← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · confederate_commando
Thread ID: 18962 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-07-02
2005-07-02 22:44 | User Profile
[B][COLOR=DarkRed][A POX ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES!!!][/COLOR][/B] Divided they stand July 3, 2005
There are two Americas, writes Patrick McCaughey. But the scale of the country means you can choose in which you reside - the Yellow Band USA of Bush and his backers or the Blue Ribbon America where excellence thrives.
As I was leaving Melbourne after my father's funeral, a young, radical lawyer told me how much he was looking forward to coming to New York.
"How can you bring yourself to visit America with your views of the Bush Administration?" I asked.
"There are plenty of people in New York who have similar opinions to mine and why should I let George Bush deny me my favourite city?"
He was perfectly right on both counts. It's hard to meet anybody in the north-east who voted for Bush except for somebody's uncle or aunt in grim little places like New Rochelle or Waterbury. But the American situation today is strange.
Externally, has America ever been so universally loathed and feared? Anti-Americanism stretches from the Melbourne Club to the wilds of Afghanistan. Major European political reputations are secured or bruised by their pro- or anti-American stance. Rumours of Koran abuse in American jails spark murderous riots in the Islamic world.
Internally, the conservative tide reaches ever-higher marks. A Kansas City school board insisted that "intelligent design", that is creationism rebranded, be taught in schools alongside Darwinian evolution, which, as Ronald Reagan famously remarked, was "only a theory". The Christian Right vigorously opposed a hate crimes bill in Maryland that tried to add gays and lesbians to the list of potential victims on the grounds that "it advanced the homosexual agenda". A yahoo is nominated as US Ambassador to the UN. The list is endless.
Why would you want to visit such a country? How can you bear to live there?
The quick answer is that riots in Islamabad are as far from Indianapolis as car bombs in Kirkuk are from Kansas City and who cares if their school board believes in the seven days of creation. The very scale of America insulates you from its problems.
There are two Americas - at least - and you can choose which country to live in.
The America of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the Christian Right and the neo-cons might be called Yellow Band USA. It is named after the magnetic tapes looped into a yellow bow and inscribed Support Our Troops that you see on the backs of four-wheel drives and pick-up trucks all over the land.
The other country I shall unblushingly call Blue Ribbon America, where excellence and the energy required to achieve it abound. You find it in cultural institutions, in the unstoppable flow of American prose and poetry, in a media that is frequently probing, critical and well-informed, in the stubborn belief that the liberal arts are the basis of higher education.
Benjamin Disraeli formulated the idea of "two nations" in his 1845 novel Sibyl:
"Say what you will, our Queen reigns over the greatest nation that ever existed."
"Which nation?" asked the young stranger, "for she reigns over two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws."
For Disraeli, the division was between rich and poor and the gap between them has grown under Bush's administration. But the division I want to explore is cultural. As Americans would say, it's about "values". What does America mean?
To answer that I needed to find a place where Yellow Band USA and Blue Ribbon America either intertwined or knotted up, and so to the nation's capital I came.
Washington is the American experience writ large - capitalised you might say - redolent with the substance and symbols of the American epoch. Few Australians and few Europeans visit. The Koreans and the Japanese are more curious. Of the 20 million tourists Washington draws every year, only 1.5 million are international.
The capital used to get a bad rap. "A city of northern charm and southern efficiency," President Kennedy once remarked. It went through a lethal period in the late '60s and early '70s when white America was paranoid about its larger cities. Today and for some time now you feel as safe in Washington as you would in New York or Denver or Melbourne or Sydney for that matter. However witty, Kennedy's quip is no longer operative.
Washington is a marvellous city both for what you can see and for its own character. It combines an imperial scale with a pleasing scruffiness. The grass on the Mall is left roughly cut. Scaffolding and builders' hoardings litter national monuments. Although a bad-tempered French engineer, Pierre-Charles L'Enfant, originally planned Washington, it's hard to work out the plan when you're tooling around. Unlike every other American city of comparable size, Washington is low-rise.
