MATT FREI
Only in America

DEDICATION

For my family George, Amelia, Lottie, Alice and Penny

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

Arriving

1 Beltway Blues

2 Tilden Street

3 The Colour of Fear

4 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

5 Grovelling for Votes

6 Weather You Can Call Names

7 God is Everywhere

8 Defenders of the Constitution or Scum of the Earth?

9 Think-Tank Alley

10 The Tyranny of Comfort

11 The Colour of Money

12 Class Without War

13 School Citizens

14 Whose American Dream is it Anyway?

Afterthoughts

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

BLACK MAN GIVEN NATION’S WORST JOB

The National Mall is the Circus Maximus of Washington, DC. Instead of chariot races and gladiatorial battles, it plays benign host to rallies, concerts, charitable walks against breast cancer or armies of tourists shuffling dutifully past the war monuments, the shrines to the Founding Fathers and the museums that form the granite and marble core of a city that refers to itself, somewhat self-consciously, as ‘the Nation’s Capital’. The steps to the grandiose Lincoln Memorial, illuminated at night like a pop-up Parthenon, were glistening with early November drizzle. It was one in the morning and a small crowd had gathered at the foot of the lugubrious Abraham Lincoln, a giant sitting back in his huge throne, in brooding disapproval of the world around him.

It was a motley gathering of students, tourists and some interns from Capitol Hill, clutching a bottle of champagne. They were all huddled around a radio as if listening intently to football scores. But the mood was too intimate and reverential for sport. In any case this was the middle of the night. One of the women, an African American, was crying silently as she listened. The make-up on a young white woman’s face was smudged with tears or rain. I couldn’t tell. What seeped out of the small wireless wasn’t the excitable voice of a sports commentator. It was the brown-sugar baritone of a politician. The voice rose and fell as if delivering a sermon. And when the speaker said that ‘the true strength of our nation is not the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth but the enduring power of our ideas’ the small radio crackled and hissed to the sound of mass applause. The gathering at the Lincoln Memorial nodded silently in collective approval. In the distance someone was hollering with apparent joy. A car passed by blaring out the popular country song ‘Only in America’.

Half a mile away at the White House a much bigger crowd had assembled. Washington, DC doesn’t usually go in for spontaneous human gatherings, especially in the middle of the night. But something had brought the streets to life. The sound of car horns echoed off the inscrutable glass and steel towers on K Street, home to the city’s most powerful lobbying firms. Even the anti-nuclear protester who has been living in his tent outside the White House for as long as I can remember, forever threatening but thankfully never achieving self-immolation, had crept out of his lair and was now staring through the black wrought-iron gates of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There was nothing to see. George and Laura Bush, famous for retiring to bed early, were probably fast asleep by now. A lone sharpshooter was patrolling the roof.

But the crowd had not come to gawp. They had come to imagine. In a few months a family would reside here that descended from the slaves who had helped to build this replica of a Virginia tobacco planter’s mansion two centuries earlier. As an African American, Barack Obama could have been legally owned by America’s first sixteen Presidents. Now he and his wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia would move into the White House, not as cooks, cleaners or advisers, but as the First Family. Millions of Americans doubtlessly felt that such an event was horribly overdue. Millions more around the world had doubted it would ever come to pass. The airwaves, the internet, the newspapers had been filled for months with meticulous polling data, touch-screen electoral maps and convoluted conjecture about why an African American would be acceptable to a largely white electorate. Or why not. Entire days of broadcasting time had been spent discussing the so-called Bradley Effect, named after a former African American candidate for the governorship of California who was soaring in the opinion polls but lost in the privacy of the polling booth because too many voters were simply too racist. But that was 1982 and this was now 2008. And wherever you were on that night and whoever you wanted to win, you had to pinch yourself that on 4 November sixty-two million Americans had elected a forty-seven-year-old black Senator called Barack Hussein Obama to be the forty-fourth President of the most powerful nation on earth.

Call it the stomach-knot-forming sensation of history. And what formed that knot weren’t the returns from those crucial swing states of Ohio or Pennsylvania, or the moment that California and Washington state tipped him over the 270 electoral votes that a candidate needs to win. No, it was the simple image of seeing America’s first black First Family walk onto the stage at Grant Park in Chicago in front of half a million people. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights campaigner who had stood next to Martin Luther King when he was shot forty years earlier in Memphis, was buried in the crowd, his face streaming with tears. He too had tried to make a run for the White House two decades earlier but failed. Jackson had been at times lukewarm, critical and downright obscene about Obama’s candidacy. Like many other leaders from the civil rights generation, Jackson at first thought that Obama, with his white mother and Kenyan father, wasn’t black enough. Obama was not the descendant of slaves. He had not been branded by history. His skin colour, like his candidacy, represented a compromise to purists in the civil rights movement. That compromise only became acceptable as they realized that the candidate had a real chance of becoming President.

The other famous face in the crowd belonged to Oprah Winfrey, the fabulously wealthy entertainer and talk-show hostess who had supported Obama from the start and had organized mass rallies on his behalf. ‘He is the one …’, she once declared, sounding more as if she was touting a Messiah than a candidate for public office. Oprah’s endorsement from the sofa pulpit of her television show dusted Obama with mainstream appeal and introduced him to legions of white housewives who were only dimly aware of the lanky politician with the exotic name. The rest of the vast crowd in Chicago was anonymous: a mixture of white, black, Hispanic, young and old. They were cheering, crying, laughing or just open-mouthed with astonishment. In our studio in Washington, DC I watched Trent Duffy, the young spokesman of the outgoing Bush White House, watch the pictures from Chicago. He too gulped. A McCain supporter, he couldn’t help but feel a moment of pride. Whatever you thought of Obama as a candidate or of his potential as a future President, this was a night to remember. America had reintroduced itself to the rest of the world.

Even the New York Times, which prides itself on its long-winded headlines, was lost for verbosity. One word bleated out from its front page: OBAMA. The New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who had been lukewarm about the candidacy of Senator Obama, splashed a reverential ‘Mr President’ on its front page. In Kenya, where relations of the President-elect still lived in a village of the Luo tribe, the government declared 4 November a national holiday. Elsewhere Obama’s election was greeted overwhelmingly as a symbol of America’s renewal, as proof that America could still inspire, as evidence that the tired cliché of the American dream was not yet dead. After almost a decade of mounting anti-Americanism, newspapers and politicians in Paris, Rome and London suddenly began to ask themselves: could we ever elect our own Obama? One dreads to think what they would have said if Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska had prevailed. It would surely have been: look at how racist America still is. The charge would have been levelled even though no European nation is close to electing a native-born Pakistani, Turk or Algerian as its head of government or state.

The morning after the election the weather was still grey and wet. Yellowed leaves were falling limply to the ground and yet the dogged regiment of Washington commuters seemed to have a spring in its step. Something had changed. I asked the African American woman at the hotel reception how she felt. She smiled, winked and said nothing. She didn’t need to. The capital, which had never failed to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate, had opted for Barack Obama by an unprecedented 92 per cent. Not even Saddam Hussein could rely on such results. African Americans, who make up almost two-thirds of the city’s population and who used to be famously absent at the polling booth on election day, turned out in record numbers. A similar picture was repeated elsewhere. Hispanic voters, who now represent the biggest minority in the United States, voted overwhelmingly for Obama. So did students. The Democrats had managed to mobilize millions of first-time voters in an aggressive and meticulous campaign that used the internet as a tool of fundraising and recruitment. Obama took his campaign to enemy territory and won states like Virginia which had not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. It was an astonishing achievement, one that came about because of an uncanny combination of factors: a ground-breaking campaign, a great candidate, a weak opposition, revulsion with the incumbent Republican President, opposition to his war in Iraq, an economic crisis that had flawed America and undermined its self-confidence, and all of the above leavened with the deep desire for change. A majority of Americans had come to the conclusion that in the twenty-first century it was time to try something different. And so they went out to make some history.

The last time I felt the benign knot in my stomach was the day the Berlin Wall came down. This too was a symbolic moment. It was bloodless and it shifted the world’s political furniture. Of course the laughter and the tears of joy didn’t last for long. German unification was a bruising business. Running America will be, too. With two wars and a failing economy, Obama has his work cut out. As the satirical magazine The Onion put it in a banner headline: ‘Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job’. How he got the job and how it became so bad is the unlikely story of America in the last eight years, a story which we joined after our arrival in the summer of 2002.

November 2008

ARRIVING

There are many reasons to feel queasy about starting a new job in a strange country. But fear of dying isn’t usually on the list. I was on my way to Washington DC. We had lived in Asia for almost six years and were preparing to take up a new posting in the United States. Penny, my wife had dispatched me early to find schools for our children George, Amelia and Lottie, a car and a house to live in. After a nomadic decade of moving from one post to the next I had learned that the secret to a happy foreign correspondent is a foreign correspondent’s happy spouse. My track record in scouting out good accommodation had been proven in Rome (a penthouse flat in a crumbling palazzo), Hong Kong (a crumbling flat with a fabulous view) and Singapore (an old British officer’s house with lazy fans and a large garden). Now it was Washington’s turn. The pressure was on. As I settled into my seat on the plane I could imagine us all lounging on one of those traditional American porches.

I hadn’t been back to DC since my first and only visit in 1988 as a young radio reporter. Then I had come to cover the election of President George (HW) Bush. If someone had told me I would be returning a decade and a half later to live in America and report on the presidency of another man called George (W) Bush I would have laughed. To have father and son elected to the same coveted job was odd enough. To have them share exactly the same name – but for one humble H – would have struck me as bizarrely unimaginative. At least they’d save money on the monogrammed napkins at the White House. The thought occurred to me as I surveyed the movie menu and looked forward to a long transpacific flight without young children and the torture that pits their restlessness against your nerves. The journey was going to be blissful.

