American Stories : Tales of Hope and Anger 9780702248443, 9780702238932

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Currently ABC Correspondent in Washington, Michael Brissenden has been a political journalist and a foreign correspondent for the ABC since the 1980s. He has reported from Russia, the Middle East, South East Asia, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas and has covered many of the biggest international stories from all corners of the globe. From 2003 to 2009 he was political editor for The 7.30 Report. For some years Michael was a regular contributor to Matilda.com. He has written for the Bulletin and has been a food and wine critic for the Canberra Times. He has also contributed to two published collections of essays: Travellers Tales 1 and The Science Minister and the Sea Cow – Thirteen essays on the nature of choice. His political analysis features regularly on ABC Online.

A m e r i cA n S TOr i e S

Tales of hope and anger

MICHAEL BRI SSENDEN

First published 2012 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia www.uqp.com.au [email protected] Copyright © Michael Brissenden 2012 This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/ 978 0 7022 3893 2 (pbk) 978 0 7022 4844 3 (PDF) 978 0 7022 4845 0 (ePub) 978 0 7022 4846 7 (kindle) Typeset in 12/17 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Contents

Prologue1 1 Winning the race 10 2 Dancing with the city 37 3 Tea Party 52 America’s Muslims and the mosque 4 at Ground Zero 73 Wild politics 86 5 Arizona brewing – Guns, God and Mexicans 104 6 7 The whole enchilada 121 8 Little Havana – Big influence 141 9 ‘Too close to the United States, not close 163 enough to God’ 10 Elvis has left the building 177 11 California screaming 191 12 Tales from the Motor City 207 13 West Virginia – Songs in the hollers 220 14 Obamacare 231

15 Mitt Romney’s magic underpants 245 263 16 ‘It’s still the economy, stupid’ 273 17 Election 2012 Epilogue288 Acknowledgements292

Prologue

Barack Obama is younger than I am. Okay, only by two months, but it’s a defining moment when you realise you’re older than the president of the United States, the ‘leader of the most powerful nation on earth’ as the old cliché has it – certainly the politician with more power and influence than any other. This can change the way you view yourself and your place in the grand scheme of things. Suddenly the world seems different. Does it suggest new possibilities and challenges? Or is it just another reminder of how fast everything is slipping by? Perhaps I should have got to a few of my challenges by now. What it does say to me, at the least, is that a profound generational shift has occurred and, well, that got me thinking, didn’t it? I mean, policemen stopped looking old years ago but until Obama came along presidents always did. And when this shift happened it seemed even more impressive or potent because it coincided with the election of the first black man to the job. Obama’s election was, of course, a significant moment for the whole world. American elections are always watched closely but 1

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this one attracted an unusual frenzy of international attention. By 2008 the world was mightily sick of George W. Bush, sick of the wars, sick of the bullying ‘you’re either with us or agin us’ foreign-policy approach, and worried about the unpredictable consequences of the overreaching corporate greed, the subprime loan crisis and the unregulated and reckless lending by banks at the heart of American capitalism, all of which had caused the biggest crisis in global capital markets in decades; a global financial crisis that still hasn’t run its course. In the face of this the world seemed to be inspired by the candidacy of the first Black American likely to make it through one of the greatest democratic tests. It’s one of those truisms about the United States that, although none of us foreigners can vote in the elections, we all have to live with the outcome. American elections and politics are still more consequential than any others in the democratic world and, perhaps like the day John F. Kennedy was shot, most people with an interest will remember where they were and what they were doing when Barack Obama was elected to the White House. While he and I were both probably squashing our rusks into the shag pile or fast asleep the day JFK was whacked, if we had been out of nappies with even a passing interest in the world beyond the playpen we’d have known how significant that moment was. Forty-four years later I certainly know where I was the historic day the Hawaiian-born African American was elected: the US Embassy-sponsored festivities at The Press Club in Canberra, with a Budweiser in one hand and a hamburger in the other, watching the mixed emotions of the senior consular staff as they took in the full impact of the news. Changes of government are always momentous occasions but the ramifications for Americans are swifter than most. Within 2

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minutes of it becoming obvious that Obama had won, the US ambassador to Australia, Robert McCallum, was on his feet announcing his resignation. As he made clear in the impromptu doorstop, it had nothing to do with his relationship with George W. Bush – a relationship that stretched back to when both men were teenagers – it had to do with his lack of relationship with either Barack Obama or John McCain, the Republican nominee. Dressed as always in a sober suit and tie and surrounded by a feverish media pack, McCallum seemed almost relieved to be announcing his departure. ‘Whoever is elected president needs to have certain ambassadorships filled by individuals that are members of their team and given the unique close relationship between the US and Australia I feel very strongly that should be the case . . . It’s very important for an ambassador to Australia to be able to plug into the oval office itself,’ he said. There was nothing flashy about Robert McCallum. A conservative – almost uptight – mate of George W’s, he’d always seemed rather media shy; an unusual public persona from a nation made up of extremely literate media performers. He was nothing like his predecessor, Tom Schieffer, the baseball-loving extrovert who regularly hosted lunches at the embassy for the media and who would always make himself available to defend the policies of his friend in the White House. During the early stages of the Iraq War, for instance, Schieffer became a regular contributor to the debate in Australia and openly engaged with domestic political arguments. McCallum tried hard but he just wasn’t that sort of guy. He didn’t come across all that well on television and didn’t seem as naturally convincing. On this day, though, Robert McCallum was doing his best to play his part for the Australian 3

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media but, as he acknowledged, the ambassador in Canberra is always the president’s man and so, if the president goes, that’s it for him. Back inside the club emotions were running high. By the way some of the more senior diplomats seemed genuinely conflicted it looked as if it was going to be curtains for a number of them as well. This was a great moment in their political history but they were almost certainly all Bush Administration appointments. The junior staff, on the other hand, seemed overwhelmingly Democratic, and somewhat overwhelmed. For the most part this crowd was white, and some of them were in tears, swept up by the power of the moment. As the footage of the cheering, weeping crowds across the United States beamed in on CNN proved, the emotion in this room was nothing to that being felt at that moment by African Americans – one can only imagine what would have happened if Obama had lost. But it was clear he’d won, the Bush era was being swept away, and renewal had begun. This was a real generational change. Nothing at all like the shift we experienced here just a year earlier from John Howard to the younger Kevin Rudd. For a start Rudd modelled himself on John Howard and presented to the electorate as a conservative, Howard-like figure, without the electorally unpalatable bits like Work Choices. Barack Obama, though, presented himself as a real point of political and philosophical difference on almost everything and successfully sold himself and his ideas to the conservative American electorate. It seemed the nation wanted change. But even then, in the euphoric glow of history in the making, it was obvious the expectations were going to be bigger than the challenges themselves, and what a story that would be. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that? 4

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I’d been thinking about a change in my own life for some time and I was aware that there were opportunities coming up in the next year or so in the ABC’s office in Washington, but this was the moment that sealed it for me. Having covered federal politics as the political editor for The 7.30 Report for more than five years it was time to think about moving on. The pressure and the grind of producing seven minutes of television almost every day in the insular political hothouse of the Canberra press gallery was starting to wear me down. My family probably thought so too – my mid-life crisis was becoming impossible to ignore. Just six months earlier, when we’d packed off to the south of France for an extended holiday, we resolved that if an opportunity to shake things up arose we would do it. The thought of getting out from behind the desk again and covering the United States and this president at this time in history was an extremely appealing prospect. There would probably never be another moment in my lifetime when the world would be facing such huge challenges. The global financial crisis had proved yet again that what happens in the United States moves the rest of us on this planet in a way that no other country’s circumstances can. If the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in the Amazon can cause a storm in China it’s not hard to imagine what havoc is wreaked on the world by the American economy going belly up. Some go as far as to suggest that what we’re witnessing is the end of empire; I’m not so sure about that. One thing that is pretty clear is that none of the diplomatic, economic, environmental or political problems the world faces at any moment can be resolved without engaging America. For a journalist it is a story almost impossible to resist. All I had to do was secure a job. 5

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There are four correspondent positions in the ABC’s Washington bureau and three of them were turning over at about the same time. Presidential elections are also turning points for correspondents as it makes sense to stay on for a full term, to see the election and the inauguration through to the end, and then think about moving on. Of the three jobs that were on offer the one I was most interested in was the television current affairs round. It is the last remaining job of its kind in the ABC’s international stable and is almost exclusively a features-rich, long-form reporting job. Just as it’s a rare job at the ABC, it is an even rarer opportunity in the current contracting media environment. This was a job I figured would, for much of the time, allow me to roam free of the daily news agenda and really put time and effort into the reporting. The interviews for the position were held and a few months later the phone call came and the job was mine. That same day, General Motors filed for bankruptcy and a few days later Barack Obama travelled to Egypt and apologised to the Muslim world for the mistakes of the West, promising a new relationship with the United States. The last time I was in the United States there was no talk of mistakes and the relationship was a very different one. Two hours after the first plane hit the twin towers cameraman Ron Ekkel and I headed to the airport from the ABC office in Brussels and began one of the most circuitous trips ever undertaken by an ABC correspondent. As the world closed down the airspace around us, the trip to New York took several days and we travelled via London, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Tijuana, San Diego, Chicago and New Jersey. Two days after we left Brussels we drove into the United States from Tijuana. The border had been closed since the attacks and a sign of just how shocked everyone still 6

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was at that time can be seen in our passports. Although it was September 13 our arrival stamps say it was September 11 – the immigration officers still hadn’t got around to changing the date. Ron and I sat it out the next few days in San Diego in a hotel full of bored and bewildered travelling businesspeople and sales reps, stranded by the airline shutdowns. Lingering over the free breakfast of packet waffle mix and weak American coffee, we filled in the time watching the anger grow on the endless cable news coverage. When the planes did start flying again, they did so tentatively, understandably nervous. The backlog of passengers and the new, hastily arranged and still unfamiliar security arrangements were causing massive disruption. On the first leg of our journey, to Chicago, an air stewardess straight out of central casting in Hollywood greeted us. This was a woman born to be in uniform, even if the only one she’d managed to get into at that stage was from TWA. She was a big-breasted blonde with a thick southern drawl and hair piled high in an extraordinary gravitydefying beehive. Having concluded that we were a news crew from Australia she proceeded to tell us how we needed to get the message out that now America ‘was gonna kick some Ay-Rab butt’. On the next flight, from Chicago to New Jersey, uniformed airport officials escorted two vaguely swarthy but well-dressed passengers of what might only just have been described as ‘middle eastern’ appearance off the flight. The two were obviously deeply offended by this but the pilot told the rest of us that they had been asked to leave for ‘security reasons’. The remaining passengers applauded. In contrast, protests were underway in Manhattan calling for ‘restraint’ and ‘peace’ – proof once again that New York can sometimes feel like a different country. Even so, out in 7

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the rundown areas of Queens a young Muslim mother later told me how she was now afraid to leave her apartment because she was being abused, threatened and spat on. Almost eight years later here was Barack Obama telling a crowd in Cairo that he’d come to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world: One based on mutual interest and mutual respect. And one based on the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. And I consider part of my responsibility as president of the United States is to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam, wherever they appear. How many of his countrymen and women felt that way? On almost every level the Obama era held out to me the promise of a fascinating ride and so far it hasn’t disappointed. What follows is not meant to be a definitive historical assessment of what will obviously be seen as an important part of American history and the American experience; rather it is a snapshot of some of the issues, challenges, places and people that make up this diverse and complex country at this particular time. While I realise there is a certain conceit in writing about this country at such length and with such detail after just over three years of living here, one thing you do realise very quickly in this world is that, because it is what it is, there are so many experts on the life, politics and economics of the United States. But in the relatively short time I’ve been here I have had the opportunity to travel through a great deal of the country and confront and dissect many of these issues. And so each of the following chapters deals with specific aspects or places that help illustrate the challenges for the 8

Prologue

p­ eople living in the United States. This book is overwhelmingly a story about people, identity and culture: American stories of hope and anger. What is captured is, I hope, a moment of change and transition in a country that has already been through so many transformations but has never confronted a set of circumstances quite like the one it faces today.

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1 Winning the race

The shopfronts in the notorious Los Angeles neighbourhood of South Central present a defiant face to a hostile world. Pawnshops and white goods repairers mix it with the legal hockshops offering ‘bail bonds’. The windows and doors are barred, but peek through the security grilles and you’ll see on every counter and every legal loan shark’s desk a framed black-and-white etching of Barack Obama. The picture on display in this part of LA is a unique regional product but the sentiment is echoed across the country in black businesses, workplaces and homes. From the hairdresser on P Street in Washington who displays photos of the president and the first family’s two daughters on the mirror he works in front of every day – and still hopes that real change will mean security guards won’t pick him out in a crowded department store and follow him into the DVD aisle just because he’s young, male and black – to the art dealer in New Orleans with a shelf full of Obama paraphernalia and full-sized posters of the first family beaming down from behind his desk. These are just a 10

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few of the Black Americans who turned out to vote in 2008, and 95 per cent of them backed Obama. There are some big expectations as you might imagine, but for these citizens the symbolism of Obama’s election victory is overwhelming – the colour barrier has finally been broken. His election has allowed a whole generation of black men and women to dream in ways their parents and grandparents never could. The United States is built on the belief that there’s nothing an individual can’t achieve; that the State won’t stand in your way and that opportunity is there for the taking provided you’re prepared to work hard enough. But until now there has been no demonstration that a person of colour could rise to the heights of president. The most powerful political position in the most powerful nation in the world has always been occupied by a white man but Obama’s victory finally demonstrates that America is consistent with its creed that all people are created equal and that everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive and grow and even become the head of state. But it is also more than that. The fact that this son of a white mid-western woman and an African immigrant could reach the highest office in the land is an important piece of symbolism for white America as well. Yes, blacks, Latinos and minorities of all sorts were motivated to vote for the first African-American candidate. But in 2008 Barack Obama also received more white votes than either Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004. For a nation with a history of racial discrimination, disparity and even violence this was a sign that the country is moving on. Obama treads carefully around the race issue because more than most he knows its power. As senator, Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency at Springfield in his home state of Illinois. Springfield has a special place in American history. 11

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It was the town Abraham Lincoln called home and, in 1908, it was also the scene of an infamous race riot that left at least seven black people dead and numerous homes and businesses of African Americans burned to the ground. This event lead to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so Springfield has a special place in Black-American history. Just as JFK was the first and last ‘Catholic president’ Barack Obama is right now the first and the last ‘black president’. This carries with it the burden of history. * We arrive in Washington DC on a steaming July day in 2009. Just off the long flight from Sydney, with two tired kids in tow, we push out into the foetid humidity that is a constant during summer in the US capital. I locate our ten suitcases stuffed with clothes for all environments and herd the family and the luggage into the van sent by the office to transport us to our new life, the first glimpse of which is the relatively antiseptic Marriott Residence Inn in Bethesda. An upper middle-class, white, suburban area on the fringe of DC, Bethesda has all the preoccupations of similar neighbourhoods just like it the world over. This is the epicentre of what’s known in this town as the ‘funnel of affluence’ – a strange introduction to one of the most significant ‘black’ cities in the United States. Like many places in this country race and class are intertwined. There are exceptions, of course, but it becomes quickly apparent to even the greenest of new arrivals that, on the whole, segregation is still a reality as the unspoken barriers of wealth and education prove more resilient than the formal legal segregation struck down decades ago. 12

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On this day the front pages of the papers are plastered with news of ‘The Beer Summit’. Two weeks earlier a policeman in the Harvard University town of Cambridge in Massachusetts had responded to a 911 caller’s report of men breaking and entering into a house in an upper-crust neighbourhood. It turned out one of the men was the celebrated Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, who had just returned from a trip to China only to find that he was locked out of his own house. The other man was his driver. Gates responded angrily to the police officers’ questioning and was subsequently arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. For many African Americans this was hardly a surprise. Henry Louis Gates Jr may be a well-respected international figure, he may have published dozens of books and made widely acclaimed TV documentaries but, when it’s boiled down, the professor was racially profiled just like any other African American. The new black president’s response that the police officers ‘behaved stupidly’ was enough to set off a storm of debate and media attention that proved, despite all the advances, America is still not ready to have the ‘big discussion’ about race – and if Obama does try to have one, it will prove to be an all-consuming distraction. And so he held The Beer Summit: a quiet afternoon on the White House lawns in front of the nation’s media, a carefully crafted image designed to take race out of the political equation. Gates and the police officer, Sergeant James Crowley, sat down with the president and the teetotal vice president, Joe Biden, that day aware that this was an important moment. Obama, we were told, drank Bud Lite. Biden had non-alcoholic Buckler. Gates went for Samuel Adams Lite and Crowley chose Blue Moon. They must be well stocked for choice up at the White House. ‘I have always believed that what brings us together is stronger 13

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than what pulls us apart,’ Obama said. ‘I am confident that has happened here tonight, and I am hopeful that all of us are able to draw this positive lesson from this episode.’ But it was Gates who summed it up best that day when he wrote: Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control. Narratives about race are as old as the founding of this great Republic itself, but these new ones have unfolded precisely when Americans signaled to the world our country’s great progress by overcoming centuries of habit and fear, and electing an African American as president. It is incumbent upon Sergeant Crowley and me to utilize the great opportunity that fate has given us to foster greater sympathy among the American public for the daily perils of policing on the one hand, and for the genuine fears of racial profiling on the other hand. For all that, Bethesda seemed unmoved. Was it any different in Anacostia? I wondered. Or any of the other neighbourhoods just a few blocks away from the White House that are some of the most underprivileged in the country? No doubt some there were watching this unfold with more than a passing interest. One of the striking things about Washington DC is just how black the city is. Of the 700,000 people who live in the city, 50 per cent are African American. In the 1970s it was around 70 per cent. On a per capita basis this is one of the blackest cities in the United States of America. 14

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I found the whole African-American expectations surrounding Barack Obama interesting, complex and politically charged, but I needed something to bring it alive in my reports – a hook to hang the issues on – and the characters to tell it. As any newly arrived correspondent would be, I was keen to get started. Flushed with naïve eagerness I thought it might be a good idea to talk to Henry Louis Gates Jr. I pulled his email address off the Harvard website and wrote to him. Dear Professor Gates, My name is Michael Brissenden and I am the Washington correspondent for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, responsible for our television current affairs coverage here in the USA. I am currently working on a piece looking at the significance of the Obama Administration for race relations in America and discussing the expectations and aspirations many African Americans have of his presidency. I realise that you may well have been inundated with interview requests in recent times but I would obviously be very grateful if you could give me some of your time for a considered sit-down interview to be included in our story. A reply came back a few days later: ‘This account has been permanently disabled.’ Obviously a few others had been trying to get to him as well. * Because the District of Columbia – the DC in Washington DC – is run by the federal government, official desegregation came to the city earlier than it did to many other parts of the country, but the 15

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defining racial borders remained. In the 1950s and 1960s southern blacks began to flock to Washington because it was the closest city where they could hope to get government jobs, even though southern congressmen provided opportunities for their white ­constituents on an unprecedented scale. JFK once famously derided Washington as a city of southern efficiency and northern charm. Before Kennedy, it was a town comprising mostly southerners, whites and blacks, but even after JFK swept in with a new crowd, from Boston and New York, Washington remained racially divided. For all his progressive philosophies it’s been said Jack Kennedy didn’t really have any black friends – there was only one black man working in his White House and the Kennedy Administration did little to bridge the black–white divide in the nation or in the city. While there was no official divide, newspapers from the early 1960s carried ­classifieds for ‘colored’ help and the areas south and east of the Capitol remained defiantly black while the white population clung to the suburbs to the north and west. U Street in Northwest Washington was the centre of black urban life. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a vibrant quarter – Billy Simpson’s restaurant was making its celebrated crab cake ­sandwiches and some of the greats of jazz were playing regularly at the Bohemian Caverns on U and 11th streets. The DC African-American community was in parts as disenfranchised and struggling as much as any other black community in the country, but it was lively, engaged and – simply because it was where it was – highly political. Washington became the focal point for black political power. This was where Martin Luther King Jr came to tell the world about his dream, and the riots that followed his assassination tore the city apart. His death had a far-reaching effect on DC and entrenched the racial divide even further. 16

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Born of frustration and anger over racial injustice, the riots of 1968 trashed the business corridors of black DC. In the end 1200 buildings were burned down, 6100 people arrested, 1097 injured and 12 killed. The riots sparked a generation of fear in the city’s white residents but it took more than 30 years for the black business community to recover. Today the U Street area is alive again with clubs, restaurants and nightlife. Ben’s Chili Bowl, a black culinary institution, is just around the corner from where the worst of the riots began. It’s a tourist attraction packed full at almost any hour of the day with whites, blacks and everyone else tucking in to chilli dogs and cheese fries. It may just be, and probably is, an exercise in opportunistic marketing, but it’s said to be Obama’s favourite burger joint in DC. Photos of the good and the great line the walls. Bill Cosby eats here a lot apparently. Movie stars and musicians stop in. Even Nicolas Sarkozy, while French president, and his wife, Carla Bruni, were convinced to try it on their first visit to Washington DC, although what they made of the chilli burger sub (two quarter-pound all-beef patties on a fresh six-inch sub roll covered with chilli and mayonnaise) and the sweet potato pound cake is anyone’s guess. It’s not exactly foie gras. Gentrification has brought with it money, new business opportunities and an affluent mixed population. Like everywhere, though, change can leave a bitter taste in the mouths of locals who fear they’re being priced out of their own neighbourhood. But well before Martin Luther King spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and well before the 1968 riots there was one act of defiance that became a celebrated political turning point that challenged the segregationist attitudes that still lingered in Washington into the 1960s. Although it’s just across the border 17

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in Maryland, for many residents of DC – black and white – the Glen Echo amusement park was emblematic of a city divided. Older African Americans can remember taking the streetcar on the old Great Falls railway line and not being allowed off at the Glen Echo Park stop. The park was a playground for whites only until 1960, when a group of college kids from the historically black Howard University staged a sit-in protest. Five students from the university’s non-violent action group were arrested, and a young radio reporter captured the standoff between a park guard and student leader Lawrence Henry. ‘Are you telling me because my skin is black I can’t come into the park?’ Henry demands. ‘Not because your skin is black,’ the guard replies. ‘I asked you what your race was.’ ‘What is the reason?’ Henry asks. ‘Your race.’ Frustrated and determined to provoke the situation Lawrence Henry asks again, ‘I would like to know the reason I cannot come into your park.’ ‘Because the park is segregated,’ the guard says. ‘It’s private property.’ ‘And you allow others? What class of person do you allow in here?’ ‘White people,’ is the guard’s blunt reply. The arrests were later appealed to the Supreme Court and were reversed but the confrontation sparked an eleven-week-long civil rights campaign that eventually forced the park to open its gates to all-comers. Today the famous carousel now runs only in spring and summer but the park’s reputation lives on in the memories of many 18

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Washington residents, and a good deal still feel uncomfortable about it. These days Glen Echo is home to a few offices and operates mostly as a venue for ballroom dancing and private parties. Not long after we arrive in Washington we are invited to a 50th birthday celebration in its old dodgem car hall. A covers band pumps out the usual set list of favourites, the beer and wine flow and the crowd that would overwhelmingly describe themselves as ‘liberal’ – a tag rich with meaning in this country – all had a very enjoyable evening. But even so, some who’d grown up in the area could well remember the notoriety the place possessed in their childhoods and, a little over 50 years on from the student sit-in, the only black person there that night was a security guard at the front entrance. * A few months later I met a woman who, like me, had been navigating her way to a children’s sporting event with the help of her GPS. Ferrying children around to suburban tournaments is a regular weekend exercise and if you’re new in town a satellite navigation device is one very helpful tool in making sure you get your young sports star to the game on time. The trouble is, letting a satellite choose the shortest route can sometimes present some challenging outcomes, and my new acquaintance was only halfjoking when she told me she’d be a lot happier if she could just program her machine to ‘avoid southeast DC entirely’. It’s a sentiment that neatly sums up the divisions in this city. Of course, there are no building codes or apartheid rules that prevent anyone of any colour living anywhere they like, and there are middle-class black neighbourhoods, poorer white areas and groovy gentrified inner-city enclaves that truly do reflect the 19

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great melting pot of race that is America, but on the whole the southeast of Washington DC is black, poor and deprived. The maisonettes and quaint terrace houses of Georgetown and the leafy suburbs of Maryland and Virginia are only a few kilometres from the urban decay that is the reality of Anacostia and Congress Heights, but they are worlds apart. The best illustration of this is to take a half-hour ride on the Washington metro, a journey I decided to document for the section called The Drum on the ABC website. ‘Start at Friendship Heights on the northwestern edge of DC,’ I wrote, which is a natural enough place to start given that our local metro stop is bang in the middle of the white, well-off and well-educated Washington suburb. Even just a few days after the biggest winter snowstorm on record Wisconsin Avenue sparkles. The sidewalks have been swept clear and de-iced. The upmarket Mazza shopping mall is well stocked and well patronised. The well-heeled locals cruise Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdales. There’s high fashion of all sorts to choose from, as well as designer homewares and gourmet food shops. Business is so good here – even in this recession – that a new shopping complex is already filling up with stores even before it’s been completed. Take the escalator underground and board the train for the seven stops on the red line with the other commuters heading downtown. The academics and students get off at the university stops of Tenleytown and Van Ness; the lawyers, lobbyists and government workers start peeling off at Dupont Circle. Change trains for the green line at Gallery Place and you’ll notice the demographics shift even before you emerge 20

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back into the daylight five stops later at Anacostia. Here the sidewalks are still impassable. Dirty snow is piled up in huge mounds – pushed off the road with no concern for the pedestrians now forced to share the icy road with the traffic. Walk a block – past the United House of Prayers and the Bethlehem Baptist Church – and turn left on Martin Luther King Avenue. There’s a mobile police station parked on the side of the road, the lights are flashing. Every few minutes a patrol car cruises past the small groups of young African-American men hanging out on the street corners outside boarded-up shops. Most of the shopfront windows are covered with corrugated iron sheeting or heavily barred, and it’s certainly been a long time since the King City Chinese served anything like a meal. There’s nothing inside but broken floor tiles and piles of rubbish. Further down the street a hopeful ‘for sale’ sign hangs on the fence surrounding three condemned houses. There’s a pawnshop and a few more religious outreach missions offering redemption and a free feed. Amidst all this a brave entrepreneur has defied the trend and opened a coffee shop. The owner had told the Washington Post she just wanted to do something for the neighbourhood. I went in for a coffee. It was ten o’clock in the morning but I was the only customer. In cities all across this country the American dream often crumbles in just a few short blocks, but not every American city is home to the White House. And this country’s first black president need only take a very short drive to be reminded of the burden and responsibility that comes with his symbolic election victory and the weight of expectation still hanging off his political mantra of ‘hope and change’.

