Matt Frei - Only in America

It is the sound of a superpower at work. Helicopters shuttling to and from the White House or the Pentagon. Motorcades. I counted five on my first day. Who are these people? Police cars with whining sirens demanding attention. Ambulances. Fire trucks. It sounds as if the whole of Washington is under siege, on its way to hospital, jail, the morgue or an important funeral. Then you look at the faces. They seem happy. It is summer after all. The pavements shimmer in the heat. They are full of chairs and tables where people in shirtsleeves are spooning lunch out of the kind of polystyrene containers you get on aeroplanes. They don’t seem to mind. The queues outside the Greek deli on 19th Street stretch the width of the pavement. Everyone is patient. No one seems to mind waiting. This place is chilled, I think. But whoever runs the ambulances, the police cars and the fire brigade is behaving as if World War III has broken out. So is the guy on the radio. We are only a few weeks away from the first anniversary of 9/11 and the local radio station we’re tuned into is humming with breathless reports about terror alerts, the conflict in Afghanistan and the failing diplomacy over Iraq. The drumbeat of a new war has begun. For now, however, it is a distant but regular thud on the horizon.

On the taxi radio the news is interspersed with advertisements. ‘Special discounts for all military personnel,’ the gravelly voice promises. The word ‘America’ seems to be mentioned an awful lot by just about everyone from advertising baritones to high-pitched politicians to the President. ‘America is better than this’, ‘America won’t stand for it’, ‘America’s favourite chocolate’, ‘America drinks Florida Orange Juice … no-pulp guaranteed’, ‘America is on the lookout for new enemies’, ‘America’s way of life will never be destroyed’, ‘Only in America …’

My head was spinning. America wasn’t just a country. America was a being and America was, it seemed, deeply pissed off. The Nigerian cab driver seemed unaware of the chorus of self-regard seeping from the speakers. The overall impression throbbing in the pastry-clad egg of my brain was that this city and country were much weirder than I imagined and far more difficult to decipher: half holiday destination, half barracks gearing up for conflict. The taxi dropped me outside my new office close to Dupont Circle, an area that used be an encampment for the homeless. On my first visit to Washington in 1988 I was chased through Dupont Circle – in those days an open space dotted with trees and surrounded by traffic – by a man in rags wielding a nail file. He was probably harmless but in those days Washington was still known as ‘the murder capital of the USA’ and my mind immediately pictures me being slashed to death in a vicious nail-file attack. Today, Dupont Circle is the heart of the capital’s gay district, where boutique hotels and coffee bars compete for attention with interior design shops and art galleries. In the fourteen years since my last visit some parts of Washington – by no means all – had changed almost beyond recognition. With its pavement cafés and bathroom-tile shops, the capital seemed more European. In so many other ways, however, America had moved further away from Europe than ever before.

I had witnessed the groping, open or clenched hand of America’s largely benign colossus from far-flung provinces but now I had been summoned to the capital itself. The BBC had allowed me to roam the world for almost two decades. I had been based in Jerusalem, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Hong Kong and Singapore. Whether it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil war in Bosnia, the isolation of Libya, the collapse of Christian Democracy in Italy, the expansion of China, the invasion of Afghanistan or the liberation of East Timor to a greater or lesser extent the hand of Washington, heavy, subtle or conspicuous by its absence, could always be felt in all of these places. America was everywhere and I had been reporting from – and on – the receiving end of its policies for seventeen years. Inevitably, the motivations of America seemed much clearer from five thousand miles away than they did up close and personal in the place where the decisions were made. There was the political hothouse of Washington. And then there was the vast multilayered country sprawling around it.

Fred Scott, a BBC cameraman born in San Diego, exudes the nasal nonchalance of someone who was brought up within earshot of Pacific surf. He spent a lot of time in Asia and once put it like this: ‘When you try and decipher America, Matt, think of India. Both are huge, complicated countries, where the difference between rich and poor is vast, where religion plays an important part in politics and everyday life. Both have nukes and both speak the kind of English that no one else does.’ It turned out to be sound advice although I am still looking for the equivalent of the caste system in the US.

For now the politics of Washington were incidental to the domestic issues that were occupying my full attention and providing my first personal glimpses of the States. I had failed spectacularly on just about every front. The first two Kathies had shown me so many houses whose addresses were never numbered in anything less than 1000s that I had lost track and my head was reeling. Did I like 3317 P Street or 3317 O Street? Was the nice garden – I’m sorry, I mean ‘yard’ – in 4567 Warren Street or 4512 Windom Place? I did, however, manage to get a car. I bought the giant, hulking people carrier in which my predecessor had ferried his family around. It was as long as a boat, as wide as a tank and had an insatiable thirst for petrol. I mean gas. The inside was so enormous that I suffered bouts of agoraphobia. And wherever I went I got hopelessly lost. On the face of it the road grid of Washington is dead simple if you know the alphabet and can count to fifty-five. Numbered streets go east to west. Lettered streets go north to south. Unfortunately outside the centre of the city, parks, hills and creeks interrupt this logical pattern. Streets are abruptly cut off and dismembered as if an angry child had thrown the puzzle map in the air and the pieces had landed at random.

For a country that prides itself on the efficiency of the free market, I soon discovered that America can also be surprisingly bureaucratic. In order to exist as a foreigner here you need a social security number, which involves descending into the bowels of the local Social Security Office. Nothing, however, rivals the fifth circle of hell represented by the Department of Motor Vehicles, the dreaded DMV. How can America’s famed love affair with the car flourish when the courtship involves an unavoidable trip to the DMV? It makes you regret the rest of the relationship and contemplate the bicycle as a preferred method of transportation. Or public transport. Or perhaps it is merely the test of true love for the automobile? The DMV is a frightening place that has achieved something unique: it mixes Hitchcock with Orwell and Monty Python.

What I hadn’t realized is that the DMV headquarters on C Street, in the shadow of the glorious Capitol, functions as a refuge for citizens of no fixed abode. In the winter it provides free heating, in the summer free air conditioning. I turned up at 7.45 a.m. to find a queue of two hundred or so, many of whom looked not only as if they had no fixed abode, but no access either to a moving vehicle they could call their own. In order not to get kicked out they all pretended that they were there on official business. They drew a number that designated their order in the queue – I’m sorry, line. I waited for three hours just to be told that I had brought the wrong papers. The man who informed me of this had clearly failed to read and learn the DMV’s customer service commandments about courtesy and efficiency pinned up on the board. I didn’t have the guts to point them out. To add injury to insult he informed me that the car I had bought from my predecessor was worth $2000 less than I had paid for it. ‘Sure hope he ain’t your friend!’ he added, laughing. The sad truth is that he was.