It was for about six hours. Until we reached a point somewhere over the Pacific. I thought I could see the sunrise over San Francisco, having just witnessed the sunset over Japan. I had already drunk half a bottle of white wine, my sense of timing was clearly impaired and I was stuck into a soppy film that would have seen me walk out of the cinema on terra firma but almost had me in floods of tears at 30,000 feet. Tear ducts are suckers for high altitude and low pressure, apparently. Suddenly the narrative was interrupted and a completely different voice entered my head, mixed with static crackle. It was the captain, an American with a reassuring baritone and a slight Southern drawl. ‘I’m afraid to tell you, ladies and gentlemen’ – pilots, it occurred to me immediately, should never use emotive words like ‘afraid’ – ‘that we have to report an engine failure in engines two and four.’ There was a pause, which I didn’t much care for. I had suddenly lost interest in the film. The tear ducts got a grip on the unfolding situation. They shut down. I was hungry for more information about our plane. I wanted to know a lot about engines two and four, but also, come to think of it, about one and three. The captain cleared his throat. ‘We will be heading, ah, I mean, returning, to the nearest airport, which I am afraid to tell you is … Tokyo. It’s five hours from where we are now, but it’s a little closer than going on to San Francisco and … we may have to make an emergency landing. I will keep you posted, folks.’ You could feel and hear the collective sobering up of three-hundred-plus passengers. Seats that had been almost horizontal were suddenly ramrod-straight. A man and a woman in the row next to me held hands and starting praying. This was, I thought, a bit premature. But it changed the mood in my section of the plane as if the Grim Reaper himself had arrived with the drinks trolley. As it happened some wanted to order more drinks. Others regretted the ones they had already consumed. I seem to remember straddling both camps. The static resumed: it was the captain again. ‘I understand that some of you may be alarmed. But I jus’ wanna reassure you. This is a very, very big bird but she can fly on two engines real good.’ I remember reading something along those lines. But was the breakdown in grammar from the cockpit an indication of engine issues the captain wasn’t letting us in on? Or was it just vernacular? Turning the 747 into a ‘bird’ was both reassuringly colloquial, betraying the confidence of a veteran pilot, but also, perhaps, alarmingly flippant. It certainly struck me as very American. All around me guttural Cantonese and high-pitched Mandarin tones were flying around like swallows before a storm. My fellow passengers were desperate for a translation that I could not nor would have wanted to give and that took five minutes to come from a Chinese-speaking stewardess. After that a few more people started muttering silent prayers. I ditched the film and went to the sky map, a handy device in moments of impending emergency; handy, that is, for working out the geography of disaster. Where would we crash-land? Who lived nearby to save us? To recover our bodies? Would there be South Sea garlands for the survivors? It was the white wine that was thinking. The little dot that represented our plane had done an outrageous U-turn over a large area of blue that displayed not a single speck of land. I zoomed out. Why not land in Hawaii? I couldn’t think of any other islands in this part of the world. Hawaii, though, was a few thousand miles to the south. We were flying over the middle of the Pacific and now we were indeed heading back to the place I had come from. What a waste of flying hours. After all this time in Asia I had become mildly superstitious. Was this a signal? Should we be going to America after all? We had been so happy in Singapore. Washington, DC, had been attacked by terrorists. My brother Chris had had a narrowish escape in New York. His apartment was next to Ground Zero but he had been on business in Paris at the time. In Singapore the only danger came in the form of stray branches from tree pruning on the airport motorway, the occasional snake in our house or being struck by lightning on the golf course (if you were stupid enough to carry one of those large umbrellas). Had I made a terrible mistake?

In the end we were spared the emergency landing, although it was alarming to see scores of fire engines and ambulances racing down the runway next to our plane. Apparently we made the evening news in Tokyo and the morning news in San Francisco. A new plane was rustled up and after a five-hour delay we recommenced our crossing of the Pacific Ocean. I arrived in Washington thirty-five hours after I had left home. I should have missed two days of my life, but because of the thirteen-hour time difference I was only a day behind. The mental maths was doing my head in. My body clock had been fast-forwarded, then rewound and then binned. Even as a seasoned traveller I had never, ever experienced jet lag like this. I should have been asleep when everyone else was awake. My brain felt like a poached egg encased in pastry. My senses were numbed, my limbs ached and I was not in the least prepared to deal with three Washington estate agents from three rival agencies. All called Kathy.

In a moment of fitful enterprise before leaving Singapore I had contacted these agencies, hoping to see as many houses as possible in the short time I had available. Little did I realize that I had broken an unwritten but widely respected etiquette in the world of Washington property. You choose an agent and then you stick with him or her to the bitter end. It is easier to get a divorce in the United States than to change agents. So to start your hunt for the dream home as a polygamist was hardly a good idea. There was also a matter of verbal misunderstanding. I was happily using the term ‘estate agent’ until the concierge in my hotel informed me that this conjured up images of managing the properties of the dead more than the accommodation of the living. I should try ‘realtor’. But that was difficult to pronounce and, in any case, sounded like something out of Viking lore. We were indeed divided by the same language, I thought, and in my mental state such subtle points of translation actually caused physical pain.

I spent much of the first day of my new life in America wondering if, when and how I should tell one Kathy about the other two. Acute jet lag makes the mind obsess acutely about little things. Eventually the Kathies would find out, wouldn’t they? And how many other BBC correspondents could there be in Washington at that time looking for a place to live? At least two as it turned out. I rang the Kathy I designated as Kathy 1, cross-referencing her name with her phone number. She had seemed to be the most forthcoming when I had called her up earlier from Singapore. ‘I’m dying to meet you in the flesh!’ I now lied, perhaps crossing a red line of familiarity.

Kathy 1 shot back: ‘Well, Matt, there’s a lot of it!’

‘Properties?’

‘No, flesh.’

I liked Kathy 1. After Singapore I was taken aback by humour that didn’t come from friends, books, TV or films. We arranged to meet later that afternoon.

I put the phone down and rang Kathy 2.

‘I am so, so glad that you called, Matt. I have just been chatting to the most delightful gentleman, who happens to be a friend of mine, who has the most gorgeous house in Georgetown. It is superb for entertaining. You and your family will adore it. Meet me in one hour, if you can.’

I was sitting on the side of the hotel bed, looking like a forlorn character in an Edward Hopper painting. My shoulders were rounder than the dome of the Capitol. My eyes had gone AWOL. My skin felt like old cornflakes and looked so pale it was translucent. I was meeting a woman who had got it into her head that I was going to entertain like an ambassador and resemble a well-scrubbed anchorman.

I turned up at the allotted location. I was early. The house was wonderful, huge and looked at least four times my budget. I was clearly wasting my time. Then I noticed an elegant woman sitting in a Jaguar on the other side of the road. She was waiting and fiddling with her phone. She had clearly seen me, but made no attempt to communicate. So she can’t have been my date. I looked at her. She looked away. It was summer. The air was ablaze and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, what everyone in Singapore would have worn. But not, it turns out, in ‘the Nation’s Capital’. Then my phone rang. It was Kathy 2.

‘Where are you, Matt?’

‘Oh. I’m outside the house. Where are you?’

‘I’m outside the house, too …’ and with that the elegant woman in the car looked out of the window of her Jaguar and caught my eye. Despite numerous nips and tucks, her upwardly mobile cheeks fell like wet cement. She got out, straightening a pink Chanel suit. Her trussed-up hair seemed to obey a higher master. In her fifties, Kathy 2 was what I imagined the quintessential Georgetown hostess would look like: elegant, urbane, and horribly disappointed by her new client. One reluctant handshake later she was ringing the doorbell of the house, probably mentally preparing her excuses for the dear friend who would find a man resembling a bedraggled mature student darkening his illustrious doorstep.

‘Hello, Jim,’ she said. ‘This is …’

But before she could end her sentence and uncurl her disapproving upper lip, Jim blurted out: ‘Matt Frei. But of course. I recognize you from the news. I lurved your stuff from Asia. Come in. Please come in.’

First a non-crash and now this. I might have jet lag but there was a God.

Kathy 2 changed her tone as if day had banished night. After this she offered to drive me round town and show me Washington. Having almost never been recognized by anyone, I was immensely grateful for this windfall of minor celebrity and wondered whether it could translate into a 350 per cent discount on the exorbitant rent charged by Jim for his glorious mansion. Alas, it was not to be. I politely declined Kathy 2’s offer of a tour of her city. She promised to get back to me with other properties ‘better tailored for the needs of your family’. In other words, cheap. I went back to the hotel to ring Kathy 3.

‘You’re already talking to two other agents. It’s a small world, you know, and there really isn’t that much around to show you at your budget. Anyway, I am already dealing with a guy called Justin Webb. He also says he’s from the BBC. How many of you are there?’ I had been busted and the in-house competition was hot on my heels.

Later that day I decided to rent a taxi and take a tour of Washington. The driver was a noisy Nigerian, so huge he seemed barely to fit into his enormous Lincoln town car. I wanted him to drive me round town on the clock for at least an hour, a dream commission for any taxi driver anywhere in the world, I thought. But not in Washington, where taxis charge you by zones and where they make the most money by shuttling you on short trips across zone barriers. So I offered him $50 and the deal was done. He spent the rest of the trip virtually screaming into one of those tiny mobile phones that look like large earrings and are almost invisible. As he swerved from one lane to the next he also swerved from English into his native language. He appeared to be having a furious row with his wife about who should collect the laundry. He was also oblivious to the fact that he had a passenger. I tried to block out the bickering and concentrated on looking out of the window, watching the familiar images of the capital float by.

There is a strange sensation that overcomes the new arrival in America. So much of what you see is instantly recognizable from television and films. A glimpse of Capitol Hill with its splendid white dome in the distance triggers a hundred ill-defined memories from flickering screens. You almost expect someone to jump out from behind a bush and scream ‘CUUT!’ The White House seems so small at first sight that you almost believe it is made of plywood and will fold up like any other film set. The size of the building exists in inverse proportion to the amount of power that emanates from it. Is this really what all the fuss is about? So much of what you see sets off reassuring recognition. So much of what you hear sounds alien, even alarming.

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.

It also didn’t help that, unlike 92 per cent of America’s driving population, I belonged to that tiny, benighted minority that failed their multiple-choice driving test. Some questions were easy. Like: ‘If you come across a funeral procession, do you A slow down B speed up and drive through it or C come to a complete stop?’ The two questions that made the difference between success and failure were: ‘What is the minimum distance you have to maintain from a fire truck with sirens on?’ I hadn’t a clue. And one about car insurance. I cheated and called up the insurance broker to get the right answer. She gave me the wrong one and that was it. I flunked the test. A kind woman at reception whose enormous girth swivelled cheerfully on a small chair helped out: ‘Oh, honey, I am sorry. You can always use a study aid,’ she said at the top of her voice. The people around me started to take an interest. I was the only one wearing a suit. I was the guy they had all put their faith in. And I had failed. Then I saw the large notice on the wall aimed at the clientele. No eating! No fighting! No pro-fanities! I felt like doing all three. Unfortunately there is no escape from the DMV if you want to drive a car legally or have a driving licence. In a country where only 25 per cent of citizens have passports, the driving licence is the photo ID of choice, without which you can board no plane, send no parcels and retrieve no shirts from the laundry. The DL is de rigueur. Especially during the ‘global war on terror’. In America you want to be able to prove who you are at all times.

By the end of my first week I had hit rock bottom. I had acquired a car I was not yet allowed to drive. I had not found a house for us to live in. And I barely had time to visit the schools that would mould the future of my precious children. I was camping out in my predecessor’s home for a few weeks, before the American owners returned. I had dragged Penny and the children away from their friends, from our idyllic house in Singapore with its frangipani and avocado trees, its pool and the sultry tropical languor that provided a welcome anaesthetic from the more mundane tasks of family life. Asia was intoxicating in the best possible sense. Washington was proving to be a major detox. And in late August it was just as hot as Singapore, if not hotter. But the formal dress code of jacket and tie meant that one was walking around in a permanent mobile sauna. The mosquitoes were the size of birds, trained for combat and confident in their belief that no city authorities would ever have the temerity to kill them with insecticide. I began to dream of the grey clouds of DDT that enveloped our house in Singapore every two weeks and killed everything with tiny wings.

Penny flew in on the day that the heavens opened with late summer vengeance over Washington. I was stuck thirty miles away at IKEA buying bedding and cutlery and I couldn’t make it to Dulles Airport to pick up my own family. This was not good. I rang Gerald, a taxi driver frequently used by the office. He bailed me out and met a confused, bedraggled troupe of surly children and their mother in a country they had never visited before and were not entirely sure why they had to move to. The passport queue was two hours long. The customs officer behaved as if he was closely related to the prick at the DMV. The family had been hit on the head by the hammer of transcontinental jet lag. The British Airways stewardess had been excessively rude even by the standards of the mile-high gulag at the back of the plane. And because of the torrential rain, the drive from the airport to our house took an hour and a half.