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It’s confronting, this divergent reality. But Anacostia is just one black neighbourhood and the story of black economic inequality is the same across the nation. This is the sector of American society hit hardest by the financial crisis. By the end of Obama’s first year in office the statistics that highlighted the black underprivileged remained startlingly singular. The general unemployment rate in January 2010 was 9.7 per cent. Among African-American men it was well over 25 per cent and the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) believed that figure was artificially low. In some parts of the country, such as South Central Los Angeles, the black unemployment rate was more like 70 to 80 per cent. African Americans made up 13.4 per cent of the population but 60 per cent of the children in poverty in the United States were black. Only 40 per cent of African Americans owned their own home compared to 80 per cent of white Americans, and a far greater number of black homeowners had been forced into foreclosure in the preceding twelve months. African Americans were far more likely to have fallen prey to subprime lenders than other racial groups. And on quality of life indicators, such as infant mortality, the statistics for African Americans were more consistent with Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of Obama’s third year the situation hadn’t improved at all. But hope is a powerful force and Black Americans still have plenty of it even in places where fate, weather and political indifference might have snuffed it out all together. DC is one of those places. New Orleans, the location of my first assignment in the United States, is another. *

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Having grown up with my father’s jazz obsession, I’d always wanted to visit New Orleans and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Four years on from Hurricane Katrina the place was still struggling to regain its footing. The housing reconstruction was painfully slow, health and education services were strained and many of those who’d been forced out by the storm and the political ineptitude that exacerbated the disaster still hadn’t returned. A lot of people now thought they never would. But the ravages of politics and weather hadn’t killed the tradition for hedonistic indulgence. There’s a bar on every corner of Bourbon Street and a different band in almost every one. From one end to the other it’s possible to drift between thumping R&B, to Zydeco and indie rock venues and back again to the more traditional jazz joint. It’s hot, sweaty and raucous but, as Louie pointed out straight up, ‘It’s not America.’ You just don’t see people drinking like that elsewhere. Aussie cameramen, particularly those that have been trained at the ABC, have a terrific reputation on the foreign circuit. Thanks largely to the variety of challenges that get thrown their way – everything from Gardening Australia to Landline and the daily news to Four Corners – they are able to adapt to almost every situation. Coupled with a great work ethic, a sense of adventure and a good sense of humour, it’s little wonder that they pop up in hotspots all over the world. The ABC’s Washington office has two of the finest, Dan Sweetapple and Louie Eroglu. I had worked a lot with Louie in the past and we were set to spend an awful lot of time in each other’s company in the future. ‘Don’t think every trip’s going to be like this,’ he says on our first night in New Orleans. It doesn’t feel like much of the rest of America and, certainly 23

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after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, it doesn’t look much like the rest of the country, either. The people here are different, and it’s not just the vibrant hedonism of the French Quarter that makes them so. It’s the heat, the food, the music, the history. Life has a different pace. But Katrina left the people here isolated and desperate. It wasn’t just a calamitous weather event or even just a failure of engineering. Above all, Katrina was a failure of political leadership that quickly became a story about race and class and a defining moment for the Administration of George W. Bush. It is still a story about race and class but now it’s Barack Obama’s watch. Four years on I figure this would be as good a place as any to gauge the strength of ‘hope’. In August 2009 much of the historic 9th Ward – the district that was largely swept away when the levee breached – is still a shattered mess. The lower 9th has a rich history in a city that takes its past seriously. It’s a predominantly African-American neighbourhood with a strong musical heritage. Fats Domino and Mahalia Jackson were both born here and musicians always lived in the small clapboard houses that used to line its streets. In a musical city nowhere has been more important than the 9th Ward. In the lounge room of one of the newly built houses in what’s now called Musicians’ Village, bass player Dewey Sampson and guitarist Charles Moore run us through a medley of some of the jazz classics. Charles Moore speaks like he plays, with rhythm and flat Creole cadence. He tells me that when he was growing up around here he was surrounded by great jazz musicians. ‘They were the best. Top of their field. None like ’em. The legacy they left behind, I’m glad to be a part of that legacy. I’m 24

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glad to have known them and their music. There was no school for the kind of music they played, they opened up a whole concept and this is where it started. I was lucky to be around them.’ His friend Dewey is lucky to be around too. He lost everything in Katrina. Now he has one of the new pastel-coloured houses in Musicians’ Village. The two men are big on hope. ‘Because without hope,’ Charles says, ‘we’re desperate people.’ They both still believe in President Obama. ‘He’ll get to us you know. He’s a very busy man but he won’t forget. He’ll help.’ On some blocks nearby, charities, like the one run by the actor Brad Pitt, are putting up cutting-edge, architect-designed, environment-friendly houses – all sharp edges and crazy angles. There’s a house that’ll float should the levee ever breach again, and one is even shaped like a wave as a permanent reminder of the destructive force that tore through the district. There are solar panels on the roofs and community gardens in the making. Are these the lucky ones? In some senses maybe they are, but the trauma is still raw. Everyone here saw family, friends and neighbours swept away. On the other side of North Claiborne Avenue it’s a different story. In some streets a concrete porch is the only reminder that a house even stood on blocks now overgrown with weeds. Many of those that remain have crosses painted on them – a sign they’re unsafe to occupy. They list dangerously as if there’s no longer any need to stand upright now that the songs and arguments, deaths, births and celebrations of all those who lived in them have been washed away by the torrent. Most of them remain empty, littered with used syringes and drug paraphernalia, but some residents have returned, repairing what they can. Occasionally on these 25

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streets there are two or three houses sitting side by side that have been re-stumped and re-painted. The people in them are not pioneers, most of them would rather be somewhere else but they have nowhere to go. On Forstall Street I get talking to a lanky twenty-year-old called Terry. Terry moved back into his family’s house with his mother a few months back. He has a job packing shelves at Home Depot, but it doesn’t pay well. This has become a dangerous place and so these days Terry doesn’t even go out at night – and he doesn’t think it’s going to get any better any time soon. It’s now also costing him too much to live here. Terry’s red Chevrolet sits gleaming in the driveway. It’s nothing flash but it’s his and he’s clearly proud of it. He tells me he’s paying more than three hundred dollars a month just for liability insurance because his house is only four blocks from the levee. The city says the levees are safe now but the insurance companies have passed their judgement and it’s not an assessment that pleases him. As we continue filming, a white guy in a huge Ford 250 pickup comes cruising down the street. He stops to tell us to be careful. ‘They shoot white people round here. This is bad shit this neighbourhood.’ He claims to be looking for his girlfriend who he says has been ‘kidnapped, shot up with ice and locked up in one of the houses around here somewhere. It happens all the time to white chicks,’ he says before he guns his rusty beast and drives off. Who knows how much of that is prejudice and how much is fact. The truth is there are plenty of bad neighbourhoods in this country and the colour of someone’s skin has less to do with it than poverty and lack of opportunity. Poverty and lack of opportunity are colourblind but prejudice is real and there are plenty of people out there who are more than 26

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happy to use race politically. African Americans still have hope, but some white Americans are finding it a lot harder to adjust to a black president. This is far from the hoped-for post-racial society, and the question of race is still proving to be a difficult one for everyone – including the president. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People says they’ve logged well over a hundred new militia groups that have formed since the election of Barack Obama. Not all of them are openly racist but many are. They’re private, heavily armed groups that train like the military. They don’t like government and they don’t like coloured people. It goes without saying they don’t like Obama. These are fringe dwellers, but how much of the mainstream political debate and criticism is racially motivated has become one of the issues of the Obama presidency. Jimmy Carter made headlines when he suggested that much of it was in an interview with NBC to mark the former president’s 85th birthday. I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that shared the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans, and that racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply. Carter reiterated the view later the same day at a town hall meeting held at his presidential centre in Atlanta, which was webcast live. 27

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‘There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African American should not be president,’ he said. But does this also work the other way? Does it prevent legitimate criticism for fear of appearing racist? Certainly some on the right counter that it does. Rush Limbaugh, for one, makes a fortune out of being provocative, of course. But there’s a whole squadron of them out there in American broadcasting, like the shouters Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity on the Fox TV network and the conspiracy theorists like Glenn Beck, who was also a Fox identity for much of the Obama first term. Rush Limbaugh isn’t a Fox identity, he’s a radio jock with a weekly audience of more than fourteen million and he said: Can this nation really have an African-American president? Or will the fact that we have an African-American president so paralyse politically correct people in the media that the natural scrutiny and process through which all of our presidents are put through and vetted do not occur because of the fear in the State-Controlled Media of themselves being called racist and the desire to be able to call everyone else racist. In other words, we have a blank slate. We have a president here who is not scrutinised, who is not examined. There is no attempt to be suspicious of power anymore . . . This racism stuff has got everybody boiling mad because it’s such a lie; it’s such a cheap shot; it’s so dishonest. Glenn Beck went even further in the other direction with the claim that Obama is the one who’s racist, that Obama has ‘over and over again’ exposed himself as ‘a guy who has a deep-seated 28

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hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is . . . ’ When another Fox talking head pointed out that many people in Obama’s Administration are white, so ‘you can’t say he doesn’t like white people’, Beck said, ‘I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.’ A lot of people still have difficulty with the race issue in America, even Democrats. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, got into trouble by telling the writers of the book Game Change (called Race of a Lifetime in Australia), published in early 2010, that well before the 2008 presidential race he thought Barack Obama could become the country’s first black president because he was ‘light skinned’ and had ‘no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’. Race is a nuanced issue. Not surprising really in a country with such a history of slavery and segregation. That’s why the ‘You lie!’ episode was so shocking for so many. It was during the president’s address to Congress on the contentious issue of healthcare in 2009 when Obama was still flushed with aspirations for pushing a farreaching reform bill through the tortuous US political process. Republican representative Joe Wilson shouted out ‘You lie!’ as the president spoke. Such an outburst would have passed almost without comment if it had happened to an Australian prime minister in the House of Representatives but Americans treat the position of president differently. Whether they agree with the politics or not they all show remarkable respect for the authority of the position, so to shout out and interrupt during a presidential address is an extraordinary departure from the norm. Not long after this I had a long conversation with Hilary 29

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Shelton, the director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau. Hilary is a thoughtful dapper man with a shock of grey hair. He’s about the same age as the president, and me for that matter, although the years have taken a heavier toll on both of us than they have on the man in the White House. He says: For some reason Wilson thought it was within his wherewithal to answer up the president in a joint session. A joint session not only heard by all 535 members of the house and Senate but by millions of Americans and millions of others around the world. For him to interrupt him as he did to yell out the word ‘liar’ in that case very well says that he doesn’t respect Obama, even in the presidency. So then you start to question why? Certainly there’s a disagreement but there are many disagreements. There were many Democrats who sat throughout that chamber when George Bush went to the podium to talk about the reasons for the war in Iraq. Now we know that a lot of that wasn’t true, whether he intentionally knew it was untrue or not we knew it wasn’t true, but nobody screamed out and nobody interrupted him at a time when his approval ratings were among the lowest in history. But Mr Wilson thought it was okay to do that. Hilary also says his organisation had started to pick the racism directed at Obama well before he was elected. When Sarah Palin was running for vice president Barack Obama had the delegates to get the numbers to win the Democratic nomination. There were people at her rallies actually saying things about the president’s race. That’s never 30

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happened before. So why are we making race the issue? Sure it’s unique that we have an African American running but I assumed it was the ideas, the plans; it was the vision that that person had for the issues that should be challenged and not the colour of one’s skin. We had some African-American technicians working at those events for the various news entities who also experienced some hostility because they were associated with the president just because of the colour of their skin. So that’s a major problem. But the question of race has paralysed almost everyone from time to time, including the NAACP and the Obama Administration. For this president, like it or not, race is part of the political discourse even if many of those paid to manage the Obama image would like to push it out of the frame and keep it out of the media maelstrom. The right-wing commentators on Fox and the conservative blogs constantly over-egg the issue. For them portraying the president as a reverse racist is all grist for the mill. But having successfully implanted themselves as part of the US media landscape it seems everyone now needs to pander to their agenda by pretending that what they pass off as news needs to be taken into consideration in any ‘balanced’ coverage. They have become so powerful the Administration feels the need to act before the media cycle, particularly the angrier corners of it that are hostile to the Administration, even has time to start. So much so that when the late conservative internet warrior Andrew Breitbart, described by the New Yorker magazine as ‘The Rage Machine’, decided to post a selectively edited excerpt of a speech delivered by Shirley Sherrod, a 62-year-old black director of a section 31

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of the department of agriculture, the White House jumped reflexively. The clip purported to show that Sherrod had told a largely black audience at an NAACP conference that 24 years ago while she was working at a non-profit organisation she had not helped a poor white farmer as much as she could have. She hadn’t given him the service he deserved because he was white. Fox News gleefully pounced on the story. The blogosphere lit up with outrage and the White House, quaking at the thought of all those salivating wingnuts and hoping to protect their man from the race question at any level, and more criticism from Fox, moved immediately to dismiss Ms Sherrod without even calling her in to put her side of the story. The NAACP president also twittered that he was ‘appalled’ by Sherrod’s comments even though they were made at an NAACP function and if anyone could have, or should have, known the full context of the speech it was him. Of course, a day or so later the whole unedited video of the speech was released. Shirley Sherrod had told the crowd that actually, after repressing some of her own racial antipathy she ultimately did assist the farmer and in the process came to question her own racist attitudes and concluded that ‘there is no difference between us’. She eventually worked with the man over a twoyear period to help ward off foreclosure, she said. She also became firm friends with him and his wife. ‘And I went on to work with many more white farmers,’ she said. ‘The story helped me realise that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race.’ The Administration scrambled after the event to try to repair some of the damage caused by their overreaction. Obama rang 32

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Shirley Sherrod to apologise in person to try to smooth things over. The Washington Post reported that the US department of agriculture offered to take her back as a consultant to help them address inequities facing black farmers but they only offered her a US$35,000 contract – an amount she described as a ‘slap in the face’. She was offered another job but refused to take it. And then George Zimmerman, a white Latino man, killed the black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida on 26 February 2012. Once again the race issue exploded. Trayvon Martin was shot dead as he walked home through a gated community in Sanford, Florida. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt – known colloquially as a ‘hoodie’. It’s the sort of street gangsta wear that has become associated with young black men but in reality is more of a teen fashion item that, just like loud sneakers and baseball caps, seems to be worn by almost every teenager at some point. But to a white neighbourhood-watch guard any black teenager in a hoodie is suspicious. Trayvon’s death galvanised black public opinion. It was proof, many said, that despite all the progress the American judicial system was still as discriminatory as ever, and it reinforced the feeling many still have deep in their hearts that they are constantly singled out for the way they look and the way they dress. What inflames African Americans more than anything else, though, is the sense of a lack of justice. A month after the Trayvon shooting the gunman was still free. He had claimed to have been acting in self-defence and was protected by the strange Florida law known as the ‘Stand Your Ground Rule’. It’s a statute that says you are allowed to use deadly force to defend yourself if you feel your life is in danger. But that plea was all it took. Normal procedures that most would have expected weren’t followed. 33

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Zimmerman wasn’t given a blood alcohol test. Background checks weren’t done. He was allowed to walk free. As the anger grew, black community leaders began to become more vocal. Leaders of the civil rights generation of the 1960s like Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton led many of the marches and called for the state to overturn the law or for federal intervention. Black political leaders at every level condemned the killing and the lack of justice. The fact that a pumped-up, armed, neighbourhood-watch captain – no better than a vigilante – was still free after killing a 17-year-old ‘A’ student was sending a terrible signal to people across the country. Of course, as reluctant as he was to inject himself into the race issue, this was one time Barack Obama, as president, had to. And he did it carefully and deliberately: My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son he’d look like Trayvon. And you know I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened. Getting beyond the issue of race isn’t easy. There is so much written about Gates, Sherrod and Martin because they do underline the difficulty everyone in this country has with this issue. And it has also brought to life the power of the new media environment and how difficult it can be to adapt to that. As the president said, ‘We now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.’ Maureen Dowd, the celebrated columnist for the New York Times, also reckons there is another problem. There are too many 34

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white boys running the White House operation, she writes. One top black Democrat told her that ‘Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing”.’ When the Trayvon Martin killing became part of the public discourse even black writers were musing openly about how the first black president was making it harder to talk about race. Many reflect on their own expectations of the president to deal with the issue, about their disappointment with the fact that even after more than three years in the job he only ever seems to engage in the issue when absolutely necessary. But well before the death of Trayvon Martin the story had started to emerge all over the place about the disappointment and frustration growing among some of what’s called the ‘Black Caucus’ in Congress, although few of them are prepared to talk openly about it. The Black Caucus has been in existence for over 40 years now and in mid 2010 the chair was the Californian congresswoman Barbara Lee. Like many others she wouldn’t confirm the reports of angry exchanges with the president and some Black Caucus colleagues who want to see him pursue more of a ‘black agenda’. Lee has an office in the Rayburn building across the road from Congress. Space in these offices is extremely tight. In hers there are secretaries, advisers and interns squeezed into almost every corner – desks are rammed up tight against filing cabinets and the walls are covered with the paraphernalia reflecting her decades of political activism. People like Lee come to politics loaded with passion and aspiration. Yes there’s a black president she tells me, but there’s still plenty of work to be done. The Black Caucus has ‘always been impatient’, she says, continuing with:

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When you look at poverty rates in the African-American community, when you look at economic disparities . . . it’s our job to make sure that we continue to raise the concerns and the issues of those who don’t have a voice. No one can tell me that racism is dead. It’s alive and well in America and the sooner we come to grips with that the more progress we can make.

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2 Dancing with the city

Louie Eroglu calls it dancing with the city. When you’re out filming in the badlands of urban America there’s an energy and edginess to everything. It’s like the whole world is wound so tight one sharp move could make it snap. On hot summer nights here the neon promises of cold ‘Coors’ and hot ‘Soul Food’ and ‘Fried Chicken’ cast a primary-coloured glow that lights up small pockets of the endless urban neglect. The poor, the desperate and the addicted hang in loose groups outside liquor stores. Deals are made openly on the street corners. Drugs, gangs and guns (particularly guns) make these some of the most dangerous places on earth. No one I’ve worked with can capture the essence of this quite like Louie. He can make the pictures dance; even at four o’clock in the morning after an eighteen-hour day he’ll find something that will lift a story above the ordinary. And then sometimes the dancing comes to us. There we were, opposite a long-closed pizza takeaway somewhere on Florida Avenue in Northeast DC, still looking, still 37

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hunting for the magic moments. For ten days we’d been trawling the streets and nightclubs of some of the worst neighbourhoods of the city and nearby Prince George’s County. People around here don’t like being looked at and certainly don’t like being filmed. Then, almost the moment we pull the camera out, a young guy with the dreadlocks, the white singlet, the low-slung jeans and the oversized running shoes comes straight towards us, clearly intent on confronting the two white intruders in a neighbourhood seething with black pride and resentment. ‘What the fuck you doin’?’ he says, his eyes a chemical red blaze. It’s a question that has been asked of us over and over – and given the hour and the place it isn’t such a bad one. We are rather conspicuous. But as usual, once it is established that we are Australian and that we are shooting a story on Go-Go, the Washington district’s indigenous black music, the tension evaporates. In his synthetically enhanced state our man gets so excited he even crosses the road and performs a street rapper’s dance move for the camera. A twirling, shuffling, moon-walking performer, a street lamp, the pizza joint and an empty black street, it is a poignant vignette, a special moment, but as we are finding out not so unusual. We are enthusiastically embraced wherever we go – from Anacostia to the notorious Benning Road, and in the cavernous thumping music clubs and half-empty malls that line Branch Avenue just across the border in Maryland. There is almost an element of respect afforded to us for even being interested in a part of town few white folk ever experience outside of their cars, and almost never late at night. The people here feel alienated and ignored and the music is an expression of that – a unique 38

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combination of hip hop, soul and rap; a gritty, thumping percussive beat interlaced with snappy horn licks and lyrics that reflect the contemporary frustrations and challenges of working-class black life. African Americans are by far the largest in population terms in Washington, and these neighbourhoods – just a short bus ride from the White House – are among some of the most economically and socially deprived in the nation. Since I’d arrived in Washington I’d been trying to find a way to tell the story of the black side of this city and of black expectations of the Obama presidency and here it was. As a metaphor for the frustrations and painful realities of life for many of the city’s black residents, Go-Go is about as good as it gets. It’s not something you hear much about anywhere else. It’s a completely idiosyncratic musical phenomenon. I’d stumbled across it one day when I saw an article in the metro section of the Washington Post written by a young black writer, Natalie Hopkinson. The article laid out the pressures that were squeezing this peculiarly Washington soundtrack to the margins of the city. A combination of gentrification and kneejerk political responses to community pressure to appear to be doing something about crime were forcing clubs to close and further marginalising the culture of its overwhelmingly poor and black followers. These are the people the city doesn’t want us to see. Hopkinson lives in a brownstone row house in the north Capitol area of DC – one of those neighbourhoods that’s rapidly gentrifying. She personifies the new aspiring middle-class – almost post-racial – residents who are changing this part of the city. But like many educated African Americans she carries some guilt with her too. She knows there’s a long way to go before the rest of the country can come close to describing itself as post-racial and 39

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she is acutely aware of the culture and the people that are being marginalised by the pastel paint jobs and the floorboard polishers. It’s happening so fast, she says, it’s making her head spin. When I spoke to her she was putting the finishing touches on the final draft of a book titled Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of the Chocolate City. ‘Go-Go is the heartbeat of the city. It is the fabric of the culture of the people who live here,’ she tells me. ‘Different political administrations might come and go but for the folks who stay here and who live here year after year, generation after generation, Go-Go is part of their identity. It is the musical expression of their identity as Washingtonians.’ Hopkinson has been working on her history of Go-Go for a long time but she generously offers me the key to the Go-Go community: Nico, the ‘Go-Gologist’. I ring Nico and we agree to meet in an outback steakhouse in a strip-mall car park a few miles outside DC in Prince George’s County. He admits it is his idea of an ‘ironic’ first meeting place. A surprising number of Americans really do think the locally owned and operated steakhouse franchise offering such culinary delights as ‘Alice Springs Chicken Quesadilla’ and ‘Kookaburra Wings’ is real Australian cuisine. We sit at the bar and plough through the spiced wings of a few dozen battery-farmed American chickens and drink large glasses of ‘Sam Adams’ beer while he sizes me up to see if I am genuine. Nico is a big, quietly spoken man and someone who carries a lot of weight in the Go-Go business. Go-Go is sort of viral, it’s ignored by the mainstream music world but it feeds itself. For most of those who are into it, it’s part of a greater-DC black lifestyle. Homemade CDs of gigs sell in local music shops and 40

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Go-Go fosters its own specific culture of underground celebrity. Often the bands will announce during the gig that someone is having a birthday, or two people are out celebrating an anniversary or an engagement. Those people will, in turn, pay for the recording of the night’s gig. It’s an affirmation of their place in their world or, as Natalie Hopkinson puts it, ‘for people who never had a voice and were never acknowledged by anyone in mainstream culture, even mainstream DC culture, Go-Go is that venue. It’s the place where you were recognised. I exist. I existed. I made a contribution. I was here.’ And Nico is the man they turn to for recordings of that special moment. He’s there at the clubs plugging in to the mixing desk night after night and he manages some of the more successful Go-Go bands and stars. I must have been relatively convincing because a few weeks after we meet Nico opens the door for me to the world of Go-Go and to the culture and artists of a truly remarkable musical genre – a big sound that resonates in a relatively confined space. Through Nico we meet Chi Ali, one of the megastars of Go-Go and one of the many black Washington residents who claim Go-Go literally saved his life. Like a lot of people here Ali grew up in a poor neighbourhood defined by drugs and violence. His ‘hood’ is the crumbling projects just off Benning Road that are still some of the most violent and deprived in the city. According to Ali, ‘This is just a bad neighbourhood to live in.’ When he was a kid, Ali said there was an open-air drug market at the back of his block. People used to come by with ziplock bags full of crack and sell it all day out in the open, and sometimes the gunfights were so bad the bullets would come flying through 41

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the windows of the nearby apartment buildings. It was that dangerous his mother wouldn’t let him sleep in the back end of the house. One night his sister had to dive over her own babies to protect them from crossfire. Like many others Chi Ali progressed through the drug culture to become a dealer. He was good at it; so good he ran the building known around the neighbourhood as ‘The Carter’. From a room inside The Carter he says he used to sell a kilo of crack a day and it was going out so fast that he didn’t even have time to bag it up. He’d just chip it straight off the block and sell it. He readily admits he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s alive. A lot of his friends died in the few blocks around The Carter. ‘I’ve seen so much death around here,’ he tells me, ‘that death doesn’t faze me. We used to hear gunshots and walk outside and see bodies smokin’ on the ground, steamin’ from the bullets. We used to see people get their heads shot off . . . and the stage is ­getting worse.’ But Ali was saved by music. A local youth organisation known as The Peaceaholics reached out to him and recognised he had a talent. He’s a good-looking guy with a powerful voice and, like many of his generation, the congas and cowbells of Go-Go were the soundtrack of his youth. Like he says, Go-Go is a part of this city; ‘You can’t even fix your lips to say District of Columbia without speaking Go-Go.’ After a few days in the black heart of DC you start to realise this is true. At first you don’t register that the conga beat is coming out of every car that passes with its windows down. That the same beat is playing in the takeaway joints and that the video playing in the corner of the barbershop is the latest DVD shot at the regular Go-Go at La Fontaine Blue, one of the biggest 42

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Go-Go clubs in Prince George’s County. Go-Go is everywhere. Like Chi Ali says, ‘We breathe it. We bleed it. It’s a part of us.’ His band, Suttle Thoughts, attracts a huge crowd when it plays at La Fontaine Blue, a cavernous venue on Annapolis Road that is used for wedding receptions and corporate seminars when it’s not pulsating from the Go-Go percussion. A Go-Go gig is itself simply called a Go-Go, and going to a Go-Go is a journey deep into black Washington – it’s another world. The fashion is extrovert – the leopard-skin skirts short and tight, the sunglasses oversized, the pimped-up Cadillacs in the car park ‘motherfucker’ pink – and the show is one hundred per cent high-octane groove. In one corner club-goers line up to pose for photos in front of a backdrop of a champagne bottle and a sports car, which is more than just a memento of the night, it is an affirmation that ‘I exist, I was here’. ‘We breathe it. We bleed it. It’s a part of us.’ And it’s true – there’s a lot of blood. Often the violence ricochets off the streets and into the clubs, especially at the Go-Gos popular with the younger crowd. Here the turf battles can erupt in unpredictable and dangerous ways. Kids have been killed in shootouts inside and outside clubs as neighbourhood rivalries fuelled by youthful bravado and too much alcohol boil over. It’s not all sunshine and light out here and Go-Go is a reflection of the highs, the lows and whatever’s in between. On stage the bands rap about whatever’s been going down – the deaths, the drug battles, the lack of work. Often kids will wave T-shirts in the air with printed pictures of their dead friends, the latest victims of the gang wars. These are the same pictures that were taken in front of the sports cars and champagne bottles at other Go-Gos. Natalie Hopkinson tells me of a time when she was writing a 43

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story for the Washington Post about a young 15-year-old boy who was killed as he was walking home from a Go-Go one night. She tried to get some information from the police but there was no police report available so she went to the T-shirt shop at Iverson Mall, one of the depressing half-empty victims of the recession that line Branch Avenue in Prince George’s County. It was only a day or two after the shooting but the shop had already printed hundreds of T-shirt tributes to the boy. His friends were buying them to wear or wave in his honour at future Go-Gos. There are hundreds of others just like him in the same shop – pictures of dead kids taken in front of backdrops of unattainable hot rods and French bubbles. This, they say, is one of the reasons there’s an unofficial war against Go-Go. The DC police have what they call a Go-Go report, a compiled list of all the Go-Gos in the city on any given day. Hopkinson says the police won’t tell her what they actually do with this report but it’s pretty clear they’re trying to send a signal that they’re ‘taking care of the Go-Go problem’. She says it’s another of those cruel ironies that the city is now turning against a part of the culture that actually helped sustain some semblance of community and life in the dark years after the 1968 riots. Go-Go emerged from that rubble of defiance and smouldering resentment and began to fill the empty spaces. The music went where no other life would. You didn’t need all that much – some musicians, some instruments, some conga drums – and a Go-Go sprang up in people’s backyards, on street corners, in disused gyms and in warehouses. ‘Go-Go filled the spaces and played a really important role in literally bringing life to places where there was none,’ Hopkinson says. But now the city authorities are after the music because the 44

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music is concentrating the social problems and the violence. Even some of those who have supported and fed off it over the years are calling for the clubs to close. Even people like the former mayor Marion Barry, a man who, more than any other figure in this city, personifies the frailties, passions and failures of his community, acknowledge that the squeeze on the clubs is official. ‘You can not allow violence to take over,’ he says. Down in Southwest two people were killed the other night outside of a club. The club wasn’t responsible for that but who do you hold responsible? It happened. The altercation started inside and so the government in DC has been forced by the political pressure and the pressure of the people to close these down. I don’t agree with that but that is where we are. Barry’s political trajectory has shadowed the story of Go-Go. He was on the scene as a firebrand civil rights activist well before the conga beat took hold, but, just as Go-Go arose from the ashes of the 1960s defiance to define the cultural life of the city, Barry emerged as the most powerful and influential political figure of his generation. He also became one of the most divisive and controversial political figures in the United States: a black man at the centre of power in Washington DC decades before Barack Obama came on the scene. Marion Barry led a largely black administration of a largely black city and a lot of African Americans invested their hopes and aspirations in him. Initially he also had the support of the white business community and developers, and attracted the enthusiastic endorsement of the Washington Post. But as crack ravaged the urban slums of America, Mayor Barry became a high-profile example of all that was going 45

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wrong. He was caught in an ­infamous FBI sting in a hotel room, smoking crack with a former girlfriend. ‘The bitch set me up’ was his now immortal line as he was led away in handcuffs to serve a six-month gaol term. How much his involvement in the drug scene actually influenced policy and government action, or lack of it, will probably never be known, but these days he is more than happy to talk about his own flaws. Barry is still politically active, being the local representative for his Ward 8 district, and he occupies a big, though mostly empty, office on the ground floor of the DC council building. He tells me he’ll never be mayor again; not because he wouldn’t get re-elected, he says, but because he hasn’t got the energy. He is more than happy to talk to an Australian film crew about what he believes is still one of the biggest untold stories in the US media. When you look at it the world sees Washington as the nation’s capital, they see the White House, they see the Capitol building, but look at the other side of Washington. The average income of an African-American family in Washington DC is $39,000 a year, whereas the median income for a white family is $100,000. The divide is just that big. If you go into the area that I represent you see a different Washington. You see poverty at 54 per cent, unemployment at 35 per cent. You see the highest cancer rates, the lowest homeownership rates. Twenty-three per cent of homeownership in Ward 8, 55 per cent in predominantly white Ward 3, and people don’t want to talk about that. I talk about it. I am glad you are all doing something about it.

