Matt Frei - Only in America

In the distance we heard a gun salute being fired at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s only a few hundred yards away and through the trees you could see the gun carriage bearing the coffin of a fallen officer. Waiting at the graveside was an elderly lady, dressed in black, slumped in her seat, surrounded by mourners. The cemetery occupies two hundred acres of land seized by the government after the Civil War from the family of Robert E. Lee, the best-known general on the losing side. President Kennedy is buried here as well as 25,000 veterans from America’s sixty-five wars. Since 2003 a new section of graves has expanded far faster than anyone had ever imagined. The Iraq war keeps the staff at Arlington busy, including one woman who is present at every funeral and whose job it is to hand the folded flag that once covered the fallen soldier’s coffin to the presiding officer. He will then give it to the mourning mother or father. It is one of the strict rituals of the nation’s most famous cemetery and the woman who carries out this task is called ‘the Lady of Arlington’. Her black, silhouetted figure is like a symbol of grief in a medieval painting, always unobtrusive, always present.

The clatter of horses’ hooves, the haunting notes of a bugle, the wind in the trees and the muffled tears of mothers and fathers were the white noise of grief interrupted now and then by the roar of military helicopters flying between the White House and the Pentagon, the Pentagon and Quantico, the Marine base south of Washington, or just keeping an eye on the people below.

As you look down at the Mall from the Iwo Jima Memorial, past Arlington Cemetery, you take in the panorama: the square temple of the Lincoln Memorial, Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the museums, the White House, tucked away in a corner and barely visible. And somewhere to the right, out of sight but never out of mind, thanks to those helicopters, is the Pentagon. And then it strikes you. The layout of Washington, the monuments, the architecture, the quotations in marble all celebrate quintessentially unimperial notions of liberty, equality and fraternity. And yet this city feels like the imperial capital. I can imagine all the marble-clad splendour one day covered in moss, crumbling with decay. I’m keen to test this idea on Mr Wyeth, the historian. But he’s escaped just in time. He and his charges have gone. I can see them in the distance heading down the hill towards a waiting bus. The sun is beginning to set.

The war memorial that is missing from the stage is the one that hasn’t been built yet because the war it will commemorate is still being fought. If we could see how the Iraq war monument turned out we could probably guess the future of the conflict and how it affected America’s role in the world. Will it be another wall of names like its Vietnam counterpart or a man toppled from a slab? And should that man be Saddam Hussein or George Bush? And will the final result in stone be as honest as its predecessors?

Like other artificial capitals, Washington was chosen by the man after whom it is named for all the things it was not: the dot on the map next to the raging Potomac River barely amounted to a village. It would never compete with New York, Philadelphia or Boston, the obvious contenders for the crown. And most importantly the notion of a central capital simply wasn’t very important to a group of settlers and pilgrims whose very escape across the Atlantic had been motivated by a desire to get away from any form of central government. Washington was thus born under the worst possible circumstances as the necessary, unavoidable offspring of administration. It is hardly a recipe for a love affair. But as America’s power has grown, so has Washington’s. What distinguishes it from Canberra, Bonn or Brasilia is that this capital is also the custodian of the near-sacred idea that has inspired the country around it. The monuments, vaults and rituals of Washington capture the essence of how America perceives itself. They are the self-conscious windows into America’s soul. The slums of Southeast Washington, the lobby firms that have mushroomed on K Street, the vast and Orwellian bureaucracy that luxuriates on the south side of the Mall – these are the grubby flip side of a noble idea. Washington is the festering interface between America’s rhetoric and reality. It is a perfect place in which to rummage for answers.

We live on what is called a ‘no thru road’. The term ‘dead end’ is considered far too terminal. It is a quiet street flanked by a small park that looks more like a jungle set for a remake of Apocalypse Now . The street descends towards Rock Creek Park, the green belt that used to divide Washington between rich and poor, black and white. Because the angle is quite steep our road turns into an ice rink in winter and a mud slide in the summer when it rains. It is named after Samuel Tilden, the hapless Democratic candidate for the presidency who won the popular vote in 1876 but lost the electoral college to Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican. The result, oddly, hinged on the outcome of the vote in Florida. It is an irony that one of our neighbours, a staunch Democrat, never ceases to remind me of.