I looked out of the kitchen window as they finally arrived. It struck me that none of them wanted to get out of the car. They all sat there, rooted to their seats like wax figures. Not smiling. Lottie, the youngest – not even a year old – could always be relied upon to be irrepressibly good-humoured. She was in tears. ‘Welcome to Washington,’ I muttered without conviction. Gerald shook his head. Penny glowered. Things could only get better. And they did.

Some foreign postings are love affairs: passionate, all-consuming. They are prone to deep disappointment but always cherished and remembered as an intimate and special bond. Other are arranged marriages. The beginnings are more prosaic and businesslike but they can blossom into something precious. Washington was the latter. It had started on a dog-tired note with an exhausted groom – me – and an indifferent bride – America. It wasn’t made easy by the fact that the rest of the world had very entrenched, preconceived notions about the bride, which became more and more virulent as the relationship took shape. For those judging America from abroad the middle ground had been eroded. President Bush’s famous statement about loyalty after 9/11 – ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ – had become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the rest of the world. You were now either with Bush or against him, with America or against it. In response the world became less willing to differentiate between an administration and an entire country. Criticizing an aspect of government policy immediately threw you open to charges of being anti-American, just as lauding a piece of policy made you into a snivelling sycophant, Bush’s poodle, Uncle Sam’s lackey and someone who was hell-bent on force-feeding their children Big Macs.

Washington is the window into America’s political soul. It is the Rome and the Athens of the twenty-first century, a city of raw power and a citadel of refined ideas. I was lucky enough to be dispatched there during a crucial juncture in the constant cluttering evolution of this huge country. I was a political tourist with family in tow, trying to find my way around the corridors of power, discover what made the colossus tick and set up a home. Invariably the broad tapestry of politics is interwoven with very personal experiences, many mundane, a few dramatic. They conspire to build a subjective impression of America which aims to be neither complete, comprehensive nor even very fair. It is, however, personal.

ONE Beltway Blues

For many years my morning commute was regularly enlivened by an encounter with the American Vice President, Dick Cheney. He lives in a secure compound next to the British Embassy that also houses the United States Naval Observatory. Does Cheney wander over to the giant telescope in the dead of night to try and catch a glimpse of distant stars and imagine alien civilizations? I doubt it. His gaze is firmly fixed on the terrestrial.

At 7.30 a.m. precisely the traffic is stopped in a surprisingly elaborate ceremony that is Washington’s equivalent of the Changing of the Guard. At first nimble policemen on mountain bikes wearing aerodynamic pod-shaped bicycle helmets pop out of the undergrowth and flag down the traffic. Then their less trim cousins emerge from police cars humming with more lights than a funfair attraction. They block the flow. Finally the super-sized outriders on their Harley-Davidsons park right across the street. The man-meets-machine road block is in place.

The wait begins. The curtain is about to be raised on a vintage Washington spectacle. We all sit in traffic, fiddling with our steering wheels, making unnecessary calls on our phones and waiting for the main event. Then the gates of the Naval Observatory swing open, the bomb barriers are swallowed up by the road and more policemen on Harleys appear with screeching sirens. They gesticulate furiously, guns in hand, reinforcing a point that has already been made eloquently and unambiguously by the grunts preceding them. Next, two black secret service vans appear, followed by an armoured stretch limo – the decoy – followed by the real one, in which the Vice President can briefly be spotted, sitting in the back, squinting at the ungrateful world outside. We always make eye contact.

Then there’s another secret service van. This one is open at the back and displays two agents looking at potential assassins through the sights of M16 rifles. At this stage I always take my hands off the wheel, just in case I make an involuntary move that could get me shot. I resist the urge to scratch the back of my head. Then there’s the obligatory ambulance. It follows dutifully in case the Vice President, who had the first of his four heart attacks when he was only thirty-six, doesn’t survive the six-minute commute to the White House. Finally there is the tail escort, another three howling Harleys. So, just to recap: two armoured stretch limos, three vans, one ambulance, six motorbikes, three mountain bikes and, oh yes, a helicopter keeping an eye on everything from above. All this just to get one old man to the office.

This is all part of the theatre of power that is Washington’s only real industry. It is what defines life inside the so-called Beltway, the ring road that circles the capital and which has become a metaphor for the insularity of the world’s most powerful capital.

No one I know has anything good to say about the Beltway. And I’m not just talking about the people stuck in one of its twelve almost permanently congested lanes. At night the Capitol Beltway, also known more formally as Interstate 495, looks like an oozing river of red and yellow dots. Whether you’re travelling clockwise or anti-clockwise you’re almost always moving at a snail’s pace. But the Beltway conjures up much more than the M25 around London or Paris’s Périphérique. The humble 495 is seen as the membrane around a political cocoon, the frosted glass encasing the hothouse, the cordon sanitaire which separates those who dwell within from the world outside.

‘Inside the Beltway’ has become shorthand for the insularity of the American capital. It was first coined in 1983 by Mike Causey, a columnist for the Washington Post. Today the phrase is received by the rest of America with a mixture of awe and disgust. Mainly the latter. It evokes a shadowy world of Byzantine machinations and deceit. It lends itself to unflattering alliteration. The Beltway Boys is a TV talk show on the FOX News Channel whose content sounds distinctly kinky but which offers nothing more titillating than pundits chewing the political cud. In Washington politics is sex. Here power has its own brand of pornography. ‘Beltway Bile’ was the name of a column in a local Maryland newspaper. ‘Beltway Bosoms’ was the name of an unsuccessful lap-dancing bar on the seedy Florida Avenue and perhaps the only time that the notions of intercourse and interstate have merged in one name. The one word you never, ever, hear in conjunction with the Beltway is ‘wholesome’. And that is unfortunate because most of America cherishes ‘wholesome’. No other capital city of a great nation has allowed itself to be defined by its ring road. But, then, no other capital city worth reckoning with has ever been created solely for the pursuit of politics.

Washington was founded in a malarial swamp by a general-turned-president in 1790. He liked the spot on the Potomac River mainly because it was only seven miles from his plantation at Mount Vernon. It was convenient enough to reach after a two-hour ride but far enough to keep the riff-raff at a distance. He then named the tiny settlement of shacks after himself, appointed a French architect called Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital of the New World on the drawing board and designated its shape as a 110-square-mile diamond. Early Washington was really no more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern Dubai, without the sand, the bling, the excellent duty-free shopping and the Russian hookers. When L’Enfant suggested that the city should be named ‘Washingtonople’, which he considered a little less crass than just ‘Washington’, he was promptly sacked.

All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a city that has never been much loved. Not even the residents who enjoyed their flirtation with destiny here have had nice things to say about it. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House crippled by the Vietnam war and unwilling to run for re-election, he told his audience: ‘I’m going home to Texas where people notice if you’re sick and care if you die!’ A former mayor of New York once quipped: ‘It’s half the size of the Queens cemetery and twice as dead!’ Fred Thompson, the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor-turned-presidential candidate, once compared the capital of power to the capital of movies: ‘Washington has all the veneer of Hollywood,’ he said with a drawl that rolled like one of his favourite Cuban cigars, ‘but none of its sincerity!’

And then there is the ultimate litmus test of the computer age. How many Google entries does Washington, DC, get? New York has 4500. Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, as it likes on occasion to be called, only a pathetic 111. Des Moines, Iowa, America’s capital of flat, rural tedium, isn’t far behind with 84. Middle Americans are disgusted by Washington, whose politics they see as the corruption of everything noble America stands for. When things go wrong it is easy to blame Beltway bile and equally easy to forget that it was the voters who originally made it happen. For its part Hollywood despises Washington like a movie gone wrong. The script had such potential, they mutter over their soy lattes. But they keep changing director. The actors aren’t up to much either. The set is stodgy. If only Steven, George or Marty could get their hands on Project Washington. The doyens of Silicon Valley look at it with the same anthropological marvel reserved for ancient, outdated hardware. Bill Gates and his philanthropic entourage descend on the city at regular intervals to appear before some congressional committee and to remind the politicians that he alone spends more money on solving AIDS and battling TB than they ever will. And yet there are those who have the opposite problem, those who fall hopelessly but discreetly in love with Washington, realizing that theirs is a love that dare not speak its name. It is the grubby and infectious love of power and it is felt most keenly by those who never exercise it. It is the love of eunuchs, a species that includes academics, lobbyists, policy wonks, economists, diplomats and think-tank types, many of whom have dipped their toes into the waters of influence by serving in an administration. It also includes the ultimate low lifes: journalists. I don’t think I have ever heard any of the above say they dislike Washington. I look around my daughter’s school playground and it is full of parents gossiping feverishly about who is in and out while vigorously pushing swings or egging on children dangling from monkey bars. Once you have examined the entrails of Washington any other form of vivisection seems dull.

The newspaper and broadcasting editors of the world recognize the fatal attraction of Washington. ‘Frei, you must not get stuck in the Beltway’ was an exhortation I heard repeatedly from my bosses when they dispatched me to the United States. ‘Of course not!’ I replied earnestly and I meant it. But a year later the magnetic pull of the capital worked its magic, the ring road became like a force field I didn’t dare crash into and I found more and more excuses not to leave. George Bush, his wars, his scandals and his determination to reshape the world are a great help, admittedly. This is, after all, vintage ‘Inside the Beltway’ material. Even my bosses wouldn’t want me to miss it. And yet whenever I manage to escape they celebrate the fact as if I was a child learning to walk. ‘Great to see that you’ve managed – finally – to get out of the Beltway!’ is one of the highest compliments paid to any correspondent resident in the city.

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.

The birth of America was as messy and as stressful as the drafting of the documents that defined it. The mere fact that the amendments to the Constitution are as famous and as important as the Constitution itself points to a process riddled with afterthoughts and contention. The founding fathers were like survivors from a shipwreck who had managed to salvage the best ideas and principles from the sinking vessel of eighteenth-century Europe and transplant them to the virgin territories of the New World. It was an extraordinary social experiment and what is so compelling is the journey between those incipient ideals and the reality of American power today. America is a pilgrim’s colony that has morphed into the mightiest military superpower the world has ever seen. It has gained strength and influence not because of its might but because of the ideas it embodies.

It is the shining city on the hill, as Ronald Reagan famously described it (misquoting Benjamin Franklin), but the city has become surrounded by ramparts and gun turrets. Can America be both an empire, determined to smite enemies sworn to its destruction, and an open democracy? Is there still a link between the annotations of the Bill of Rights and the 2002 Patriot Act, which has given this administration unprecedented power to interfere with the lives of its citizens? Has Guantanamo Bay killed the Gettysburg Address? Has the idea of America been trampled by the reality of power? These are the questions that keep Washington awake today, first as a whisper and now as a roar. This is the debate that underpins the most open and unpredictable election campaign in at least half a century. America is scratching its head, chewing its nails and peering uneasily into its soul. The country is on the psychiatrist’s couch, taking a collective ‘emotional inventory’. The fleeting certainties forged in the heat of revenge after 9/11 have become brittle.

The Iraq war is increasingly being compared to the debacle of Vietnam, where creeping defeat created feverish self-doubt and introversion. Today’s experience could arguably turn out to be worse. There’s the potential of meltdown in Iraq spreading to the region. The impact on oil prices; the spectre of a Sunni – Shia civil war tearing the Middle East apart. And then there’s the self-inflicted wound on America. As the sole remaining superpower the United States no longer has the luxury of icing failure with comparisons to the Red Soviet peril. Since the end of the Cold War it has been judged alone on the basis of its own merits and failures and not someone else’s. And whatever you say about America, the people who call this country home are far happier being loved than feared. America was, after all, born to please.

