This evening we ate Beijing duck in Chinatown and then headed off to the cinema, as I had promised our party a viewing of The Dark Night Rises as my birthday treat. The film was completely sold out but it was only after I had bought tickets for the next evening that we realised why security was so tight in the cinema. In the early hours of this morning a mass shooting occurred at a Century movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, during a ‘thematic’ midnight screening of the film. The cinema was in a mall just like the one we were in. A gunman, dressed in tactical clothing (many members of the public were in themed costumes of some sort), set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. The sole suspect, arrested outside the cinema minutes later, had died his hair bright red and declared himself to be The Joker. America is in deep shock, chilled by the knowledge that this is neither the first nor, almost certainly, the last such random attack on innocent people. The attack almost coincided with the first anniversary of the Breivik killings in Norway but there are not, so far at least, any political undertones to this latest tragic event.

It is Trivial Pursuits for political anoraks time. Readers of this blog will know that I regularly illustrate entries about the European Economic and Social Committee’s ‘enlarged Presidency’ with a picture of William Howard Taft, who was easily the fattest ever President of the United States. Our guide today pointed to a statue of Taft’s father, Alphonso Taft, on Capitol Hill, declaring it to be the only statue of a non-President in Washington DC (I think). Alphonso Taft did indeed lead a distinguished career but in this post I want to concentrate on his son, who was distinctive for reasons apart from his weight. He served as the 27th President of the United States and, later, the 10th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court – the only individual to have held both positions. He was the first President to be buried at Arlington and one of only two (the other being JFK, of course). Oh, yes, and he was the last President to sport ‘facial hair’ (a walrus moustache).

Another Washington memorial got me thinking about European parallels. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial is a pleasant and extensive collection of water sculptures and marbled gardens marking FDR’s unique four mandates. Excerpts from some of his more memorable speeches are carved into the marble. The one I am standing in front of in the photo states: ‘No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.’ This was the logic behind FDR’s ‘New Deal’ for growth and jobs. Surely it stands to reason, no?

A good example of that mess is the way Washington became the capital city of the United States. As part of the new Constitution, the founding states agreed to have a capital city that was not governed by a state, which ruled out Pennsylvania and gave New Yorker Alexander Hamilton (picture) the chance to champion his home town. Thus, on 4 March 1789 congress and the electoral college met in a refashioned British City Hall on Wall Street, New York, and unanimously selected George Washington as the nation’s first president. Hamilton was appointed scretary of the treasury. Thomas Jefferson, appointed as secretary of state, rushed back from France. He strongly opposed Hamilton’s ideas about a central US bank and a federal assumption of the debts the states had incurred during the war (sounds familiar?). But he was even more opposed to New York becoming the new nation’s capital. At a 20 June 1790 dinner party, hosted by Jefferson and James Madison, the two Virginians promised to help Hamilton’s bills go through as long as he didn’t oppose a move to the south for the federal capital. The deal was done and Congress met in New York for the last time in August 1790. Washington then insisted that the capital be located close to his Mount Vernon estate (16 miles away), with Maryland and Virgina handing over the necessary parcel of land. Thus a central bank and the creation of federal debt were traded for the site of the nation’s capital.

The Vietnam War memorial, a gash of polished black marble cut into the lawns of the Mall, with the names of all of the dead engraved upon it, is a profoundly powerful public sculpture. Like all the other memorials and monuments dotted about the Mall, it is also a unifier.  Whilst we were there, a group of US soldiers were visiting. They first had their photograph taken at the Lincoln Memorial, a sight that sparked spontaneous applause from the American tourists up there, and then they came to gaze, in huddled groups, at the wall (picture). It’s impossible not to gaze, really (though not related, there are two Westlakes on the wall: Clair Lloyd Westlake Jr. (born 04.03.47, died 01.01.69) and William Arnold Westlake (born 02.03.48, died 26.09.67)). That fierce pride and sense of patriotism that led the crowd to cheer spontaneously is something we Europeans don’t have. Patriotism and militaristic fervour got themselves bad names at the nation state level, of course, and we don’t salute a/the flag in the morning. But European flags fly much more these days than they did, say, twenty years ago. There will hopefully never be a European equivalent of the Vietnam War, but those who dismiss the prospect of European Union out of hand would do well to study the mess that was early American history. (Whilst on the theme of cultural unifiers, the Star-Spangled Banner was only adopted as the American National Anthem in 1931.)