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This could be seen as testament to Barry’s failures as mayor but most people in this part of town tend to lean towards a belief in the conspiracy theory. Barry isn’t the only one convinced that ‘in this country certain powers of the federal government, certain enemies, were after [him] for a long time’. The thing is, as mayor, Barry was a reflection of what was happening all over town. Crack was devastating DC and to the underprivileged African-American population Mayor Barry was DC’s own. Many saw persecution in his prosecution and after serving his time for the crime he was easily re-elected to the position of mayor. Ask anyone on this side of town old enough to remember and the almost unanimous view is that the government (the federal government) set him up. They don’t condone his behaviour but they see him as a victim just like everyone else. Many also see it in the wider context of a bigger fight between developers and local communities. In Barry’s time local ghettos and projects – violent as they might have been – were protected from those with an eye for turning the neighbourhoods closest to the Capitol building over to the lobbying class. Many still see Marion Barry as one of the few politicians who actually fought in their corner, even if the corner stagnated for decades. Most residents say the problem was bigger than a one-man local issue. It’s a view you find all over black Washington – on the streets, in the clubs and in the churches. Just across the border, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, the Reverend Tony Lee has been watching the fallout from what he describes as the ‘big play’ that got rid of Barry and opened up the ghettos of Southwest DC for the developers. ‘When you put temptation in front of someone, that’s a bit different to catching someone,’ he says. ‘When the government 47

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buys crack and puts it in the room and says “hey would you like to smoke crack”, that’s an amazing thing for the government to do just to prove you have an issue.’ Reverend Lee isn’t exactly your cardboard cut-out pastor. He runs a church called the Hip Hope Nation in the basement of the same rundown Iverson Mall as the Go-Go T-shirt shop. A tall, whippet-thin, dreadlocked bolt of energy, he presides every week over a service that’s a collision of old-time gospel and Go-Go. His church band is the first point of difference between it and other places of worship. A hot thumping rhythm section, some great horn players and a chorus of voices the equal of the Staple Singers pump out a conga-driven, soul groove in between Lee’s own fiery, rap-like sermons. In age it’s a remarkably mixed congregation. Young and old alike dance and sing their way through the service. This is high-energy worship and Reverend Lee’s church and his reputation are growing fast. ‘Whatever you say about Marion Barry,’ Lee tells me, ‘he was not going to allow them to hurt the poor people of DC and he was trying all he could. He was the last kind of wall of defence. They got him out and brought others in and that’s when the deals were done. The play was set. And that’s when the developers got their way and they started tearing things down and we’ve since seen that real hard migration in the last six or seven years.’ Most of that ‘hard migration’ has been to this part of Prince George’s County, an area of black Washington that a decade or so ago was for the most part home to a relatively well-heeled African-American community. They take great pride in touting the fact that they are – or were – the richest black county in America with an abundance of what’s referred to as ‘Cosby’ households. But the DC migrants have brought with them crime, 48

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drugs, social problems and, of course, Go-Go. Prince George’s’ infrastructure has been stretched and there’s local pressure too for the authorities to get tough on the music. Prince George’s doesn’t want the refugees from the DC slums and so consequently some of them are being pushed even further out across the next county line to St Charles County. In the predominately white, affluent neighbourhoods of Washington the colloquial term for Marion Barry is ‘Mayor Barely’. In Anacostia, where Ward 8 is located, he is simply referred to as ‘the man’ or often ‘Mayor for life’. A walk on the streets with him is an event in itself. He’s high-fived and fist-pumped by every­one. Busses pull up in the middle of the road – passengers lean out of the windows and shout encouragement. ‘We miss you, Marion, we want you back, man.’ Others get off the bus and spill on to the road to hug the man and shake his hand. ‘You the one who looked after all the young people . . . you looked after the old people. They don’t do it like that no more, man. You got to teach the young boys how to do it. They don’t do it like you did.’ ‘I know they don’t,’ Barry replies with a modesty honed by years in the limelight. And the ‘they’ for Barry goes all the way to the White House. Like 95 per cent of Black America, Barry supported Barack Obama in 2008, but unlike many he claims to have played no small part in the historic ascension of a black man to the White House. ‘Barack Obama, whom I supported, stood on the shoulders of people like myself from the civil rights movement, and Jesse Jackson who ran for president in 1984, [he has] . . . not done enough.’ Like so many others Barry is also pragmatic about what 49

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Obama might be able to achieve. This is the central dilemma for many African Americans who are watching the first black president with the mantra of ‘hope and change’ ringing in their ears. They know he has so many other problems to deal with as president for all Americans. Healthcare, education, the economic crisis, the wars; the list goes on and on. They also believe he has a unique responsibility to bridge the fault lines of race in this country. They are patient, they know it’s a big ask and that it’ll take time, but they also know that he will be judged at the end of his presidency by his own black constituency. This doesn’t in any way diminish what they truly believe is the symbolic significance of his victory. Everyone has a strongly held view about that. The fact that he’s made it to the White House has already had a huge beneficial effect on every Black American. Natalie Hopkinson has two primary school-aged kids. She says that the biggest thing for them is the fact that a black president is no big deal. It’s just what it is, and their model for what’s possible is just so radically different than what my model of what’s possible was. When I was their age, you know, we had The Cosby Show. That was just a TV show, you know, it wasn’t real, it was makebelieve, but it was still really powerful in sort of modelling what’s possible and the sort of life you could lead. And here the Obama family is real. You know Sasha and Malia are real, Michelle and Barack are real, and that has to be more powerful for the next generation of black kids . . . and also white kids. It’s given everyone a new perspective of what power is, what possibilities there are for success in this country.

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This is the message you hear over and over again from Black Americans. The symbolism is powerful. Even as the gloss began to wear off the Obama presidency, as his approval ratings began to fall, Black America could still hold up his presidency as a symbol of what could now be achieved by everyone in America regardless of race. Significant sections of White America, though, were growing restless.

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3 Tea Party

Nothing in the United States in the years following the Obama victory gripped the political attention of the nation and the world quite like the Tea Party. America has a long tradition of maverick, populist political movements that have included radical agrarianism, collectivism, reformism, patriotism, libertarianism, leftism, rightism and complete wackyism. Some of the most successful and enduring ones have come from the patriotic, libertarian edge of the spectrum, dating back to the progressive party in the early 1920s and the John Birch Society in the 1960s, all the way through to Ross Perot in the 1980s and on to the Tea Party, a loose group of pro-­Constitution ‘patriots’ that emerged as a response to the Obama presidency and all that they profess it stands for. Will the Tea Party be a resilient and enduring political phenomenon? It has had, and is still having, a considerable impact on American politics, engaging and energising the right. But it seems to be only adding to the identity crisis within the Republican Party and perhaps, for 52

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the moment at least, even damaging the party’s wider political ambitions. The Tea Party is born of, and nurtured by, the febrile cable news noise that now occupies such an important place in the American media landscape. But this ‘grassroots movement’, as the various Tea Party groups like to describe themselves, also flourished with the patronage of a web of fiercely libertarian, right-wing organisations, think tanks and political groups and foundations funded by two of the wealthiest industrialists in the United States – the Koch brothers. The billionaires David and Charles Koch have spent decades creating an ideological infrastructure to support their low personal and corporate tax, small government and anti-regulation agenda. Their combined wealth, a fortune built initially on oil, is exceeded in America only by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Much of the focus of their political network is devoted to fighting global warming climate science but they have funded campaigns against many of the Obama Administration’s policies. Their network includes the influential Cato Institute in Washington and the powerful Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which was founded by David Koch in 2004. The brothers tend to shun the public eye and rarely give interviews but one of the more thorough and revealing portraits of them, written by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker magazine, found through an investigation of tax records that the three main Koch charitable foundations handed out US$196 million, mostly to conservative political and policy organisations. This didn’t include the more than US$50 million spent by Koch Industries on direct lobbying. They’ve spent a fair bit in the year since then as well. The Kochs have been waiting for something like the Tea 53

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Party to come along for years and, while they deny having any direct links, when the first shoots of dissent and anger began to spring up, the ideological framework they had established certainly embraced and encouraged them and helped fund, organise and train the Tea Party protesters. The various Tea Party groups that became the foundation of this ‘new American revolution’ began when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli threw a wobbly live-to-air on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009, about a month after Barack Obama’s inauguration. He was fuming and spluttering about the Administration’s plans to provide assistance to homeowners facing foreclosure. Sure, some of them recklessly got in too deep, but there were many others who were the unwitting victims of subprime mortgage salespeople. Santelli challenged the new Administration to hold an online referendum on whether Americans really wanted to subsidise the mortgages of ‘losers’, or would they instead let them fail and give others the opportunity to buy the foreclosed houses and ‘reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water’. That comment caused the traders on the floor to burst into spontaneous applause, but there was even better to come. ‘This is America,’ he said. ‘How many of you people want to pay for your neighbour’s mortgage [on a house] that has an extra bathroom and [they] can’t pay their bills raise their hand.’ ‘Nooooo,’ the traders cried. ‘President Obama are you listening?’ Santelli asked, looking straight down the barrel of the camera lens. Here was a hall full of cocky futures traders and masters of derivatives letting us all know what they thought of government handouts for the subprime victims. But what happened 54

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next excited the angry corners of cyberspace faster than a George Soros currency plunge. ‘We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan. I’m gonna start organising. We’re going to be dumping in some derivative securities.’ Within hours the ‘rant of the year’ had gone viral on YouTube and spawned an Official Chicago Tea Party website. Tech heads in the office of a little-known libertarian group called FreedomWorks posted a picture of Santelli on their home page. In the Atlanta suburbs a housewife named Jenny Beth Martin heard the Santelli rant on her car radio, organised a conference call with 22 likeminded people she’d hooked up with on Twitter and founded the organisation that would become the Tea Party Patriots. Just over a week later Tea Party protests starting springing up all over the country as more and more people found embracing the icons and ideals of America’s past a perfect foil for the failings of the modern state. The appeal of a ‘just’ and truly patriotic revolution that came with powerful imagery, not to mention the opportunity to dress in colourful historical costumes, drew together conservatives of the same mindset, who were growing more and more concerned about the whole idea of ‘change’. Within months, helped by the funding, training and organisational assistance of the Koch political network, this social movement had captured the interest of an estimated 30 per cent of the American voting public. Within a year it had claimed its first political victory by throwing its support behind Scott Brown – a regular-guy type of Republican candidate who defied the odds and conventional logic to take Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats for the first time since 1972. 55

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And then came the midterms – the congressional election that, although it didn’t feature Barack Obama on the ballot paper, was ultimately all about him and the direction he was taking the country. The midterms were a stunning victory for the Republican Party and a surprising disappointment for them as well. With unemployment still hovering around 10 per cent, home fore­ closure rates still running out of control and polls showing a slim but growing majority of the country unconvinced by a healthcare bill that, according to a cacophony of commentators, was on its own threatening to undermine American ‘exceptionalism’, self-reliance and personal freedom and turn the country into a socialist basket case, the Republicans thought they should have had a chance of winning back a majority in both the house and the Senate. In the end the victory in the house was historic. A 60-seat turnaround to the Republicans in the 435-seat House of Representatives – bigger than the gain of 54 seats made against the Clinton Democrats in 1994 and a swing not seen since the Democrats took 75 seats from Republicans in 1948 – but they fell short in the Senate. In their more honest and reflective moments many were forced to concede that it was actually the Tea Party that cost them complete control. The Republican Party, or Grand Old Party (GOP) as it’s often referred to, was a sitter to win the Senate seat in Delaware but the sturdy, reliable, nine-term establishment Republican Mike Castle lost the pre-selection battle to Christine O’Donnell. O’Donnell was endorsed by Sarah Palin and backed by the Tea Party, but she’s a fruit loop who was never going to attract the middle ground in the relatively liberal northeast. She held 56

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some crazy, contentious positions and became nationally – even internationally – famous as the anti-masturbation candidate: as the president and founder of the Savior’s Alliance for Lifting the Truth she told a 1996 MTV documentary on sex that ‘the Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery and you can’t masturbate without lust’. She was also the figure of a fair amount of amusement and ridicule over her youthful dalliance with witchcraft. The Republicans should also have easily won Harry Reid’s seat of Nevada. Reid, as Senate majority leader, was the most visible arm of the Obama agenda in the upper house and, like Nancy Pelosi, the majority leader in the House of Representatives, the figure most closely tied in the public’s mind to the Obama agenda. But the Republican primary process threw up Sharon Angle – a Tea Party conservative who talked openly about abolishing social security and the department of education. She ran a disastrous campaign and refused to talk to most of the media – at one point she was shown running away from a television camera. Harry Reid scraped back in by the slimmest of margins but most of those who professed to know anything about politics in Nevada thought that Angle’s more establishment opponent in the Republican primaries, Sue Lowden, would have trounced him easily if she’d been on the ticket. For all that, the Tea Party did sweep into Congress with a host of new candidates and it remains a potent force in US politics. Modern America is awash with anxiety, fear and uncertainty. The Tea Party movement is overwhelmingly white and elderly, fired up with an angry lament for a country, an attitude and a way of life they think they’re losing. They are mostly, though not exclusively, from regional and small town America – and they cling 57

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to what they believe are the small town values of an America that is fast disappearing. These are people who seem particularly uncomfortable with the rapidly accelerating cultural diversity of the twenty-first century. The cities of this immigrant nation have always been a melting pot but it’s the suburbs and the towns that are now seeing the ethnic make-up of their neighbourhoods change. In some cases parts of America that have been all white bread and hot dogs for generations are fast becoming more salsa and tacos. It’s happened in a rush and the passengers on the Tea Party express don’t like it much. * Like a lot of Americans Matt Lewandowski wears his politics on his car. The bumper stickers leave no doubt about his political feelings – ‘Raise my taxes – Lose my vote’, ‘Save the US Constitution’, and ‘Congress – you’re fired’ are just a few of them. The little American flags on plastic flagpoles that fluttered from the roof were a bit of a clue too, but the car itself certainly wasn’t the usual oversized gas-guzzling truck that most Tea Party backers prefer. Matt drives a small, faded, red, four-cylinder, fourdoor sedan. His mate Marshall Smith, co-founder of the Virginia Beach branch of the New Republic Patriots, drives a mini for goodness sake – a car you could barely see from the front seat of an F150 pickup. I meet them in the parking lot of the Hilton Garden Inn in Virginia Beach the day before the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. That wasn’t why we were meeting, but the date is significant. Americans take their history very seriously and, although most might not recognise immediately that 28 August commemorates 58

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a day that changed the course of the civil rights movement, they would all know that this one speech did more than any other and that its tone and passionate lyricism still resonate through the American consciousness. ‘Free at last, free at last . . . thank God almighty we are free at last.’ As foot soldiers of the Tea Party movement and keen students of American history Matt and Marshall would certainly have been able to identify the speech. They may even have agreed with its broad sentiment and, importantly, they would also have claimed as much ownership of it as a black man living in Mississippi or Congress Heights in DC or in the projects on the Chicago South Side. Unlike the black man, though, they may not have seen it so much as a defining moment of racial politics but rather just another significant part of the wide tapestry of American history. It was a moment that changed the country profoundly but barely affected the lives of most white folk in Virginia Beach. Tomorrow, though, Matt and almost a hundred thousand others like him will be making a very similar pilgrimage to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, hoping to call on the same tradition, hoping that by sheer force of numbers and passion they can move the nation in a different direction. The crowd in 1963 came out of a long struggle, from an entrenched atmosphere of racial violence and intolerance, at a time when America was trying to reconcile the dark truth of its racist past and the stark realities of its still racist present in many areas of the south. They came however they could – the majority in convoys of busses that set out from every corner of the country. They came calling for an end to injustice, for equality, for progress. Forty-seven years later the New Republic Patriots of Virginia are 59

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about to set off in another convoy of busses, hoping to make history of their own. Matt and his sidekick Marshall are the unlikely looking leaders of this branch of the angry uprising that is coursing through the first term of the country’s first black president. Matt and Marshall and the couple of hundred other almost exclusively white members of their group see themselves as freedom fighters too, and their spiritual leader is a short, pudgy, ex-alcoholic, ex-cocaine user, ex-Catholic, Mormon convert who rules the excitable febrile corner at the right of the broadcasting spectrum – Glenn Beck. Beck has become the chronicler of all that the Tea Party sees is wrong with the ‘Obamanation’ that is America today. He’s made a name for himself, and a fortune, from being a shouter on the political fringe. As is often the case in what is one of the few growth sectors of the media landscape, strident opinions equate to ratings and dollars, and in some cases the more strident the more dollars. Beck got his start on radio and initially on television on CNN. He then drifted predictably enough to Fox News. In January 2009 he began hosting his own hour-long show at five o’clock every day, where he unveiled his chalkboard of conspiracy theories and ranted against the progressive cancer he fears is eating away at the soul of America. There are others like him – most of them as it happens are also on Fox, like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, and then there’s Rush Limbaugh, who speaks to tens of millions every day through his syndicated radio show. They’re all wildly successful and wealthy men but none have quite reached the heights of hyperbole or megalomania that Beck has. The apex of Beck’s self-aggrandisement is the Restoring Honor rally promoted tirelessly on his programs and held on the same day and at the same spot as the 1963 rally for freedom march on 60

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Washington. It is a mix of old-school evangelism and new-school political chicanery but just an ever-so-slight octave shift on the general Tea Party theme of reclaiming America, of ‘taking back the nation’. Restoring Honor is all about returning to God, the family and traditional values – this from a man who often warns of a nation on the brink of violent upheaval and regularly decorates his rhetoric with violent imagery. ‘We are at the Archduke Ferdinand moment,’ he likes to warn. ‘We are sitting on a tinderbox.’ ‘The war is just beginning.’ ‘They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.’ ‘The other side is attacking.’ ‘They are putting a gun to America’s head.’ And on it goes. * It is still dark when they begin trickling in to the big empty asphalt car park behind the Smoky Bones Bar and Grill. They park their cars and check in at the two trestle tables set up near the convoy of busses. By 5.30 most of the Virginia Beach chapter of the New Republic Patriots have taken their seats and the busses are warming up ready to roll. In Australia you could have mistaken this crowd for a country bowls club heading off for a tournament – almost exclusively over-55 and white – but here in the United States such organisation and determination these days generally suggests a political motivation, and these people are passionate about their cause. It is early, but most of them seem remarkably bright eyed. Trays of Krispy Kreme doughnuts were being passed around and the Obama bashing was already in full swing. There was a ‘we’ll show ’em’ mood in the air. 61

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‘We’ve got to make sure our grandchildren have the same USA that we have.’ ‘How could the president continue to ignore this?’ A young black guy hops on board brandishing an array of ‘Palin for President 2012’ T-shirts. He is selling them for $10 each and, although a bit upset with himself for sleeping in and arriving late for what seemed like a golden entrepreneurial moment, he claims he has actually sold a few so far. Still there isn’t much interest on our bus. Surprisingly, most of them think Sarah Palin has been doing a great job as an advocate for the cause but few actually think she is the right choice for president – not yet anyway. Our driver is a black man too and the imagery is striking. Before Louie and I had set off from the Washington office we’d spent a bit of time going over the old footage of the 1963 event. The start of one of the documentaries about that day was a powerful montage of the journey to Washington’s National Mall. Shots of crowds on busses and trains intercut with a spiritual rendition of ‘We shall overcome’. I can’t help but wonder what our driver thinks about all this, transporting to this place a busload of white folks who are putting on such a provocative display of people power of such a different kind from the one 47 years ago. Not that there is any hostility towards him from anyone in any way. Although the membership of the Patriots and the Tea Party movement is largely white, they passionately reject any notion that they’re in any way racially motivated. It’s just that most black ­people don’t share their views. The polling of black support for these groups is put at less than 1 per cent – and, as one wag put it, that’s well within the margin for error. Somehow I don’t think our driver is in that margin. Before we leave he starts shuffling though his DVD collection trying to find 62

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something diverting for the three-hour drive to come. From the folder holding twenty or more movies he chooses The Blind Side, the story of a homeless and traumatised black boy who is picked up and adopted by a white family with the courage to challenge the preconceptions and prejudices of their own wealthy white circle. In the movie the family employs a tutor, a feisty rusted-on Democrat, to help their new son get the grades to ensure he can qualify for a football scholarship at the local college. At one point the father, played by Tim McGraw, turns to the mother, Sandra Bullock, and says, ‘Who thought we’d have a black son before we met a Democrat!’ The significance of this day and this moment, and the sense of occasion on the MLK anniversary are clearly not lost on our driver, but the movie is all but ignored by his passengers. Most of them are diverted by a running commentary from Matt about forthcoming Tea Party events, such as the six-day cruise off the Florida Keys that will feature a range of political lectures and a cast of activists dressed up as historical figures who, he says, will be roaming the ship hoping to engage in discussions about the Constitution. There is planning to be done for future rallies too – like the now regular pilgrimage to Washington on 9/12. For Tea Partiers the day after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has become almost more important than the day itself. That day now marks the 9/12 project created by Glenn Beck. A project he says is designed to ‘bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked we were not obsessed with red states, blue states or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created.’ It also represents the nine principles and twelve values he says represent the 63

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principles and values shared by the founding fathers of the United States. These are: Nine Principles: 1 America is good. 2 I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life. 3 I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday. 4 The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government. 5 If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it. 6 I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results. 7 I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable. 8 It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. 9 The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me. Twelve Values: 1 Honesty 2 Reverence 3 Hope 4 Thrift 5 Humility 6 Charity 7 Sincerity 8 Moderation 64

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9 Hard Work 10 Courage 11 Personal Responsibility 12 Gratitude Glenn Beck is the patron and the personification of this brand of political obsession and his influence on the thinking of the Tea Party supporters just can’t be underestimated. He is, as more than one of those on the freedom ride to the mall that day explained to me, ‘the teacher’. I first came across the power of Beck deep in Amish territory in Pennsylvania. For our first New Year’s Eve in the country we decided to take the kids to see the nineteenth-century curiosity that is the crazy world of the Amish. It’s a bit of an historical and religious freak show but it’s fascinating nonetheless. Horses and carts clip clop through sleepy little country villages – almost European in their quaintness and their sense of old-world community. It’s a bucolic environment that has attracted many city folk who run twee B & Bs for the tourists and spend at least some of their time in quiet reflection – dropping out with God and prayer. As you might imagine New Year’s Eve here is a subdued affair. We stayed at a B & B just up the road from the town called, somewhat provocatively, Intercourse. The New Year’s knees-up consisted of an evening of parlour games and puzzles. A huge jigsaw had been laid out on the kitchen table, drinks were offered, and the pleasantries and introductions began. As is the case in America, people always ask you what you do first, and I could see quite a few of them visibly flinch when I told them I worked for Australia’s public broadcasting network. That carries 65

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connotations here among some, just as it does at home, but a powerful sub-theme of the Tea Party narrative is a rejection of the perceived bias of what they refer to as the ‘mainstream media’, or as Sarah Palin likes to call it the ‘Lame Stream Media’. This doesn’t include Fox News, of course, but does include just about every other major broadcasting network and most of the broadsheet newspapers – particularly the New York Times. On a scale of socialist-inspired bias, public broadcasting is viewed as right up there at the top with the Times. After a while the men and women are split into separate groups for a trivia quiz. We men folk retire to the sitting room to work our way through the ten pages of questions. They are polite about it but I can tell they feel a bit uneasy and it becomes pretty clear that our host is trying his best to steer clear of any political discussion. When others stray into what is obviously the usual discourse in this group, the odd disparaging mention of Washington or Obama or healthcare, you can see he desperately wants to jump in and give it both barrels but checks himself each time, pulling back and forcing the conversation in a different direction. Like many Tea Party true believers, politics is an angry passion and not something that can accommodate an exchange of opinion. Politics has gone beyond any exchange of ideas. It has become an evangelical crusade and they have no doubt that God is on their side. The bookshelves in the sitting room are stacked with political biographies and the musings of some of the better-known evangelists. Alongside the works of Billy Graham there is also the entire collection of the Glenn Beck catalogue. Books with titles like America’s March to Socialism and Arguing with Idiots are turned face out for display. In the American evangelical tradition Beck is 66

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prolific and our host is a big fan, in fact so big that he’d dedicated his own work to him. Mr B & B was an artist who drew what he described as ‘whimsical wildlife portraits’ – or ‘random acts of artistic nonsense’ – cartoon-like representations of word plays. Something called ‘Cattle Drive’, for instance, shows a series of cars with cows behind the wheel. A drawing of pigs playing golf is titled ‘Sausage Links’. As I discover, he has very strong views about art as well as politics. His artistic sensibilities are, like his politics, fairly conservative – Andy Warhol was a fake and fraud, most ‘modern’ art is rubbish, as it seems are most forms of artistic expression that don’t fall into what might be termed the ‘drawing room’ landscape tradition. He has published collections of his own work in books that are left lying around on the coffee tables, one of which has the said dedication: For Glenn Beck. Your daily radio show is welcome company as I toil at the easel. I appreciate how, through humor, you both entertain and enlighten us. In describing ‘the Real America’ you inspire listeners to recognize the power of having desire. You encourage us to commit to our dreams and to embrace, with humility, the spiritual principles upon which this nation was founded. Thanks for sharing your faith and personal struggles openly and honestly. You’ve become a gentle example for millions – that redemption is real and that we are here to serve others. God Bless you.

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I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to run into our B & B host eight months later on this bright summer day, 28 August 2010, when the ‘real America’ converges on the National Mall in their tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands. The size of the crowd is still a matter of some conjecture: CBS puts the figure at a fairly precise 87,000; the National Parks Service estimates it at around 300,000; the event organisers put the figure at a more significant 500,000; Fox News simply says the turnout is ‘huge’. Abraham Lincoln stares down from a huge banner with the Restoring Honor theme emblazoned across it. Two even bigger monitors set the tone for the day with ­sonorous monu­ mental music and commentary about the greatness of America with sweeping majestic panoramas and vibrant big-city skylines. Chants of ‘U-S-A’, ‘U-S-A’ echo between the crowd lining either side of the reflection pool until finally the man himself comes slowly, almost shyly, on to the stage to begin the sombre business of remaking the nation. Dressed in a loose-fitting blue shirt and tie that look like they have been buttoned up over a bulletproof vest, Beck builds the momentum until he hits a regular rhythm of rhetorical highs and lows. He is sweating and red-faced and sometimes close to tears as he wails with rage, wooing and cajoling like Billy Graham at his best. ‘I know many in this country think I’m a fearmonger . . . I talk about frightening things but I don’t think the man on the Titanic who warned about the iceberg was ever called a fearmonger. He was warning the people on the ship.’ Beck’s ‘warnings’ are most often directed at the socialism that is destroying America; the trespass on liberty and values represented by everything from healthcare reform, stimulus spending, 68

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the Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security, left-wing progressives and, worse still, the Marxists that have infiltrated the White House. These are the themes that echo through the lounge rooms of a surprisingly large section of conservative suburban and small town America. Through the homes of mostly middle-class, mostly white folk who are angry at Washington, suspicious of government and sceptical about the worth of government programs. Overwhelmingly they are upset at the cultural shift that is occurring in America and they’re clinging to a past they imagine as a better place. At the height of his popularity – a moment that coincided with the deepest trough of the recession – Beck had a daily audience of more than three million. But as the recession almost looked like it was beginning to turn during the first half of 2011, as unemployment started to drop, as the auto industry recovered and some of the gloom of the atmosphere of economic crisis began to lift, Beck finally brought about his own end. He became even too much for his facilitators at Fox News. As some of the anger in the general community began to dissipate, Beck’s audiences began to drop ever so slightly and, even more importantly, advertisers came under increasing pressure to abandon the program. As a Fox News executive admitted to the New York Times some time later, ‘I think that his ratings provided us, unfortunately, with empty calories.’ As the spiral down began, Beck became ever more desperate to keep his wild conspiracy-driven presence in the headlines. In the end it wasn’t enough just to berate the left and claim that Obama and a one-world government were out to destroy life as we know it. He started to go further into the nether land of mad conspiracy theorists. He even began to peddle anti-Semitic rants that, among 69

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other things, accused the financier George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, and at one point he devoted an entire show to a ­theory about the Rothschilds and other Jewish bankers conspiring to create the Federal Reserve. By April 2011 – more than two years after he first appeared with a regular weekday show on the network – Fox announced it wouldn’t be renewing his contract. The last Glenn Beck Program went to air on Fox News on 30 June 2011. It’s one thing to promote partisan journalism as Fox does, it seems it’s quite another to host a mad racist conspiracy hour every day. What is undeniable is that before he went completely off the rails, Glenn Beck was one of the big reasons the Tea Party message had been resonating so widely; and just as Beck burned himself out in a fury of incendiary rhetoric, so too did the steam start to come off the Tea Party. In the same month that Fox News cancelled his show a CNN poll found that the percentage of the public who viewed the Tea Party unfavourably had increased to 47 per cent, which was up considerably from the 26 per cent who had that view just a few months earlier in January. Like others in the long history of conspiracy theorists who occupy the fringes of America’s political dialogue from time to time, Glenn Beck slowly faded out of the mainstream and back into the darker corners of syndicated radio and the internet, where he has established his own GBTV. Online is now the place for the faithful to watch the daily TV show, and he continues to flourish, although with far less impact. His legacy of anger and insecurity still courses through the Republican Party as the Tea Party has grabbed hold of the mainstream conservative agenda. The Tea Party is one of the big reasons the Republicans did so well in the midterm elections in 2010 but it is both a blessing and a curse. Having nurtured the anger, and 70

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channelled some of the more extreme rhetoric by offering a raft of undeliverable promises, the Republicans now find themselves captive to what are for the most part unrealistic demands and expectations. As one analyst from a conservative DC think tank told me a few months after the midterm vote, ‘If you encourage a rabid Rottweiler and it gives you victory you can feel good for a while but after a while that Rottweiler can turn nasty if it doesn’t get enough meat.’ After the midterms a third of the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives was backed by the Tea Party, and even those who weren’t didn’t want to risk a possible primary challenge and do anything that might upset these ferocious grassroots campaigners. Many of those Tea Party campaigners would have seen the midterms as just a warm-up for the big event in 2012. As the political cycle crept forward through 2011 there was an intense focus on who would emerge as the preferred Tea Party candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. A good deal of it centred on Sarah Palin, who for a long time did nothing at all to discourage it. As noted, the Tea Party types all admired Sarah Palin but few of them actually thought she was ready to be president. Sarah Palin didn’t think so either, apparently, although whether she actually has presidential ambitions or is more interested in making piles of money is a moot point. She kept most of the Tea Party faithful guessing for about as long as she possibly could. Teasing them with regular bus tours to those all-important key ‘early voting’ states and constantly holding political rallies where she would attack Obama, the ‘special interests’ and the ‘permanent political class’. ‘The status quo is no longer an option,’ she cries again and again in a well-rehearsed speech that the faithful never seem 71

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to grow tired of. Talk about status quo. One Sarah Palin rally seemed much like the next for nearly three years until finally, as the primary season began to take shape, she couldn’t keep the charade going any longer. In the end she is little more than a political celebrity, getting rich off the notoriety and feeding off the disenchantment, dazzling and beguiling the people who want to identify with some easy solutions and well-tailored packaging. As someone said, she’s a bit like the vacuous celebrity Kim Kardashian with a few one-liners about economics thrown in. Finally, in October 2011, the long flirtations came to an end when she announced she wasn’t going to run because, ‘as always my family comes first’, and because, ‘I believe that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office – from the nation’s governors to congressional seats and the presidency . . . It’s not about me, it’s about all of us who are trying to wake up America.’ ‘By not being a candidate,’ she said, ‘you are unshackled and able to be even more effective.’ She then thanked her supporters and those who had encouraged her to run and ‘especially those in the Tea Party and those who are independent and patriotic and know that a republic is worth defending’. The Tea Party crowd defines the ‘defenders of the republic’ as those that think like them; those that bang on about less government, less regulation, freedom and the right to bear arms. But there are very few Americans of whatever political persuasion who would not believe in defending the republic. In every corner of the country the view of what the republic is and what needs to be defended is a matter of opinion.