The charm of the north-west sector, with its farrago of 19th century architectural styles, or Georgetown - the South Yarra of the capital - temper Washington's grandeur. The latter, with its 18th century houses, redbrick pavements and its very own Jesuit university, may have intensified its commitment to consumerism over the years but it has that rarity of American cities: the urban throng by day and by night.
THE Arlington National Cemetery, most potent of symbols, lies across the Potomac in Virginia. The clean, quiet metro drops you at the front gate. Unlike most of Washington, it's hilly and the final home of more than 200,000 service men and women. The number grows weekly. You are kept to the roads and paths and not allowed to wander among the graves. Even so, as you wend your way up the hill, the democratic nature of the cemetery strikes you. Sergeants lie next to generals, colonels to privates, with headstones that disclose little beyond age, name and conflict.
In a shady grove, the life-size, equestrian sculpture in bronze of Sir John Dill, that unfortunately named British Field Marshal, is the only oddity on the way up. What on earth is he doing here? Dill, we read, died in Washington in November 1944 when acting as senior liaison officer to the US army and was, I guess, "a rattling good chap" so he made the cut at Arlington. Nobody but me stops.
The common goal is the grave of John F. Kennedy. Surprisingly, he is one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. The other is the forgettable William Howard Taft, who succeeded Teddy Roosevelt and served a single term. A terrace overlooking Washington serves as an antechamber to President Kennedy's grave. On the curved lip of stone some of Kennedy's best lines are carved:
With a good conscience our only guide, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessing and his help.
Over 40 years, wind and water have weathered these words and in the sunlight you have to make an effort to read them. Few bother. The grave itself is deeply moving. The eternal flame has turned the neck of the black Massachusetts stone grey and ashy. Jacqueline Kennedy lies alongside as does their son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who lived for three April days in 1963 and a daughter stillborn in August 1956 and nameless.
An awkward turn down the hill lies Robert Kennedy. An even more minimal grave than his brother's, a plain white cross stands over a small marble tablet: Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy 1925-1968. Behind you a modest reflecting pool with an extract from RFK's Indianapolis speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King with its anguished yearning "to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world".
Rising above the graves is a steep slope of mown grass. There is a green hill far away without a city wall. Yellow and blue are intertwined.
To my astonishment what stands atop the hill on the very heights of Arlington is Robert E. Lee's antebellum mansion, with a massive portico of swollen Doric columns. He was married in the house and here, on the morning of April 19, 1861, he decided to join the rebel Confederacy. The previous day he had heard of Virginia's secession from the Union and rode into Washington, where he was offered the field command of the Federal army. Four days later he left Arlington, never to return.
Had Lee accepted Lincoln's offer, the Civil War would still have happened. Whether it would have lasted four years and taken 750,000 lives is another matter. Lee was the Confederacy's biggest human asset. Without his leadership, it is doubtful the South could have fought so brilliantly and so bravely for so long.
Lee's Arlington plantation became a burial ground for the Union dead during the Civil War. Sowing the land with those he had killed put paid to his return. With the first interment of The Unknown Soldier in May 1864, Arlington became the national cemetery.
The slave quarters at the rear have been blandly restored and are unrevealing and largely unvisited. The 19th century terraced garden is being reconstituted. But no aspect of the Lee Memorial, for so it is called, makes "gentle the life of the world". From neither garden nor portico can you see the Kennedy graves. There is a disconnection between the two Americas, between the legendary war hero above and the slain advocates for peace below. As you descend the steep flight of stairs from the Lee terrace, you catch your first view of the Pentagon, less than a mile away, crouching in battle dress khaki and grey. You realise again how much war has shaped the American experience.
The same metro will take you down to Alexandria Old Town. Older than Washington, less frantic than Georgetown, the old town has benefited from benign neglect, leaving intact many 18th century houses of varying distinction. A handsome brick Episcopalian church dating from 1773, surrounded by a graveyard, has white box pews and clear glass to let the light of nature and reason illuminate the faithful. What a long time ago that was.
Two blocks away the Confederate War Memorial commemorates the men of Alexandria who marched away to join the rebel cause in May 1861 - the same week as Union troops occupied Lee's mansion on Arlington heights. The bareheaded young man turns his back on Washington and looks sorrowfully to the south. Even here on a warm evening in Virginia, you cannot escape the martial undertone.