We spent the afternoon on an inevitable bus tour around the city, stopping off at most of the main sights; the Capitol, the White House, the various ministries, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, the Martin Luther King Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the Vietnam and Korean War Memorials, the Iwo Jima Marines’ Memorial and Arlington Cemetery, the Pentagon… So many memorials! Not for the first time, I found myself comparing and contrasting with the European Union’s ‘capital cities’ – Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Why are there so few statues and memorials to Europe’s ‘founding fathers’? There are buildings and bridges, but why no statue of Churchill in Strasbourg? There is a bust of Schuman in front of the Cinquantenaire in Brussels, but why no bust, statue or memorial to Jean Monnet? There is a bust of Paul-Henri Spaak in the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg but it took until 2008 for him to get a bust in Brussels, and then it is in the Place Horta. I suppose part of the explanation is that the definitive seats of the institutions were decided only in the 1990s and that too much pomp and circumstance would have been regarded as being pretentious and/or provocative. Is it being excessively idealistic to imagine that there might one day be a public sculpture of that iconic moment when François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl held hands at Verdun?

I celebrated my fifty-fifth birthday today by boarding the Amtrak train at Penn Station and travelling through five states (New York State, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland) to Union Station, Washington, DC. Thus ends an all-too-short stay in New York, but it is only the first of six major US cities we’ll be visiting on this tour. The rail trip goes past some splendid industrial architecture and any number of important sights, including Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore and the Delaware River. We’ll be back, that’s for certain. In the meantime, Washington’s Union Station likes to boast that it receives 30 million visitors a year – more than the White House. This is not so surprising. In the first place, the White House has been closed to visitors since 9/11. In the second, the whole of the underground concourse of the station is given over to ‘eateries’ of every conceivable ethnic and cultural origin, and all delivering ‘fast food’ of some sort. Even a short stay in Union Station could lead to obesity, I fear!

No visit to New York would be complete without a trip up the Hudson River to Cold Spring to see my university contemporary and friend of thirty-six years’ standing, Adrian Ellis and his wife, Libby. Adrian has just finished a five-year stint as executive director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center and is currently building up for another major project. The link spells out his glittering career,  primarily in culture and the arts. The house, lake and surrounding forest at Cold Spring is his little slice of paradise. The house was designed by a Gropius student and Adrian recently learned that one other identical house was built a few miles away. It currently belongs to Steve Reich. I like the musical echoes (Adrian is a jazz fanatic). After a swim in the lake, Adrian and Libby treated us to a delicious supper whilst Nicos supplied an excellent Cypriot white wine. The evening was the perfect antidote to the heat and energy of New York.

In fact, we were hurrying along Fifth Avenue to get to Grand Central Station to catch a train out to Cold Spring where a friend and university contemporary, Adrian Ellis, has a house. I shall write more about Adrian and Cold Spring in my next post. By chance, Adrian had a most distinguished guest staying, former Cyprus Ambassador Nicos Agathocleous. Agathocleous is now retired but has enjoyed a most extraordinarily distinguished career, including long stints as Head of Mission to the European Union (whilst simultaneously serving as ambassador to the Benelux countries and Ireland) and permanent representative at the United Nations. He has a wealth of eye-witness accounts and we were soon swapping EU anecdotes (by coincidence, Cyprus has the presidency of the EU Council of Ministers in the second half of this year), but perhaps his most fascinating reminiscences were of his times as a young diplomat at the UN in the early 1960s, including the famous October 1962 clash between Adlai Stevenson and Valerian Zorin during the Cuban missile crisis (when Stevenson demanded ‘Don’t wait for the translation, answer yes or no!’ – It was surely that episode that Colin Powell had in mind when he produced photographic ‘proof’ of Iraq’s weapons of mass  destruction in the very same Security Council meeting room…) Nicos has no plans to write his memoirs. I tried to convince him otherwise. His reminiscences about Cyprus alone could fill a book!

Also coincidentally in New York, and at our lunch, was my fellow (Brussels) writers’ workshop member, Tonnie Walls. Tonnie is a New Yorker by adoption, and so it was perhaps less of a coincidence that he should have been here. Still, it was funny to be walking along Fifth Avenue, New York, with Tonnie rather than our more habitual Chaussée d’Ixelles, Brussels!