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4 America’s Muslims and the mosque at Ground Zero America has a grand immigrant history. Wave after wave of new settlers have been embraced and accepted here. This has been a remarkably tolerant place. But in the past few decades immigration has started to feed into the political discourse like never before. The newer immigrants are spreading beyond the usual inner-city ghettos. Latinos, in particular, are changing the demographics of neighbourhoods that haven’t changed for generations, but the biggest cultural hurdle America has is with the reaction to one of its smallest of immigrant populations – Muslims. America isn’t unique in this regard but here the problems, the cultural clashes and the political temperature that has surrounded them have been intensified and magnified by the events of September 11. Since then, to be Muslim in America has been different. And travel around the country with one for long enough and that becomes even more apparent. Louie Eroglu goes to the mosque when he needs a bit of spiritual healing but most of the time he’s more a product of his 73

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western Sydney suburban roots than anything else. That’s not to say he’s not an educated, erudite, worldly wise sort of a bloke, it’s just that he carries a lifelong passion for the Parramatta Leagues Club and speaks the Queen’s English with a broad Aussie disregard for its finer points. He’s a man who fits in easily with everyone and usually manages to charm even the most sceptical talent or disarm the most uncomfortable situation with a wellplaced joke or an honest and heartfelt reassurance. It’s a skill that many of the best cameramen have. He presents as an everyday, easygoing Aussie but, as he even admits, he has the willpower of a flea – he will eat pork if he’s not told that’s what he’s eating and he sometimes even partakes of the devil’s drop. He is a religiously dispassionate Australian Muslim, and in America, on occasions, that creates a few uncomfortable moments. It wasn’t overt in any way but the first time I really noticed it was at the same big Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally in DC. A couple of hundred thousand flag-waving patriots cheering on the call for a return to the values of the 1950s proved to be a little confronting for the boy from Auburn. There wasn’t any mad Muslim baiting or anti-Islamic rhetoric but it was undeniably evident. Whistling underneath the repetitive refrain about the greatness of America’s achievements and the sanctity of the Constitution was the usual not-so-subtle appeal to defend the nation from threat and a post-9/11 anti-terrorism message that feeds on a mistrust of Muslims in particular. As you might imagine this was by no means a multicultural event. It was what it was – huge, white, Tea Party, pastoral – and Louie was picking up the vibe. We did what we had to do, we vox-popped the crowd, we filmed the TV stand-up, and we stayed long enough to get a good feel for the day. It wasn’t until we left and jumped 74

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into a taxi being driven by an immigrant sporting a large beard and some unmistakable Muslim headgear that the smile returned to the Turk’s face. ‘You want to steer clear of here for a while, brother,’ he tells the driver. Being a Muslim in America can be uncomfortable as America is still in the throes of a long and difficult meditation about how it should deal with its Muslim minority. Immediately after September 11 tensions were particularly high. There was no end of anecdotal evidence from American Muslims that the attacks had changed things substantially. Muslims were harangued and harassed in the streets. Venturing out with a hijab was to court insult or worse in some places. But politicians, wary of the flashpoint that could develop, were careful. The criticisms of Islamic extremism were, on the whole, couched in politically cautious language. A peaceful religion had been hijacked by radicals and all but the most rabid were careful of casting all the followers of Muhammad as terrorists. Just a few days after the attacks George W. Bush went to a mosque in Washington and told the gathered crowd that he believed ‘Islam is peace’. Others also made a point of saying what they could to calm the public mood. But over time the circumspection has slipped. The possibility of Islamic terror is still a problem in the United States and probably always will be. Who knows how many terror plots have been foiled? Almost certainly more than we’ve been told about. But, even with a great deal of human and financial resources spent on intelligence gathering and prevention, no one can catch everything. In November 2009 a lone gunman killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, the most populous US military installation in the world, just outside Killeen in Texas. Nidal Malik Hasan was a US 75

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army major, a psychiatrist no less, who had gradually become radicalised over the years. He was a homegrown terrorist, American born but of Palestinian heritage. Intelligence missed him even though they had registered his email correspondence with the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Then there was the ‘underpants bomber’ who tried to blow up his nether regions as his flight from Amsterdam was making its descent to Detroit. It was a pathetic effort really. One of the passengers even turned to him at one point and said, ‘Hey, dude, your pants are on fire,’ but it obviously could have had deadly serious consequences. Not long after that a Pakistani-born US citizen, Faisal Shahzad, parked a pickup truck packed with propane tanks and fertiliser on a busy corner of Times Square and attempted to blow it to bits. A couple of street vendors noticed smoke coming out of the rear vents and heard what sounded like firecrackers going off inside. Luckily it didn’t go up. The political temperature, however, ratcheted up a notch or two. By then conservatives, in particular, had begun to feel emboldened enough to shake off the straitjacket of political and cultural sensitivity. Peter King, a Republican from New York in the House of Representatives, chaired a congressional hearing addressing the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism. There had been others before that, such as those held between 2006 and 2009 by Joseph Lieberman and the Democrat from California, Jane Harman, but the King hearings were different in tone. King’s own views had been well known for some time. King is sometimes referred to as a Republican even most Democrats can take a shine to. He’s a plain speaking, workingclass conservative who stands up for his constituents and his 76

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friends – Bill and Hillary Clinton are among them. He famously opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and the Clintons are said to have returned the political favour in spades over the years by withholding support for any Democrat who chooses to run against him. Before September 11 King was also on very friendly terms with many of his Muslim constituents, but in the weeks after the attacks he was so concerned at the lack of contrition and the suggestions from some that it might just have been the enemies of Islam, notably Israel, that could have been behind the attacks that he changed his tune completely. He now thinks American Muslims are simply not doing enough to expose the radicals in their midst. As a result he believes the threat of homegrown terrorism is rising and in 2007 he told a reporter that America had ‘too many mosques’. It was a statement he had to clarify later by saying ‘too many mosques in the country do not cooperate with law enforcement’, even though his critics, and there are many, point out that 48 of the 120 Muslims suspected of plotting domestic terrorist attacks since September 11 were actually turned in by other Muslims. In the end the King hearings did little more than inflame the debate. His opponents denounced them as a witch-hunt – the modern equivalent of the McCarthy trials. His supporters called them brave, timely and necessary. But as the country moved towards the inevitable media frenzy that would become the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks in 2011, nothing inflamed the debate like the proposal for development of one mosque in particular. The plans for an Islamic cultural centre with a mosque tucked into one room on a street just two blocks from the Ground Zero site set off a national shouting match like nothing that had come before it. 77

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The fact is New York is home to the fastest-growing Muslim community in America and many thousands of them commute from Queens and Brooklyn to Manhattan to work. Muslims work everywhere and at every level, of course, but they are a very real presence in the lower-paid menial jobs that have always been the preserve of recently arrived immigrants. Fast-food trucks selling halal kebabs, for instance, have colonised the streets around the financial district. The devout among them pray wherever they can. There are already 200 mosques in New York City and there are makeshift ones in some of the most unusual places. It’s hardly surprising then that the Muslim community would want to build themselves a cultural centre in lower Manhattan and include a mosque in the building. But the building, a former Burlington coat factory at 45–51 Park Place, became a controversy that pierced the national debate like a pre-dawn call to prayer. The shock jocks hopped into it with glee. They quoted the Imam as describing the United States as an accessory to the attacks and saying that America was responsible for creating Osama Bin Laden. ‘If that’s the face of modern Islam,’ one of the more prominent of them said, ‘then it reinforces the concerns we have with Muslims here in the US.’ Ground Zero has become a sacred site, claimed by the entire nation like Pearl Harbor or Little Big Horn. This isn’t just any block in New York anymore, it’s part of the American psyche. Even though the attacks were carried out by a few Islamic radicals there is a point – probably a radius of about a mile or so, though no one can be that precise – where there is no room for political niceties or sensitivity. Even the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, told me one day at a police-sponsored cricket match for Muslim 78

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youth that ‘we have to be sensitive to the fact that we have been attacked by Muslims’. Commissioner Kelly has probably done more than just about anyone of authority other than the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to try to build bridges with the city’s Muslims. He knows, of course, that they need to facilitate information from the community as well and what better way to reach out to young Muslim men than through sport. Under his direction the NYPD has sponsored annual cricket and soccer competitions but his comments underscore the sentiment held by many that Islam was ultimately responsible. It was a discussion about the Ground Zero mosque in a quiet suburban house in the back streets of the Bronx that sparked the other memorable Muslim moment for Louie Eroglu, the Aussie Turk from western Sydney. He now has the boast of being one of the very few people who have interviewed both a relative of the 9/11 terrorists and relatives of the victims. Just a week after the attacks Louie filmed an interview in Lebanon with the uncle of Ziad Jarrah, the ‘pilot’ of flight 93 that went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nine years later we’re knocking on the door of a single-fronted suburban bungalow in the Bronx about to interview another person with a close family connection to the terrible events of that day. * Sally Regenhard is a feisty woman who might be anywhere from 50 to 65, she won’t say exactly. Like a lot of those with family connections to the New York Fire Department she has long and strong Irish-American roots. She lives in the neighbourhood around Woodlawn, where there’s an Irish pub on every corner 79

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and all the delicatessens sell packets of those small pork sausages the Irish love so much, along with soda bread and tins of baked beans. There have been several waves of Irish immigration to this part of the Bronx but the financial mess in the United States at this time has nothing on the crisis in Ireland and a new wave of young exiles from the Emerald Isle are flocking into the country. Red-faced bricklayers, barmen, hairdressers and personal assistants are all part of another generation of Irish émigrés. Line up for a corned beef sandwich here at any Woodlawn deli at lunchtime and you’d think you were in Dublin. Sally’s family has been here for generations but this part of the Bronx is still the first stop for the sons and daughters of Eire straight off the plane. Wave after wave of Irish immigrants have been embraced by this city, and the fraternity of the FDNY in particular. A lot of their descendants died climbing the stairs of the World Trade Center on September 11. Sally’s son Christian was one of them. He’s one of the 1100 people who are still missing, their bodies most likely vaporised in the inferno; they are simply referred to as ‘unaccounted for’. For years now Sally has been the voice of the families of the victims of 9/11. She’s a formidable, pugnacious and determined activist. She’s testified before Congress, campaigned for tougher building codes to ensure better access for fire fighters to tall buildings, and she’s sued to have the emergency call tapes of that terrible day released to the public. She’s taken her campaign to Washington and she’s been photographed with presidents – there’s a framed picture of her meeting with Barack Obama on her wall. The controversy over the Ground Zero mosque sorely tested her faith in one of her political heroes. The plans were greeted with horror by many, although by no means all, of the families of 80

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the victims, and seized on by others keen as ever to score political points and inflame cultural anxieties. It was good fodder for a hungry news machine looking for new ways to mark the day. The plans for the Islamic centre had been around for a while. They began to get some traction in the public’s mind as the ninth anniversary approached in 2010, but at some point the whole proposal just seemed to explode as an issue and it quickly became a cultural and political fault line that divided the country and tested the limits of the Constitution and the perceptions Americans have of their own nation. Again the shock jocks around the country jumped on it. Ever the opportunist, Sarah Palin came out strongly against it and declared in her own inimitable style that Muslims should ‘refudiate’ the plan. Newt Gingrich, also at this time building a platform for his run for the White House, wrote that ‘building this structure on the edge of the battlefield created by radical Islamists . . . is a political statement of shocking arrogance and hypocrisy’. Barack Obama hit back during the annual address to the Ramadan dinner with leading American Muslims at the White House and declared that Muslims had ‘the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this county . . . and that’, he said, ‘includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances’. ‘This is America,’ he added for good measure. The president’s initial comments made a lot of Muslims happy, and upset more than a few Democrats looking nervously at their polling in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections. The next day, perhaps after a briefing from his political spin machine, he ‘recalibrated’, as the Huffington Post put it. 81

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‘My intention was to simply let people know what I thought,’ Obama said: Which was that in this country, we treat everybody equally in accordance with the law. Regardless of race. Regardless of religion. I was not commenting on and will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country’s about and I think it’s very important that, as difficult as some of these issues are, we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about. But this was not a recalibration that impressed Sally Regenhard. ‘When I heard his comments I was very taken aback. I was shocked,’ she tells me. Jim Mcaffrey and Russell Mercer were shocked too. They also had family members in the fire department who never came home that day. We meet the three of them in Sally’s impeccable lounge room. They are keen to do what they can to stop what they clearly believe is an affront to those who died and a desecration of this sacred ground. We drink coffee and talk. A copy of the New York Post lies open on the coffee table. There are family photos lined up on a mantelpiece and a crucifix on the wall. Apart from the shrine dedicated to Sally’s son, which takes up almost an entire corner, it looks like a thousand other Irish immigrant lounge rooms in the Bronx. Russell can’t hide his Irish heritage even if he wants to. He has a face born of generations of bad diet, damp and suffering. Put him in a pub in Sligo and he wouldn’t seem out of place until he 82

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opens his mouth. Out comes a New York accent as thick as the yellow mustard on a street vendor’s hot dog. Russell’s stepson Scott was killed on the 78th floor of the south tower. ‘My understanding is he was vaporised. That’s what they tell us. Never to be found. No traces of him at all. Never to be found.’ Jim’s brother-in-law was a battalion chief in the same crew of firemen on the 78th floor. Jim was also an active duty lieutenant with the FDNY on that day and he spent months after that at the site. He’s now retired but it’s clear you never really leave the FDNY. As we sit looking at photos of their dead relatives it’s also evident that all three of them, Sally, Jim and Russell, are motivated not just by their own loss but by a sense of higher duty, a desire to protect the integrity of a place that is now and forever a national memorial. They’re not opposed to a mosque on religious grounds, they say, but they are opposed to it out of a sense of decorum and respect for those who lost their lives there that day. ‘The people who are connected with this mosque have made a huge divide,’ Jim says. ‘They have set back the goal of interfaith and inter-cultural understanding for decades. They could reach out for years afterwards and not accomplish as much as they would if they would just move this mosque right now.’ Sally bangs the same drum with a bit more force. ‘People have a right to do what they want but is it the right thing to do?’ she asks. ‘I’m sure we have a right to put up all types of displays. People have the right to build perhaps a Nazi information centre if they want, but should that be built near a Jewish building or a Jewish synagogue? No, it shouldn’t.’ The reach for the Holocaust reference seems a little overblown, particularly as the city’s Jewish mayor, Michael Bloomberg, 83

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has been one of those who have consistently and emphatically defended the developer’s right to build whatever they like on the site. For him, and for many others, it’s more than just a matter of cultural sensitivity or some sense of totemic national remembrance – it’s about an essential American freedom. As the debate began to heat up Bloomberg was one of those out in front of it. A basic question had been lost in the argument he contended. ‘Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion?’ he asked. ‘That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favour one over another.’ They don’t have a lot of time for Bloomberg in Sally’s house but there are plenty of Muslims on the other side of the argument in America who do see the whole episode as a test of the American premise. So many of them express the view that it is important that the cultural centre be allowed to proceed to send a message that America is an inclusive society, to send a message to the extremists that America’s ideals won’t be bullied into submission by an act of terrorism. As we are leaving, the discussion was still ranging over the Muslim issue, the city and its Jewish mayor and about how Muslims are still a relatively small part of the population. ‘It works a little bit differently in Australia,’ Louie says at one point. ‘At home Muslims outnumber the Jewish folk.’ ‘How did they let that happen?’ Sally asks, not realising how it sounds to the boy from Auburn. *

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A little over a year later, on September 21, 2011, just days after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a small ceremony is held in the still undeveloped site of the community centre at 45–51 Park Place. The Ground Zero mosque is opened. The plans for a fifteen-storey cultural emporium are on hold but inside the building that was once a coat factory a grey-and-green carpeted ‘prayer space’ had been set up for the area’s local fast-food traders and taxi drivers. The four-piece oud section from the New York Arabic Orchestra plays as guests enjoy non-alcoholic drinks and munch on lamb balls. No one at the gathering talks about the heated debate of the year before and, although the ceremony is reported in a couple of local papers, none of the firebrands or shock jocks or frenzied bloggers even mention it.

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As a features correspondent, pitching story ideas can be an idio­ syncratic sort of business. Finding something that holds the viewers’ attention and has enough depth and layers to last for almost a full half-hour of television is challenging. You might throw up dozens of ideas to the production team in Sydney before one sticks as the producers back at the head office have to weigh up things on their terms, taking into consideration the pictorial and editorial mix of the program over the year. ‘Have we done something that looks sort of similar somewhere else?’ ‘Have we had too many city-based stories?’ ‘Is there too much Third World? Not enough issues? Too much worthy?’ So there I was pitching stories on HIV levels in Washington DC and the drug wars in Mexico. ‘Maybe we should also be looking at Hugo Chávez,’ I ask. ‘What about the gang violence that’s tearing apart Chicago?’ 86

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‘No,’ the cogs in Sydney turn. ‘What we really need is . . .  hmmm . . . how about something from the West? Big sky country.’ Which is how we find ourselves standing on the side of the road in the little town of Enterprise in the state of Oregon ­staring up at a huge red neon sign on top of the Ponderosa Motel that simply reads ‘SORRY’. We assumed, rightly enough, that it was meant to tell the weary traveller who might have washed up here that the town is full – luckily we have a reservation. Who’d have thought a little place like this, stuck between endless rolling farmland and the base of the imposing northern wilderness, could have been so busy. The ‘SORRY’ sign is so big that if you approached the town from the other side you could probably have seen it from the mountains on your way down. Were the ­people of Enterprise ashamed in some way of their tidy little town? Despite its name it is one of those towns that make you wonder what it is that people actually do while they live here. But they do do as the sign attests. Tonight the place is going off. Down at the showground the annual music festival is in full swing and the last of the day’s bands are belting out some blues favourites for a crowd that by the time we checked in at the Ponderosa and followed our ears had definitely begun to thin and wobble. By all accounts it had been a spirited event. When we got there the bar had run dry – sorry. The last 20 or 30 inebriated festival goers who were still only just able to dance were evidence enough of that. Enterprise, it seems, was full in more ways than one and it had only just gone seven o’clock. As it happens it was also a holiday weekend and the only other place in town that was open and not sorry to see us was an Irish pub that served a reasonable steak and a particularly unreasonable 87

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red wine called ‘Ménage à Trois’. The state of Oregon makes a lot of good wine but try finding it in any of the local restaurants. More often than not the locals seem somewhat surprised that we’d ask for wine in the first place, and almost incredulous that anyone might assume state pride would see some cunning – even enterprising – restaurateur consider putting their own wine on the menu. But no, no such luck – sorry. Sorry had quickly become a theme of our life on the road as we follow ‘the footprint of the wolf ’, and it is only just beginning. As we are soon to find out nothing shakes up emotions in big sky country like the wolf. Once hunted, trapped and poisoned to the point where it became little more than a memory – part of the folklore of the American West – it’s now on its way back and is bringing with it some long-forgotten fears, enmities and hopes. The last wolf packs roamed the mountains of the American West in the 1930s, and until the early 1980s most people had thought they were gone for good. Around that time, as wolf numbers grew across the border in Canada, reports again started trickling in of the occasional wolf sighting. But it was the decision by the Fisheries and Wildlife Service to capture a pack of 30 wolves from across the border and release them into Yellowstone National Park that really set up the wolf ’s return to the US side of the continental divide. The program has been relatively successful to the point that there is now an estimated 1600 wolves spread across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and Oregon. In some of the bars in small towns there are still old photos on the walls of hunters with their trophy kills from the early days of the twentieth century, and in quite a few of those bars those old sepia images now have recent photos of new kills sitting alongside them. A lot of people say the Canadian grey wolf is different from 88

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the one that lived in these parts all those years ago. Occasionally you’ll come across an old-timer who reckons he remembers seeing a wolf way back when and apparently the wolves were smaller and tinged with red. These Canadian grey wolves, they say, are monsters by comparison. But whatever the colour, size or origin the response to its return is pretty much the same. In these drinking holes you can’t always get a glass of local wine but you can always get a discussion about the wolf – there’s not a lot of love for the wolf here, wherever it’s from. It is, quite simply, the most divisive issue in this strikingly beautiful part of North America and it quickly becomes apparent that when people out here start talking about the wolf they are really talking about a lot of other things as well. The wolf ’s reintroduction is at the centre of arguments about wilderness and development, farming and food production, big-city expectations and Native American heritage and legal rights. At its most extreme it can become a sort of clash between an urban, East Coast, New Age spiritualism and the equally blinkered Wild West, huntin’, shootin’, Tea Party, true-values crowd. At one end of the debate is the dreamy barmaid who tells me that the wolf is her favourite animal, her talisman, but can’t quite tell me why. ‘They’re just, like, mystical creatures,’ she says. And at the other is the Stetson-wearing Ron Gillette: ‘I don’t go anywhere without packing a weapon. And I will use it. I mean, if a wolf takes one step toward me, as far as I’m concerned he’s lookin’ at me for lunch.’ In between these two is a more considered layer of opinion, legitimate fears, aspirations and good intentions, but Ron Gillette is what they call in this game ‘good television’. A short, nuggetty man with a ruddy country complexion and 89

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an irresistible attention-getting turn of phrase, Ron is the face of the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, although you get the feeling on meeting him that the coalition part of the equation is a pretty loose term. Ron claims to talk to, and for, a lot of other people, but he can never quite give us any names of anyone other than himself who would be willing to front the camera and decry the return of this dangerous predator. Not that it really matters. After spending a couple of days with him we certainly feel we have that extremity of the argument well and truly covered. Ron is at first reluctant to meet us because of what he fears are our ‘East Coast, liberal ideas’, but once he does agree he comes through with a wagonful of one-liners and is as cooperative as any camera crew could possibly want. He eagerly engages with the filmmaking process, shows us around his ‘ranch’ and poses happily beside his log cabins with his little Pomeranian ‘wolf killer’ on his lap. A mean-looking handbag-sized puff of white fluff who, Ron brags, ‘gets them wolves and pops their necks’. There’s no doubt that Ron is an enthusiast for his own little piece of paradise – the town of Stanley in central Idaho – but he is consumed by his hatred of the wolf. ‘You know in my thinking,’ he says at one point, ‘I believe Osama Bin Laden is a classic example of a foreign terrorist. The Defenders of Wildlife . . . and those other enviros . . . all those people are domestic terrorists and the wolf is the wildlife terrorist.’ You just can’t buy talent this good, even in Hollywood. Ron drives a pickup with a number plate that reads ‘NO WOLFS’. He wears a T-shirt that has a picture of a wolf in a gun sight and the caption reads ‘smoke a pack a day’. And he rolls around the backcountry firing up the locals with his homespun rhetoric about an animal he believes is destroying the land and life 90

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he loves so much. When Ron starts talking about the wolf one eye crinkles shut under a bushel of brow, little balls of spittle rest on the corners of his mouth and his complexion lights up like a stoplight. You get the feeling he lives for little else and once you get him started he’s hard to stop. Good for us; bad for his blood pressure. Ron blames the wolf for almost everything. For him the wolf is a liberal plot. It’s killing the big-game herds that underpin the hunting industry, killing stock and ruining farmers’ livelihoods, tearing apart communities, threatening businesses and tourism and potentially threatening humans as well. ‘What are they gonna eat?’ he seethes. ‘We’re in a wildlife disaster in this state and they’re killing everything. What are they going to eat? Our livestock . . . and then [will they] start eating humans? What are they going to eat?’ As mad as he seems, there is something endearing about Ron Gillette. He is totally obsessed with the wolf but when he’s not addressing meetings and ranting against environmentalists, he’s just another small businessman with a collection of holiday cabins on the outskirts of Stanley. It is a stunningly beautiful part of the world. A pretty little town on a plain by the Salmon River with the Sawtooth mountain range towering above it. His family has lived here for nearly a hundred years and he has a genuine love and connection to the land and to the pioneering spirit and mythology of the American West, including what I suspect is the most comprehensive collection of cowboy memorabilia anywhere – magnificent saddles, spurs and chaps; genuine Native American rugs; beautifully painted portraits of the great Nez Perce Native American rodeo rider Jackson Sundown; some serious cattle whips; and even a display case of colourful garters worn 91

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by the nineteenth-century ladies of the night, every one with a story, one of them simply embroidered with the instruction ‘stop’. Ron Gillette’s fears are genuinely held. He is dead against the federal government, dead against Barack Obama, anti-liberal and deeply conservative. His anger, frustration and fear about the disappearance of an America he understands have been channelled into the fight against the wolf. For him the wolf encapsulates the growing power of the federal government over state law and the aspirations and ‘elite’ concerns of the liberal East Coast, many of whom want wilderness but rarely if ever visit and certainly don’t ever intend to live alongside it. Like the Tea Party activists, Ron doesn’t like what’s happening to America – the multicultural shift, the decentralisation, the globalisation of his backyard. ‘Leave us alone,’ he says. ‘Let Idaho look after Idaho. People in Maryland, New York, New Jersey, New whatever – they have no idea what we’re doin’ out here. I’m one of those people that I don’t care what they do back there. The point is we live here. We pay our taxes here, we try to be good citizens, we try to make a living, we try and raise our families. Leave us alone. We leave you alone. You leave us alone.’ It’s a view you hear a lot in the west, particularly among older folk, but for many it’s not so much an expression of anger like it is with Ron, rather an almost elegiac lament. People like Dean, a wiry 72-year-old hunter we meet a few days after talking to Ron, who tells us about how he grew up in the forest at the base of Mount St Helens in Washington State, where his father worked a cedar-shingle mill. ‘There were no roads in or out in them days,’ he says. Dean isn’t at all your stereotypical, Elmer Fudd, shoot-’em-up 92

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guy. Short, thin and fit as a mountain goat, he wears an unfashionable moustache-less goatee and looks more like a svelte garden gnome. He hasn’t had an alcoholic drink in more than 40 years and he seems to exist on little else but Pepsi and chocolate bars. He shot his first deer at the age of eight and he’s been hunting ever since, although for the last twenty years or so he says he has hunted exclusively with a bow and arrow, and even more recently he has stopped shooting altogether, preferring instead to just stalk the prey and ‘call in the elk’ for others. He’s renowned in these parts as one of the finest elk buglers in the country. As we weave our way up a winding dirt road in his Dodge pickup to the hunting camp in the mountains, the old hunter recounts how he has moved to Idaho to escape the increasing suburbia of his childhood home. He’d once been as far east as South Dakota, he says, but he has no interest in ever doing that again. He never used to be political but in recent years he’s become more and more interested. The wolf rule is just one issue but it was an important one in his transition. The federal government’s decision to reintroduce the wolf to the high country and, worse, to then put it on the endangered species list and prevent anyone from shooting it is, in his view, a rule instituted by people from the east who for the most part have never been to the west, and imposed on people from the west who have for the most part no intention of ever going to Washington. The next morning, after a meal of tinned stew and a freezing night on a camp bed, Dean takes us out bugling for elk with a couple of young hunters from a nearby camp. To these kids Dean is a legend and he is certainly a mean hand at bugling – a strange and no doubt difficult skill to acquire. It’s the sort of skill you need a lot of time on your own out in the wilderness to perfect. 93

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Bugling involves placing on your tongue a reed – not unlike the sort saxophone and clarinet players use – and then contorting the mouth in such a way as to make a sound that alternates between a sort of whistle and a grunt. You then amplify that through a piece of plumbing poly pipe, and what comes out is apparently pretty close to the sound of a rutting bull elk. Or so I’m told. We didn’t actually get to see any elk despite Dean’s reputation as a man who could bugle an elk up out of a ravine like no one else. The day we went out there was nothing. Dean didn’t think there was going to be much of a season as the wolves have gotten into the elk herds and that has changed everything. He wasn’t just talking about the hunting. ‘I’ve seen the best of it for sure,’ he says. ‘We’ve noticed it really bad in the past four or five years since the wolf has driven them into the bottoms and they’ve taken a lot of them. It’s tough to get ’em anymore. You can spend two weeks out here and only see maybe three or four bulls but we’d have three or four bulls goin’ in one mornin’ in the first couple of hours before.’ The kids, keen eager young outdoors types, look on forlornly. Although this lot was somewhat obsessed with killing wild animals you could see this was a way of life that had been a part of western experience for decades and it was changing fast. Dean reckoned it wouldn’t be too long before the elk was driven to extinction by the wolf. A lot of other people out here, though, think that what Dean remembers is an unnatural imbalance and many argue that bringing back the wolf is just restoring the normal order. The Defenders of Wildlife organisation is the group pushing this line the hardest. According to them wolves are simply bringing the elk numbers back into alignment. As a result they say the riparian 94

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areas are also recovering because the young plants and saplings around rivers are not being trampled into oblivion. And because of that beavers are also returning to the waterways because now they can find things to build their dams with again. The whole ecosystem is benefitting from the return of this top-of-the-foodchain predator. For all that, the Defenders of Wildlife recognise that the reintroduction of the wolf is creating some problems for people, particularly ranchers. But it is, they say, simply a process of reeducation. The rancher needs to relearn the skills they were able to let go after the 1930s and there are now programs run by the greenies to help them do just that. The Defenders are out on the range with the sheep farmers showing them how to protect their flock, they’re riding with the cattle herders who use the summer pastures to at the least get an indication of how many stock animals are actually being taken by wolves, and they’re tagging and tracking wolves to get a better understanding of their range, which is in some cases huge. Idaho has the largest areas of wilderness in the United States but some packs have been known to roam up to 50 kilometres a night. Do that sort of distance for a couple of nights and you could be in another state. With this sort of range there is simply no wilderness area big enough for them not to have contact with humans or their property and livestock. There has been a huge investment in parks and wilderness in the United States over the past hundred years or so but the truly wild areas are shrinking. The Defenders argue – and the federal government agrees with them – that bringing the wolf back to Idaho is important to ensure that these areas do remain ‘wild’. These are the people Ron Gillette calls ‘enviros’, a word he spits out with unbridled disgust. 95