THE Mall is the heart and spine of Washington. Stretching two miles from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, the monuments dominate its western end and the museum its eastern approaches. The war memorials are the magnets for Americans.
The cornerstone from which all others take their bearing is the Lincoln Memorial. The 50-plus steps leading to the 5.8 metre-high sculpture of Lincoln enthroned in his temple are penitentially steep.
"If you have tears, prepare to shed them now."
On the south wall are inscribed the 271 words of the Gettysburg Address: In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate - we cannot consecrate - we cannot hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
On the opposite wall is his Second Inaugural Address. Both speeches were made during the Civil War. Lincoln is above all else a war president. Both parties deprecated war: but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
Here the Yellow Band and the Blue Ribbon intertwine. Most stopped to read all or part of the speeches as familiar to Americans as The Lord's Prayer.
This time, however, I noticed a more troubled look on Abe's face than previously. Surely that is because he now looks down the 750 metres of the reflecting pool only to find his vista interrupted by the godawful World War II memorial opened by Bush last year and built at a cost of $US197 million ($259 million). What on earth did Friedrich St Florian, the designer, do with the money?
A shallow amphitheatre in granite with a large pool and meaningless fountain, surrounded by columns - one for each state plus a few client states such as the Philippines and Guam - two portals marking the war in the Pacific and the war in Europe: you cannot conceive of the banality. The narrative bronze plaques showing the course to peace through war would have looked quaint in 1905. The texts, carved in stone, have such ringing phrases as "the eyes of the world are on you" (Ike to his D-day troops). But it's the meeting place for Yellow Band USA.
The morning I visited, a group of middle-aged women in stars-and-stripes scarves were singing patriotic songs to scattered applause. A group of clean-shaven vets had set up a machine-gun post with sandbags and were busily defending it against the climbing ambitions of the kids. There's nothing for anybody to do in this sterile pit.
The lack of resonance, the lack of information - Pearl Harbour is glossed over - and the lack of feeling make this the oddest choice as the memorial for what Americans have taken to calling "the greatest generation". Maybe not. Its blandness may be the key to its success. Omaha Beach, where 2200 Americans died on D-day, might never have happened. Nothing unpleasant is remembered.
One kilometre west, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial slices into the earth like a wound. It retains the almost unbearable pathos of memory.
The story is familiar. Maya Lin designed it when she was 21 and still a student at Yale. She produced the greatest post-modernist, conceptual work of art we have on record. The names of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam are incised on the black marble slabs that comprise the two 75-metre long walls. The walls are set at an angle and they slope down to the corner. The black marble is highly reflective so that you see the faces of the living among the names of the dead. The names are listed in the order that they died, not alphabetically.
As you walk down the decline, the walls rise over your head until the dead overwhelm you. After you turn the corner, it's like coming up for air. First you are eye level with the rough grass of the Mall, then you see trees and cars on 23rd Street and the relief comes like a rush. You have been released from tragedy.
Do Yellow Band USA and Blue Ribbon America meet at this place? They do now, I think. They didn't at first. Conservative pressure made them add a flagpole and then a life-size bronze sculpture of three GIs leaning on each other. The figures now stand heavily armed up to their knees in shrubs and look ridiculous.
Maya Lin has won through because, out of that terrible war, which lacerated and divided the republic far more deeply than Iraq, her memorial has transformed tragedy and waste into a sacred place. And it works. The day before at Arlington, I had noticed the graves of two Vietnam vets and wondered whether they were also remembered at the memorial.
Both were in the registry. John Riegel was on panel 32-east line 27. Bromley German was on panel 33-east line 57. Counting down the lines carefully, I saw them. John, from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania died first, a week before Christmas in 1967. He was 20. Bromley, from Waterbury, Connecticut, was killed two-and-half weeks later on January 6, 1968. He was 24.
