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.
Page 38 of 209
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.
I came across the following shocking statement in my Economist magazine this week (28 July): ‘America uses more energy for air conditioning than Africa uses for everything.’ One of the health challenges of traversing America in a heat wave is avoiding catching colds from all the changes in temperature. In every building and on every train where we have slept we have had to turn the air conditioning down (or is that up?) or off. I have blogged previously about the extraordinarily long coal trains that growl their way through the Rockies, pulled and pushed by massive diesel locomotives. And yet this is the America of the wonderful national parks and a strong environmental awareness. One of the many paradoxes of America is its almost cavalier attitude to energy use, mainly seen as an infinite resource, and to the environment. This was summed up for me by something the volunteer guide in the observation car on the train to San Francisco said. She had described all sorts of wonders of nature about us and then got on to the 1969 Santa Barabara oil spill. This was, she said, for a long time the ‘biggest oil spill that ever happened in the world’. She said it almost as though she was proud.
An erudite comment piece in the New Yorker (23 July) explained the complications of corn sex before going on to comment ‘It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well.’ The problem is two-fold; consistently high temperatures, and the drought. Over half of America’s counties are now officially experiencing a natural disaster. We have ourselves experienced those high temperatures and sometimes, as we gazed out of our Amtrak trains, we have seen signs of the drought (stunted crops, low water levels, dried mud). The combination of water shortages and increased fire risks is in itself a potential disaster but the comment pieces in the newspapers are concentrating more on those corn crops. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been steadily revising down forecasts for this year’s crop. As a result, corn prices have been steadily rising and since a lot of corn is used to feed livestock, the prices of dairy products and beef are also likely to rise (the latter were already on the rise after a devastating drought in Texas last year). But the commentariat are looking further. A lot of grain is also used to produce ethanol and there may well come a moment when government will have to consider its priorities. And then there will almost certainly be knock-on effects on world food prices which, it is being predicted, means bad news for the poor and the hungry but also for inflation. Not good. Not good at all. Last but not least, the comment pages are asking, is this a consequence of climate change and, if so, what, if anything should be done about it?
If you are an architect and you have ever had a problem once your building has been built, then cheer up. We came across two architectural ‘bloopers’ during our trip. The first was the Mile High Center, in Denver, Colorado. The tower was designed in the early 1950s by I.M. Pei, and considered to be Denver’s first modern high-rise. The building is part of a complex with the Wells Fargo Center and as can be seen in the photo, features the Wells Fargo “cash register” profile in the form of a glass atrium at the base. According to our guide, the problem with the curved roofs is that nobody thought about the risk of avalanches in the winter. After one such hefty avalanche occurred (fortunately, no deaths) the problem had to be solved by placing electric heaters in the roofs. The second was Frank Gehry’s beautiful Los Angeles Opera House. As the Wiki entry describes: ‘the Founders Room and Children’s Amphitheater were designed with highly polished mirror-like panels. The reflective qualities of the surface were amplified by the concave sections of the Founders Room walls. Some residents of the neighboring condominiums suffered glare caused by sunlight that was reflected off these surfaces and concentrated in a manner similar to a parabolic mirror. The resulting heat made some rooms of nearby condominiums unbearably warm, caused the air-conditioning costs of these residents to skyrocket and created hot spots on adjacent sidewalks of as much as 140 °F (60 °C). There was also the increased risk of traffic accidents due to blinding sunlight reflected from the polished surfaces. After complaints from neighboring buildings and residents, the owners asked Gehry Partners to come up with a solution. Their response was a computer analysis of the building’s surfaces identifying the offending panels. In 2005 these were dulled by lightly sanding the panels to eliminate unwanted glare.’ It can happen to the best of us.
Nowhere has the health of America’s quality press been more in evidence than in its critical coverage and analyses of the Aurora massacre. Seen by this outsider at any rate, the coverage also illustrated a gloomy fatalism about the state of American society. In the Sundays, soon after the tragedy, commentators speculated that, a silver lining in the cloud, the tragic events might elevate the political discourse during the remainder of a campaign that has drawn much criticism for its smallness in the face of the country’s problems. By midweek editorials were more world-weary. Many of the victims – chance survivors of terrible bad luck – would have to pay for their medical costs and so a lot of the newspapers started running campaigns to raise funds for them (compare and contrast with Europe, where survival in such tragedies is not usually accompanied by the threat of bankruptcy or lifelong debt). It had also become plain that (notwithstanding what Mitt Romney opined in London) the killer had ordered much of his equipment from the internet and had bought the rest legitimately over the counter. Here the commentaries very soon recognised that neither of the two presidential candidates could afford to show any critical attitude towards America’s all-powerful gun lobby, leading to (for example) the following depressing headline in Western Colorado’s The Daily Sentinel: ‘OBAMA WILL NOT PUSH FOR STRICTER GUN LAWS, WHITE HOUSE INSISTS.’ Ten days on, the press had subsided into several acknowledgements: while nothing substantive could or would be done, this sort of madness would surely occur again. In the meantime, on Tuesday, 24 July, the Chicago Tribune reported in a tiny article on a truck crash in Texas that had killed fourteen and injured nine. The dead and injured were suspected of being illegal immigrants. There was no further comment or analysis on this tragedy.