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‘It’s amazing to me that most of these enviros that are wolf lovers are also vegetarians. Then they support the biggest carnivore there is. Amazing!’ Ron was on a roll: The enviros several years ago put out how they had studies and had taken polls across the state how popular the wolf is. Well we’d like to see one of those polls. Maybe if they took it down at Boise State University with a bunch of political science students that might be true. [But] you go out across this state and get to the grassroots citizens, you’ll find out how bad we want these wolves gone. Of course it’s not quite so simple. Although there aren’t too many people alive who can remember ever seeing a wolf back in the 1930s, the fight over the wolf has become a symbol of the contest between old values and the rapidly changing world. But like a lot of places in the United States, the demographics are shifting. The sort of people living here and the things that attract them to come in the first place are changing. You can go to any rural town now and along with the signs for the local Tea Party meeting and the political posters for the district candidate for the Libertarians, there’s a coffee shop baking its own bread and selling espressos. While you’re there you can log on to WiFi for free and, more often than not, you’ll hear a discussion about someone’s problems with their latest graphic design project, which they’ve been commissioned to do by that company in San Francisco, as you will about hogs and cattle and the NASCAR results. The fact is the grassroots are, if anything, becoming greener. Not fast, mind you, but the population is a lot more diverse than it once was and a 96

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lot of them have come because they’re attracted to the wilderness and all that it represents, including the wolf. Admittedly some of these people are a bit loose in the top paddock as well. It might be a different paddock from the one Ron Gillette roams around in but there are some strange things that go on up there nonetheless. Nancy Taylor lives for the wolf – or rather wolves – plural. She has seventeen of them that she keeps in huge cages up on a property near Sandpoint, a pretty little upmarket tourist town in the Idaho panhandle just below the Canadian border. Her top paddock is actually reserved for the wolves. It’s a five-acre fully fenced enclosure that’s as close as they get to a return to the wild. Just one look at them is enough to convince anyone that these guys are no ordinary dog. For a start, they’re huge. Certainly a lot bigger than Nancy, who’s as tiny as a bird with bottle-blond hair and wide, constantly amazed eyes – she’s a sort of diminutive Loretta Swit as ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan out of the Mash TV series. Nevertheless she takes her wolves down to the enclosure every day, one or two at a time, and has a good old howl with them, literally. Out of her tiny blow-dried frame comes a full-throated ‘aaa-woooooooo’, and before long the wolves are all joining in. Not just the two she’s taken to the paddock while we are there but all the others as well who can’t see the missing members of their pack but like to let them know they’re nearby. It’s a cacophony – quite confronting for the uninitiated. ‘The wolves have been very telepathic with me on several occasions,’ Nancy says, and you can’t doubt it. ‘I communicate with them all the time because I’m very close to my wolves; I’m very in tune with them.’ In this debate Nancy is the yin to Ron’s yang. She is so obsessed with the wolf she’s made it her life’s work and she’s 97

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making a living out of the fear and the myth that fuels the fascination a lot of people have for them. She’s opened a shop called Wolf People down on the highway leading to Sandpoint, selling wolf paraphernalia to tourists and conducting educational sessions in a cage out the back. Every day she brings down a couple of the pack for the passing parade to look at. By the time we met up with her she’d been doing the same thing, day after day, for seventeen years. ‘The Little Red Riding Hood stories and so forth from Europe really, really hurt the wolf and they’re still hurting him today,’ she says. ‘They make the wolf out to be a monster, a snarling evil creature, which he isn’t, and so, you know, here at Wolf People we try very hard to show that the wolf is not that way at all.’ As well as selling wolf T-shirts and mugs Nancy takes her education campaign to local schools and scout groups and even into the RV parks in the summer time. Nancy says she has met ‘so many people who say, “the wolves look like they have a soul”, their eyes look right into your soul and they try to understand people.’ There’s clearly more people who think the wolf is something special than Ron might like to admit. The thing about the wolf conflict is it’s also a little soap operaish. There are big issues floating around it but the cast in this drama all seem to at least know about each other – and they all certainly know about Ron. Nancy says she recognised him straightaway when he came to her shop a year or so earlier. He was there on his own at the edge of a group of tourists who’d stopped by to hear one of Nancy’s daily lectures about the wolf and how, according to her, it’s so relatively harmless. Ron Gillette apparently started ranting and screaming that she was harbouring killers. Ron’s notoriety spreads a lot further than the trinket shops on 98

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the tourist trail. They’ve heard about Ron in Native American country too. Aaron Miles is a Nez Perce tribal leader. ‘If they were just to get rid of all wolves like Mr Ron Gillette preaches to everybody,’ he says, ‘I think that would be really sad. It’s unfortunate that the arrogance of someone’s culture can override what has belonged here for thousands of years. That arrogance we face it and we’ll continually face it.’ To the Nez Perce Native Americans, the wolf is more than just a symbol of environmental renewal. The return of the wolf is a symbol of their own renewal. For them the wolf ’s decline and struggle mirrors their own. After four generations and a hundred years Ron may feel a connection to this land but the Nez Perce have been here for a lot longer than the Gillettes of this world. Before the white man, the hunters and the ranchers, and well before the environmentalists and the iPad-toting urban refugees telecommuting from their solar-powered hobby farms, this was the domain of the Nez Perce. Just like the wolf, the tribe once roamed over huge territories in the American West and both were hounded from the land. Their country once stretched for 50,000 square kilometres from Montana through Idaho and all the way to Oregon. Now the Nez Perce occupy just under 300 square kilometres of central Idaho – most of it just outside Lewiston, named after Meriwether Lewis, one half of the famous Lewis and Clark mission. Most Americans out here hail the achievements of Lewis and Clark, the explorers who made the epic voyage across the continent to open up the west, but naturally enough the Nez Perce have a slightly different take on history. For them, Lewis and Clark heralded the start of more than two hundred years of injustice. In 1805, when the two explorers and their soldiers came crashing 99

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through their territory with their wagons, the Nez Perce fed them, gave them horses and even acted as guides. In return Lewis and Clark offered a ‘peace and friendship’ agreement. The tribe signed its first formal treaty with the federal government in 1855 in an attempt to protect and preserve some of the best of their land but by the time gold was discovered in the 1860s any notion of peace and friendship had disappeared up the river and a new treaty was forced on them. This reduced their land to a tenth of its size. Some of the Nez Perce chiefs, however, never agreed to the new treaty and under the leadership of the warrior chief known simply as Chief Joseph they began a battle to retain their lands and this eventually saw them forced to fight their way towards Canada. They never made it. After months of fighting Chief Joseph surrendered and his band of the tribe was eventually exiled to reservations in Oklahoma, where many of them died from malaria and other diseases. Today there are just 2000 Nez Perce tribal members who live on their reservation in central Idaho, granted under the disputed treaty. The Native Americans, like the wolf, were seen as expendable. While their territory was plundered for farmland and they were being forced to assimilate, the wolf was being poisoned, trapped and also moved off to make the land more conducive to European settlement. The Nez Perce story is a familiar tragic tale. For tribal leaders like Aaron Miles the return of the wolf is of enormous symbolic significance; it’s about restoring a balance, and helping to manage their reintroduction is an investment in the tribe’s survival. Aaron is one of today’s younger tribal leaders. A big man who exudes a sort of spiritual calm. He’s a thinker and a philosopher who, like most in his tribe, constantly carries the burden of history on his shoulders. 100

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‘To see wolves back in this part of the world is important beyond any political agenda that the United States has,’ he says. It’s everything to our culture and bringing back elements that belong with us. We’ve been here for tens of thousands or so years as Indian people, and to say ‘well, you know what, we’re gonna forgo a part of our culture’, that just doesn’t look right. And as much as we respect the ranching way of life and the farming, all these aspects that make Idaho what it is today . . . I mean, I would hope that those individuals would have the same respect for our culture and way of life and that’s really where the battle is. It’s a testament to the strength and resilience of the Nez Perce that after all that’s happened to them someone like Aaron can still express his respect for the ranching way of life. In fact, over the years the tribe has embraced the ranching culture. They’re magnificent horsemen and cattle herders, and they obviously have an affinity for the land. Not too many years ago the battle with the white man used to happen in the rodeo arena. The Nez Perce are a significant presence on the local rodeo circuit. In fact, one of the most famous of them was Jackson Sundown, who was admired by everyone, including the redoubtable Ron Gillette. Sundown is still perhaps the most celebrated rodeo rider of all time out here. The Nez Perce no longer field their own team at the annual Lewiston Roundup but they love coming to the show. As I sit with Aaron in the crowded stands watching young bull riders defy their own mortality, he has a good laugh at his own expense: ‘There would be people who’d be understanding but I 101

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don’t think there’d be people who’d say, “Oh Aaron, great job on the wolf recovery.”’ He’s a realist. He knows this crowd wouldn’t think much of his take on the wolf and most of them probably resent the fact that the Native Americans are the ones pushing for the wolf ’s return and doing a fair bit of the work driving the recovery programs, but he doesn’t care that much what they think. In fact, if you strike up a conversation with any of the run-of-themill farmers and ranchers out here you quickly pick up on the resentment. A lot of them feel that the Native Americans are using the whole wolf thing to get back at them as an act of revenge. The wolves are a disruptive force for a lot of farmers. They are changing the way people have farmed around here for the last 70 years. A lot of them just can’t leave their flocks unprotected any more and they can’t let their cattle range into the mountains for summer grazing without fear of losing some to wolves. For so long they’d been free to range their cattle over a wilderness area that was cleansed of any really threatening native predators, but the wolf is back and some here don’t like the fact that the Native Americans have a hand in it. Again, big Aaron doesn’t care much what they think. For him, and for the others in his tribe, the wolf is a symbol of renewal and a tangible expression of their legal rights – proof of the power of their treaty, signed not only by the tribe but also by the federal government. The Nez Perce have learned from bitter experience that their only real recourse is to fight with the law onside. As they say, they no longer bring the peace pipe to negotiations, they bring their lawyers. Their legal rights are all they have to protect what’s left. The wolf is an affirmation of that. The treaty gives them the right to hunt and fish on their own land and the tribe is using the power of the law, granted under 102

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their treaty arrangements, to protect the wolf. They have the right to manage the natural resources of their land – salmon and timber being two of the most important – and they are managing and guiding the wolf ’s return as one of their traditional cultural resources. So the wolf is both a spiritual and legal talisman, and the fact that the federal government has intervened on behalf of the wolf and put it on the federal endangered species list is proof to the Nez Perce that their treaty actually has some legal power. This federal law, like all federal laws, is open to challenge, and Ron Gillette for one isn’t going to let some ‘Indian Treaty’ get in the way of what he sincerely believes is a classic states rights issue. ‘Those of us who live here, we’re gonna fight. And we’re gonna fight hard,’ he says. Ron argues that this federal law can be challenged, just as attempts to impose federal gun laws were back in the Clinton era by Arizona sheriff Richard Mack. Mack challenged the federal ruling known as the Brady Bill, which would have forced sheriffs to conduct background checks on anyone wanting to purchase a gun. In what has become one of the most celebrated decisions, Justice Scalia ruled that the states or their political subdivisions ‘are not subject to federal direction’. In essence, Justice Scalia cited the Tenth Amendment, with a ruling that said the states and the federal government are a dual sovereignty but the federal government cannot impose certain directives on the states. Sheriff Mack took on Washington and won, and the Scalia ruling has been interpreted widely ever since, giving hope to anyone who wishes to challenge the imposition of federal power, whether its wolves or healthcare. For a lot of people sheriff Mack became a political hero.

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6 Arizona brewing – Guns, God and Mexicans For a man who’s become something of a national celebrity, Richard Mack lives a fairly modest sort of life. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I didn’t count on the ordinariness that seems to envelop a figure of such notoriety. Mack still lives in the town he grew up in, where he was elected sheriff, although now that his kids have grown up he’s recently moved into a small new project home on the edge of town. No view to speak of, no landscaped yard, a browned-off lawn that is really mostly dirt, and a one-car garage. It’s a totally unremarkable house in what is a fairly unremarkable neighbourhood. The town of Safford isn’t a big place by any means. It sits on a dusty plain in southern Arizona and is as ordinary as any dusty little town in America can be. Like a lot of places, Walmart has pretty much hollowed out most of the heart of the old centre but Safford does manage to support a bit of charm. There’s a nice old preserved streetscape, an old drug store that sells soda from a fountain and still mixes the cola and root beer from syrup, a diner 104

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and a Mexican restaurant, and the old town hall that looks like a western movie set. As we amble down Main Street the former sheriff reminisces about his time as the chief officer of the law, a role that hasn’t changed all that much from the days of Wyatt Earp. Like ambassadors who are no longer ambassadors, or presidents who left office long ago, you can claim the sheriff moniker for life in America, and so they still call Richard Mack sheriff, despite the fact that he hasn’t worn the star for almost fifteen years. Sheriff Mack has walked these streets thousands of times, streets that he says have the same problems as just about everywhere, ‘same little drug problems, family fights, burglaries, property theft, vandalism, kids fighting . . . that sort of thing’, but ‘being able to be sheriff in your own town was a dream come true’, he tells me. Mack is genuine, you don’t get the feeling he’s coming on all-folksy just for a reporter from Australia. As we amble along he greets people with a politician’s ease and charm and they in turn respond warmly to a man who has obviously been a fixture around here for a long time. Of course, in the end being sheriff is all about politics. The sheriffs are elected local officials and they have to stand for office every four years. Richard Mack is popular but the people of Safford did only give him two terms. ‘It ended way too soon,’ he says. ‘I wanted to stay sheriff a lot longer but you know I’ve moved on to different things. I lost the third election and now I’m doing my other dream job – travelling the whole country talking to people about freedom all over the United States.’ Richard Mack’s patch has become huge and his reputation has spread well beyond this little town. To many Americans he’s a fighter for truth, justice and an American way of life that a lot of 105

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them think is under threat. As the man who took on Washington and won, he’s an inspiration to millions of Tea Party activists all over the country, but it is Arizona that made him. In more ways than one Arizona was the Tea Party long before the Tea Party spilled into the national conscience. The ideas and themes that drive and inspire these political activists had been brewing here for years and Richard Mack has become one of the driving philosophical forces behind the movement. He preaches his freedom message to Tea Party meetings big and small, and the night we are in town he is the star attraction at his local Tea Party gathering. The Manor House Restaurant and Rock N Horse Saloon are in a sprawling, modern motel and convention centre built in the Spanish-revivalist tradition – a project-home confusion of columns, arches and terracotta. By seven o’clock it is standing room only in the conference room. As with just about every other Tea Party meeting, the audience is all white and, apart from one young couple with a baby, there isn’t a person under 60. After a prayer and an enthusiastic rendition of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, Richard Mack begins what has become his well-practised spiel. ‘This is a great lookin’ crowd,’ he says. ‘It’s a great statement of what sort of people we have here.’ They were his sort of people for sure, and he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. ‘I was joking with people when I was coming in, that if you believe in the Constitution you’re a radical. You know, if you believe in God and read the Bible you’re a radical. And if you read the Bible and believe in the Constitution – man, you’re really radical.’ At that the crowd erupts with a gusto that belies their generally frail physical health, but out here, in the anxious mental landscape 106

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of the Tea Party faithful, Richard Mack is a folk hero through his successful challenge to the Clinton Administration’s attempts to enforce the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, most widely known as the Brady Bill. The act is named after James Brady, the press secretary to Ronald Reagan who was one of the three others shot during the assassination attempt on the president outside the Hilton Hotel in Washington DC in 1981. Initially reported that he had been killed in the event, Brady survived but was left permanently dis­ abled and became an advocate for gun control, lobbying hard for the bill. The very thought that the bill required local law enforcement officers to conduct background checks on anyone wanting to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer was an affront to gun-packing freedom lovers across the country. Even so, this is more than just a fight about gun laws and gun ownership. For many here it’s a fight about the fundamentals that underpin what it is to be American. Before you can draw a bead on a counterargument someone will cite the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment allows many Americans to assert they have a guaranteed Constitutional right to bear arms. To those who preach this line the issue is black and white, but there is a surprising amount of nuance around it nonetheless. Here’s what the Second Amendment says: A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. But does that mean people have a personal right to bear arms or simply the right to bear arms in a group or militia? The Supreme 107

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Court decided in a five to four vote in the 1980s that it was an individual’s right to possess weapons in their own homes but some legal scholars also argue that the Second Amendment applies only to the federal law, and any state law could override the federal jurisdiction. In turn, that is only held up with the help of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Got it? No? It’s all beside the point now, in a sense, because by the time the Supreme Court got around to making a decision on the interpretation of the Second Amendment there wasn’t much for them to rule on. By then the powerful National Rifle Association had convinced more than 40 states to pass laws that guarantee the rights of individuals to carry weapons, and no state that has passed those laws has ever taken them back. Along the way the NRA has become one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country and gun ownership and the ‘right to bear arms’ have become a symbolic Constitutional line in the sand and a matter of principle. ‘Free men and free women own guns,’ the pro-gun crowd often say. ‘Subjects don’t.’ Or as Richard Mack says even more directly, ‘No other country has a Constitution that guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This wasn’t to go hunting. This wasn’t to shoot duck or deer. This was a right of the people to remain in charge. This is our country. “We the people.” All power generates from the people.’ While there is arguably still plenty of ambiguity around the exact intentions of the wording of the Second Amendment of the Federal Constitution, there’s certainly nothing ambiguous about the Arizona Constitution. In Arizona an individual has the right to carry guns in defence of themselves and the state. It’s a cut-and-dried guarantee of an individual’s right to bear arms for whatever reason they might choose to do so. And they do. 108

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In Arizona any adult can carry a concealed weapon without a permit so you wouldn’t even know if that nice-looking elderly lady sitting next you in the restaurant was packing a Glock, or for that matter if the person you just abused for cutting you off on the freeway might decide to take out his frustration by pumping a few rounds from his Smith & Wesson through your back window. Arizona is also one of the states that allow people to own what they call class-three weapons: machine guns, guns with silencers, short-barrelled rifles and shotguns. This is a state that believes individuals should be allowed to own weapons, carry weapons and use them in self-defence, but it’s more than just a measure of self-empowerment. The Arizona legislature has also used gun laws to stick one up federal power and send a message of principle back to Washington DC. Arizona isn’t just a geographical frontier, it’s a cultural and political frontier as well. Of all the states in America this is the one where that Constitutional mantra of freedom and liberty, enshrined in the 1700s, collides hardest with the social and political realities that are dividing this nation in the twenty-first century. And gun ownership is a symbolically important red-meat issue to a legislature that sees its role as representing a conservative, rural, libertarian population – the sort of people who gravitate to the Tea Party movement, and the sort of people who flock to town halls across the country to hear Richard Mack speak. The same people on the whole who, even after a deranged college student let loose with a semi-automatic weapon he’d bought without question from a local gun dealer, vehemently defended the state’s liberal gun laws and their right to gun ownership. If anything, that sort of crazy violence made them even more determined to be able to defend themselves. 109

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In January 2011, a 22-year-old male walked into a suburban supermarket and unloaded 31 rounds from a Glock 19 handgun as the local congressional member was holding a regular meet-and-greet session with her constituents. Miraculously the congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, survived, but six ­others died and fourteen were injured. The massacre once again threw the spotlight on America’s complicated relationship with guns and particularly on Arizona. The gunman legally purchased the weapon just a few months before from a local firearms store even though he had a well-documented record of drug abuse, and even though there were clear concerns held about his mental state – after a number of disruptive incidents the college he was attending had told him that if he wanted to come back to school he needed proof from a doctor that he wasn’t a danger to himself or to anyone else on campus. By a strange twist of fate, one of those killed was John Roll, the District Court judge who first supported Mack in his case against the federal government. Was it a coincidence that Judge Roll just happened to be in the crowd, one of those who came along to speak directly to their local representative? Richard Mack wasn’t about to explicitly suggest some sort of conspiracy theory but he certainly came close. ‘I don’t have any evidence he was the target,’ he says. ‘It certainly looked coincidental that the best judge in Arizona is taken out in the shooting.’ As the shock and outrage grew over the shooting there were some who were quick to draw an even wider bow and also connect it to the inflated partisan political rhetoric that has so inflamed the political debate all over the country. According to some, the sort of ranting that comes from the more extreme ends of the media 110

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spectrum – the bloviating jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck – can and sometimes does have a wider impact. Just hours after the shooting the sheriff for Pima County, Clarence Dupnik, attracted national attention with his startlingly frank declaration that unbalanced people like the shooter were ‘especially susceptible to vitriol’, particularly ‘the talk that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country’, he said, ‘is getting to be outrageous. And unfortunately, Arizona . . . has become the sort of capital . . . we have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.’ You don’t say something like that and go unnoticed. By speaking his mind Clarence Dupnik injected himself head first into the cauldron of heated rhetoric. Within hours Fox News accused him of politicising the shooting and he became a target of a good deal of that hate and vitriol from all the usual suspects in the days and weeks that followed. The prejudice and bigotry Dupnik was referring to related most directly to the controversial immigration laws in the state, more than the gun laws, but the two issues have become part of the same political cocktail, often referred to in the same breath: ‘We will defend our right to own guns and we will defend our state from the hordes that are pouring over the border.’ And it’s true, Arizona at times can feel like a state under siege. Particularly, for those who live close to the border with Mexico. People like Eugene Kambouris. Eugene lives alone in a little house, among a cluster of other little houses, in what seems like the middle of nowhere. A pair of rainbow-coloured suspenders holds up his camouflaged combatstyle trousers and he has a matching colourful turn of phrase the camera finds equally compelling. 111

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‘Am I a bigot?’ he asks. ‘Yeah, sure. I think everyone is to a degree. Am I a racist? Oh, maybe. Okay. Am I mad and fed up about the illegal problem? Damn right.’ It’s a warm, early spring day and we sit on his back porch looking out to the mountains and beyond to Mexico; it’s one of those clear desert days that seem to make Arizona, particularly at this time of year, seem well . . . just so benign. But this is dangerous territory according to Eugene, and it’s been getting worse. The way he sees it, he is out here on the edge, one of the last defences against a tide of illegal traffic of people and drugs, and since the explosion of the Mexican drug cartels the traffic in both has accelerated. This stretch of the border, known as the Tucson Sector, is just over 400 kilometres long and it is one of the busiest for the US Border Patrol. At times the statistics are staggering. On one day in May 2010 patrol officers captured close to 700 people making the dash to America. The total arrests here in the whole of 2010 amounted to more than 250,000. Most of them are just questioned and turned back to try again another day. Eugene, for one, reckons he has a better way. ‘You put a bunch of law-abiding citizens out there with sniper rifles and knock six or seven of ’em down and leave ’em hangin’ on that fence. They ain’t gonna be comin’ across no more. But you see we can’t do that because we’re so civilised, because we’ve become so politically correct.’ And as for the drug problem, he’s got an answer for that too. ‘A lot of people call me radical. I’ve been, you know, talking wild stuff for a long time. Well, I can fix your drug problem for you. You know, every bale of marijuana that you capture, you lace it – I don’t care with what, you know, strychnine, Drano, whatever – then put it back on the street. And I’ll fix your drug 112

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problem for you, ’cause in time,’ and here Eugene lets go with a little chuckle, ‘there won’t be any more druggies.’ It’s almost hard not to laugh with him but he’s serious. Anywhere else you’d label Eugene a fringe-dwelling extremist, but out here there are plenty of others who say the same things privately. Not that many are prepared to tell it to the camera like Eugene is. Then again, maybe old Eugene has just given up trying to hide his true feelings. He’s at the point where he’s really got nothing much to lose. He’d be in his early seventies, extremely emphysemic and arthritic, and what tolerance he might have once had is long gone. He says he’s got a gun in every room in his house except the toilet, although he’s only prepared to show us one. Even if there is an arsenal he’d be no match for a desperate Mexican, but he loves to talk. He is a bigot and a racist but like a lot of people around here he’s genuinely frightened as well. Hard not to be at least a little bit apprehensive when some mornings you come out your back door and find groups of illegals running across your bottom paddock. These days more often than not those groups are being couriered through by armed men called ‘coyotes’, and they’re not called that because they’re friendly. This insecurity has bred a vigilante culture and the most active of the vigilante groups in Eugene’s neck of the desert calls itself the Cochise County Militia. Eugene is a part-time member. They’re a group of old men, basically with too much time on their hands, who patrol the border looking for ‘illegals’. When they find them they call Border Patrol, which then comes out to pick up the wouldbe immigrant. For all his bluster and tough talk Eugene is hardly in a position to bring them in himself. He can barely get out of his truck for a start, and when he does he can take only a few steps before he runs out of breath. The Cochise County’s ‘Dad’s Army’ 113

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is not well organised by any means but they say they’ve caught up to three thousand illegal immigrants a year going through this area of the border. But there are others in this part of the Wild West who run their patrols like a military operation, and most of them, appropriately enough, live around Tombstone. Tombstone is one of the places seared into American legend. In the 1880s it was a thriving mining boomtown. It’s now remembered as the site of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral – thanks to the 1957 movie of that name that immortalised it. It’s where Wyatt Earp took out three cowboy rustlers in the most famous shootout in the history of the Old West. Today, these 30 seconds of bloody history is the only thing Tombstone’s got going for it. It’s a tourist trap but it’s an endearing low-key sort of place. The old main street has been preserved and actors in period costume take people on wagon rides around town. There’s a re-enactment of the famous gunfight every day at 2 pm, and there’s lots of tacky cowboy paraphernalia to buy. After the show you can stop in at the O.K. Café for a burger and pick up a copy of the town’s bestselling book – America DeFENCEless. This unassuming little café and its unassuming little owner, Carmen Mercer, are the nucleus of the most organised of all the vigilante groups operating on the Arizona border. Carmen, the author of the book, is herself an immigrant. She came from Germany when she was in her twenties, but as she likes to remind everyone she did it all legally, following due process and the law. Now she’s the head and co-founder of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Carmen is a fiery blonde in her late fifties who dishes out burgers and fries and plenty of unsolicited advice seven days a week at the café. At night she transforms into a border vigilante called ‘Scorpion’. 114

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In keeping with the quasi-military nature of the group, the minutemen all adopt aliases when they are out on patrol. They’re overwhelmingly white, mostly – although by no means exclusively – older, concerned citizens who believe the federal government is failing the nation. It’s no surprise there’s a lot of crossover with the local Tea Party groups. At one point the minuteman group had as many as ten thousand volunteers. There’s not so many involved now but it is still a significant and often controversial institution. Tonight we’re out on patrol with a small group of committed vigilantes. There’s Scorpion, there’s ‘Young Gun’ (well he is in his forties after all), there’s ‘Wizard’ and a handful of others. They are mostly dressed in fatigues and they’re carrying a formidable arsenal of handguns, semi-automatics and fully automatic machine guns. They have handheld walkie-talkie communication devices, ladders, picnic chairs and night-vision binoculars. This is a serious business and, of course, in Arizona no one goes out unless they’re ‘locked and loaded’, certainly not to the border. As the darkness closes in and the temperature drops, Carmen and the gang tell us this is one of the so-called funnel points that illegals and drug traffickers prefer because they can get a visual on a blinking red airline tower that sits further up the valley. They call it the finger because it ‘points the way to America’. A while back, the minutemen say, there’d be hundreds of illegal immigrants in this area trying to cross on some nights. Sadly for us, tonight isn’t one of them. Time ticks by. Young Gun constantly scans the desert with his night-vision binoculars – nothing. Finally, some hours after we’d arrived, he spots something and immediately bounds off his ladder and gestures us to follow. 115

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‘Stick with me like glue and be as quiet as you can,’ he says. What follows is a ludicrous dash across the desert with Young Gun in the lead, Scorpion running behind him, and the cameraman and reporter struggling to keep up. If there is an illegal out there hoping to steal into the land of the free he’d be steering clear of this caravan for sure. You could have heard us coming for miles. We tumble across the desert – stopping about every three metres so Young Gun can consult his heat-seeking device. The object is getting bigger, we’re getting closer, but it’s not moving. We finally come crashing through the scrub – and there it is – a cow. Or, in Young Gun’s military speak, ‘a bovine’. Disenchanted and frustrated we start trudging back across the treeless plain to our lookout point but we soon find out we’re not the only ones scouring the desert tonight with heat-seeking night-vision goggles. At first it just sounds like a faint rumble, but as it develops it rises out of the inky black night to become a thunderous roar. The boy scout enthusiasm of Young Gun turns to panic and he starts flicking his little flashlight around in the dark hoping to spot whatever it is that’s bearing down on us with such ferocious intent. ‘Friendly . . . friendly!’ he calls into the blackness, panic rising in his voice as the storming unidentified wall of noise rolls towards us. We can hear it but we still can’t see it, and we have no idea where it’s coming from. It seemed like minutes but was surely only ten seconds or so before Border Patrol come steaming out of the night like the horsemen of the apocalypse and surrounded what they’d obviously thought was a fine catch on a slow night. Wrong. ‘Code Four! Code Four!’ They shout into their walkie-talkies, relaying their disappointment back to their base. Then without 116

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saying much more they turn tail and leave even more frustrated than we were with our bovine. No one knows for sure how many people actually risk an overland crossing from Mexico or how many are actually successful but even Carmen can understand the motivation. ‘If I were living in Mexico,’ she says, ‘I would probably do the same thing that they’re doing, you know. I mean how can you live down there? What with the corruption and the horrible brutality of the drug cartels.’ Still, that’s not about to change her resolve to do what she can to stop what she and others often refer to as an invasion. Here in the border towns the feeling runs especially high. They see the inability of America to control its own territory every day, but many of them are blind to their own contradictions. Eugene Kambouris, for instance, tells me he often used to drive across the border at Nogales to get his teeth fixed and pick up his medicines on the cheap. Mexico might be dangerous but the healthcare is certainly more affordable. He rants about people coming to the country illegally. ‘As soon as they step across that fence without a visa, they broke the law. It’s a crime.’ But then he tells me he’d spent quite a bit of time during his years as a CIA operative working undercover in Latin American hotspots helping to undermine the various socialist governments. He had no plans to stay but he didn’t tell them he was there either. Then he complains about his Mexican neighbour, who actually has been a legal citizen in America for decades. ‘Jesus Galez, he lives next door. The front of his house, you would never believe he was a Mexican. And the front of his house is that way because we tell him to keep it that way. Now you go 117

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round the corner and look in his backyard and, well, you know there’s Mexicans livin’ there.’ Eugene’s own backyard is strewn with old car parts and the eclectic debris from a life of collecting – old road signs, various gnomes and garden seats made out of truck tyres. I go round the corner and actually have a look across to his neighbour’s yard and, apart from an old Volkswagen that’s obviously a labour of love, the yard looks pretty clean. In fact Jesus is out there with his son and they’re burning off garden refuse. They wave at me. I wave back. It all seems so neighbourly but on reflection I think maybe they are having a lend, part of the game they play with the neighbour who likes to make sure they keep their yard clean. Illegal arrivals flooding across the border is an old story and there’s no chance – even if a fence does eventually stretch all the way from California to Texas – that it’ll stop. As long as life looks better on this side people will come. As long as the United States has had legal immigration legislation it has also had undocumented immigration. In fact, the first immigration regulations were probably the prohibition of the importation of enslaved persons in 1808, and that was routinely violated. There’s always been some effort to catch the unlawfuls and turn them back but if they make it in, if they don’t commit crimes or place undue demands or cause undue difficulty for the nation, if they contribute and work and pay their taxes, they’re eventually allowed to stay through an amnesty. Between 1893 and 1996 there have been six major amnesties and dozens of lesser amnesties, and the way the policy here has worked is that there has been basically a two-tier immigration process: lawful and unlawful. That’s how it’s always worked and that’s how it’ll probably continue to work. No one at this stage is seriously talking about deporting the 118

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eleven or twelve million people who are currently estimated to be in the country illegally. Given how hard they work and how they prop up the economy there aren’t too many people who think that’d be a good thing. At some point there’ll be another opportunity for those who have been in the country for a substantial amount of time, who’ve worked hard, established contacts and had children, to become citizens – or at least be allowed to stay legally. The slate will be wiped clean and it’ll start all over again, but for the moment it’s certainly hard to see how an amnesty can be granted in the current political and economic climate. When there’s serious unemployment and people’s houses are under water (repossessed through foreclosure), there’s not a lot of sympathy for immigrants – legal or illegal. The issue has been a convenient political football for those who find it easier to scratch the underbelly of insecurity and fear for political gain. There is a real and dangerous threat from drug couriers and the coyotes in some parts of the border country but there is also no shortage of hys­teria. And the politicians in Arizona have contributed to that. They have helped build what sheriff Dupnik referred to as ‘the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry’. Singled out as the real legislative consequence of the illegal immigration hysteria more than any other law is the one known as SB1070. It effectively makes failure to carry immigration docu­ ments a crime and gives police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant. In essence, it makes anyone who looks even vaguely Mexican a suspect. The fear of deportation at any moment is the reality – it’s a new and terrifying irritant in the daily grind of hundreds of thousands of illegals in the sweatshops, taco factories and dusty fields of Arizona. Even so, viewed from the streets of towns with no option other than a 119

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capitulation to the growing power and influence of the drug cartels, life in the shadows in America is a tantalising and enduring glimmer of hope. Despite the new laws they keep coming at great personal cost. Many get caught, some never make it, yet others are sent back across the border only to try again almost immediately. The tragedies are endless and almost everyone who makes it has a story of a near-death experience in the desert.