The disdain that many Americans feel for the Beltway tends to melt away when they actually visit the Nation’s Capital and wander awe-struck among its monuments. The spinal cord of monumental Washington is the Mall, a mile-long runway of manicured grass, shallow reflection pools and war memorials that extends from the foot of Capitol Hill to the Lincoln Memorial. It is a showcase, made for parades and gatherings of a million people, at the very least. Most days it is circled by tour buses rather than chariots, trampled by joggers and not horses. The architectural scale is Roman and imperial. The activity is distinctly American. The joggers, of whom there are thousands, are lean, taut and grimacing with determination. Presumably these are alpha people who run the most powerful city in the world, replenishing their endorphins, working off some of that imperial rage. Those not jogging are probably tourists who have come to marvel at the theatre of power.

The focal point of the Mall is the 555-foot-high obelisk of the Washington Monument. This is the white needle at the heart of the city. On a clear day you can see it for miles before you land at the capital’s airport. After sunset two red lights blink at the approaching aircraft and the needle looks suspiciously like an emaciated member of the Ku Klux Klan with conjunctivitis. On one side of the monument, set back among trees and a small park, is the White House. On the other sits the brooding Smithsonian Castle, the institution that was founded in 1861 thanks to a bequest by the Englishman James Smithson. Its architecture can best be described as Gothic Victorian. Resembling a red brick teacher training college in Middle England, it looks out of place amid the neoclassical splendour of Washington. Smithson was a scientist who made a fortune, loved the idea of America but never actually went there. The seed money from his foundation has funded all the great museums that line the Mall and, astonishingly for America, charge no entry fee.

At the Virginia end of the Mall, Abraham Lincoln slumps on his throne surrounded by marble columns and stone slabs, etched with quotes from the Gettysburg Address. The expression on his bearded face is a curious mixture of resignation and wisdom. It’s what you might expect from a gloomy fellow who suffered severe bouts of depression and steered his country through the bloodiest conflict America has ever fought. Irreverent pigeons congregate on his head and use it as a lavatory. At the other end, straddling the hill it is named after, sits the Capitol, the tallest building in Washington, above which no other edifice is allowed to rise. After two hundred years it still dominates the skyline and has avoided being dwarfed by the corporate spires that define virtually every other American city. White and resplendent, the Capitol sits like a huge, domed wedding cake on top of a pedestal. It is both a monument celebrating ‘the greatest democracy on earth’, as the tour guides put it, and a living, breathing, lunching, legislating parliament. Most Americans admire the building and what it stands for but have a very dim view of the electors who toil inside it. Opinion polls repeatedly give the assembly of congressmen and senators pitifully low marks of approval. In fact it’s hardly surprising that Washington, DC, is so hated. It is after all the favourite haunt of America’s three most loathed professions: lawyers, politicians and lobbyists. The latter are particularly despised: a lobbyist is an amalgam of the first two enriched by huge fees. Eighty per cent of congressmen and women end up working for lobby firms. The city boasts an astonishing 32,000 lobbyists, compared to 8000 policemen and 3000 teachers.

Every four years, in the middle of January, the American public is prepared to turn its gaze away from the entrails of government and the Capitol becomes a giant stage for the celebration of the presidency. Think of it as an arranged wedding that finally takes place after months of wrangling over the dowry, fights among the family factions and arguments about the cost of the party. Presidential election campaigns are marathons of mutual malice. The inauguration of the winner is an opportunity for everyone to kiss and make up and celebrate the commander-in-chief before the next round of mud-slinging. Even after George W. Bush won the bruising Florida recount in 2000 and was hoisted across the finishing line by the Supreme Court, the bile and acrimony were suspended for a day as Al Gore, the former Vice President, graciously congratulated his opponent and President Bush took the oath of office.

On that occasion, too, the grand terrace in front of Capitol Hill was decked with red, white and blue bunting. Giant flags were draped over the sides. An arena of seats rose out of the ground and the Mall was packed with tourists and local citizens watching the ceremony on super-sized video screens and hundreds of policemen and secret service agents watching the audience. If the President is the bride on Inauguration Day, the Constitution is the groom. Every presidency is a continuation of the sacred covenant between the elected leader and the founding fathers, who framed the Constitution. No wonder this is an occasion when arch rhetoric is pushing at an open door. George Bush may not be known for his articulacy but after his re-election in 2004 he and his principal speech writer, a fellow born-again Christian called Michael Gerson, worked tirelessly to earn their place in The Book of Great Quotations. On a freezing day, while thousands shivered in the snow, George Bush mounted the podium under leaden skies and talked about America’s mission ‘to end tyranny on our earth’, the ‘universal God-given right to liberty’ and the nation’s burden to help bestow this gift on the less fortunate inhabitants of this planet. The reality of a bruising, failing war in Iraq, a mounting body count, Osama bin Laden on the loose and the blatant unwillingness of many countries to have Lady Liberty thrust upon them barely impinged on the audience. They were hooked. On occasions patriotic rhetoric seems like a benign opium of the masses. It encourages them once again to believe and for a brief moment it’s as if the entire nation was entranced by the ritual being enacted before their eyes.

I was standing next to Tom and Amy from Missouri. Like so many on the Mall they had timed their visit to the Nation’s Capital to coincide with the inauguration. They had not voted for George Bush. In fact, they didn’t much like him. But they really wanted to see an American President say the oath of office on the altar of democracy. Amy was wrapped up like an Arctic explorer and she and her husband had stood outside for two hours before the President started his speech. In the gap between hat and scarf I detected a tear running down a red cheek as the commander-in-chief promised to expand the horizons of liberty. When the national anthem was played everyone around me solemnly laid their right hands on their chests and sang along. I fumbled nervously with my scarf, wishing I had a large sign on my hat declaring: ‘This isn’t treason. I am a foreigner!’ Even if Americans don’t like the reality of the President who is running their country, they are head over heels in love with the idea of the presidency.

If America is a nation founded on the ideas of liberty and equality, Washington is the temple that keeps the ideas preserved in aspic. If those ideas had been embodied in a man or a woman he or she would be embalmed in an air-conditioned mausoleum, as Mao or Lenin once were. Instead, Washington offers a tour of monuments, memorials and institutions that hammers home the gist of America with relentless rhetorical force. There is nothing subtle about this. In fact, the only other capital I know where the official architecture feels this didactic is Beijing. The giant red banners in Tiananmen Square, extolling the virtues of the revolution and the victory of the proletariat, the huge portrait of Mao over the gate of the Forbidden City are as crass as the cult of liberty trumpeted by Washington. The equivalent of the workers’ delegation shuffling awe-struck through the Great Hall of the People is the thousands of school tours that pay homage to the Nation’s Capital and the founding fathers every week.

On a warm spring day, when the cherry blossom fills the trees around the Tidal Basin with pink cotton candy and when the air is filled with the sweet scent of jasmine, the Mall is a truly delightful place to hang out. I joined a group of eighth-grade teenagers from a high school in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who were being shepherded around the capital by their history teacher. The students were a mixture of African American, Hispanic and Caucasian. Apart from one boy named Lester, none of them had been to Washington before. A meticulously scrubbed offspring of military parents, Harrison Howard had one of those American names that seem to work better backwards. He also had the annoying habit of interrupting the history teacher in the prime of his passion and the flow of rhetoric about our great founding fathers. Mr Wyeth sported a disconcerting goatee and a Paisley bow tie, which he twisted as if it was a wind-up key. He wore the kind of Stars and Stripes lapel badges that became the fashion in the White House after 9/11. He spoke fluently and passionately about the Gettysburg Address, the Bill of Rights and the numerous wars fought to defend liberty. ‘The war on terror started long before our homeland was attacked,’ he concluded at one point. His jaded audience fiddled longingly with their silent iPods.

There were twenty students in the group, only ten of whom had ever been outside their home state. What most of them really wanted to do – and who could blame them? – was to visit Disneyworld in Florida, see Hollywood or gawp at Times Square in New York. Instead they found themselves on a gruelling tour of Washington that sounded like an intensive refresher course in patriotism and sacrifice. On Monday they went to see the Jefferson Memorial, which is a splendid dome, modelled on the Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson. America’s first Secretary of State, drafter of the Declaration of Independence stands twenty feet tall, looking sternly towards the horizon or perhaps the kebab van on the other side of the Tidal Basin, one can’t be sure which. Then the class trekked over to the new World War II memorial, which is an unabashed celebration of the war that secured America’s dominance on the international stage. Gurgling fountains veil heroic quotations about the struggle for freedom. Every state is represented by a square granite column, festooned with copper wreaths. There are 4014 gold stars, each representing a hundred fallen soldiers, and two giant arches commemorating the victories in the Pacific and the Atlantic. For a monument that celebrates America’s victory over fascism it has an oddly square-jawed appearance. It’s as if Albert Speer had been asked to redesign Stonehenge.

The sheer number of war memorials is surprising. There are an astonishing 246 in Washington. Anyone who has ever led a battle charge is commemorated on a plinth somewhere in the city. They range from the puny bronze of Colonel Blassier, the commander of the 3rd Iowa Rifles, standing to attention like a stranded tourist looking for directions, to the extraordinarily tasteless ‘Flaming Sword’ near the White House. A seventeen-foot-high frilly phallus, covered in gold plate and clutched by two interlocking hands, it celebrates the sacrifices of the US Second Army Division in World War I. Stylistically it belongs to the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein. The uncanny thing about these war memorials is that many of them reflect the nature of the conflicts they commemorate. The World War II monument is unambiguously triumphant and celebrates a conflict that changed the rest of the world. The famous Vietnam Memorial is a stark black granite wall. This sombre slab bears the names of the fallen – all 56,400 of them – and forces you to remember a war that cowed America and gave birth to a syndrome. Even the students from Arkansas, exhausted by thoughts of sacrifice and nobility, were stunned into reverential silence as they ran their fingers over some of the engraved names. At first they didn’t even notice the bearded amputee who manoeuvred his wheelchair next to the shiny wall and rested his hand on a group of names. He sobbed quietly, oblivious to the other visitors, lost in the memories of some distant battle. When they did notice him many of the students looked embarrassed and walked away. Mr Wyeth was lost for words. Perhaps out of respect. Perhaps because Vietnam was a war that most Americans would rather forget. It strayed from the heroic narrative of the country’s other conflicts. It served no obvious purpose. The Vietnam Memorial is simple and intimate. The shiny black granite reflects your face, pockmarked by the engraved names. It remembers a failed war that had virtually no impact on geopolitics but tortured the individuals who fought in it and the soul of the nation that sent them there. It is a black slab devoid of heroism, bleating with introspection.

It stands in stark contrast to the Korean War Memorial which features life-sized soldiers traipsing up a mountain in the bitter Korean winter. Huddled against the freezing wind, these silvery figures look flash-frozen in a moment of history. What better monument to remind people of a largely forgotten, indecisive war that ended not in victory or defeat but in an inconclusive truce. Even today America is still officially at war with North Korea. The students liked this one. Looking at the petrified men they tried to imagine what battle felt like. Again Mr Wyeth was anxious to move on. He didn’t want his charges to get worn out before they reached the apex of his tour: the Iwo Jima Memorial on the other side of the Potomac in Virginia, perhaps the most famous of them all. It displays the six Marines who hoisted the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima during the Pacific war. It has inspired countless books and a Clint Eastwood movie and Mr Wyeth choked back the tears as he launched into a monologue about sacrifice and liberty. The monument, which has a commanding view over the Mall, was circled by a group of silver-haired veterans and their wives. They said nothing; one reached up to touch the cast-iron boot of a soldier.

