpower conflict, when Yuri Andropov and Ronald Reagan turned their backs on one another and the doom-mongers had the clock ticking down to nuclear Armageddon poised at five minutes to midnight, I lived with these two tall strangers day and night, without ever having seen either. And now here they are, the SS-20 a gift from the Kremlin, a powerful token of reconciliation that the men in power in Washington and Moscow today would do well to remember.

Yet there is one more set of rooms that contain objects with even more evocative power, even if they are gathered together here only as part of a
temporary
exhibition. Entitled Treasures of American History, this is an inspired one-off bringing-together of items that show how in a very real way this mighty country is not just a military but a cultural icon for the world. What treasures of any other nation would resonate so widely across the globe as the original Barbie dolls, Kermit the Frog and Dorothy’s red slippers from
The Wizard of Oz
. It says a lot for the curator and for America’s sense of itself that they can put these together with Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, Abraham Lincoln’s top hat and a
buckskin coat belonging to General Custer, the dress worn by Jackie Kennedy at JFK’s inaugural ball and, of course, the compass used by Lewis and Clark on their mission of continental exploration.
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There was, however, an oversight. It is addressed on the building almost next door: a strange, almost organic structure in curving natural limestone. The National Museum of the American Indian was an afterthought, not even imagined until a quarter century after the Museum of National History was established. The idea didn’t come until 1989, the building until 2004, and for all its interesting architectural quality – designed by Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal (of mixed Métis and Blackfoot Native American origins) to echo natural stone eroded over centuries by wind and water – is how little is actually on display.

The museum collection contains over 800,000 objects and 125,000
photographs
. But there is precious little to be seen, beyond some simplified
storytelling
and superficial references to religion, culture and art, more than one would have expected from the Mayan and other Central American ‘Indian’ civilisations. Obviously the mostly nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes of the Great Plains have left less in terms of objects, but wandering around a display that on an intellectual level is less satisfying than the average waxworks, I feel only disappointment at the scale of opportunity missed. I have a friend in England who has learnt Navajo and spent weeks at a time on a reservation: he has told me more in a drunken conversation in the pub than I have learned wandering around a supposedly ‘national’ museum dedicated to this
continent’s
oldest inhabitants. Is there somewhere here, for example, an attempt to discuss or place historically the ancient ruins I passed coming over the Rockies? Not as far as I can see. I leave with the feeling that this impressive building is nothing more than a fig leaf, for a display that might as well be called ‘Injun Lite’.

But then the ‘Indian wars’ – the euphemism for what is now widely
recognised
with embarrassment as near genocide – belong to a far more distant past than the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. More than probably any other capital city on earth, Washington is a place of tokens and totems. It has never been the ‘imperial city’ that New York remains, not a capital in the same way as London or Moscow or Paris, or even Tokyo or Beijing. This is a political hothouse, a city of present-day intrigues and monuments to the past.
None of them more important or compelling than the war memorials. In
particular
the 75-metre long, sunken wall of black granite etched with the names of 58,256 US personnel listed as missing or killed in the war that spluttered into life from 1959 onwards and came to its end with that humiliating airlift from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975. This powerful sombre monument – perhaps the first great war memorial to depict conflict as sacrifice and tragedy rather than heroism – both symbolises the scar it left on America’s heart, and did much to heal it.

It also finally forced the authorities to recognise the dead of another
battleground
in South East Asia, one that was on the verge of being forgotten, the Korean War. Arguably a conflict still unfinished – there has never been a formal peace treaty and North Korea is with Iran the biggest bugbear in the eyes of the Pentagon and White House hawks – the relatively brief three-year war that was halted by armistice on 27 July 1953, cost – according to recent dramatically upgraded figures – more than 54,000 US lives. It was only after the
construction
of the Vietnam memorial that pressure from veterans of the Korean
conflict
finally forced the government to honour their fallen too, even then it did not see the light of day until 1999, 17 years after the Vietnam memorial.

It offers a stark contrast in design, yet is – almost incredibly – equally
powerful
: not a wall of names but a statuary group that in theory is more conventional but in reality is not. For these are not proud soldiers at the moment of victory, but grey ghosts stalking out of the shrubbery: men in full fatigues, 19 of them, though it is not easy at first to count them: fanned out across a triangle of low shrubs, advancing slowly, surreptitiously, warily. And on the granite wall behind them: sandblasted photographic images of others. This is no
triumphant
pageant either, but an army of the dead. As dusk falls and the subtle fibre optic lighting kicks in suffusing the scene with an eerie glow against the sunset, I can feel a chill wind down my spine.

I go back across to the dark scar of the Vietnam memorial. I have a question I want to ask of the serenely smiling young officer of the National Parks Service whose duty it is to stand guard and offer information to visitors: ‘When will they build the next one?’ ‘Sir?’ ‘The next memorial? To Iraq?’ He stands there impassively, the smile fixed but frozen on his face. It is not his fault, not his job, not his responsibility. And he is right, I am being unfair, but it is a question that had to be asked, for those guys in the bar in Beale Street, the one from ’Nam as well as the ones on leave from Baghdad, for the boys from Malta, Montana, and their brave mothers. I didn’t expect an answer.