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In the last ten years or so the United States – one of the greatest immigrant nations on earth – has arguably undergone the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts in its history. Everywhere you look Latinos are the new face of the nation. They are the gardeners, the plumbers, the construction workers. They are the hairdressers and nail technicians. They are the dishwashers and short-order cooks. In fact the restaurant industry would be in a real crisis without the huge army of mostly illegal immigrants that keep it turning. In the trailer parks on the outskirts of Tucson fear, suspicion and heartbreak are as much a part of daily life as tacos and chillies. It’s ingrained in the existence of the fringe-dwelling illegal community. From the smallest child who runs to warn her mother that a couple of strangers are walking the streets to the furtive glances and the blinds that shutter shut in the trailers as we walk past. In most cases the trailers have long since given up any notion of moving. The wheels have been replaced with concrete and brick 121

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pillars and, although they’re jammed in one after the other, there is a small private space between most that provides enough room for a basketball hoop or the remains of a rusting pickup. Dogs and kids play on the streets and in the compacted dirt. Many of the children here have been born in the United States, so unlike their parents they’re legal residents. But they suffer the consequences of a policy that leaves no room for family sensitivities. Maria, her two brothers, one sister and mother all live in the two rooms of a trailer that like many others has been patched up with bits of recycled building materials. A dangerous and very amateur-looking wiring job is tacked onto the walls inside and a jumble of wires sprout like plastic spaghetti from an overloaded power board on the kitchen floor. Life for Maria’s family is a constant improvisation but their story is typical. It’s a story that’s repeated for blocks and blocks in the dusty trailer yards out here. Only her youngest sister is an American citizen; she was born in Tucson eight years ago. The rest of the family is illegal. Maria was only eight when she first came across the desert with her mother and her brothers. They walked for two days before they finally found a train to jump. Since then they’ve built a life for themselves. The kids are getting an American education but the life is hard. Maria’s mother, Griselda, gets up at 4 am every day to start work in a factory making tortillas. From the job and from recycling metal – old refrigerators, washing machines and aluminium cans – she says she can usually make about $140 a week. The kids all work too; they’re all constantly looking for metal to recycle. Maria washes clothes and makes bread and tamales to sell on the street. But they live in fear of deportation. Griselda has already been sent back to Mexico three times in the past few years. Each time it’s fallen to Maria to look after the 122

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rest of the family. The first time it happened she was just twelve years old. A family friend brought them groceries and they stayed indoors for the three weeks it took Griselda to make her way back across the border again. Maria’s father used to live here too but he was caught in a raid on the factory where he was working as an underpaid illegal a few months ago. It’s the third time he’s been caught. The first two times he was deported; now he’s serving time at a detention centre at the US taxpayers’ expense and Maria says they have no idea when he’ll be released. She fears that another deportation would kill him. The last time he crossed the desert he almost didn’t make it. Maria doesn’t know what will happen in the future. The family has enough trouble living from day to day, but she dreams of one day being a doctor and maybe marrying an American citizen so she can become legal. And like all illegal immigrants she dreams of the next amnesty. For all the hardship and anxiety, though, Griselda says it’s been worth it. ‘I wanted the American dream,’ she says. ‘We think that when we come to this country that we’re going to be a little bit better off and we’ll be able to support our families and get our families ahead. But now that I’m here I work to just pay the rent and the bills and food. Even so I thank God for bringing me to this country and helping me get my children ahead. I am alone with them now but I’m getting there.’ There are millions of others just like Maria and her family and they are remaking the entire country. Salsa is changing America. But Latinos are also increasingly rising to positions of significance. They are the new political power block in this country and they are growing impatient to redress a power balance that has 123

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kept many of them consigned to those menial jobs, poverty and social dislocation. Latinos are organising and preparing themselves for the day they do eventually become the majority in this country, even if many mainstream Americans are not quite ready to accept it. Perhaps the only group to have come close to the one transforming America today was the Irish in the late nineteenth century, when millions of them fled the potato famine looking for a new life across the Atlantic. The Irish imprint on American culture and society was and still is considerable, but the death of Ted Kennedy, the last significant member of that high-profile political family, suggests that the immigrant experience for IrishAmericans is over. It took a hundred years for the first Catholic of Irish descent to reach the White House. How long will it be before there’s a President Rodriguez, or a Gutierrez? Latinos themselves are now also starting to ask that question openly. The 2010 census tells a dramatic story: More than half of the growth in the total population of the United States between 2000 and 2010 was due to the increase in the Hispanic population. In 2010, there were 50.5 million Hispanics in the United States, composing 16 percent of the total population. Between 2000 and 2010, the Hispanic population grew by 43 percent – rising from 35.3 million in 2000, when this group made up 13 percent of the total population. The Hispanic population increased by 15.2 million between 2000 and 2010, accounting for over half of the 27.3 million increase in the total population of the United States. The non-Hispanic population grew relatively slower over 124

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the decade, about 5 percent. Within the non-Hispanic population, the number of people who reported their race as White alone grew even slower between 2000 and 2010 (1 percent). While the non-Hispanic White population alone increased numerically from 194.6 million to 196.8 million over the 10-year period, its proportion of the total population declined from 69 percent to 64 percent. These figures are undoubtedly conservative. Many Latinos who are in the United States illegally would have refused to take part in the census for obvious reasons, and so the figures only confirm the escalating and undeniable transformation that has become so obvious in the past few years. It’s now accepted that by around 2023 more children will be born to families of Latin-American origin than any other grouping, and by 2050 the numbers of Latinos in the United States is expected to be three times what it was in 2005. The Latino influence in America is nothing new. Until 1848 California was Mexican territory and down south there’s always been more than a hint of spice penetrating the frontier towns. In the gunslinger country immortalised in the movies and in the old-time country and western songs, La Frontera was populated with bandidos and troubadours playing mournful cancións on beaten-up old guitars waiting for John Wayne to come riding into town wearing a big white hat. Things are a bit different down there now. Today the streets of El Paso and Laredo are a transit route for cocaine and crystal meth and all anyone can seem to do about it is to gaze blankly through the heat haze across the border as Mexico goes to hell and the drug lords run death squads and kidnapping rackets, the Mexican military runs amok, thousands 125

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of people get slaughtered every year, and the economy sinks further into an abyss. No wonder the Mexicans want to get out. * Long Island, New York, is not the sort of place that immediately comes to mind when you start looking for ways of making the story of this waking demographic giant come alive. But in many ways the East Coast is where the shift is really catching people by surprise. These are the communities that have for generations been largely ‘white and right’, as the pastor of Patchogue, Dwight Walter, puts it. Long Island is a comfortable drive from the towers of Manhattan – a place where the old-money elites and the new finance cowboys build their big-summer weekenders and the commuter class and the small family businesses come to afford a lawn and a nice family. There is a predictable pattern to life, almost a sense of entitlement – whether you are wealthy or not, everyone has a place. Generations of tradesmen have kept the big houses of the country-club set in the Hamptons painted and the gardens manicured; and the middle-management commuter clerks built their three-bedroom catalogue homes on blocks in gritty towns like Patchogue and Farmingville. When the Italians came they opened restaurants and businesses too but they never threatened the equilibrium. The Latino influx is different. It’s happening so much faster for a start. In 2001 in Patchogue the Latino population was around 2 per cent of the total; by 2010 it was closer to 30 per cent. A stroll down the main street today reveals a community in transition. Take a closer look at the businesses and it’s clear there’s something different in the air. The Greeks who first established The Old Olive 126

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Tree restaurant have long since gone. A Latino family is now cooking the gyros and serving the ‘traditional’ moussaka. The old pizza shop has a sign that reads ‘Pizza and Tacos’ on the awning but the handwritten sign on the door says ‘No Pizza – thank you’. Apparently when the new owners first took over the business they thought they might not survive without serving pizza as well but they’re doing just fine now and they’ve given up the pepperoni and the four seasons toppings to concentrate on what they know. The poster in the window of the armed forces recruitment office next door has a picture of a Latina woman in battle fatigues and an exhortation in Spanish to sign up. Down in the bar at the bowling alley the old locals are grumbling about it but it is well past a small change now. The Latino population in Patchogue is entrenched and here to stay. To say it’s taken this place by surprise is an understatement. Few people saw the social consequences, few people, that is, except Dwight Walter. Reverend Walter is a high-energy convert to the cloth. A rakethin urbane Manhattan sophisticate, he looks to be well into his mid fifties despite his shock of vibrant red hair. He gives off the impression that Patchogue is the last place on earth he expected to find himself but he became the pastor at the historic congre­ gational church in 2006. Since then he says he’s seen a community tested to the limits by a growing population of immigrants they don’t understand and don’t particularly like. He says he doesn’t want to appear the Monday morning quarterback but that is exactly how he sounds. ‘You can’t have that amount of change without some response or some reaction, some joy or resentment, something’s gonna happen. You don’t just all of a sudden find yourself in a completely 127

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different neighbourhood than you were raised in.’ And not long after he arrived something truly horrible did happen. Seven local youths went out one night looking for some local sport. Around here they called it ‘beaner hopping’ – bashing Latinos. The sport that night ended in disaster when one of them pulled a knife and stabbed Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero to death. The boys were so casual about it that they didn’t even bother to throw away the bloody knife. The murder shocked Long Island but threw a spotlight on what had become a growing trend – hate crimes against Latino immigrants. The fact that only the boy who actually used the knife was charged with second-degree murder further inflamed the anger in the Latino community. Now the streets of Patchogue are prickling with resentment and a racial crevice is dividing the town, but this could be happening anywhere in the country. The killing came after many warnings about the escalating tension, which were largely ignored by the local white police force, seemingly indifferent to the strains the social upheaval was causing. The demographic shift has torn up the old certainties and, particularly at a time of economic upheaval, it has been a confronting reality shift. To use Dwight Walter’s words, ‘there’s not a lot of joy among the traditional residents of Long Island these days’, many of whom have found that the house next door that had been home to a family of five is now home to seventeen people. When the retired nurse goes into the emergency room with her insurance card, which allows her to get treatment for just $25, and finds that she’s the thirteenth in the line and that no one in front of her speaks English, and they’re all getting treated for free, she gets angry. Here too, like many other places in the United States, there are no white plumbers or carpenters or 128

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artisan tradesmen of any sort anymore. If anyone needs a hedge trimmed, a garden shed pulled down or a foundation poured they only need to cruise the streets to find someone who’ll do it for next to nothing. From first light, unemployed, unregulated Latino men, many of them illegal immigrants, start congregating in groups on street corners. Most will stand there all day long only to end the day disappointed. Some, though, will be picked up to work on casual jobs. The going rate used to be about US$100 a day but the recession has even been driving these prices down – now the best most of them can expect is US$8 an hour. Even then some find they get cheated out of that. They know they are open to exploitation and many of them have started demanding payment at the end of every day after a spate of instances where the contractors failed to pay at all at the end of a long job. It mightn’t seem much but US$8 is often a full day’s pay back in Ecuador or Guatemala, so they keep coming in hope. In Patchogue this is all new and it’s all happened so fast. It’s also a social transition that has a long way to go yet, but if you want to really see into the future you can find it already well entrenched 5000 kilometres away on the other side of the country. Los Angeles is already a Latino capital and there’s an old saying in this county: ‘As California goes, so goes the nation.’ * I ask Luis Rodriguez if he could suggest a good place to conduct our interview – somewhere with perspective, somewhere that might tell a story about this side of a city best known for the make-believe world of Hollywood. He takes us to the top of a hill in an area known as City Terrace, the largest Mexican-American 129

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community in the United States and home to more than a million people in an area bigger than Manhattan. It fits the bill perfectly; you couldn’t be further from the hustle of the movie pitch or the gleaming-white showbiz teeth of the pavement poseurs down on Wilshire Boulevard if you try, and on a clear day like this you could see all the way to the towers of downtown LA. It’s a spectacular enough sight as it is, but what rolls out in front of us is why we’re here. Los Angeles is a remarkably layered city and the ramshackle barrios that spill through the tough neighbourhoods of Boyle Heights are a world away from the big houses and the glamour of Beverly Hills. On the east side of the Los Angeles River it is almost completely Hispanic, mostly Mexican, and it’s been like this now for more than a hundred years. Mexicans first started settling here at the end of the nineteenth century. More came after the Mexican Revolution and from then on Boyle Heights became a major funnel through which legal and illegal immigrants have poured on their quest for the elusive American dream. West of the river used to be almost exclusively white – in the affluent neighbourhoods of Westwood and Santa Monica – or mostly black – in the projects of South Central and the grid pattern of squat little houses that sit fortified against their own violent neighbourhoods with barred windows and cyclone fencing in places like Watts. But things are changing, fast. While the Latino population in LA has always been a significant presence, in the last twenty years or so it’s exploded, pushing out further east, south and, more significantly, west as well, all the way to The Valley. Through white areas and black areas alike Latinos have changed the colour of the entire city. ‘We’re just spread out everywhere now,’ Luis Rodriguez says. 130

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‘The East side is still very Latino but now we’re all over this area.’ In some areas, like the San Fernando Valley, a lot of the whites who used to live there have just up and moved. Luis Rodriguez says some of the locals remember when the shift started in the early 1990s one of the cafés putting up a sign in the window that read ‘No Mexicans and No Dogs Allowed’. Only twenty years ago The Valley was all white, now it’s almost all Latino. In other traditionally black areas African Americans are also gradually being pushed out. Watts, for instance, was once considered the black heart of the city. This was the ignition point for generations of unrest and discontent; from the riots in 1965 to the confrontations sparked by the beating of Rodney King in 1991. Now Watts is turning decidedly brown and all over South Central LA Latinos are becoming the majority. Even the public schools around the affluent white areas of West LA now have a majority of Latino students. It wasn’t like that 40 years ago. There were no Latinos that I knew about in the Westwood Public School I attended in 1970. My father had taken a position in the English department of the University of California, Los Angeles, that year and our family moved into a neat three-bedroom box in Westwood. As a nineyear-old fresh from the relatively benign mono-cultural world of the Canberra suburbs, the realities of life in the California public school system was something of a shock. These were the days of enforced bussing. Black kids were bussed into white neighbourhoods, often kilometres from their own homes, in an effort to break down the unofficial segregation. In most cases this strategy completely failed. It was social engineering that ultimately did nothing to bridge the economic and cultural divide. In my own experience the black kids never mixed with the white kids; in 131

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fact, at this school things got so bad they had to reintroduce a sort of segregation after the earthquake of 1971 rendered some of the school buildings uninhabitable and they were forced to take up most of the playground with prefabricated temporary classrooms. All that was left was one basketball court and, of course, on the basketball court there was just no contest. The black guys ruled. ‘Hoops’ was their game and they weren’t going to give an inch of this precious asphalt over to anyone. Ultimately the teachers had to step in to keep the two groups apart. It sort of summed up the whole bussing failure really. Today it’s Latino gangs who rule the schools and they’re not bussed in. If they can afford it white families send their kids to private schools in West LA. The gang culture is ingrained in the underbelly of LA life and it has been for generations. But where it used to be about regional identity, community and petty crime, it’s now mostly about drugs, a change that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s as the population of Latino immigrants exploded. The gangs are evident everywhere, but the core of their activity is in the depressed inner-urban south and east of the city where there are an estimated 700 different gangs – more than 500 of them are Latino, the rest are black. There are 230,000 gang members in California and 80 per cent of the crime in LA is gang related. It is a cancerous, destructive culture defined by violence, addiction and the revolving door of the prison, but for many it’s also a refuge from a world they feel holds no promise or opportunity. Luis Rodriguez has written perhaps the most powerful firsthand account of gang life ever published. His book, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., is a bestseller and he has become a truly inspirational and transformative figure. Always Running is now required reading in many schools and Luis 132

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is actively engaged in helping young people from underprivileged backgrounds. He’s the go-to gang expert, and for more than 30 years he’s been conducting workshops, readings and talks in prisons, juvenile facilities, homeless shelters, universities and schools. What he talks about is his story, his journey through gang life, a journey that began – as it often does – at a very early age. Luis was just eleven when he joined the ‘los lomos’ gang. ‘Nobody forced me to join a gang,’ he tells me as we look down over the sprawling barrios that tumble towards LA. ‘I grew up in a barrio, mostly Mexican, very poor, very similar to where we are now, with hills, no sidewalks, dirt roads, shacks. It was a little Mexican neighbourhood surrounded by white suburbs. Joining the gang made sense because you didn’t have any other friends except the people who took care of you.’ Today Luis is no oil painting but he’s a handsome enough, well-built man in his mid fifties. When he was younger he says he was an ugly kid. A beating when he was nine left him with a badly fractured jaw that made his chin stick out. In the way kids are, his deformity became his identity. He was known in the gang as ‘Chin’. His chin is still prominent but time and a few extra pounds have softened his features. In the gang I took on a new identity. I became a new person. The way we dressed, the tattoos, we were different from ­others. We had baggy pants, long-sleeved shirts and we walked differently so it gave me an identity when I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know my Mexican roots because I’d been removed from it. I didn’t know anything else other than this is my barrio, this is my gang. So I joined to get respect and a sense of belonging to a new family. 133

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By the time he was eighteen Luis had lost 25 of his friends to violence or drugs. Four of them had been killed by police. He was a heroin addict and he was facing a six-year gaol term. It was then that he decided to turn his life around. But Luis is an exception. Getting out of the gangs is hard work and often dangerous and not many make the transition so successfully. Gang members are not hard to recognise. They have a style of their own defined by different fashions and ‘colours’, as made famous in the movie of that name. But the easiest way to identify a gang member is by the tattoos. Many of them have the names of their gangs scrawled up their necks or in the more extreme cases across their face and forehead as well. Obviously this is not the sort of advertisement that helps you get a straight job or start over anew outside the gang culture. The Jesuit charity Homeboy Industries has been working for decades to try to change that and help young gang members take the path of reform. The most popular service they have is a free tattoo-removal clinic. Every day the waiting room is packed full of hardened gang members hoping to be lasered clean. It’s pretty confronting seeing a 150-kilogram tattooed gang member in tears as a specialist starts shooting the three-centimetre-high capital letters etched into each cheek with his surgical laser gun. But that was Big Mike, and his tears were threatening to spill through the plastic swimming goggles he’d been told to wear by the doctor wielding the de-inking weaponry. I first met Big Mike in the waiting room before the operation began – one of about half-a-dozen or so tough-looking dudes waiting for their chance to remove their past. He was certainly formidable but he was holding hands with his girlfriend and spoke quietly when we introduced ourselves. His tattoos included 134

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a huge L in heavy black, block lettering on one cheek and an M on the other, signifying his gang, the Lopez Maravilla Rifa. ‘I’m going to change,’ he almost whispered, looking slightly embarrassed. Any remnants of the tough guy were now gone. This would be the first of what would have to be at least ten painful visits to clean up his face. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Little by little, so I can better my life and quit going to gaol and stuff. People are scared of me.’ Mike was making a brave move but plenty don’t have the courage or the motivation. Getting into the gang is easy, getting out is hard, and it is still a significant part of life in the barrios. It is also one of the many clichés that blights the Latino experience, and in this gang-infested city Boyle Heights is gang central. There are more gangs in Boyle Heights than anywhere else in the country. It is one of the most violent places in America but walking down Cesar Chavez Avenue during the day you wouldn’t know it. Eating and drinking in the local bars and restaurants is one of the more pleasant and diverting ethnic experiences you can have anywhere in the world. Boyle Heights is truly little Mexico. The streets move to a different syncopated rhythm, at once laidback but also pulsing with an almost erotic tension, like a late-night rumba in a sweaty bar. No one speaks English unless they have to and the tacos from the caravans that dot almost every corner are spicy, cheap and authentic. On any given night thousands of people cruise the bars or gather on the top floor of the huge Spanish-arched El Mercado de Los Angeles to eat, drink and be serenaded by duelling mariachi bands. It’s an almost comical event as tables of large extended families and friends compete to pay the bandleader US$5 to strike up their choice of a list of well-worn Mexican folk songs. There’s 135

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a full brass section, violins, guitars and a couple of barrel-chested troubadours at either end of the cavernous hall. It’s loud, energetic family-flavoured hedonism. This is how it’s been around here for generations. But something else is beginning to happen in Boyle Heights and it’s a reflection of a growing confidence and impatience in a community that is starting to realise it’s no longer an underclass. The place is being gentrified but not, as is usually the case, by gays or white middle-class professionals. It’s being dragged up in the world by the slow but gradual economic and political empowerment of Latinos themselves. People like Josefina Lopez. Josefina is a young writer and director who’s dedicated herself to sketching out a representation of the Latino experience in film and on the stage. Like many, Josefina was smuggled across the border as a young girl. She was undocumented – one of the millions of illegal immigrants – until she became a citizen at the age of 25 through an amnesty. Her best-known work is the film adaptation of her play Real Women Have Curves, a funny, poignant and three-dimensional depiction of an immigrant Latino family. When she was growing up she says she really believed she was an alien. ‘It was rare that you saw any Latinos on television. And the few times that I did see Latinos on TV they were always playing the criminals,’ she says. Josefina’s parents were hard-working dignified people but on TV all Latinos were bad. ‘That’s when I said something needs to be done about it and I decided to take up writing.’ For many Latinos in the film and theatre world Josefina is an inspirational figure but she still runs up against prejudice in Hollywood. African Americans have a prominent place in 136

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mainstream American culture but she says she’s constantly being told by movie execs that Latino films just aren’t commercial. Real Women Have Curves proved them wrong but it didn’t change attitudes. Josefina is one of those who are impatient for change. ‘Latinos are waking up,’ she says, ‘but we do have to demand positions of leadership instead of waiting.’ The truth is that just by sheer weight of numbers Latinos are becoming a force to be reckoned with, and the 2010 census will change a lot. Congressional seats will be reshuffled with more going to the big-growth states in the south like Texas, Nevada and New Mexico. The growth is almost entirely Latino and, outside the Cuban communities in Florida, Latinos are voting solidly for Democrats. It’s changing the political balance. More than 80 per cent of Latinos who voted in the 2008 presidential election ticked the box for Barack Obama, and both major political parties have started to take notice of what’s happening. On the surface Latinos should be natural Republican voters. They are for the most part Catholic, family oriented and conservative. They are entrepreneurial, mostly small business operators, and many have real reservations about abortion. But immigration is the number one issue and corralling their vote has been a lot easier for the Democrats than it has for the Republicans. George W. Bush tried pretty hard to win them over, he made a big deal of slipping Spanish phrases into speeches when he thought the audience might be appreciative and he started to take a softer line on immigration – at least rhetorically if not quite in practice. But on this issue, like on so many others, the Republicans find themselves dancing too much with the Tea Party crowd, and the immigration priorities of that lot are not exactly appealing to the Latino demographic. 137

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It’s a nice twist then that one of the more eloquent and forceful Latino spokespeople comes from the Tea Party TV network of choice – Fox News. Geraldo Rivera is a bit of a caricature of the Latino media stallion with his big handlebar moustache and tanned visage. But like a rat with a gold tooth and a good patter he’s worked his way into the alleyways of the most confrontational conservative network on US television and become something of a Latino human headline over the years. ‘If the Republican Party doesn’t accept a more compassionate and measured view on immigration,’ he says, ‘then in my view the Republican Party will never be a national majority party in this country again.’ You can imagine how that goes down with some of the other stars at the network. But Geraldo is a disarming, charming bloke who has some well-formed views on the Latino experience and he’s certainly not afraid to air them. In fact, as with Josefina, it’s become something of a personal mission. If he doesn’t do it he says who else will? Who else will counter the ranting of the likes of Lou Dobbs, another outspoken former TV shock jock who has made himself infamous and extended his career by banging on endlessly about the scourge of illegal aliens taking over the country? Geraldo has no doubt that the shift is on, that the United States is becoming an Hispanic nation and that the change is happening faster than the mainstream would like to believe. ‘There’s a huge swathe of the country where Latinos are already the dominant voice, politically, socially, economically and culturally,’ he says. ‘Have a look at a city like San Antonio in Texas. It’s already there. Or East LA for that matter. These are communities where people shift with ease from Spanish to English or 138

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Anglo-cultural traditions. It’s the new America and the new face of America.’ Not only that, this is the face that America needs. Almost every­where else the Western world is having to cope with an entirely different demographic crisis: a rapidly ageing population with increasingly expensive needs. In the West, only the United States stands apart, and it’s precisely because of this growth in the Latino population. This is an overwhelmingly young demographic and these are the people who will support the social security and old-age pension needs of the future. Geraldo Rivera describes the Latino population growth as a ‘massive game-changing event’. He says, ‘the sooner Americans come to grips with that and realise it’s a net positive to their own economic and social situation the better. Latinos are coming. They are here. They’re going to be recognised. They’re going to stand up at some point and there will be Latino senators and God knows, going forward, even a Latino occupant of the White House.’ In that regard Geraldo is only parroting what many Latinos truly believe is just an inevitability. Barack Obama has opened the way to political empowerment for them as much as he has for African Americans. But it was the symbolic appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United States of America in 2009 that really moved Latinos from all walks of life. In a community not overburdened with heroes her ascension to the high court was a thrilling, uniting moment. Plenty of Latinos have told me they cried when they saw Sotomayor being sworn in. It was as if finally anything was possible. You get a feel for that if you spend any time at all with some of the new crop of Latino politicians. In the weeks just before 139

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the census landed in mailboxes around the country I took to the hustings with Tony Cardenas. Tony’s a former real-estate wheeler and dealer who decided to make a life out of his social conscience. Even in this downturn he could have been making a lot more money selling houses to the expanding Latino community in the San Fernando Valley but he is part of the Latino consciousness. He was also very generous with his time. This is another thing that often surprises me about Americans who are for the most part remarkably forgiving of the media, television in particular. Tony Cardenas is a politician, of course, but there was nothing in it for him to give over a day to a crew from Australian TV. We followed him through a tour of his electorates’ nursing homes before the 2010 census was taken as he worked the games rooms and the lunch hour trying to overcome some of the traditional reluctance that many of his constituents have of giving any government authority any of their personal information. It’s a hard sell trying to tell someone who came here as an illegal immigrant to own up to their existence in an official form, but the message he’s giving them is clear: this census is an opportunity to rise above the fear. There is no hope without representation, and political power through numbers is the path to immigration reform. It’s a difficult message but he and other community leaders did obviously manage to convince some. No doubt there were still plenty of others who didn’t overcome their fears and suspicions but this census did shift the paradigm nonetheless. Latinos are becoming a force to be reckoned with even if the mainstream in America is still reluctant to admit it. Latinos know that in the future ‘change’ in this country will have a distinctly Latin face.

