The waiting is over. The US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today named the fiscally conservative Paul Ryan as the next President of the United States (that was a Romney slip of the tongue). As I reported in this previous post, speculation about Romney’s choice of running mate was one of the consistent areas of interest in the commentary sections of the American press. What would he do? Shore up the base vote, or reach out to the middle? Opting for reinforcement of the base vote is being seen as a tacit acknowledgement that the Obama attacks have been working in the key battleground states. At the same time, the Obama camp is reportedly happy to have a clearer ideological divide, thus enabling it to avoid a referendum on the President’s economic performance. It might seem curious to European eyes to choose as a running mate somebody who apparently has more ideas and policy positions than the candidate himself, but the echoes are that Republicans of all colours are happy. Ryan’s conservatism, so they say, balances Romney’s alleged liberalism (particularly when he was Governor of Massachusetts), and his relative youth (42) balances Romney’s age (65). Interestingly, for a country where these things matter, Ryan is a practising Catholic, so the Republicans have opted for a Mormon-Catholic ticket. His nomination will surely add plenty of grist to the ongoing debate between the ‘Austerians’ (as Paul Krugman has dubbed them) and the New Dealers. But it is another example of the paradoxes of America’s political system that both sides could be happy with the same decision.

It seems that those shrivelled corn fields that I wrote about in this post are going to have a big and potentially alarming effect on world food prices this autumn. This has been the worst drought the US has experienced for at least fifty years and an estimated one sixth of the country’s corn crop has been lost over the past month. The most striking statistic I have read is that US corn farmers have abandoned fields greater in combined area than Belgium and Luxembourg together. In addition to the knock-on effect on world food prices, the drought is going to open up another difficult issue for the US presidential candidates. US corn is mostly used for animal feed and for the production of ethanol (biofuel). Should government now step in and direct production away from biofuel? Already, the UN and the G-20 have started to mobilise. The good news is that the production of other staple crops elsewhere in the world has held up well but it is easy to see how international concern about food prices could become a red hot domestic political football.

A return to Brussels and to the office is also a return to familiar rhythms and habits. Thus, the dog was pretty insistent about taking me for a walk around our favourite circuit at Berthem early this Friday morning. The agricultural landscape here is constantly changing. Some of the wheat fields have already been harvested. The potato crops seem not to have suffered from the persistent rain. But the maize/corn crop and some of the barley fields seem stunted. Nettles in the lanes and footpaths, on the other hand, have rocketed up. At a small pond where normally just a few ducks hang about there was a large gang of geese. Now what, if anything, should that tell us? Could they already be migrating south again? If so, does that signify anything about expectations for the autumn and winter this year?

I found myself watching the 2011 film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo this evening. The Stieg Larsson phenomenon had so far completely passed me by, perhaps because I am not the most avid of readers of crime fiction. I can imagine the book being quite a good read, but the film’s faithfulness to the book (as I imagine it) brings it down more than a little, for the plot is sprawling and the story loses its momentum. (My other, old fogie, gripes would be that there is maybe too much graphic violence and little is left to the imagination.) I should add that this is the American re-make of the 2009 Swedish film of the book. The basic story line – an aristocratic family riddled with extremists covering up for ghastly family crimes – is plausible and the false leads and dead ends are cleverly played out. Daniel Craig (an investigative journalist with the bit between his teeth) and Rooney Mara (the girl with the tattoo) turn in strong performances as the film’s main protagonists. To be fair, I suppose I would be happy to watch the sequels in the Millenium Series, if they are made…

I’ve been back in the office since the beginning of the week and have found ‘re-entry’ into the working atmosphere much easier than would have been the case even four years ago. In the first place, a combination of smart phones and wi fi access and business centres in most hotels means that there are no longer e-mail mountains to be confronted upon return nor, indeed, much pending business. In the first place, anything important or urgent was dealt with remotely and, in the second place, I have created a decentralised hierarchical structure that allows for effective delegation. This morning I had a catch-up session with EESC President, Staffan Nilsson. Actually, we have been in touch throughout and, indeed, he has been following my travels on Facebook. Still, it’s always good to meet face to face. All is well. There are some who eschew the use of smart phones and internet access during holidays, regarding them as slavery to the office. Not I. On the contrary, I think they free the user up. Of course, you have to know how to balance use and access and know also how to turn the things off…

The newspapers this morning carry the obituaries of Marvin Hamlisch. Despite such successes as the film adaptation of Scott Joplin’s ragtime music for the film The Sting, The Way We Were (including Barbra Streisand’s hit song of the same title) and Nobody Does it Better for the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, Hamlisch probably remained below the European radar screen for most of his professional life. The piece of his work that I liked the most was his first film score, for the film The Swimmer. Every time Burt Lancaster’s character plunges into another swimming pool, in Cheever’s brilliant metaphor for a damned man trying to wash away his past mistakes, Hamlisch’s strings soar upwards wistfully then flutter down to the reality Ned Merrill can never truly escape. It is a highly accomplished piece of work for a very first film score and, together with Lancaster’s performance, does much to make the film a classic.