But that’s what I get for wandering around war memorials at dusk, the night
before Hallowe’en. On the way into town that evening, to try a few beers from the Capitol City Brewing Company’s brewpub on New York Avenue – the first establishment brewing on the premises in the capital since the end of
Prohibition
in 1933, I am haunted by more ghosts. Real ones, this time, or should that be the reverse: the youth of Washington University kitted out in Hallowe’en party gear. Almost all of them under 21 and therefore by US law too young to drink, almost all of them carrying crates of beer or bottles of wine on their way to private parties. It lends a surreal air to the scene on the streets as I look out of the window over a pint of Pale Rider, emblazoned in honour of the season with a grinning Death’s Head and the slogan ‘Hell on Wheels’. Superheroes There are vampires, ghouls, mad axe men covered in blood, white-skinned
Morticias
from the Addams family, the occasional Batman and a lone Darth Vader (perhaps strayed from the pavement outside Sid Gruman’s Chinese Theater). Superheroes, movie stars and intimations of mortality.

The next morning as I head for the station and the last leg of my continental tour, little more than a commuter run up to New York and JFK airport, they are all out there again. In their thousands, the fit, energetic youth of America, competing in the Marine Corps Marathon. It is nicknamed the People’s
Marathon
, run in honour of fallen heroes of the most prestigious branch of
America’s
awesome armed forces. In 2006 they ran a ‘satellite event’ in Iraq to allow serving soldiers there to take part. As I watch them pound past the marble monuments of Washington, this deliberately self-styled ‘Athens of the New World’ – these fit, muscular, self-confident young men and women, Jena from Colorado somewhere among them – I find myself filled with a curious mix of admiration and trepidation. And offer a silent wish: I hope to hell you know where you’re going, because in the modern world, whether we like it or not, we’re going with you. 

HALLOWE'EN IN NEW YORK
and the last pumpkins are spread on the cobbles of Union Square for the bustling farmers' market. I know how they feel: it is the end of my journey and I might yet turn into one. I have come full circle, with a few zigzags thrown in en route. The city that was steaming and sub-tropical little over a month ago is now basking in a bright but chilly early winter sunshine.

Reluctant to repeat my experience of the ‘Y' I have managed to grab a room at a less-known but almost equally iconic Manhattan mini-institution, Hotel 17 in the Gramercy Park district just a stroll from Greenwich Village. It is a cosy, no-frills sort of place, resurrected from near dereliction and restored as an
old-style
New York home-from-home. There are no en-suite bathrooms in most rooms – compared with even the cheapest motel out in the sticks – but you risk bumping into a better class of clientele waiting for the shower. Madonna once stayed here and one of the pictures in her infamous
Sex
book was allegedly shot on the premises (I'm pretty sure I know which one). Woody Allen used it as a location for his 1993 film
Manhattan Murder Mystery
with Diane Keaton.

But then the whole of New York looks like a scene from a murder mystery tonight. The ghouls on the Washington metro were as nothing to the vast hordes of hobgoblins, Tellytubbies, Jedai Knights and mini-skirted NYPD policewomen with shackled male convicts in tow. The Hallowe'en Parade is the counterpart Celtic import to the St Patrick's Day Parade, at the
opposite
end of the year: tonight literally tens of thousands of New Yorkers have donned costumes from the truly frightening via the hilariously grotesque to the wholly whimsical to gather south of Spring Street in ‘the village' and parade up Sixth Avenue to 23rd Street. But even these hordes are just the tip of the iceberg. There are children in fancy dress too – little devils and witches – but this is not primarily a night for them. Hallowe'en is an adult event, an innocent
orgy of mild excess disguised as a Saturnalia of sin. This is America indulging itself, reimagining itself, letting its hair down and having fun. The Hallowe'en I remember from my Irish childhood – all bobbing for apples, making ‘turnip lanterns' out of swedes (whoever had heard of pumpkins in 1960s Britain?) and damp squib firework displays in suburban back gardens – was nothing like this ‘Volksfest' of saucy micro mini-skirts, beer and costume jokes at the expense of everything from popular culture to organised religion and national politics.

In the 1995-founded home of the Heartland Brewery on Union Square I sip a Smiling Pumpkin Ale alongside Jesus Christ, a ‘Naughty Nun' and Pharoah, and watch as Wonder Woman, Little Red Riding Hood and Catgirl compete to take orders from Shrek, Darth Vader and that evil giant rabbit from Donnie Darko. But the hit of the night is undoubtedly the girls in glasses with their hair tied up in buns, ‘Miss Wassila' beauty queen sashes and low-slung machine guns. A total unknown just a few months ago Sarah Palin is – at least in New York City – everyone's favourite Hallowe'en nightmare. I pass three versions of her on the way to the Gents, each one more willing than the last to pout and pose. Digital flashes fill the air as vampires and ogres jostle for a view of the scariest costume in town. Especially when she puckers up for a kiss with a particularly rubberised Barack Obama. More than a little of tonight's frisson comes from the fact that it is the final Friday before an election that everyone knows will be a watershed one way or another in American history.

Palin, the controversial Alaskan governor drafted in as running-mate for the elderly earnest John McCain, is anathema to most of these hip young New Yorkers but everyone knows she struck a chord out in the great heartland between the coasts that those here would call ‘redneck country'. Union Square this afternoon may have been awash in Obama buttons and T-shirts
displaying
the unmistakable features of the charismatic young Chicago senator, but I know for sure that out there in Malta, Montana, they'll be voting
McCain-Palin
straight down the line. And what about the cowboys in Colorado?

With just a couple of days to go before the election, behind the fancy dress there is a tangible feeling of an America trying once again to reinvent itself. Right here and now there is both hope and uncertainty in the air. Will Barack Obama become the first black president? And if he does, will it really change the way the world feels about America and the way America feels about itself?

Four days later there is the first inkling of an answer as Obama's electoral victory resounds around the world. The rest is history. It just hasn't been written yet. One way or another, America has not reached the end of the line.