If you don’t watch live television, read a newspaper or follow the matter on the internet, then the US Presidential elections campaign could pretty much pass you by – and I suspect, at least for the time being, that is what is happening across the States for most Americans (in the last Presidential election only 63% of eligible voters voted – and that was the best showing in 48 years). Deep in the commentaries and analyses a number of trends have been highlighted that are probably going to change the way American Presidential campaigns are run in future. Obama has taken a few swipes at Fox News but surveys reveal that Americans are watching live television (where the all-important ads – and they are shockingly partisan to European eyes – are run) less and less. Surveys also reveal that religious affiliation is in decline (one in five Americans are without religious affliations or beliefs). The image of suburbia as the hub of white affluence is fast fading: most American suburbanites now live in racially diverse areas. Texas will have a hispanic-origin majority in the near future. The national birthrate is at its lowest in 25 years. Republican efforts to fight voter fraud through tougher registration requirements have widely been regarded as a backdoor means of discouraging the ‘wrong sort of voter’ from registering, but the underlying trends I have touched upon here all hint, say the pundits, at a significant erosion of the GOP’s traditional electoral base. If Obama is currently edging it Romney could yet win, say those same pundits, if the economic outlook remains gloomy or declines. He would win by appealing more effectively to a core vote that may be evaporating. Such a victory would illustrate an essential paradox of American presidential elections; to win you have to divide but to govern effectively you have to unite. Assuming the pundits and the trends they have identified are correct, it will be interesting to see how American party politics evolves over the next few decades…
About a third of Americans currently hold a passport. Until the aftermath of 9/11 imposed travel restrictions even for Canada and Mexico, that figure was much lower. Europeans traditionally cite this statistic as an illustration of how parochial most Americans are, but if coverage of the European economy is anything to go by, Americans are probably more aware of what is going on in Europe than Europeans are of what is going on in America. Doubtless this is in part because American economics commentators currently see the risk of a ‘perfect storm’ brewing, with continued recession in Europe and a slowing recovery in America leading to a global slump. Americans seem also to be more aware of their European responsibilities. The Ford company’s sales, for example, have stalled in Europe, leading to major losses, with consequences for the North American market in turn. (Factory closures are, alas, being predicted, and the Americans worry about this.) Seeing such coverage, it seems so obvious that there ought to be some sort of structured trans-Atlantic dialogue (something that, inter alia, the European Economic and Social Committee has been calling for for many years). The logic for the longstanding Trans-Atlantic Legislators’ dialogue is certainly strong. To quote from that website: ‘The economic relationship between the European Union and the United States is perhaps the most defining feature of the global economy. The integration is broader and deeper than between any two other political regions in the world. The EU and US account for 35 percent of global merchandise trade, 45% of world trade in services and produce 57% of world GDP. The partnership is also the single most important driver of global economic growth, trade, and prosperity.’
In Hollywood, among the footprints we saw set in the cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, are those of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Done in 1994, they are accompanied by his Terminator catchphrase, ‘I’ll be back.’ Since then Arnie has been back several times – not least as Governor of California (two terms). Now, he’s back again. Last Thursday (2 August) the Los Angeles Times reported that the University of South California and Arnold Schwarzenegger had announced a partnership to ‘establish a think tank that will seek bipartisan solutions to environmental problems, economic policy, political reform and other public policy issues.’ Schwarzenegger will chair the Institute’s Board of Advisors and will hold an appointment as the Governor Downey Professor of State and Global Policy at USC. Professor Schwrazenegger’s first lecture is planned for early December. That’s right; Professor. The Simpsons’ spoof phrase ‘I came here to lead, not to read,’ comes to mind. More seriously, Austrian-born Schwarzenegger’s constant reinventions are proof that the American dream is alive and well. Indeed, he has become the embodiment of it.