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8 Little Havana – Big influence

If there’s any group in the Hispanic community in the United States that knows how to influence political power it’s the Cubans. In Cuba they say it’s impossible to talk about their country without talking about the United States, and in many ways it’s also impossible to talk about the United States without referencing Cuba in some way. Down on Calle Ocho, the main thoroughfare of Little Havana in Miami, they’ve been talking about little else for 50 years. Here on the corner of 15th Street the old antirevolutionaries have formalised their gatherings in a fierce and continuous domino competition in a small park named after Máximo Gómez, a famous military commander in the Cuban War of Independence, who curiously enough refused nomination for the presidency in 1901 because he distrusted politics. They don’t seem to mind politics here, though, and every day, rain or shine, they gather to smoke cigars, to play dominos and to talk about Cuba. This is the generation they call ‘The Historicals’, the ones who 141

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fought the Castro revolution and who fled to the United States. They were the foot soldiers for the Bay of Pigs invasion, they rallied and lobbied two generations of American politicians and they’re still fighting the old war. They mightn’t look it in their uniform of high-slung dress shorts belted over the paunch, polo shirts and baseball caps, but they are the most politically active and politically successful of almost any of America’s immigrants. They have had sway and influence far beyond their numbers. But as the Cold War fades from memory that influence is waning too. Their world is changing; even old historical warriors like Pepe Hernández can see it. Francisco José ‘Pepe’ Hernández first arrived in Miami in 1960 as one of the many exiles from the Castro-led revolution. He went back to Cuba as part of the ‘underground’ opposition and was gaoled for two years for taking part in the failed US-sponsored invasion in 1961. By 1964 he was back in Miami, plotting, lobbying and organising through his powerful Cuban American National Foundation. Back then, Pepe and the others thought they’d be in the United States for only a few years. It’s obviously turned out to be a longer exile than any had ever imagined. They naïvely thought the Bay of Pigs debacle would succeed. They certainly thought they’d be back in Cuba once the Soviet Union fell apart. In fact they were so confident at the Cuban American National Foundation in the 1980s that they even mapped out a sort of Peace Corps plan for Cuban Americans who wanted to go back and help in the reconstruction effort. ‘We thought if we pushed hard enough it would crumble,’ Pepe says. But geopolitics and the Castro family’s genetics, things well beyond their control, ensured that the Cuban Revolution endures even as every one of history’s seismic shifts over the years 142

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has given them hope that one day the regime will disintegrate. And so much of this has defined the Cuban experience and the American experience. The Cuban missile crisis was the symbolic nadir of the twentieth century’s great ideological standoff. Like the exiles themselves, that little island republic, less than 150 kilometres south of Florida, has had influence way beyond its size. These days even Pepe accepts that the Cuban problem will only ever be resolved when the Historicals on both sides disappear. When I met Pepe at the modest office of the CANF he was about to mark the 50 years since he first left Cuba as an exile. Pepe still has the smooth Latin looks of someone twenty years younger – he’s a man who wears age well. We sat and talked under a wall of photos showing him shaking hands and posing with some of the most important and influential American politicians of the past two generations. Almost every president or presidential hopeful was there, keen to be seen with Pepe – a testament to the power of the Cuban vote in American politics. Even though until very recently they almost always voted as a fairly reliable bloc for the Republicans, it was obviously important enough for the likes of Bill Clinton and others from the Democratic side of the equation to be close to Pepe and the CANF. The Cuban impact on political races has been significant over the years but their impact on policy has been even more so. As a bloc they are still an important factor in Florida and US politics but they are now no longer as reliably partisan as they once were. ‘The young people,’ Pepe tells me, ‘they came here looking for something different. They were not really politically minded and they don’t really participate in the politics as much as the older generation. They’re also more liberal in their social opinions. 143

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And there’s another group – the children of the historical group. They’re more liberal too.’ In 2008, 70 per cent of Cuban Americans under the age of 35 voted for Barack Obama and 30 per cent for John McCain. The reverse was true for those over 40. Pepe Hernández is still a fierce advocate for democracy in Cuba even if the last 50 years have tempered his political passion somewhat. But there has been one constant in Pepe’s life that hasn’t changed: the Castro family’s grip on his country. ‘Yes our initial goals were to really confront the regime by armed force. We saw ourselves as liberators of the Cuban people and we took that fight very personally. This isn’t the case with us now,’ he says in a languid, heavily accented lament, ‘because we realise that our role at the present time is a different role. We can’t force democracy or democratic principles on a nation. It’s something the Cuban people have to select and fight for themselves, inside the island.’ If the folks at the CANF can do anything to help they will. A majority of young Cuban Americans may not care much for politics anymore but there are still enough firebrands to fill the desks at the foundation. There are young ideologues the equal of anything Pepe Hernández was in his own youth. ‘If you ever do get to Cuba,’ one young guy says after I’d expressed my hope that one day this posting would take me there, ‘make sure you get in touch.’ At the time I didn’t think any more about the invitation. I’d been in the States as a correspondent for nearly eighteen months and had been trying to get a visa through the Cuban representation in DC almost since the week I arrived. Nothing – nada, a dead end. Then without explanation – an example and a warning of what was to come – something changed. 144

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I assume it was more the result of a change of the guard at the representation level in DC rather than a change of policy but it was enough. To our surprise the next visa application began to progress through the various levels in a way that no application before it had. Our calls were being answered and our producer in Washington was even granted a personal appointment with the attaché. And then, without warning, we were told the visa had been granted but only for a specific two-week period that was to begin in just over a fortnight. * The José Marti International Airport in Havana is the first reminder of the years of Soviet patronage that bankrolled this outpost of ideology just 150 kilometres from the United States. Having spent a good deal of time in the old country and the former Soviet republics I have a pretty good eye for the markings of Soviet social engineering, a facet of collectivist bureaucracy that is particularly apparent in architecture and public spaces. The paintwork is usually the first thing that gives it away; every new coat sloppily applied with little or no preparation year after year, so that the layers just pile up on each other like the growth rings in the crosscut of a tree. Next is the lighting, or rather the lack of it. Soviet-built airports have the same dingy, dark mustiness about them. There’s a smell of mould and strange industrial cleaning liquids, and then there are the immigration booths, sitting in a row with no line markings, ensuring a sense of uncertain chaos even before you’ve officially arrived. There are invariably only two booths open to deal with the at least two or three simultaneous flight arrivals and, even though there seem to be dozens of uniformed officials standing 145

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around doing not very much, no one moves in to ease the load or speed up the process. It’s much the same from Chis‚ in˘au to Kiev and Tbilisi – or at least it was in the mid 1990s when I was a Moscow-based correspondent. Things have actually changed in some of those places since then but you can bet that, except perhaps for the short-sleeved uniforms and the tropical heat, arriving in Havana is still pretty much the same as arriving in Minsk. Like me, Louie had been posted to Moscow in the past and had done his fair share of time in the former Soviet republics as well. It quickly became apparent to the two of us that Cuba was Belarus in the Caribbean in more ways than we could have imagined, from the security apparatus through the media minders from the ministry of information right down to the industrial ham-like product that passes for meat at the hotel breakfast buffet at the Hotel Nacional. The grand Hotel Nacional de Cuba is a place that likes to remind the visitor of its rich history at almost every turn. There are pictures of Winston Churchill on almost every wall along with a collection of fading black-and-whites of the countless other stars who’ve came and gone over the years – Nat King Cole, Marlon Brando and Ava Gardner are all there, as is, of course, Ernest Hemingway. In fact it’s hard to go anywhere in Havana without running into the ghost of the old man. His picture is plastered over every bar he ever drank in around the old city and grey overweight men in their sixties dressed in the tropical bloomers and the safari shirts he favoured during his Cuban period roam the streets posing for photographs with the tourists. Presumably the hotel at least was a lot more efficient back in Hemingway’s day. Today there are a lot of people in the hotel’s 146

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uniform standing about but considerable chaos and uncertainty at the check-in desk. Eventually we’re through the paperwork and sipping our first mojito, waiting to meet our government-approved ‘fixer’ and listening to what will become a relentless succession of earnest renditions of ‘Guantanamera’ from the wandering hotel house band. The Buena Vista Social Club movie did a lot to bring Cuban music to the world but after a week at the Hotel Nacional I swear you’ll never want to hear ‘Guantanamera’ again. It’s our fixer who gives us the first indication of the real difficulties that lie ahead, though. For this shoot we are joined once again by my old friend Michael Maher as producer. A distinguished former ABC correspondent in his own right, Michael now lives and works in New York City. He has a great eye for television and structure but he’s also a fine critic with a first-rate bullshit detector. Our first meeting with our local governmentsanctioned minder wasn’t promising. From almost the moment we heard that our visas had come through Michael and I had been in fairly constant email contact with our appointed chaperone. We’d given her a fairly detailed wish list of things we were hoping to film and people we wanted to interview. All through this process we’d been led to believe she was a Canadian true believer who decided to make the revolution her life work and Cuba her home. The Cuban Revolution, in particular, attracts a certain breed of middle-class political activist. They are generally well intentioned, but like all flag-wavers they’re entirely blinkered, fervent defenders of the system and vehemently anti-American, of course. These days, like the Cuban leadership, they’re getting a bit long in the tooth but their zeal generally remains as impervious to reality as it always was. And 147

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so it was with this woman who, although she affected a Latinised version of a fairly common Anglo name, actually turned out to be an ashamed American – hence the effort to pass herself off as a Canadian – who had fled the United States during the days of the anti-Vietnam protests, holed up in Africa for many years fighting the good fight and then washed up in Cuba – the last sanctuary of the politically tunnel-visioned. We learned later she was conflicted in so many more ways. She was the daughter of a famous Jewish scientist who had helped develop some of the most deadly and efficient of America’s Cold War weaponry. Here in Cuba she is among the revolution’s most loyal servants and, as many of them do, she wallows in the hypocrisy of the well-connected true believer. She constantly sings the praises of the ‘Triumph of the Revolution’ but she works for hard currency and lives a life of relative privilege, the like of which is reserved only for top party officials. She has a fine house in a nice suburb all to herself and, unlike ordinary Cubans, she has unrestricted access to the internet, even if it is ‘only a dial-up’ service. Our list of interview candidates we were hoping to get included a local monthly journal editor, a filmmaker, a dissident and the most senior person in the government we could hook. We thought Raúl Castro would be unlikely but we were hoping that his daughter, Fidel’s niece Mariela, might be a possibility. She had recently given an interview to the BBC and she seemed at least willing to put herself out there as the face of the new generation and argue the case for the family legacy. All requests we were told had to go through the official ministry of foreign affairs media unit and, as was the way with these things, our fixer was appointed to us by the ministry minder with responsibility for media relations with Australia and other dwellers at the lower 148

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end of the diplomatic rung. It goes without saying that we weren’t considered a priority. After a few days sitting around waiting for something – anything – to happen it became pretty clear our two weeks of visa might well run out before anything was officially organised. Also our request to meet with the young dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez was met with a tirade of revolutionary rhetoric from the minder. It didn’t take much to wind the old firebrand up to a fullblown lecture, but the lecture was followed by threats. ‘I don’t think that would be wise at all,’ she says, full of indignant political puritanism. ‘That would not be looked on kindly by the ministry and could even jeopardise the chance of the ABC ever being allowed back in the country,’ she insists. Not only that, she makes it plain that she will have nothing to do with any efforts to find the young online dissident or any other critic of the regime, despite the fact that we did try to press on her that we weren’t here to film a tourist commercial. The line between propaganda and journalism wasn’t something she ever really had to consider and she wasn’t about to start now. At that point I gave up on official channels completely, forked out the US$5 the hotel demanded for their shaky, unreliable internet access in the business centre, and emailed my young friend at the Cuban American National Foundation. Surely they could help find me a dissident. * Óscar Chepe answered the phone before it had even finished the first ring. That wasn’t so much an indication of his enthusiasm to engage with whoever it might be that was calling but rather a direct consequence of the size of the apartment that he shares 149

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with his wife, Miriam. Óscar is now in his seventies and Miriam isn’t that much younger. To say they’ve had an eventful life would be an understatement. These two once-loyal party members have seen the highs and the lows and now they and a lifetime’s worth of belongings are squeezed into a tiny two-roomed apartment on the outskirts of Havana. In a country with a penchant for spraying slogans of revolutionary encouragement on almost every blank wall, Miriam and Óscar are rare; they are true revolutionaries, and they’ve paid dearly for their beliefs. Óscar came out of the jungles fighting with Fidel. He was a militant activist in the socialist youth movement and in 1959 he had every confidence that the revolution would deliver on its promise and his dreams and aspirations. But you get the feeling that by 1960 he’d changed his mind. Shortly after Castro and his band of guerrillas had successfully stormed into Havana, Óscar began studying economics and even worked with Fidel in a group he created for economic research. That’s when he says he first started to have problems. ‘I wanted to give my opinions,’ he says. ‘So I could help.’ Unfortunately his opinions on economic matters didn’t fit the accepted paradigm. Óscar was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. That was his first prison term. After that he was rehabilitated and went on to serve in the Foreign Service in various positions. Eventually he was posted to Belgrade where he was all but forgotten until Fidel made an official visit in the 1980s and sent him home for sympathising with the ideas of perestroika, which was emerging within the Soviet bloc at the time. He was demoted to a position at the National Bank of Cuba but before long his ‘opinions’ got him into trouble again and he was expelled from the bank, accused of being a counter-revolutionary. 150

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Back then Miriam was working as a senior official in the ministry of foreign affairs and as an adviser to the government and to Fidel (there’s a picture she still has of herself sitting next to the president at an important international conference) but her promising career was brought to a swift end as well when she was asked to make a choice: leave your marriage to a counterrevolutionary or leave your job. Eventually she was fired from the ministry and from the communist party due to what they called ‘a lack of political confidence’. After that both Miriam and Óscar entered the twilight zone of ‘independent journalism’ in Cuba, effectively declaring themselves opponents of the regime and social outcasts. As Miriam says ‘the consequences have been huge’. For nearly twenty years they’ve been quarantined in their two little rooms. There’s a political police office in the apartment above them that keeps track of their every move and taps their phone. Even so, Óscar and Miriam continued writing articles critical of the Castro regime for publication abroad. Óscar also hosted his own radio show on Radio Marti, a US-backed radio station that broadcasts into Cuba. In 2003 Óscar was gaoled for a second time, convicted of pursuing activities that were deemed to be against the integrity and sovereignty of the state. The evidence was a collection of newspaper clippings that detailed meetings between representatives of the United States and Cuban dissidents, among other things. The government also alleged that the money they found in the apartment – US$13,600 – was proof that the pair was being paid by the US government. Óscar was just one of a group of dissidents rounded up at the time, and they became known as the ‘Group of 75’. Óscar was sentenced to twenty years during a closed trial that lasted only a few hours. Nineteen months later he was released 151

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after considerable international pressure and because his health had deteriorated so rapidly. Miriam says the last thing the government wanted was to have Óscar die in prison and deal with the international condemnation that would have followed. The whole experience has obviously been a traumatic one for both Óscar and Miriam. She spent much of the time trailing her husband from gaol to gaol, trying to get in to see him and at least administer some healthcare. By the time he came out, she says, he was in a very bad way. He had serious liver problems and had lost a lot of weight, but the worst impact was the psychological pressure they applied. ‘In Cuba,’ she says, ‘they don’t apply torture that you can see, you know, they don’t leave any scars outside. But in your mind they do a lot of harm.’ These days Óscar is still recovering but he and Miriam remain unbowed, even though during the long interview we conducted with them they both came close to tears at several points while discussing their lives and their commitment to at least being able to express themselves despite the continual harassment. ‘You have to get used to it,’ Miriam says, ‘because if you don’t, or if you lose your nerve or simply don’t say anything, then you become a miserable person because you can’t even express your feelings or your thoughts and we’ve always fought against that. We have to be strong and we know what we are doing is right and we are entitled to exercise our rights.’ The five of us – myself, Louie, Michael, Miriam and Óscar –  plus a camera and lights barely squeeze into what is their office/ living room; the only other room being their bedroom. A kitchen is sectioned off by a curtain at one end. On the wall there are a few photos – the only reminders of a long and certainly eventful 152

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life. There’s a snap of the two of them in Dubrovnik, looking much younger and well dressed, during the time they were posted to Belgrade. And there’s a shot of Óscar in the police car that hauled him off to court – it was taken by a foreign-news agency photographer. Óscar, who looks every one of his 70 years, is still fighting. If he felt he had nothing to lose before, he and Miriam both feel they have even less now, but they also sense that there is a real change underway, that a tipping point of sorts has been reached. The changes if they aren’t made, he says, will happen anyway. ‘It’s inevitable, because the acknowledgement that the system has failed is already present. All Cubans now know this and are conscious of it. There is a deep sense of frustration because the dream that the majority of Cubans had no longer exists, there is only a nightmare left. People want change and nobody can stop that.’ History has shown time and again that once the social contract is broken there is no turning back. If the government can’t actually deliver on the trade-offs required to keep people from expressing themselves, if the people don’t have jobs and can’t feed their families and if they see no future, then something will break. That’s what’s happening in Cuba – but it’s a slow crumbling rather than a decisive and defined break. Without an economic sponsor – other than Venezuela, which is filling the gap the Soviets left to a certain degree by selling Cuba hugely discounted supplies of oil – the country has reached a crisis point. It can simply no longer afford to keep everyone employed. The acknowledgement of this was the decision to lay off more than half a million state workers and to allow those unfortunate enough to be thrown into fending for themselves the rare privilege of being able to sell 153

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pirated CDs and DVDs by the side of the road, or to cut hair or repair furniture – but not apparently to actually build anything new and sell it, or to actually set up a shop and sell fully imported legitimate DVDs. So it’s happening – but it’s happening slowly. Certainly Óscar and Miriam are rarities. Not everyone is willing to speak out or has the confidence to do so without expecting their lives to be turned upside down or to be turfed into prison. In Cuba there are very few people with that sort of confidence unless they’re born to it like Mariela Castro. Mariela is the charming, smiling, youthful face of a regime that knows it has a PR problem and certainly knows that it has to deal with the foreign media in some way. After all, why else would she speak with us? Her father Raúl certainly wouldn’t, and getting anywhere near Fidel has been impossible for years. Although he has agreed to the odd targeted interview, such as the curious one he gave to the Atlantic magazine in 2010 in which he wanted to show off his grasp of international affairs and what he believed was the now inevitable war between Iran and the United States – he also seemed to suggest that even he didn’t think Cuban socialism was working properly anymore. No one else from the government wants to talk at all. In fact, for much of the time it looked like we wouldn’t even get to speak to Mariela. Not getting any comment of any sort from the regime would have made our story a much less interesting one for sure. That was the point we pressed repeatedly with our old firebrand minder, who in turn would simply inform us that the requests had been made and that ‘Nuerca’, the comrade in charge of Australian media relations within the ministry, was looking after it. As it happens comrade Nuerca had failed to deliver on any of our interview requests so far. With just a day to go before we had 154

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to leave the country, it took a sit-in by an angry Michael Maher to get any movement. Eventually at the eleventh hour we were granted access to Mariela Castro and a more cooperative comrade you could hardly hope to find. When we did finally sit down with her for the interview she was warm, engaging and terrifically camera friendly. She was also happy to address any question I threw at her despite having told us at the start that she wasn’t really in a position to be a political commentator. But as a young Cuban producer at APTN said when she learned we’d done the interview, ‘Well she’s allowed to speak, of course. We’re not.’ Suffice to say Mariela Castro delivers her lines beautifully. Unlike a lot of her fellow countrymen and women, Mariela is a woman of the world. Given my very rudimentary knowledge of Spanish and her inadequate English we find we can have a comfortable conversation in our common understanding of Italian, and she proves to be delightful company – witty, warm and engaging. She is also a strikingly beautiful woman who’s clearly never had any need for unnecessary exposure to the sun. She’s married to a Sicilian photographer and she tells me she travels with her family to Sicily regularly to see her husband’s relatives. We talk about her children, about Italian food and about her passion for art and her lifelong commitment to sexual equality and gay and lesbian rights. She runs a sexual orientation clinic in Havana – a sort of refuge for gays, lesbians and transsexuals, which seems like an incongruous sort of career but even princesses have to do something, and it certainly keeps her engaged. As such, Mariela is described as Cuba’s chief sexologist. Her National Center for Sex Education is widely credited with lobbying the government about gay rights and with preventing discrimination, but there are more than a 155

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few prominent gay activists who accuse her of demanding total loyalty to the regime and of blocking efforts to establish gay rights groups that are independent of the government. Mariela is also a patron of the arts. Everyone who’s anyone in the arts world – at least the privileged officially sanctioned arts world – knows her and courts her. She took us to an exhibition opening at the home of the famous Cuban artist José Fuster. Known as the Cuban Gaudí, Fuster has decorated his house and most of his neighbourhood with tiled murals. He is a well-­ travelled member of the Cuban bourgeoisie. Officially sanctioned artists are in fact among the privileged few in Cuba who seem to be free to come and go as they please. It’s a unique little club that appears untroubled by the ordinary financial concerns of most Cubans and certainly appears to be fêted by the regime. Cubans have taken great pride in their artistic achievements. Sometimes this manifests itself along the Soviet model of big, traditional, classical dance and theatre companies but also shows up in the patronage of smaller and more creative modern artists. The trade-off, again, is that none of them are overtly political in any way that is a threat to the regime. They spend a great deal of time travelling abroad to ‘cultural’ festivals promoting the Cuban brand to an audience that is all too often keen to embrace the regime without criticism, simply because it has been such an integral part of the great ideological struggles of the twentieth century. These are audiences and forums that are often a little too quick to embrace their inner anti-Americanism but refuse to acknowledge the pitfalls and shortcomings of a regime that affords only a certain select few the freedom to express themselves. Mariela Castro knows this, of course, and plays to it. She is part of the Cuban ‘royal family’ and an important part of it, but 156

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she’s not stupid. She knows things are changing and the world is a different place from what it once was. She knows Cuba is going to have to adapt, just as her ageing father knows it will have to change in future, but she too isn’t prepared to acknowledge that the system itself is broken. ‘I also don’t like how the communist party has been operating up to now,’ she tells me. ‘It’s now renewing itself, thank goodness; it was time.’ If the communist party isn’t capable of renewing itself then the people will have to ask for other things, she admits, but she makes it clear that the other things they ask for will have to be sanctioned. ‘We know that what is known as “the opposition” are groups of mercenaries paid by the United States and the European Union to intervene in our domestic affairs, based on their own desire for domination,’ she says in the classic circular reasoning peculiar to demagogues and one-party states. In effect, she means, ‘we are with the people and the people are with us, so until another party comes along that can summon the support of the Cuban people they will be considered illegitimate and until and because we are the people we will decide when that time has come and what party that might be.’ Or, as it was explained to me by a learned Cuban intellectual and party loyalist, Cuba doesn’t need multi-party democracy because the communist party itself has factions – one more orthodox, one moderate and the other more radical. This is, apparently, already providing the same democratic balance as exists in the United States, for instance, where the power is shared between the Republicans and the Democrats. You can’t help thinking it’s that sort of naïveté that’s led a nation 157

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that used to be the world’s biggest exporter of sugar and coffee to become such an economic basket case and now a huge importer of both. And yes, you hear the stories about the great Cuban health system and the organic agricultural revolution that’s taking hold in the country, but when most of the doctors are being shipped overseas to Venezuela, to South Africa, to the Middle East, and when ordinary Cubans have to wait for surgery, when their families have to pay extra backhanders to get medicine and a hospital bed and watch as hard-currency health tourists strain the infrastructure even further, and when the country can’t feed itself or harvest the sugar that they do still grow on the collective farms without the help of donated Brazilian harvesters, you know that reality has overtaken dogma. And you know that once the doors are open enough for a young DVD street entrepreneur to earn in one day ten times what he earned in a state job in a month, there is no turning back. And you know that something’s not right when a group of musicians is made up of highly educated and skilled engineers, metallurgists and chemists because they earn so much more playing for tips in the tourist bars of Havana’s old city than they ever could dream of in the professions for which they trained. One of the other real problems for Cuba is that it’s running out of friends and sponsors. The place has been in a crisis now for more than twenty years – ever since the Soviet Union collapsed – but has managed to cling on to the principles and ­ideologies that have so devastated its economy with a combination of patriotism, dogma and cheap oil from Venezuela. As long as the ‘revolution’ remains wrapped in the defiance of Yankee imperialism then there are other interests outside the country that are ready to help prop it up. But Hugo Chávez and other leaders of the Latin American left are no longer going to 158

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be enough. A new revolution is happening in a way that the old men of the past just can’t understand – a generational shift. Turning off the internet for the majority of the people in Cuba isn’t going to work. Young people know what’s going on around them outside the Castro vacuum seal. Importantly, they know what they don’t have but they also know what they are missing: opportunity. On the whole Cubans are a proud lot, they are proud of their independence, they are proud of their country’s achievements, and many of those who have stayed are even proud of their country’s role in the Cold War standoff. But the grandchildren of the revolution are growing more and more frustrated by their lack of engagement with the world. It’s just not possible to continue to isolate them and the pace of change is starting to pick up. When the old men in their jungle fatigues finally drop off there’s no doubt that pace will pick up even more. Few people here expect it to end well. Not that most people think about politics all the time. They don’t. They get on with their lives. They put up with the petty bureaucracy, the rations, the poor pay and the inadequate and overcrowded transport. They accept they may never be able to own their own car or even leave the country of their own free will. They ignore the sloganeering and the dogma but they also know they’re in a sort of limbo. Life is not quite what it should be or what it’s inevitably going to be. There’s a mist of uncertainty that covers everyone. The elderly, of course, are worried about change. They’ve worked their entire lives for the revolution. They want a comfortable and dignified exit but they’re worried about their pensions and about healthcare. But the younger generation, the grandchildren, has no nostalgia for the ideals of revolution. 159

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They don’t all express it but the national stagnation has a huge impact on their lives. ‘Young people always want rapid change,’ Mariela tells me during our interview at the sex clinic. ‘They always expect things immediately.’ But when you talk to these kids, they don’t want rapid change; they want meaningful change. They are true believers in themselves and their country, but not necessarily true believers in the system that their parents and grandparents have forged. They don’t have regular internet access but they want to engage the world. They don’t want to live in a bubble. Like Kaysa, a striking 17-year-old with a classical dancer’s body, they are quick to simply state their determination to succeed. Kaysa has been studying classical ballet since she was four, and now she’s a star of the Spanish dance school. She wants to be a famous dancer. ‘I work hard to be able to achieve that some day,’ she tells me. We meet in the Grand Theatre of Havana, which isn’t quite as grand as it once was but it is still an imposing institution. This is the home of the Cuban national ballet; like the Bolshoi in Moscow, it is the favoured state institution, a grand nineteenth-century showcase for nineteenth-century arts. It seems a sort of strange Soviet-like affectation in the Caribbean but there’s something that has always attracted dictatorships to the pinnacles of European culture. This being Cuba, a former colonial outpost of Spain, the dance here has also branched out into classical Spanish dance. When we arrive we follow the hypnotising, pulsing rat-tat-tat through the marble foyer and up the resplendent staircase, down a dark and peeling corridor to a room at the side of the building. Inside, behind a patched-up door, twenty beautiful young 160

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dancers are being put through their routine by a demanding and equally beautiful older instructor. She pushes her sweating young protégés through their steps, stopping one to correct posture, lifting the chin of another sinewy, athletic 16-year-old boy. The dancers are fixed with concentration; sweat pours from their faces. They whirl and stomp across patched-up uneven floors. Dust swirls through the bands of sunlight that creep in through open French doors. The room is small but the ceilings soar above the dancers and the French doors offer a glimpse of the capital and the crumbling façades of the other great buildings that stretch on up the Paseo de Marti. Dance at this level requires dedication, perseverance and dis­ci­ pline, and for every one of those who make it there are thousands of others who fall short. Not surprisingly, the crumbling home of Cuban dance can barely contain all the intense, youthful exuberance. These kids are passionate and extremely talented, and they certainly want to be the very best dancers they can possibly be. Like all ambitious, curious, gifted young adults they dare to dream but will their dreams take them beyond the strict physical and political confines of their little island home? Kaysa wants to travel the world as a Cuban dancer. Not to travel ‘just for the sake of it’, she says, ‘but if you go to another country and they recognise you and say, “look at this Cuban, how good she is, an excellent dancer, one of the best in the world”, that’s what’s important’. Kaysa is no young dissident. If anything she recognises that she has been afforded some great opportunities by the system but she also loves American pop music. If Shakira ever came to Cuba she says she’d be the first in line at the box office. She won’t be able to buy her tickets online that’s for sure. Maybe change will come without turbulence. Maybe the old 161