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.

TWO Tilden Street

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!’

Barbara is the boss and although our neighbours include the former head of the American Peace Corps, two senior partners in a big law firm, the CEO of a biotech firm, a nuclear scientist, a deacon and the chief of staff of one of America’s best-known senators, it is Barbara who runs Tilden Street. It was Barbara who gave the reluctant nod to the wooden fence in our front garden, erected to prevent our small children from spilling over onto the street and being run over. When Alice, our fourth child and the only genuine American in our ranks, was born at nearby Sibley Hospital, it became even more important to herd our brood into a secure location. Some of the neighbours couldn’t be deterred from their displeasure. The Frei fence ruined the ‘line’ of the street. It was Barbara who organized the ‘working brunch’ in her house to discuss the controversial school extension at the end of the road. As we sat around her plush living room with adhesive name tags on our shirts, munching on bagels and smoked salmon, Barbara took us patiently through a PowerPoint presentation, outlining each aspect of the extension as if she was planning a counterinsurgency. The detail was as mind-boggling as the earnest-ness with which it was delivered. I snuck out after two hours feeling as if I had walked out in the middle of a High Mass. The next day Barbara accosted me in the street: ‘I know why you had to leave early,’ she said with a mixture of menace and sympathy. ‘The kids must keep you so busy!’

I was seized by paranoia. Had she seen me sneaking out and then chatting to my neighbour for half an hour? Did she know that my wife had taken the kids to the zoo and that my childminding services weren’t even required? Had my facial twitches revealed the fact that I was bored to death by the whole presentation?

Barbara’s PowerPoint briefing is part of a civic spirit that has thrived in parts of Washington – and in much of the rest of America – despite, or perhaps because of, the increasing transience of modern life. Almost none of our neighbours was born in Washington or grew up here. They have all lived elsewhere, many have been posted overseas, and yet they all behave as if they are tenth-generation residents in a Shropshire hamlet. When I first walked down Tilden Street to case the neighbourhood, two future neighbours stopped their cars and asked me what I was doing. The British accent immediately reassured them and news that we had just bought the Tuplings’ house triggered smiles and a wave of questions about our children. One ageing neighbour reiterated Barbara’s call for new blood in the place, making me wonder whether we had just bought into a suburban version of Rosemary’s Baby. But the Tilden Street solidarity has been a refreshing experience. If we forget to lock our front door at night we don’t wake up in a cold sweat. When Penny’s father passed away suddenly in January 2005, Lisa, one of our friends, who was born in Kentucky, turned up on the doorstep with baked rigatoni: ‘In the South it is a tradition to cook for our neighbours when they are busy grieving.’ This was a first. Steve and Betsy’s daughters Olivia and Mona regularly babysit ours. In Rome we lived in a three-hundred-year-old block of flats that was still inhabited by the descendants of the noble family for whom it was originally built. In five years we barely managed to extract a greeting from our neighbours, let alone a bowl of rigatoni. In Hong Kong the couple living below us regularly had screaming rows that went from threats of homicide to protestations of passion, finishing only about three hours before we had to get up with our young children. Our relationships could best be described as AMA – assured mutual annoyance. In Singapore the house next door was deserted apart from those days when it was apparently used by the secret service for interrogations. So the whole neighbourly package on Tilden Street came to us as a novel and welcome surprise.

What also cements the spirit of Tilden Street are the annual rituals, repeated all over America. On Memorial Day, which marks the beginning of a sweltering summer, the Stars and Stripes are displayed in a flurry of patriotic fervour, even though almost everyone in our street is a sworn Democrat and hates George W. Bush. Under the red STOP sign at the top of the street, one wag has added the letters BUSH! Before Halloween the street is transformed into a witch’s cavern, with fake skeletons, giant spider’s webs and glowing skulls adorning every porch and front garden. Even the neighbours without children feel the urge to hang a few cobwebs from their front door or prop a glowing cauldron on the lawn.

A few weeks later, when the last Halloween gourd has rotted, it is time for the Christmas fairy lights. Barbara deploys a twinkling regiment of reindeer and sledges. Her next-door neighbours have gone one better: the single sparkling reindeer, which looks as if it has been irradiated in the forests around Chernobyl, swivels its head in serene and infinite disagreement with the world. The tax attorney on Upton Street makes up for his lack of neighbourly communication with a super-sized inflatable Santa Claus that sways gently in the icy wind and carries a huge see-through sack full of fake snow. There are no limitations on the number of lights or the shapes in this annual extravaganza. You can transform your house into a blinking Camelot. You can show the Nativity in rhythmically flashing colours of the rainbow. Your house can be bright enough to be spotted by the space shuttle. There are no limits to bad taste, but there is one iron rule: the lights must come down by the end of January! You should ignore the advice belted out by Gretchen Wilson, one of America’s most famous country singers, in her hit song ‘Redneck Woman’: ‘I keep my Christmas lights on/on my front porch all year long!’ That would be lowering the tone of the neighbourhood.

Our street is not unusual, but if it seems to embody the civic spirit and ritual promulgated by our neighbour Barbara, the picture is by no means uniform. You need only travel down Washington’s P Street to see what I mean. It starts in the elegant neighbourhood of Georgetown, much of which still displays the quaint cobblestones and tramlines that date back to the late nineteenth century. The architecture here is not much smarter than in other parts of Washington but the tenants have scrubbed up their homes so that they look as if they’re competing for space in The World of Interiors. The streets are lined with manicured trees and cute terraced houses whose flowerpots overflow with geraniums in the summer and mums (chrysanthemums) in the fall. There are no unseemly additions because the Georgetown Historical Association is more draconian at sniffing out any irregularities than a troupe of IRS investigators. Here a bijou two-bedroom house can cost well over a million dollars. Senators, lawyers and lobbyists jostle for space with IMF officials, World Bank gurus and the occasional journalist.

But, oddly for a place with so much money and so many domestic treasures to protect, there is very little privacy. The more opulent the house the less likely it is that the curtains will be drawn or the shutters closed. The lights will be on, even if the owners are nowhere to be seen. Gawping is encouraged. House-proud America wants you to share in their pride. Or at least to feel a little jealous. Since this end of P Street is crawling with police patrol cars and responsible, like-minded neighbours, the assumption is that crimes are less likely to be committed. The open view of a sumptuous interior is seen as an invitation to imitate or get inspired but not as an invitation to smash the window and grab the first Ming vase.

All that changes if you travel a few miles down the same P Street until you cross 10th Street, which was in recent years the front line of gentrification. Here it’s impossible to peek inside the homes, not because the curtains are discreetly drawn but because the broken glass has been replaced by plywood. You can always tell the socio-economic status of the neighbourhood you find yourself in by the amount of furniture outside the front of the house. A faux leather sofa or a dislodged car seat on the front porch is a giveaway. So are metal bars on the front door. There are police cars here as well, but instead of gliding about with silent, reassuring menace they screech around, sirens blaring, lights flashing. In Georgetown the shops sell those pointers to affluence, kitchen tiles, bathroom fittings and fixtures and bedside lamps. At the dodgy end of P Street there are no shops apart from the occasional liquor store, where a terrified Korean couple cower behind iron bars as thick as their son’s arm, and dollar and dime stores that announce they accept social security cheques. The two Washingtons live cheek by jowl, the filthy rich next to the dirt-poor, not rubbing shoulders but giving each other the cold shoulder in close proximity. It happens here and in just about every other American city where there is enough space to sprawl and live among your tribe.

That America is a melting pot is a myth. If anything, this country is a vast archipelago of exclusive neighbourhoods surviving in an ocean of no-go zones. Washington, DC, boasts the U Street Corridor, which is a growing island of prosperity in a swamp of grinding poverty. We live in the so-called ‘Northwest Corridor’. It is green, leafy, predominantly white and overwhelmingly middle class. The majority of parents send their children to private schools, which is why 80 per cent of the students at the state primary school opposite our house are bussed in from the poor black neighbourhoods of Southeast Washington on the other side of town.

Many would disagree that the civic spirit is alive and well in America, even if only in bubbles across the country. The influential social historian Robert Putnam believes that civic America has been killed off with the passing of the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and World War II. Television, the internet, social mobility and social insularity have all conspired to keep the American family cooped up at home or in their cars, unable or unwilling to interact with each other. Perhaps. But on Tilden Street, Barbara made sure that we would be the exception.

Things didn’t always go smoothly. Civic spirit bristles at the unnecessarily unseemly and on that front the Freis have a problem. It comes in the shape of the three cars that we bought in our first year. In Europe these days three cars would be seen as an obscene overindulgence, a guarantee of social ostracism, an indelible black mark as big as your carbon footprint. That, however, is not the problem we have on Tilden Street. Most of the families in our neighbourhood have two or three cars. The issue is the state of our cars, their physical appearance, their roadworthiness and the kind of milieu they reflect. If America is having a love affair with the car then we have neglected our lovers to an extent that can only reflect badly on us. The convertible BMW, which is almost thirty years old and blotchy grey, has a black canvas roof so lacerated and threadbare that it looks as if it has been mauled by a tiger. The grotesque people carrier, used to ferry our four children to and from three different schools, appears to have been involved in several minor collisions. Whenever its doors are opened, a large quantity of sweet wrappers, empty bottles, broken toys, stray gloves and stale sandwiches spill out onto the road.

And then there’s the offensively red Dodge Neon, a car that looks as if it was designed for hobbits but hasn’t been driven anywhere in three years, thanks to its irredeemably illegal status. The red car is seeping slowly into the tarmac of our drive in a state of decomposition. It looks so downtrodden and crestfallen it might well be atoning for the sins of all the other gas-guzzling vehicles of America. The Frei cars are an exhibition of neglect that not even our British otherness will explain away. First they asked: ‘Are you ever gonna drive that car?’ Then: ‘Are you ever gonna sell that car?’ Now they have stopped asking. The red car has become permanently established as a mouldy fixture on our street. I could have it scrapped or ‘disappeared’, but since the car was never registered in my name that would be legally complicated and costly.

If Tilden Street offers an insight into the intrusive yet reassuring nature of American neighbourliness the purchase of our house was an early lesson in the excessive rituals of real estate. As an alien with no credit history in the US it took me a whole year before I became worthy of a credit card in this country. But I had no trouble finding a bank that was prepared to lend me a king’s ransom immediately to buy a house. Like most of the other hopefuls in the Washington real estate market my wife and I attended the ‘open houses’ that take place every Sunday afternoon; never in the morning because that clashes with church. Since we did not experience this scheduling issue ourselves we spent Sunday mornings snooping round the neighbourhoods, casing the houses before they flung their doors open in the afternoon.

Would anyone find out that we hadn’t been to church? Would they care? Perhaps they would only sell to a good Christian? Paranoid? No, as it happens. We are always being approached by Americans who want to know which church we belong to. And we are still working on an answer.

