Matt Frei - Only in America

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.