At the baggage retrieval carousel we said our farewells to our wonderful guide, Roger Marsden, and the other members of our thirty strong group (most of whom, realistically considering, we probably will never see again) and then set off to the long-stay car park. Traffic on the M25 and the M420 was fluid and we caught our Channel Tunnel shuttle on time. By seven-thirty in the evening we were back in Brussels and unpacking our cases and suddenly America seemed very far away again. Time for consolation with a few facts and statistics about our ‘Grand Coast-to-Coast Tour’. Altogether we visited or passed through sixteen (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California) of the USA’s fifty states , including stays in six great cities (New York, Washington, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco) together with another seven lesser towns and, of course, the R.M.S. Queen Mary on Long Beach. We got to know several of America’s great rivers, from the Hudson and Potomac in the east, through to the fantastic Colorado. We crossed the Delaware and the mighty Mississippi and we stayed on the shores of Lake Michigan. We visited the Rocky Mountains National Park, Goosenecks Canyon, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon and we saw a lot of great animal, plant and bird life. We saw some of America’s mightiest constructions, from the Empire State Building and New World Trade Center in New York through to the Willis and the Hancock Towers in Chicago and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. We visited some wonderful art collections, from the MoMA in New York to Chicago’s Art Institute to Denver’s Modern Art Museum to the San Francisco MoMA and we visited the Smithsonian. We saw America’s capital city and its civic architecture, from the Capitol to the White House, from the Supreme Court to the Fed. Including the Channel Tunnel Shuttle, altogether we took ten train journeys, from the mere 80 kilometres from Silverton to Durango (but along some of the most spectacular scenery we saw) to the massive 1,670 kilometres between Chicago and Denver. In total, we travelled 5,708 kilometres by rail, 1,634 kilometres by road and 14,188 kilometres by air, making a grand total of 21,530 kilometres for the whole journey. We travelled across six different time zones (Central European Time, British Summer Time, Eastern Standard Time, Central Standard Time, Mountain Standard Time and Pacific Standard Time). And, of course, we gazed on the Atlantic and on the Pacific Oceans.

On the flight back I watched Clint Eastwood’s 2011 J. Edgar, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role as the FBI’s founding father. The script portrays Hoover as an inwardly tormented and sexually confused man whose driving ambition is never really explained (though it is implied that his domineering mother, played by Judi Dench, had something to do with it). DiCaprio does inward torment very well (think The Aviator) and his performance carries what would otherwise be a lacklustre and somewhat confused film. But he can’t carry it all the way. Altogether, Hoover directed the FBI and its predecessors for 48 years. So what did that make him? The tormented soul of the film version (which doesn’t confront the rumours about cross-dressing, by-the-way) or a highly accomplished bureaucrat who introduced modern methods of detecting and knew how to survive in Washington’s political jungle (not least because he knew where the bodies were buried)? The script has Hoover deliberately plunge into a homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson but the relationship is only portrayed in a series of clichés and, having established his sexuality so firmly, the film never confronts the anti-homosexual prejudices and activites of the institution he was heading up. Was this the ultimate betrayal? We never learn. One of Hoover’s early FBI successes was the killing of John Dillinger and in a sense this film closed a circle that had opened for me in Chicago. But it left me feeling frustrated because, notwithstanding DiCaprio’s thespian heroics, we never really find out what might have made Hoover tick. That’s a shame, because Hoover and the FBI were working at one of the great faultlines of the USA, between the states and the federation. Indeed, the creation and consolidation of the FBI is as much a part of the USA’s evolution as the creation and consolidation of the Federal Reserve and Hoover’s ambitions could only be played out through a consolidation of the federal level.

We took off from San Francisco at 17.30 local time, with almost an hour’s delay. The pilot expressed the hope that he could make up most of the delay during the flight and he, doubtless aware of where he could pick up a good tail wind, was as good as his word (at least, that’s my explanation for the heavy turbulence we experienced at times). I wonder if Wilbur and Orville Wright, camped out at Kill Devil Hills on 17 December 1903 and gazing on their wood and canvas flyer after its successful flight of 59 seconds carrying one man, could have had any idea – even in their very wildest dreams – that just over one hundred years later man would be regularly piloting planes carrying over five hundred people for ten hours non-stop at speeds of almost one thousand kilometres an hour, from San Francisco on the western American seaboard to London Heathrow in northern Europe. (Wilbur died of food poisoning in 1912 but Orville lived on until 1948, the dawn of the supersonic age, and by then planes were already regularly crossing the American continent.) The icing on the cake came as we neared London. As the plane made its approach run over central London the Scottish chief steward gave a running commentary on what passengers were seeing as we flew above the various Olympic Games sites. He kept going until we were almost at Heathrow (I have never experienced a running commentary on an approach run before). He capped this off with a roguishly witty announcement just after we had touched down and were still braking: ‘Would any volunteers to clean the plane after everybody has left please undo their seatbelts and stand up before the seatbelt signs have gone off?’ We were back in Europe, wit and all.

He didn’t like the job…

The media has been full of what, in an example of American linguistic wit, has been dubbed the ‘Veepstakes’. Romney’s choice of running mate – and the timing of his announcement – are being seen as his first Presidential-style decisions. Everybody remembers John McCain’s disastrous 2008 choice of Sarah Palin and whilst nobody seriously thinks Romney will fall into the same trap of going for a ‘wow factor’ candidate from the right, the pundits are arguing that he has a difficult balancing act to perform between shoring up his support on the right wing of his party and reaching out to the centre ground. The Drudge Report has floated Condolezza Rice and David Petraeus as wild card candidates but the smart money is on a choice between three men: Ohio Senator Rob Portman, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, and former Minnesota Governor, Tim Pawlenty. Each of these potential candidates has advantages and disadvantages, supporters and detractors. So much agitation about a job once notoriously described by John Nance Garner as ‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’, and yet the decision could matter hugely.