At first an open house seems a lot like a drinks party. Invitations are issued in the newspapers and at the realtors’ offices. Dressed as immaculately as Georgetown hostesses, the agents, with names like Clarissa and Mary-Lou, greet the guests as if they are old friends. In fact if you have done your homework and read the blurb you would know about Clarissa’s likes and dislikes. Likes: snowboarding, hiking, riding and baking. Dislikes: being late, traffic jams, air and noise pollution. With hair that has been blow dried to a new gravity-defying dimension and a face that has seen the careful attention of at least one plastic surgeon, Clarissa, who must be in her late forties, looks like a gently fading movie star. Her picture and profile give her celebrity status. And amid all this it’s quite easy to forget that she is an estate agent and her mission is to sell you a house and not sign an autograph. But America respects the individual, celebrates him or her, gives everyone – well, almost everyone – their shot at stardom. As the man selling me a tie at Saks said after I successfully completed the purchase and he shook my hand as if he had just agreed to let me marry his only daughter: ‘Matt, it was great working with you!’

Clarissa has done a fabulous job in turning the house into the kind of place you can imagine yourself living in. There is virtually no trace of the real people who still actually live here with their three children. The dining room table is adorned with a beautiful bunch of seasonal flowers. All evidence of the current inhabitants has been clinically removed by teams of sweepers who have left the house like a blank canvas onto which the buyer can paint his own fantasies. Mozart, Schumann, or some suitably soothing mood music seeps inoffensively from the stereo and if there is a fireplace a fire will be burning in it, even in summer. All that’s missing are the drinks, the nibbles and the customary bonhomie among the guests.

But this is one party where there is no eye contact, no handshakes, no back slapping. Prospective buyers size up the house furtively, orbiting each other like repellent moons before bidding a gracious farewell to the hostess and running to the car to hit the phones and call in the bids. The owners are nowhere to be seen and the highest bid doesn’t always land you the house. I had to write a grovelling letter to ‘Dear Mr Tupling’ about how I could ‘imagine my family thriving in your wonderful, inspiring home!’

It worked. We bought the house even though the agent informed us that we had offered less than the other contestants. At first I thought she was trying to make us feel better. Then I realized she was probably telling the truth. Americans pride themselves on the constitutional protection of the individual. But when it comes to personal finances the open market and culture of competition subject them to serial indiscretion. The actual sales price of every house in our neighbourhood, including ours, is frequently advertised by local estate agents. The size of my mortgage and my monthly payments seem to be in the public domain judging from the number of letters I get from rival mortgage companies advertising. ‘Matt, don’t you want to save money? Don’t you want to enjoy the lifestyle you KNOW you can afford? So why pay X Dollars a month on a X Dollar mortgage, when we can offer you X Dollars a month?’ Why indeed? I could practically feel the mortgage consultant’s hot conspiratorial breath in my ear. But none of that bothered us too much. We had signed the deeds. We, or rather Acacia Federal Savings Bank of Illinois, now owned another tiny slice of America. It was to time to turn the Tupling house into a Frei home. A week later a team of Ecuadorean construction thugs ripped the walls apart, tore out the fusty old bathrooms, obliterated the kitchen and started to eradicate every possible trace of the dear old Tupling home. When we finally sell up I will also demand such a letter as the one I wrote and expect my taste to be trampled on. But it’s all worth it. There is something curiously satisfying about owning a piece of the world’s most powerful real estate, however small.

Compared to life in London it is also astonishingly comfortable. There are two schools at the end of the road, a park, two playgrounds and three public tennis courts. After a ten-minute walk you reach one of Washington’s best cinemas, an excellent Italian deli and four good restaurants. In the autumn Tilden Street is a riot of reds, yellows and fluorescent oranges as everything disappears under a carpet of fallen leaves. Snow obliging, in the winter it looks like a scene from Narnia. Spring is a succession of blooming trees working in colourful shifts: first the magnolias, then the cherry trees, then the dogwoods. Summer is hot and humid and belongs to a new generation of feisty mosquitoes, soldiering 24/7 to make our lives miserable. The vegetation on Tilden Streets sprouts aggressively. We live in a jungle. The seasons and the setting are almost rural but the idyll is constantly interrupted by the intrusion of modern Washington life, post 9/11. The effect is schizophrenic.

There’s the never-ending squawk of police, fire engine and ambulance sirens. The Israeli Embassy is situated less than half a mile away. Police cars sit in front of its bomb barriers or lurk in nearby alleyways and side streets, keeping an eye on what must now be the target within the target. I reassured Penny that if you’re going to make it all the way to Washington as an Islamic extremist, bombing the Israeli Embassy would make a rather tangential statement when the city is already groaning with targets.

Next to the Israeli Embassy is the new Chinese Embassy compound, carved into a hillside and built entirely by Chinese labour flown in from the Middle Kingdom. The workers in their blue uniforms are housed across the road in a makeshift compound, complete with proletarian banners extolling the virtues of the People’s Republic in a language that the host country can’t read. And so right at the end of our little road we get a fleeting glimpse of the face-off taking place between two global giants: the incumbent superpower and the emerging one.

The Chinese construction workers wake up to patriotic songs blaring through their compound of Nissen huts. They compete with the pledge of allegiance being recited, by law, in the playground of Hearst School, opposite our house. Every morning 110 children, none older than ten, stand next to the flag pole and listen as one of them bellows out the pledge of allegiance on the crackly intercom system. A high pitched reed-like voice cuts though the dank air pledging to defend the Constitution and honour the flag that flutters a hundred feet above the children’s heads.

Oddly, what always made me feel safe on Tilden Street was not the permanent police presence, not the Mossad agents with weighed-down jackets searching the bushes for bombs. Not the buzz of helicopters above or the unmanned drones eyeballing any potential threats. No: it was Barbara, walking the streets with her Labradors, keeping an eagle eye on everything on Tilden Street. In 2007, however, Barbara fell out with the one neighbour she knew better than anyone else: her husband. A grumpy fellow who was as absent from Tilden Street as his wife was present, he bolted after more than two decades of marriage. They divorced, the house was sold, Barbara moved away and Tilden Street was never the same again.

THREE The Colour of Fear

I am used to it now. After five years of living and travelling in America I start unbuckling my belt automatically as soon as I leave the check-in area of an airport. I wear shoes that can be kicked off easily. I no longer bother packing shaving cream in my hand luggage because it will be confiscated, and as I disrobe in the ludicrous pyjama party that has become airport security I think of those who are responsible for every act in this elaborate, involuntary striptease. The coat and additional ID check are, of course, courtesy of Osama bin Laden. So is the confiscated Swiss Army penknife that my father gave me when I was a boy. The separate screening for the computer predates bin Laden. It is, I believe, an Abu Nidal legacy. The shoes, of course, are a gift from Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber. I have nurtured a special place of loathing for him even though he never actually managed to detonate his sneakers. The confiscation of creams, aftershave and medicine bottles goes back to the liquid bombers who tried to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic in 2006. What happens if someone uncovers a plot to conceal a bomb in their boxer shorts or panties?

The Transportation Security Authority, or TSA, has managed to recruit people who would normally be stuck on the breadline without any qualifications, put them in a uniform, told them that they are the front line in the war on terror and encouraged them to unleash a barrage of humourless officiousness on the paying passenger. When I showed some annoyance about having to part with a newly acquired bottle of expensive aftershave, the screener, whose belly hung over his belt like a blubbery white sporran, shouted at me: ‘Sir, are you doubting our Homeland Security guidelines?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Some of them are absurd!’ This was the wrong answer. I was immediately rounded on by two of his superiors who took me into a special booth and gave me a search that involved just about everything apart from the intrusion of a gloved hand.

On flights from New York to Washington you had to exercise heroic bladder control because you were not allowed to get out of your seat for thirty minutes prior to departure in case you wanted to loiter with intent by the cockpit. This ruling only applied to the cities of New York and Washington. On any other destination you are permitted to use the loos at the front. In any case the cockpit doors these days are as secure as Fort Knox. Once I forgot this dictum, got out of my seat as we were approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and was screamed at by a stewardess as if I was charging at the cockpit door with an axe. ‘Sit down NOW!’ she hollered, only seconds after asking me sweetly if I wanted another cup of coffee. Why, I wondered, had she offered me the drink if she didn’t now allow me to make room for it in my bladder? In theory the passengers were probably on my side. In practice none of them was showing it. Everyone looked down at their newspapers or folded hands. I sat down, chastened, like a naughty schoolboy, and crossed my legs, hoping to feel the plane descend soon.

At Washington National Airport a huge American flag is draped across the departure hall. In Europe such an exuberant display of patriotism would make the headlines. Here it is standard. Soldiers in desert fatigues and crew cuts shuffle through the airport on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan or heading home after another deployment. America is unmistakably at war. Uncle Sam feels fearful, vulnerable and pissed off. When strong countries feel weak strange things happen.

Washington’s other airport, Dulles, which receives international flights, has become a fortress. For non-US citizens the immigration line can last up to two hours. The use of mobile phones is strictly forbidden as if the tired and bedraggled passengers were about to call in air strikes. Here that famous American spirit of welcome and friendliness has taken leave of absence. Once I turned up at Dulles after a tediously delayed flight from London. The queue was of biblical proportions. My surreptitious use of the BlackBerry had caused the ‘customs arrival overseer on duty’ to have a seizure. Then I committed the ultimate faux pas. In filling out my visa form I described myself as a ‘resident’. It seemed logical to me. I was living in the US at a fixed abode. The customs officer, whose neck was wider than his face and whose face was as red as the alarm buzzer on his desk, looked at me as if I had just burned the Stars and Stripes on his desk.

‘You are not a resident!’ he decreed.

‘I beg to differ,’ I hissed back, perhaps too eagerly. ‘I reside here. I pay taxes here. I own property here and my fourth child was even born here, which makes her a full-blooded American.’

The neck reddened. Somewhere inside the folds of flesh an Adam’s apple stirred. His grey eyes, as minute as a tick in a questionnaire’s box, signalled a combination of triumph and rebuke.

‘You are a non-resident alien.’

He left it at that. In his book he had delivered the ultimate insult. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought, yearning – briefly – to return to my own planet. Since Alice, our youngest child, has an American passport on family holidays we now place her in front like a human shield, holding up her precious blue document. It breaks the ice. Sometimes. I can fully understand America’s careful attention to security. But the one thing not to point out at the airport customs desk – unless you want to get deported – is that the biggest threat in terms of the number of people actually killed is thoroughly home-grown: road rage, school shootings – there is one on average every six months – shopping-mall massacres, disgruntled employees who avenge an overlooked promotion by blasting their boss with an M16 … America makes it very easy for someone with a grudge to buy a gun.

The fortress of Dulles Airport is located in the state of Virginia where it is much easier to buy a gun at the age of eighteen than a beer. A short drive from the airport there is a gun store that proudly announces: Open 364 Days a Year. Closed ONLY on Christmas Day. It was a Bushmaster rifle legally acquired by a man with an undetected history of mental instability that caused a terror spree soon after we moved to the United States.

October should be the kindest month. The blazing heat and the humidity of summer have yielded to cooler breezes. It is the perfect time of year to arrive in Washington. The children can play outside without having to be doused in industrial quantities of mosquito repellent. The evening air is filled with barbeque smells. We were counting our blessings. No more trips to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Despite fresh and searing memories of the attack on the Pentagon, Washington, DC, seemed safe. And then something changed.