The house we eventually ended up calling home has Georgian-style windows, flanked by duck-egg blue wooden shutters and a façade of whitewashed brick distressed less by age than by bitter winters and baking summers. It is described as ‘genuine colonial’, which means it was built in 1953.

The shutters on our house don’t open or close. They have been nail-gunned to the walls and are only for show. Most of the house is made of wood, so fragile that a small troupe of termites could devour it as a mid-morning snack. If our house is ‘colonial’, then the one on our left might as well be ‘imperial’, or ‘impérial’. It has a hint of Versailles about it, offering the faintest architectural nod towards a miniature French château. Three doors down is a log cabin, which looks as if it has been beamed down from Montana via the Swiss Alps. It is hideous. Across the road is the last antebellum – pre-Civil War – residence in Washington, which means that the vultures from the local planning commission guard it as if it were the Holy Grail. Two hundred and thirty years ago the whole area was a vineyard planted by George Washington. Today it could be an international exhibition of different architectural styles. Curiously, this mishmash has conspired to produce a very attractive street. What all the houses have in common is that they are overshadowed and threatened by a cluster of enormous trees. The District of Columbia takes no responsibility for trees growing on private property and, since ‘tree work’ is even more expensive than ‘face work’, the willows, oaks and poplars have been allowed to grow to an obscene height.

As a result we await every hurricane season with trepidation. Not only could our fragile house be blown away by a robust wind but it is ‘challenged’ by a poplar that is more than 100 feet tall and hangs over our ‘colonial’ residence like the Sword of Damocles. It could slice our house in half like cheese wire. During the hurricane season the Freis sleep badly in the basement. Penny pins her hopes on the fact that the previous tenant was the founder of the Sierra Club, America’s most influential lobby for tree lovers.

Although we live a mere fifteen minutes from the White House and three minutes from the Homeland Security compound – the mega-agency that controls a staff of over 170,000 bureaucrats and is the nerve centre of America’s ‘war on terror’ – the power cables in our street droop like washing lines attached to flimsy poles, above roads pitted with potholes the size of bathtubs. I have seen better roads in Mozambique. The last tropical storm dislodged a branch which ploughed through the cables, plunging Tilden Street into darkness for a whole week, disabling the telephones and the TV. When we finally got hooked up to civilization again it was thanks to Barbara, our neighbour and street kommissar. Barbara, a sturdy fifty-year-old matriarch who wears starched jeans and sports a flowing mane of grey hair, organizes everything from the Labor Day neighbourhood working breakfast – ‘a new season brings new challenges’ – to the Earth Day ‘neighbourhood trash sweep’ – ‘this year I am counting on all the Freis!’ – to the bruising trench warfare with the private school at the end of the road and its team of bedraggled architects. For Barbara getting the power back on line is a cinch. It is a battle she has fought and won many times. After two decades of storms she knows who to call, when, and how to threaten them. In fact, she prefers to outsource the small stuff to her neighbour and understudy, Susan, so that she can focus on the mother of all battles: getting the District of Columbia education department to authorize a new playground and clean up the tangled jungle of poison ivy, rampant bamboo and leaning willows otherwise known as Hearst Park. Barbara, whose own children have grown up, genuinely cares about the safety of ours. ‘We need new blood on Tilden Street!’ is her battle cry to get the playground fixed and to minimize the menace and maximize the attractions of our little corner of Washington. With whatever nasty surprises lie in wait for Osama bin Laden’s least favourite city, I want Barbara on my side and by my side. When she isn’t berating us about our neighbourly negligence she seeks to protect us, mainly via e-mail circulars. ‘Beware the swarm of bees on the corner of Idaho and Tilden’ read one. ‘My dog and I were bitten this morning!’