The Korean War Memorial on the other side of the Lincoln Memorial is another matter. Aiming to balance the Vietnam memorial stylistically and topographically, it consists of 19 over-size GIs in stainless steel, garbed in full battle gear. They are set on a triangular patch of ground and their burnished steel gives the figures an eerie effect, as though they were lit by moonlight even in daytime. The tableau suggests that they are on patrol. However: every one of them looks sideways or downwards or backwards, as though listening or looking for a hidden enemy. Each GI is on his own: there are no buddies here. And they all look scared. Only the single figure at the apex of the triangle looks directly ahead and he is frozen with fear.
The sculptor - new to me - is Frank Gaylord and I have no idea whether it was his intention to provide heroic presences, which misfired into these anxious figures, or whether he intended the disturbing ambivalence from the start. Yellow Band USA and Blue Ribbon America can each make their pick here.
Wearied by war memorials, I walk round the tidal basin to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. More than 40 years in the making, it looks as though a committee designed it. Open-air room follows on open-air room with little sense of progression and no climax. Water crashes down meaninglessly and rhetorically on massive red granite blocks from South Dakota. Roosevelt could hardly be more out of fashion and favour than in George Bush's America. Even school groups desert the place. Roosevelt, alas, resonates little today either with the Yellow Band or the Blue Ribbons. As you walk on round the basin to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the cherry trees obscure Roosevelt from view.
Jefferson remains the most contentious of the founding fathers. Yellow Band USA remains in shock over allegations that he had a long-standing affair and progeny by the slave girl, Sally Hemings. Blue Ribbon America is disturbed that the champion of liberty and author of the Declaration of Independence, in which "all men are created equal", owned slaves all his life and liberated relatively few on his death.
Appropriately, Jefferson's memorial, a neoclassical rotunda designed by John Russell Pope, is the most distinguished architecturally. It has some of his famous texts emblazoned within. They have lost little relevance: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just"; "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man". Tell that to the Christian Right.
The Jefferson Memorial is the furthest from the Mall. At night the rotunda is floodlit and even though the statue of him in his rough fur coat stands some 5 metres high, Jefferson appears to be a lonely, isolated figure at the edge of the tidal basin.
HOW does this resolve itself? Yellow Band USA is not going away. Fulminating against Bush and all his works achieves little. Augmenting the strength of the Blue Ribbons is a harder and more urgent task. The reality is that both have been part of the landscape for a long time.
A quarter of a century ago Arthur Schlesinger jnr, the historian and savant, outlined an elegant "Theory of America: Experiment or Destiny?" He described a tradition that started with the founding fathers and framers of the Constitution that America was an experiment. Could a popularly elected government, aspiring to the highest ideals of a secular republic, dedicated to liberty and justice for all, survive?
The destruction of Greece and the fall of Rome were vivid examples of the failure of such societies in the past. Like any experiment, it would have to be tested by experience if it were to endure and grow. The Civil War was its greatest test and Roosevelt's New Deal, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society and civil rights legislation were its greatest experiments.
The counter-tradition believes that America is an elect nation, uniquely blessed, a beacon of light in a dark and tempestuous world. Even as important a writer as Herman Melville thought that "we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world". As Schlesinger tartly puts it, "it was a short step from salvation at home to the salvation of the world".
This counter-tradition is firmly in the saddle and "rides mankind". But the will to change, the preparedness to experiment, the embrace of the new, are profound traits of American character and they are neither dead nor dormant. And they give rise to hope, an endemic ingredient of American life.
Patrick McCaughey is a former director of the NGV.
[url]http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/02/1119724847206.html?from=top5[/url]
2005-07-07 16:30 | User Profile
[QUOTE]The other country I shall unblushingly call Blue Ribbon America, where excellence and the energy required to achieve it abound. You find it in cultural institutions, in the unstoppable flow of American prose and poetry, in a media that is frequently probing, critical and well-informed, in the stubborn belief that the liberal arts are the basis of higher education.[/QUOTE]
Gross oversiplification and absurdity. As if only liberals acheive, despite the corruption of corporate America. The cultural institutions are likewise socialist enclaves, college campuses virtually monolythic in their socialist secular dogma, and the press is a joke. Probing sure when their liberal OX is gored but only then.
This guy is an ASS.