Only a few weeks after our arrival we found that playgrounds were becoming emptier, until they were completely deserted. Schools forbade their pupils to play soccer on open fields or venture out into the sunshine during breaks. It was as if everyone apart from us had been issued with silent orders to evacuate. A hidden plague was stalking the open public spaces of the capital, spiriting away children. Many schools took the added precaution of masking windows with black cloth. Classrooms were turned into dark caverns, as if their inhabitants were underage vampires who could not be exposed to natural sunlight. But this bizarre behaviour wasn’t just confined to children and schools. I remember filling up at our local petrol station on Connecticut Avenue. There were five other cars. I noticed the inordinately tall taxi driver next to me – many of them are Eritrean or Somali – crouching down while he was filling his tank and looking over his shoulder as if he was whispering furtive words of encouragement as the petrol gushed into the tank of his Lincoln. I started bending over, too. And then so did everyone else in the petrol station, bowing in deference to their vehicle. But this wasn’t reverence for the automobile taken to new heights. It was a matter of personal security. We were taking cover.

No one wanted to stand out or be exposed, especially when the enemy might be hiding in a nearby forest or among roadside bushes. Wheeling the rubbish bins onto the street in front of our house became an even more onerous ritual. Now it was conducted with brisk efficiency and a nervous glance over the shoulder. One year after 9/11 the citizens of Washington were terrified once again. But it wasn’t Osama bin Laden or rumours of an imminent Al-Qaeda attack that triggered this wave of paranoia. It was the murderous rampage of a seventeen-year-old Jamaican called Lee Boyd Malvo and his forty-two-year-old mentor/godfather, John Allen Mohammed. For three weeks the pair cruised the heavily fortified area of the Nation’s Capital picking off on average one civilian every two days. They killed ten and injured six, including a fourteen-year-old schoolboy waiting for a yellow bus. He was shot in the stomach.

They shot an elderly man mowing his lawn, two people at a petrol station, a bus driver in his seat as he opened the door to passengers and an FBI analyst who had just emerged from the Home Depot megastore with rolls of wallpaper and floor matting. They felled their victims at random, while they were engaged in the most mundane acts of daily life. This grotesque game of Russian roulette gripped the city and captured the imagination of the rest of America. What was novel about this killing spree was that it took place in the predominantly white neighbourhoods in and around the capital. Violent death in African American areas like Anacostia or Southeast Washington was so commonplace – and continued unabated during the sniper period – that it was banished to the inside pages of the Washington Post Metro section. Unless the crime was particularly horrific, no TV crew would be sent to cover the event. But the Washington snipers terrorized the usually placid suburbs of the capital at a time when the city had been turned into a veritable fortress. They made a mockery of the whole notion of homeland security.

The only things that can enter Washington airspace without strict permission from the Department of Transport or the Pentagon are pigeons and bald eagles. A day before Ronald Reagan’s funeral in June 2004 the executive jet belonging to the Republican governor of Kentucky caused widespread panic on the ceremonial Mall and triggered the evacuation of the Capitol because the pilot had failed to log his plane’s arrival. Antiaircraft Patriot missile batteries stand alert on a hill behind the domed Capitol and a phalanx of CCTV cameras supposedly records every suspicious movement. Police cars sit on just about every street corner ready to pounce on unruly drivers, as I have discovered repeatedly to my own cost. And yet for three weeks this overwhelming uniformed presence did nothing to make us feel safe. The Washington snipers had opted for something so simple and crude that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t thought of it.

They had converted an ordinary blue Chevrolet into a killing machine. The back seat had been ripped out to allow the shooter to shuffle into the boot on his stomach. Here an orange-size hole had been made just above the number plate to allow the muzzle of a Bushmaster rifle to be poked through. From this position the young Malvo – he pulled the trigger in most of the killings – was able to kill Linda Franklin with a single shot to the head as she wheeled her shopping trolley into the covered car park at the Home Depot in Fairfax on a busy Monday night. Her husband had opened the car. He looked round to see his wife dying in a pool of her own blood. Penny and I had planned to go to the same Home Depot the following morning to buy supplies for our new house. We cancelled the trip. A week after the killings started the police received a tip-off about the shooter. (It was only at the very end of their hunt that they realized two gunmen were involved.) According to the tip-off the assailant was driving a white truck. For builders, bakers, refrigerator maintenance men, postal workers and plumbers this is the delivery vehicle of choice and for an entire week the streets of Washington were lined with white ‘box trucks’ held up by twitchy police officers.

It was at about that time that police stopped the car used by the snipers, because it was veering from one lane to another on a Maryland highway. The officer checked the two occupants’ IDs but never searched the vehicle. The snipers got away undetected and went on to kill another five victims. Had they not repeatedly sent letters to the police which were thinly veiled pleas for recognition, containing crucial details about their identity, they might just have driven to the next state and disappeared. In the end it was a truck driver stopping at a roadside motel in the middle of the night who discovered their car and called the police.

I had lived through my share of hairy moments but I never felt such relief as the day the snipers were caught. Everyone did. The playgrounds filled up fast, schools removed the black tarpaulins from their windows. There was no more crouching at petrol stations. And yet the city had been left with a bitter realization: how easy it is to terrorize people who have become used to a sense of security. We had just experienced a very crude but effective form of homespun terrorism, which took the authorities three weeks to neutralize despite all the means at their disposal. What about something more sophisticated? The very notion of ‘homeland security’, that folksy concept that combined heartland images of curtain-twitching vigilance with the Pentagon’s sophistication of unmanned surveillance drones, had been held up to ridicule. It turned out to be a fitting prelude to a year of terror alerts and paranoia. America, the country that possessed the mightiest military ever known to man, was feeling vulnerable. And when powerful nations feel threatened, they are prone to overreact.

Six months after 9/11 the new Department of Homeland Security devised a ‘terror threat advisory system’, a colour chart that was used to alert citizens about the degree of perceived danger from any potential terrorist attack. Red is severe. Orange, high. Yellow, elevated. Blue, guarded, and green, low. You cannot avoid the colours or the adjectives associated with them. Go to any airport in the United States and you will hear the same computerized baritone advising you that ‘the terror threat advisory level is currently at yellow or elevated’. That’s where it seems most of the time. In fact, since the system was put in place it has never gone down to green and only once to blue. For three months in 2003 Hawaii was let off the leash and lowered its coding to ‘guarded’ before moving it up again to ‘elevated’. There was no obvious logic to this move. Indeed, the Attorney General’s office, which is in charge of setting the codes, is under no obligation to publish the criteria or explain to a worried public why the colours have changed.

When they did change it was big news, as if the whole nation was taking part in a mass show-and-tell experiment. ‘Did you hear? We’ve gone to orange!’ It was a common talking point competing with the din of cutlery at the American Diner on Connecticut Avenue or the flatulent steam nozzle at the La Baguette Café on M Street. It engaged people’s attention. It rekindled their most recent fears. It made them call home. What was less clear was why the colours had changed. Had a new plot been discovered? Were we about to be attacked? Was it the latest Osama bin Laden video release that was really a code for triggering a wave of suicide bombers? Sometimes the administration obliged with possible explanations. The Attorney General had announced the unmasking of an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper cell or a piece of intelligence about a potential threat to container ports. At first twitchy citizens lived on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but after a while the colour codes became like a faulty burglar alarm that keeps going off. First people stopped paying attention, then they started wondering whether the administration was manipulating the codes and treating us like a Pavlovian dog. The comedy shows started to make fun of it all.

‘There were more warnings issued today,’ Jay Leno told The Tonight Show audience, ‘that another terrorist attack was imminent! We’re not sure where. We’re not sure when, just that it is coming. So, who is attacking us now? The cable company?’ David Letterman chimed in on CBS. ‘Homeland Security has already warned about new terrorist attacks and it must be pretty serious because President Bush has already ignored three memos about this.’ This was just a tiny sample from a growing catalogue of derision which was enriched when it was discovered in 2005 that the deputy press spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security had been arrested for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old. ‘This fifty-nine-year-old guy, Brian Doyle, was arrested for exposing himself to a young girl in Florida on his webcam and sending her porno on the internet. It’s nice to know,’ said Leno, ‘that our surveillance cameras are being put to good use in the war on terror!’

Then the conspiracy theorists got to work. Brigette Nacos, a social scientist from Columbia University, began to track the uncanny coincidence of code changes and spikes in the President’s popularity. She then plotted the graph to a timetable of the 2004 presidential election campaign. Bingo! We were being taken for a ride, she concluded. Eventually, even the hapless Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, had to admit that the system ‘invited questions and even derision!’ Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, with an honest face and a firm handshake, admitted to me that he hated his job. ‘It’s a pretty thankless task, to manage a super-department of 170,000 bureaucrats and to live and work in a world of constant threats.’ A few months later he resigned and you could hear the sigh of relief all the way from the White House.

Perhaps the low point of the colour-code system was reached in November 2003 on the day the Department of Homeland Security hastily told people to prepare for the eventuality of a chemical attack. The result was panic, confusion and a collective scratching of heads. The following morning I was waiting for my train at the Cleveland Park metro station. The middle-aged woman standing next to me grabbed my arm. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing inside the carriage which had just swished to a halt. ‘There are too many people asleep.’

‘So?’

I didn’t actually say the word but I threw her an involuntary look, somewhere between disdain and surprise.

‘They might have been gassed!’ she added in a whisper.

Clearly mad, I thought. The doors opened and I walked in, leaving the woman on the platform, shaking her head. Then I looked around. Out of fifteen commuters in the carriage half were indeed asleep. My normal instinct would have been to join them and nod off, hoping not to miss my stop. I resisted. Then it dawned on me. It was nine in the morning! I should have been squashed in a throng of other passengers, fighting for half an inch of elbow room, trying to revive the blood circulation in my trapped feet. This was Thursday rush hour … and the subway was emptier than it was on a Sunday. Now that did make me feel uncomfortable. Penny had beseeched me: ‘Take a taxi. Don’t take the tube!’ No, I thought, I won’t let Osama dictate my commute.

Three stops to Dupont Circle. Only three but I counted them in and I counted them out. Suddenly the train jerked to a halt between Cleveland Park and Woodley Park. We must be somewhere below Connecticut Avenue, I thought to myself, while all the other passengers continued with uninterrupted slumber. Near the Uptown cinema. They’re still playing The Lord of the Rings, even though no one seems to be going these days. Cinema … confined space. Great for gas. Just like the subway.

I started reading the emergency directives: face forward, press the red button, don’t panic, walk slowly in single file. Fine for misuse: $2000 or jail. Surely they would understand. We are in an orange alert, after all. My stop. I got out, relieved. But the escalator had broken down and it was a very long walk up the steps towards the crisp blue winter sky. I got to the top and bumped into a man with a megaphone holding up a copy of the Bible: ‘We are all damned,’ he proclaimed. ‘Hell awaits every one of you!’ His voice was fuzzy. Perhaps his loudhailer was running low on batteries. The city may have been on orange alert, but my imagination was already running on red: the ‘what ifs?’ had vanquished the ‘so whats’ and I forgot to buy my grande latte.

When I got to the office London was on the phone requesting a piece about the ‘panic buying’ of duct tape and plastic sheeting. It was all over the wires. I rang one of my most reliable sources. On the mobile phone I could hardly hear Penny’s voice for all the commotion. ‘Where are you, darling?’

‘I’m at Stroessniders,’ she said. Stroessniders is our local hardware store. ‘It’s mayhem here. Everyone is fighting over plastic sheeting.’

The last time she had bought plastic sheeting was for Amelia’s birthday parties to use as a cheap picnic blanket. Now her fellow shoppers were trying to follow the ‘Homeland Security terror threat advisory’ broadcast on the news the night before. This urged people to get hold of plastic sheeting to insulate their basements from any potential chemical attacks. Penny wondered if she should join in.

I called the crew and we raced up to Stroessniders. Penny had already gone, presumably busy measuring the windows for insulation, but the shop was crammed with women. Some in tracksuits, some in furs, some in hysterics, all tearing at bags of plastic sheeting as if their lives depended on it. Which, perhaps, they did. A new load of sheeting had arrived and was greeted at the door as if it were a shipment of rice and milk powder in an Afghan refugee camp. I noticed that people weren’t filling their shopping trolleys with just duct tape and sheeting. Torches, batteries, huge bottles of water, candles and matches were all flying off the shelves as if the whole of Washington was preparing for a long stint in a fallout shelter.

Bill Hart, the store manager, didn’t know whether to be delighted or distraught. He had sold two years’ supply of plastic sheeting in one day, he told me. But he himself didn’t have a clue which room to designate as the bunker in his own house. In aisle six (Glues and Adhesives) a heated discussion was under way.

‘For Chrissake don’t turn the playroom into your panic room! It’s below grade!’ The man seemed to know what he was talking about. He had horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair. He looked respectable, knowledgeable and authoritative. But he was also wearing a blue bow tie. Was he a mad professor or just mad? In the general absence of expertise everyone else was listening as if the shopper in the bow tie held the Chair for Applied Sciences at Georgetown University. ‘Chemicals don’t rise. They fall,’ he intoned, looking round at his audience, waiting to be challenged. ‘That’s how all those Kurds died in Iraq.’ I was about to pitch in and ask about the up or down movement of radiation, bacterial agents, mustard gas … but thought the better of it. Allan, the laconic Australian cameraman, was busy filming. I was busy trying to remember my O-level chemistry, but the only thing I remembered was that I had failed.

When I returned home that night my wife had packed a bag with extra clothing for the children and nappies. There were torches in every room, enough spare batteries to illuminate the whole neighbourhood, twenty litres of mineral water and three roles of duct tape; $1000 in cash had been stuffed into a sock in a drawer. ‘The ATM machines are bound to fail,’ she explained. I told her about the scene at Stroessniders, but she refused to see the funny side.

‘How many rolls of sheeting did you get?’

‘None,’ I confessed. ‘I forgot! Too busy filming,’ I explained feebly. Penny gave me one of those looks that best translates as: ‘Don’t you care about our four children!’

‘What do you want for dinner?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t care but don’t touch the tins!’ she added sternly. ‘They’re emergency rations.’

We spent the rest of the evening working out an evacuation plan. Everyone seemed to think that prevailing winds head north. So we should head west. West Virginia. Kentucky. But we only had a map of Maryland … and that was north. The BBC had conjured up an alternative evacuation plan for the office. This would involve taking a barge down the Potomac River to the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. No one seemed to have worked out how we would get to the barge, whether the authorities would stop all river traffic, whether the good vessel would be fast enough to escape the dangers or, indeed, what would happen to our families stranded at home with rolls of duct tape, plastic sheeting and tins of baked beans.

The evacuation plan lasted about three months before it was shredded, forgotten and replaced with nothing. Nevertheless the whole experience veered somewhere between the absurd and the sobering. We didn’t have a clue and nor, it seemed, did the authorities. It soon became clear that if the Nation’s Capital was subject to another terrorist attack the only thing we could count on was mayhem. At the end of 2003 a disgruntled tobacco farmer from Virginia drove his tractor all the way up I95 into the heart of Washington, DC, and parked it in the rectangular reflector pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a protest about a rise in the tobacco tax. The secret service initially thought it might be an impending terror attack. The man was targeted by police marksmen and Washington traffic ground to a complete halt for six hours. Memorial Bridge, one of the main escape routes, was closed and the city put on a spectacular display of road rage. God help us all if there was a genuine attack. It was a sentiment shared by many that day.

That night I listened to the radio on our screened porch, enjoying a post-traumatic stress cigarette. The local station introduced one of a whole regiment of retired colonels and generals who have benefited from the extraordinary growth in terror analysis and fear-mongering. The voice of ‘our in-house terror and security consultant’ boomed with unflappable confidence. A veteran of many wars, he was now a warrior of the airwaves. A nervous caller from Arlington asked about the effects of a dirty bomb.

‘I can assure you, Gene,’ said the colonel, ‘that if a dirty bomb went off half a mile from this building, you would be doing more damage to your health if you were smoking a cigarette outside.’ I looked at my Malboro Light glowing in the dark and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So much for ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’! Roosevelt is surely spinning in his grave while today’s political masters are telling us that the only thing we need to fear is the absence of fear. Fear is good. It keeps you alert. It also sets impossibly high standards of success in the ‘war on terror’. Since we came to the United States the country has apparently thrived on being afraid. First there were the colour-coded alerts. The word TERROR still flashes across our screens in a truly terrifying whoosh, especially on Fox TV, which would be bereft if America were universally loved. There is the obvious fear of terrorists wanting to blow up New York and Washington. Oddly, though, the fear of another terrorist strike grows the further away you are from the places that were actually hit. In lower Manhattan life got back to normal almost as soon as the rubble was cleared and Ground Zero became a large hole in the ground waiting to become a construction site. Property prices in the immediate vicinity slumped for a few months before resuming their astronomical climb. A big city like New York takes tragedies in its stride. The spirit is indeed unbeatable. But go to Omaha, Nebraska, or Martinsburg, West Virginia, both places that no self-respecting terrorist would ever bother with let alone find on the map, and the population is cowering behind triple-locked doors in fear of the extremist Muslim hordes.

If it isn’t the Caliphate that’s trying to topple the American way of life, it is the ‘superbug’ that could wipe out entire school communities in a day. If you watch Lou Dobbs on CNN, an anti-immigration campaigner masquerading as a broadcaster, you would think that the flood of illegal migration across the border means that we will all be made to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish and eat tortillas instead of hamburgers. If that isn’t enough, you can always rely on the Chinese to terrify you. It was bad enough when they were taking away hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs but now they are also trying to poison our toddlers by selling us toys laced with lead paint. In the run-up to Christmas 2007 some of the cable TV networks launched campaigns helping hapless Americans spot ‘toxic toys from China’, which they might have wanted to buy for their grandchildren. And if that’s not scary enough, just remember that China also owns most of America’s debt. The Yellow Peril is drowning in a sea of greenbacks. The Chinese could sink the dollar even further by dumping it on the market. ‘Beijing has become our banker’, as one commentator put it in the New York Times. ‘And you never pick a fight with your banker!’

The many fears that stalk America these days are the flip side of the enormous successes and the social mobility the country has experienced in recent years. The booming town of Culpeper, about eighty miles south-west of Washington, is a case in point. I got to know the place at the end of 2007 because the BBC chose to adopt the town as a way of measuring the political pulse of America in the run-up to the 2008 election. Finding a representative patient in a country as vast and complex as this might seem absurd, but Culpeper embodied many of the changes yanking America in different directions. It was located in the middle of Virginia. A traditionally conservative state that had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, it had turned against the Republican Party because of a combination of factors: the unpopular war in Iraq, the President’s advocacy of immigration reform, the declining economy and a general, queasy feeling that America had lost its way. Virginia had become a bellwether state. It could swing either way during the election. Its traditional certainties had been undermined by new anxieties and it found itself in mid-transition from rural backwater to expanding exurb.

The town’s population had doubled in the last seven years. Half the new arrivals were migrant workers from Latin America, who spoke barely any English, had snuck across the border with Mexico – 1500 miles from Culpeper – and had come there in search of a job. Most of them had been employed by the construction companies turning the rolling hills of Virginia into what resembled a sprawling set for Desperate Housewives. These new, gated communities might as well be called Wisteria Lane. The houses look as real as cardboard façades in Hollywood and about as sturdy. Having ignored the town for decades, the Amtrak train to Washington, DC, now stops here to pick up a swelling number of commuters. There are now two Italian restaurants and a Thai on Main Street. At the coffee shop on Grant Street it is no longer good enough to opt for coffee with or without cream. You now have to choose between tall lattes, double-shot decaf frappuccinos and a grilled/toasted/baked panino with a bewildering choice of exotic hams and cheeses. The nineteenth-century façades of the houses in the ‘historic centre’ have been scrubbed clean and given a new lick of paint. Shops that were shuttered or empty a few years ago are now selling smart kitchen utensils, Italian designer furniture, Vietnamese throw cushions and pot-pourri. Home makeover fever has struck Culpeper, the surest sign of all that the town is booming. And yet our sample of citizens were vexed by the changes. The overriding fear was that the property prices that had shot up in recent years were now beginning to tumble. Culpeper’s new citizens were being hit on two fronts. The rise in petrol prices had made their long commute to the capital far more costly. At the same time the fall in property prices no longer allowed them to think of themselves as wealthy. The number of foreclosures had doubled to about a hundred in three months and dozens of the large newly built houses – called McMansions in the United States – remained empty and unsold. The universal fears about property helped to trigger some very particular anxieties.

Steve Jenkins, the burly football-coach-turned-town-councillor, describes himself as a son of ‘old Culpeper’. One of his ancestors was the town’s first soldier to enlist on the Confederate side. What fuels Steve’s passion today is America’s new war against illegal migration. ‘I don’t hate Mexicans,’ he explains in the last remaining diner on Main Street. (‘I don’t like that fancy cappuccino stuff.’) ‘But I can’t stand the fact that they sneak across the border illegally and then expect to be welcomed like real citizens. They don’t pay taxes and yet they fill the schools and use our hospitals.’ As he vents the muscles and veins on his oxen neck bulge and pulsate to the drumbeat of growing anger. He grinds his fists together. I am glad I have a legitimate visa, I think to myself. Steve is adamant that his anger stems from the fact that much of this migration is illegal. But it also becomes clear that, like millions of others, he’s afraid that America’s soul is being warped. ‘The illegal ones should all be deported,’ he says, thumping the counter and causing a few drops of pure American filter coffee to spill onto the stainless steel. ‘The rest need to learn English. Real good!’ Steve blamed the migrants for a whole host of ills, from a rise in the rate of burglaries to an increase in road rage. ‘The traffic is terrible here now. People used to stop for you when you crossed the street. Now they just plough through.’ On Grant Street I saw two cars driving so slowly they might have been kerb-crawling. The driving etiquette of Culpeper seemed to be a lot courtlier than anything I had encountered in Washington, let alone New York. But for Steve it was a matter of comparison with a lost era of perfect road manners, when Culpeper was smaller, poorer and everyone spoke English.

Betsy Smith, a former businesswoman turned Baptist preacher, is much less afraid of the new wave of migration. She has met quite a few Mexicans at her church. ‘They tend to be hard-working, God-fearing and law-abiding. They’re against abortion and the ones I have met are good Christians.’ What keeps Betsy up at night are the declining morals of the society that surrounds her. The first time we met her was at Halloween, clutching her five-year-old daughter who was dressed as an angel. But we didn’t find them at the traditional Halloween parade on Main Street. ‘That kind of Halloween is a celebration of evil. We don’t go in for that.’ Instead Betsy helped to organize an alternative parade, where members of her church were handing out leaflets on the Ten Commandments and Bible studies with the candy. The usual witch’s cavern and cauldron had been transformed into a crib and a manger. The fact that we were in a car park, marooned in the middle of a shopping mall next to a gun shop, didn’t seem to bother Betsy and her friends. They had carved out an alternative niche for themselves. Even in a small town like Culpeper they found the space to create their own social bubble, unbothered by the heathens around them who were themselves largely oblivious to the alternative sin-free Fall Festival Parade taking place in the church car park.

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