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regime will see that it has to shift. But it’s hard to be optimistic. Since well before Kaysa and her fellow dancers were born Cuba has been on the verge of a change that just never seems to come – the tyranny of a transition that’s always out of reach. Is it possible that this is the generation that will be able to step out into the world again? And can they do it and preserve their identity, their unique Cubanness? Cuba struggles with the paradox of its location. The 150-odd kilometres that separate it from the United States has overwhelmed the island, dictated its politics, split families and destroyed its economy through an embargo that’s lasted nearly 50 years. In the end the conclusion about Cuba is one of overpowering sadness and apprehension. Like our idealistic fixer, the regime is clinging to the old political certainties because there is no other option but to admit that it was wrong. That it failed is self-­evident. Havana is in a state of melancholic decay. The once-great buildings and boulevards are crumbling away and Cubans themselves are uncertain about their future. Change is coming. Towards the end of 2011 the regime allowed property sales for the first time but Cubans are still restricted to owning just two residential properties. Car sales were legalised as well but the import of new cars was still tightly controlled so Cuba still has one of the most overpriced car markets in the world and few ordinary Cubans can afford to take advantage of their new freedom. But this is another incremental step. In Cuba it does feel like history’s pivot is now in sight. As one well-connected Cuban said to me just before we left, ‘Even though there are those who don’t want Cuba open, Cuba will open in the end. But I have to say I’m not clear what the future will be. I hope that it will be good, but . . . ’

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9 ‘Too close to the United States, not close enough to God’ In the United States Cubans have used their political clout and their geopolitical influence to great advantage. They are immigrants with a special status like no others. Cubans who reach American soil are automatically accepted into the country; within one year, they are guaranteed permanent residency. Effectively, everyone who leaves Cuba for the United States is considered to be a refugee and is allowed to stay indefinitely. By way of contrast, the United States hasn’t accepted a single Mexican refugee since the Office of Refugee Resettlement began keeping records in 1983. But there are plenty of Mexicans who would consider themselves refugees escaping a drug war fuelled by the insatiable demand north of the border. Mexico is a victim of its own geography. Drugs have always been big business here, sandwiched as it is between the biggest drug market in the world and the world’s most efficient drug producers. Not so long ago the drug distribution network was overseen by six cartels. They each had their own territory and they each 163

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had their own responsibilities. There were difficulties – often violent ones – but left to themselves the cartels usually worked it out. It had been that way for decades. And the politicians pretty much left them alone as well. There was a modus vivendi, a status quo, that seemed to work well for everyone – certainly for the Americans – but after the flowering of democracy in 1997 the tacit deals that existed before were no longer viable. Let the democratic sunshine in and all of a sudden everyone’s noticing the weeds and, more specifically, talking up a war on drugs. It started with pressure from the Americans in the late 1990s but it really went downhill when Felipe Calderón scraped into office in the questionable election of 2006. Mexico, he said, was no longer going to turn a blind eye to the rivers of narcotics coursing through the country from south to north. Looking for legitimacy and public approval he ordered the army in to go to war with the cartels. Many of the cartel leaders were killed or imprisoned but that just served to cause more splits and even more turf wars as the surviving cartel gang members fought each other for control of territory. The war on drugs unleashed a sleeping giant. As the former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castañeda put it, Calderón had ‘kicked the beehive without any protection, without any anti-bee disinfectant’. He unleashed a monster that has resulted in the death of more than forty thousand people since 2006, and it’s estimated that ten to fifteen thousand of them were innocent bystanders who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s no wonder Mexicans want to get through the fence to the United States. Living in the border towns is almost impossible. The 20-foothigh steel barrier is lit up at night and patrolled around the clock on the United States side by border guards in their distinctive 164

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white-and-green F150 pickups. The American side is clean and well kept with little or no development save for the fence, the border posts and the surveillance roads. On this side life seems to wash up against it in a relentless mournful tide. Walk along the fence at the split border town of Nogales after dark and the culture shock is stark. Nogales, USA, is fast asleep, but the night’s only just starting up over in Nogales, Mexico. Here the kids are still out on the streets playing, squealing and laughing. Music from one of the houses wafts towards the border – it’s a slow Mexican love song and a group of men has joined in singing the chorus. The smell of garlic and frying onions drifts over with the music. The occasional car horn wails from somewhere deeper inside Mexico, dogs are barking. Mexicans love to party, to eat and to drink. The bars and restaurants are only just getting busy. Not too long ago the streets would have been full of Americans, cruising the seedy bars, soaking up the cheap beer and tequila and the cheap sex. For years after the Second World War places like Nogales and Juárez were crawling with vets. The years after Vietnam were boom years, and by then cheap drugs had joined the list of cut-price escapism. By the late 1990s the Americans were gone. The drugs had pretty much taken over and they came with the added risk of a possible violent confrontation with the wrong end of a cartel foot soldier. The drug gangs are kitting themselves out like an army. They’re patrolling the streets in homemade armoured cars and even fashioning their own tanks and APCs out of scrap metal and old Fords. These days the whorehouses of Juárez are simply too dangerous for the new generation of battle-scarred American vets, and they’re even too dangerous for the whores. Many of them have either moved north as illegals or, like Gracia, taken refuge in bigger safer cities further south in Mexico. 165

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I met Gracia in a bar in an up-market neighbourhood of Mexico City. I declined her invitation to part with my money for her services but it was a slow night and she was happy to talk. Gracia was young – in her early twenties – and she told me she’d come down from Juárez with her mother a few years ago. ‘We just left everything behind,’ she says. But life in the city is tough. The money she earns during the day as a preschool teacher isn’t good enough to survive in the big smoke so she’s taken to turning tricks around the bars and boutique hotels of La Condesa. It is pretty lucrative, although she says she isn’t planning to do it for long. She wants a family of her own one day and to get more qualifications – ‘Maybe be a real teacher at a real school . . . that would be good.’ She doesn’t think she’d ever go back to Juárez now. ‘Maybe I’ll try to get to the US one day soon,’ she tells me. The futility of the war on drugs and the drug cartels is nowhere more evident than in Juárez. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes is still the leader of the dominant Juárez Cartel despite a full-on army occupation of the city. He’s a tough nasty piece of work not averse to sending his henchmen out with orders to decapitate or even just slowly torture and mutilate his enemies. As a result Juárez is one of the most dangerous places on earth – more dangerous than Baghdad or Kabul. More than three thousand people were killed here in 2010 alone; it is quite simply the primary transportation route for a drug-trafficking business now said to be worth up to US$40 billion a year. The war on drugs is not just killing Mexicans, it’s killing parts of the country too. For a start, it’s costing billions of dollars to keep the army fighting on its own soil, but even more damage is being done to the economy. Tourism was Mexico’s biggest money 166

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spinner but the tourists are fleeing to safer more predictable destinations. One of the hardest-hit tourist spots is Acapulco, once the hip playground for the Hollywood A-list stars, led by the likes of Johnny Weissmuller, Errol Flynn and John Wayne in the 1960s, all of whom used to hold court at the town’s once-famous hotels. Hedy Lamarr was married in Acapulco, and Lana Turner lived here. In the old days 90 per cent of the tourists would have been foreigners – Americans and Europeans mostly. Now almost the only tourists here are Mexicans and the official figures for Acapulco show that foreigners now make up less than 10 per cent of all visitors. The cliff divers, though, still risk their lives for the tourists’ cameras at the El Mirador hotel. It’s an extraordinary sight – a sort of rite of passage for the kids who grow up around the resort. Young boys, mostly, climb the cliffs more than 30 metres high and launch themselves into a narrow channel of the churning North Pacific Ocean below. Further round the coast the Hotel Los Flamingos sits perched like a fading Polaroid on the cliffs. The bright pink paint job, the thatched roofs and tropical bamboo theme seem just as dated. The whole place has a worn weather-beaten feel to it – far from the glorious hard-drinking party hotel that was once the favourite haunt of the Hollywood gang. The pictures are still there on the walls, a sort of hall of infamy recalling the good old days, but the rooms and the swimming pool are all but empty. On Thursday nights locals come to drink beer and sing along with a piano man playing old-time Mexican hits, to eat the local specialty – a sort of glutinous seafood stew, and watch the sun set over the ocean. The songs even seem stuck in a time warp but it’s a long way from the highball hedonism of Acapulco’s golden years in the 1960s and the 1970s. It once even attracted the political glitterati – the Nixons spent their 167

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25th wedding anniversary here, and the Kissingers honeymooned here. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck, the names of the famous who once frequented the area trip from the tongues of some of the old entertainers, like Cisco Alba who rubbed shoulders with them all in the nightclubs and discos that used to pump all night along the Costera. These days Cisco still sings the old Elvis and Sinatra hits but the big clubs aren’t what they were. One of the few regular gigs he still has is crooning to locals at an Italian restaurant down in the plaza. Cisco is well into his seventies now. He sports a long mane of dyed auburn hair, impossibly white teeth and a fine silver medallion drapes across his chest left bare by his almost completely unbuttoned bright purple silk shirt. He’s a professional from his era, through and through. Cisco lives a modest, quiet life but the mementos of his wild days line the walls of the small apartment he shares on the hill above the bay with his wife. There he is in bell-bottoms and a ruffled shirt walking barefoot across the road with the other members of his band in a mock-up of the Beatles Abbey Road album cover. There he is smiling with Sammy Davis Jr in the nightclub of the Acapulco Hilton. Posters from the early sixties show a handsome young man in a tuxedo posing with a microphone – in one a swirl of colour trails off like an imagined slipstream behind him. ‘Of course, the nightlife in Acapulco then was fantastic, you know. Nightclubs like Whisky-A-Go-Go. But now?’ From the windows of his apartment Cisco has a fine view of the full graceful curve of Acapulco bay. The years have left their scars on the strip. A few half-finished construction sites sit next to the older art-deco hotels and apartment blocks. He points out to the beach. 168

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‘You see in the Costera, in the main avenue, many places closed. For rent, for rent, for rent. But in the sixties and seventies, wow! There was a lot of business.’ Acapulco has a few fundamental problems. One is that it faces a fair amount of competition for the tourist dollar these days from other tropical Caribbean destinations. The fact is it hasn’t really moved with the times. It’s looking decidedly down at heel and Cisco acknowledges that today’s cashed-up tourists want something else. He still loves Acapulco, though. It gave him every­thing. The beaches are beautiful, the water is warm but he says, ‘Some travel companies they try to put Acapulco down. They are taking advantage of our troubles.’ Cisco concedes the other thing the tourists want is security. In 2011 Acapulco was at the heart of one of the most vicious turf battles raging across Mexico and became the country’s second most dangerous city. Three cartels were fighting it out for control of the territory and severed heads dropped on the boardwalk don’t make for good tourism promotions. In fact the severed head has become the Acapulco warning of choice in the last few years. One day there’s a clutch of fifteen or so lined up along the boardwalk, the next there’s five in a plastic garbage bag dumped outside a local school. The most violent years were 2010 and 2011, yet it’s a war that shows no sign of ending. In fact, across the country the war is now largely being fought against, and between, three of the most successful and naturally most brutal of the cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel is considered an old-school traditional drug cartel. The Los Zetas was founded by former soldiers and is certainly the most aggressive and violent and is fast expanding its operations into other areas of criminal activity like extortion rackets, kidnapping and human trafficking. The 169

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third, the Gulf Drug Cartel, is also well armed and determined. In the middle of it all there are other criminal outfits that have begun to copy the main cartels’ style and tactics and carry out criminal activity using the cartel names. So what’s the solution? There’s a big argument going on about legalising the drug trade. If you can somehow take the financial incentive out of the business then the killing would stop, so the argument goes. But Mexico’s drug problem is tied to the United States and despite the fact that fifteen states across the border have touted legalising marijuana there’s a long way to go before it’s a national trend and no one’s heading that way with cocaine or crystal meth. No one in the United States or in Mexico, though, really believes legalising hard drugs like cocaine or crystal meth or even a nationwide legal market for marijuana is a real possibility. But there are plenty of others who argue America could and should be doing a lot more to help. This is America’s problem as much as it is Mexico’s. In fact, Mexico doesn’t have a drug problem as such – certainly nothing on the scale of the United States. The justification for the war from the newly elected President Calderón was that the cartels were taking over the country and they were infesting and corrupting local bureaucracies and governments. But now that well over forty thousand people have died people like Jorge Castañeda say the premise was all wrong to start with. The Calderón Administration hasn’t given the country any proof that anyone was taking over anything and, as he says, Calderón ‘hasn’t been able to arrest and sentence a single politician in five years now, not one, not a mayor, not a governor, not a congressman, not a senator, not a former official, nobody’. When he’s in Mexico Castañeda lives in an ultra-modernist Mexico City condo. Inside, a large bookshelf runs the entire length 170

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of the apartment. There are hundreds of books, many of them in English, a language he’s more comfortable using than most native English speakers. There are also dozens of photos of him with various world leaders and significant global figures – Hillary and Bill Clinton, Shimon Peres, François Mitterrand, George W. Bush, the former Mexican president Vicente Fox, and even Fidel Castro and the Pope. This is a man who likes his visitors to know he’s had a hand in some of the big issues of the last few decades, and he is a powerful presence, with the confidence and arrogance that often comes to people who’ve spent a great deal of time occupying positions of power and influence. But in his case his arrogance is certainly well deserved. Castañeda has been an important contributor to the intellectual and political discourse here and abroad. He seems to write books at the speed most of us write emails and he’s constantly on the move. As I arrive he’s just finishing a photo shoot for an international magazine and he’s squeezing a few minutes in for me before he jets off back to New York to no doubt crunch policy and international relations with some of the other big names of world affairs. Castañeda, like a lot of Mexican intellectuals, spends a considerable amount of time in the United States. He knows the country well; he gives talks and lectures there and writes books that sell well there too. He has the ear of some very important people. As the former foreign minster of Mexico he commands a lot of respect and he has a lot of contacts, but not many in America want to hear his solution to the drug crisis. ‘If the Americans want to stop drugs in the United States, let them do it,’ he says. ‘I’m telling the Americans, “Look it’s your problem. We’re not telling you to reduce consumption, do whatever the hell you want. But do it on your side of the border. You 171

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want to put an army on the border to stop drugs from entering the United States; you put your army on your side. You bring them out of Afghanistan and you put ’em in Texas. That’s fine with us. Not on our side.”’ For all that, Castañeda is also one of those who rejects the idea that the drug war is leading Mexico along the path to being a failed state, as many have begun to argue. It might be costing a lot of blood and money but Mexico, he assures me, is bigger than the war. ‘We have a failed war,’ he says, ‘but we don’t have a failed state. We have a US$300 billion budget. It’s an enormous state that has money, that has oil, that has an extraordinarily competent financial administration, a foreign policy, a diplomatic corps, a central bank that’s incredibly orthodox and rigorous. This is not a failed state.’ But tourism, yes, that’s in trouble. ‘We know what the terrible impact all of this has had on Mexico’s image abroad. You’re here reporting on the war,’ he concedes, ‘you’re not reporting on the beautiful Mexican beaches and asking Australian tourists to come here.’ Fair enough. But the state is failing a lot of its people and many of them are getting increasingly angry about it. The drug cartels’ turf wars are paralysing the entire nation and the fingers of violence snake all across the country. Jorge Castañeda may dismiss the failing state argument but plenty of ordinary Mexicans think their country is failing them. Many seem defeated by it all, and occasionally a death – a particular death – will amplify the nation’s growing pain and anxiety. Twenty-one-year-old Juan Francisco Sicilia’s gruesome death was one of these. There are plenty of theories swirling around about why Juan 172

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Francisco and his six friends were eating at the popular seafood bar so late that Monday night. What is known is that shortly after they left they were kidnapped, tortured and killed, their bodies dumped in a car. Inside the car the police found a message with the letters CDG – the initials of the Gulf Drug Cartel organisation – scrawled across it. CDG is one of the cartels contesting territory around the pretty colonial town of Cuernavaca, almost midway between Acapulco and Mexico City. Juan Francisco was just one of thousands killed that year but he also happened to be the son of a passionate and much-loved Mexican poet, Javier Sicilia. When his son was murdered, Sicilia put his pen to poetry for the last time, writing of silence. After he’d finished he proclaimed that poetry is dead. It was his last poem. But from that moment Javier Sicilia was anything but silent. He became the rallying point for a mass campaign that carried the slogan ‘Hasta la madre’, a colloquial Mexican saying that roughly translates as ‘enough is enough’. The father’s grief, his powerful expression of it and his determination to actually see something done about it, inspired hundreds of thousands to take to the streets and voice their frustration. They don’t believe the war is even worth fighting and, like Sicilia, many people think a better option would be to try to sue for peace with the cartels – to come to some national consensus that would stop the slaughter. Is it naïve? Probably. But the government is currently spending US$10 billion a year fighting the cartels and many Mexicans believe the money could be better spent elsewhere – on fighting corruption, on boosting police numbers, and on more defensive measures like protecting communities. 173

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They also overwhelmingly think this is a problem caused and fuelled by their northern neighbour. Just two months after his son was killed we follow Sicilia as he and a few hundred others set off on an 80-kilometre march from Cuernavaca to a rally in Mexico City. One woman on the march sums it up succinctly. ‘The trouble is,’ she says, ‘we’re too close to the United States and not close enough to God.’ By the time the march gets to the outskirts of the city it has grown to well over a hundred thousand people. When it reaches the final destination in Mexico City’s central square there is twice that number. Struggling with his own emotion, at times choked by his own tears, Sicilia addresses the nation and, more particularly, the Calderón government from a stage at the end of the square. ‘We still believe the nation can be reborn,’ he says. It can grow again out of these ruins, to show the lords of death that we are standing and didn’t relent in defending the lives of all the sons and daughters of this country who still believe it’s possible to rescue and to rebuild the fabric of our towns, our neighbourhoods and our cities. If we don’t do this we can only pass on to our children a house full of helplessness, fear, laziness, cynicism, brutality and deception, where the only things that reign are the lords of death, ambition, excessive power and complacency and complicity to the crimes. Javier Sicilia’s grief has become a very public grief but many in the march that followed him were harbouring their own private heartache. There were hundreds there who had come holding aloft pictures of their own dead children. And there were quiet 174

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people like Javier Morlet who came because he just didn’t know what had happened to his daughter but knew enough to know it was connected in some way with the cartels. Adrianna Morlet had left the family home in Acapulco for the big city to study at the National University of Mexico. Then one night in September 2010 she disappeared. She was last seen leaving a friend’s apartment. Adrianna was 21, a beautiful girl. Her parents, naturally enough, have been completely devastated by her disappearance. Javier has sold up his business in Acapulco and now lives full time in Mexico City, combing the streets trying to piece together his daughter’s last movements. He needs to know what happened but he’s been doing what he can without much, if any, assistance from the police, who he says are just too overwhelmed and under-resourced to do much anyway. Less than 2 per cent of violent crimes in Mexico actually get to court. But the police have convinced him that his daughter is probably still alive. As the cartels, and the Los Zetas Cartel in particular, have grown in power and wealth they have also branched out into other lucrative criminal activities and human trafficking is one of the most lucrative there is. Javier Morlet says all the evidence suggests his daughter was kidnapped, sold into sexual slavery and flown out of the country – probably to somewhere in Asia. In the end that’s why he agreed to talk to us in the hope that someone, somewhere, in the broadcast region where the ABC satellite service reaches into Asia, will recognise his daughter and recognise his own pain. ‘You can’t eat, you can’t sleep,’ he says, the many sleepless nights and months of torment weighing on him heavily. ‘You cry many times, especially in the nights. It’s very difficult to wake 175

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up in the morning and it’s very hard when you go out on to the streets or to the authorities and the government and when you come back to the house and your hands are empty of information. Empty about what happened to her . . . it’s very hard.’ In much of Mexico City these days it’s hard to imagine the violent underbelly that has long been its reputation. For the most part, you can walk around with the same impunity as you might in any other big city in the world. Sure there are bad areas, there is violence, but it’s not like you see it everywhere. The bars and restaurants, the shopping malls, the public areas, the old city and the monuments are all relatively safe but this is a big place and out there among the 23 million people who call the city home there are some bad things happening for sure. Javier Morlet says the country is in desperate need of moral leadership and he believes Javier Sicilia is the man to bring it. ‘We need a poet for a president not a politician,’ he says, ‘because poets can say what we can’t say. They can express their fears. Normal people can’t express their feelings. And poets don’t have compromises with the mafia, they have compromises with their heart.’ Which is perhaps why poets make such poor politicians. Back in America, though, normal people have been finding plenty of ways to express themselves without the help of poets or politicians.

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Whether it’s the Tea Party or the Wall Street occupiers there is obviously a fractious and angry mood about – hardly surprising. Many people in the United States have spent the last four years hammered by circumstances beyond their control. More than sixteen million are unemployed, many millions more are underemployed, and even those with work have found that their incomes have fallen. Many more have been affected by the realestate downturn. Across the country property values have fallen, foreclosures are still at record levels and borrowers are under water. All this has a knock-on effect felt at almost every level of American life, but particularly at what you might call the ­extraneous edge of the spending equation. If they’re doing anything Americans are doing it cheaper. The family holiday, in particular, has become more of a luxury and, while they may not be going to Acapulco anymore, if they are taking holidays they’re looking for cheaper holiday packages. As it always is in a downturn companies are also spending less on perks .

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and on conferences and conventions. Nowhere on the American side of the fence shows the extent of the fall quite like Las Vegas. Las Vegas is down, but like Elvis, still refusing to die. The city has for decades been the glittering representation of the far-flung reaches of American excess. The pleasure and entertainment capital of the richest nation on earth is now, though, on its knees. But like a desperate gambler the place is still certain that the next winning streak is just around the corner, and that America and its people will return to the big-spending, carefree growth that has fuelled this fantasy for the past 60 years. This is one of those places where the wound of the American recession is at its most visible. There are others too, of course, but Nevada is free-enterprise central. This state has no income tax and a free-for-all business culture that attracts billionaires, fortune hunters, dreamers and schemers, and leaves the losers to fend for themselves. It’s a model that’s worked well in the boom years but it’s a model that for those who don’t succeed makes nothing but dreams and avarice. Right now, in the worst recession this place has ever experienced, the model is broken. All along the famous strip the skeletons of half-finished casino construction projects stand as testament to the financial meltdown and the folly of the big corporates that played on, refusing to acknowledge the world as they knew it was unravelling. These high rollers, like Sheldon Adelson, the elderly chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., lost billions of dollars during this recession. Ultimately he found he just couldn’t keep borrowing; the loans dried up and his stock price crumbled faster than a gambler’s overdraft. In 2007 Adelson’s company’s share price was US$150 and, according to the Forbes list of richest Americans that year, he had 178

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an estimated net worth of US$28 billion. Then came the fall. The stock price dropped more than 90 per cent and Adelson is said to have lost nearly half his fortune. Around the same time our own James Packer, Kerry’s little boy, also threw a good chunk of his inheritance at an ill-timed US$2.7 billion purchase of Cannery Casino Resorts. He bought in just as the subprime mortgage disaster was starting to unfold and two Bear Stearns hedge funds went bust. You might have thought that would have rung some alarm bells for him. Two years later, in 2010, his 20 per cent stake in the new Fontainebleau casino resort down the southern end of the strip was also in trouble. The building’s for sale even though it’s only half-finished. The blue-glass edifice glints in the Nevada sunshine but inside it’s empty and likely to cost more than a billion dollars to get it ready to open. Even if they do get to fitting the gold taps and polishing the marble inside, who’s going to come and how much are they going to spend? Vegas is so desperate to attract visitors you can get a 70-squaremetre room at the MGM or New York New York for less than a hundred bucks a night. You can see what’s billed as Australia’s hottest act, The Thunder from Down Under – eight buffed strippers, the pride of Australian masculinity – for a knockdown price. The sexed-up Cirque du Soleil show has also slashed its ticket prices by 40 per cent, and if you want a meal thrown in with the titillation you can get three courses for the price of two. In an act of sensuous denial the lights of the city still flash and the music still pumps 24 hours a day, the fountain show at the Bellagio roars into life to the sound of Sinatra crooning ‘Fly me to the Moon’, and the tourists still line up for photos with the old Elvis impersonators togged up in the white-sequined costumes of the King’s fried peanut butter and banana sandwich era. And 179

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it does seem to be working; the strip is packed. But there’s not too many high rollers among the crowds. On this Wednesday night a group of overweight middle-aged, middle-American couples dodge young girls on an extended hens’ weekend, who barge around squealing and clutching frozen pink daiquiris in half-gallon plastic takeaway containers. Other groups of older, long-married women seem to be hunting in packs, hoping to live up to the slogan ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. In the massive foyer of the New York New York Hotel lads from Birmingham knock back the free drinks at a blackjack table and big note themselves with US$100 bets and raucous cheers as the cards fall their way – at least for the moment. Across from the felt tables sad lines of hunched-over retirees mindlessly push buttons on the sea of slot machines that roll out forever. They all seem to be having a great time but no one’s spending enough. How long is this a sustainable business model? Even the Elvis wedding chapels are feeling the pinch. For the past twelve years, ordained minister David Nye has been running the Elvis chapel on 9th Street. In a room decorated with a baby grand and a smattering of memorabilia, including what looks like the original certificate of Elvis’s marriage to Priscilla Ann in 1967, Reverend Nye laments the impact of the downturn on his business. He’s preparing for one of the rare ‘Viva Las Vegas’ concert packages that he books these days. Some people in Vegas are starting to say they think things are picking up. David Nye’s not one of them. ‘I can’t really say that I’ve seen that,’ he says. ‘I watch the trends pretty closely and I haven’t noticed it pick up. We’re still in the trough as far as I can see. More people are pinching pennies and fewer people are buying extras.’ 180

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Today, though, Jeff and Christen are spending up big. Watched by their small group of friends, men sporting military buzz cuts and bottle-blond women, Jeff and Christen vow to ‘love each other tender’, to never treat each other like a ‘hound dog’ and to always be ‘your teddy bear’ as an Elvis impersonator in a goldlamé dinner jacket serenades them with a recorded backing track of half-a-dozen classics. It’s still early, only half-past twelve, and the wedding party is off in their stretched limos to a reception. Once the bride and groom are dispatched the rest of the party will no doubt spend the rest of the week throwing money at the slot machines or perhaps catch a strip show at any one of the dozens of clubs offering specials for couples and cut-price lap dances for the willing. In this climate the market for top-shelf hedonism has disappeared and it seems Las Vegas is now throwing all its efforts into promoting sleaze. As soon as you arrive it hits you in the face. There’s the ‘Aussie’ Thunder Down Under, of course, but the sensual assault comes from everywhere. In the huge arrival hall of the airport posters of almost-naked strippers cover an entire wall. On the hotel TV soft-porn celebrities constantly present advertisements for restaurants and nightclubs. Even Avril Lavigne – the skater girl – seems sexed up as she extols the virtues of one dowdy looking nightspot. Behind it all, though, it’s abundantly clear Vegas isn’t just for the beautiful people. As always this place is for dreaming, for escaping, and right now it’s cut-price escapism. Las Vegas, the old hands say, isn’t what it used to be. But it still does it for some, like the girl on the rent-a-car desk who tells me she’s been here for four months and still feels like she’s on holiday. And it’s true that if all you want to do is party you probably can’t find a better 181

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place than Vegas. But if you want to find the underbelly of the American dream this is a pretty good starting point too. The flipside is never far from the surface in many American cities. It’s usually just a matter of blocks that separate the successful from the desperate. As many have observed there are two Americas, and a lot of people in the first one just choose to walk through life with the blinkers on. In Vegas the contrast is visually startling. The strip and the glitz are so over the top, but move just a mile or so south, towards the downtown area, and you’ll stumble into the dark side. This is the old strip. This is where it all began and the fading cartoon architecture of the 1940s and 1950s is still here in the so-called weekly motels with names like The Safari, The Sky Ranch and The Roulette Wheel. Half a century on these places only take in guests prepared to pay week by week, a policy designed to discourage the casual tourist but not give too much certainty to any long-term tenant. They would have once been a sight to behold with their car parks full of big-finned Chevrolets and bars full of sales execs drinking gin martinis, but now the paint is peeling off these old gems almost as fast as the big boys are going bankrupt up the glitzy end of the strip. Mostly they’re the last stop for the casualties of the modern American malaise. Down this end of Fremont Street there’s a tragedy on every corner and a story in every room. Matthew O’Brien came to Vegas looking for something to write about twelve years ago. He’s still here. He’s the guy who found all the people living in the stormwater tunnels under Caesar’s Palace. They were a motley collection of mostly drug addicts but also a few genuine eccentrics who just want to get away from it all. They have beds and stoves and showers down there in the dark, and it’s all pretty cosy until it rains. 182

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But everything’s up on blocks and Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert after all so it doesn’t actually rain that much anyway. Matthew wrote a book about the tunnels and the people who live there called Beneath the Neon. These days he’s so tired of fielding requests from television producers wanting him to take them through the maze that he’s stopped doing it. The tunnels’ inhabitants are over it too. They don’t like the intrusion. After all they live underground to get away from the world, not to be the star attraction. Matthew is now writing about life in the ‘weeklies’. He points me in the direction of the Blue Angel. Built in 1958, the Blue Angel in its day was considered one of the finest motels in town. Today the swimming pool is full of crushed concrete to prevent it filling up with water and becoming a dangerous drowning hazard, and the car park is empty save for a rusting, beaten-up pickup in one corner. But the angel is still on the roof. She’s at least six metres tall with a halo and a wand that no longer lights up. She was designed by Betty Willis, the same woman who came up with the now iconic ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign that has become the symbol of the city. The Blue Angel is home to a rugged collection of Vietnam vets, single mums on disability pensions and victims of the city’s now rampant foreclosure rates. Vegas has the highest foreclosure rate of any city in the United States, at least half the homes sold here at the moment are bank repossessions and once you’ve got a foreclosure on your record it’s hard to pass the credit check that landlords generally want before you can rent a house. Some people just have nowhere else to go. There are families living in these places where the rent is US$120 a week and the only thing that comes with it is free electricity and one roll of toilet paper. 183

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For some of them it’s a temporary stopgap, for others the weeklies have become a way of life. At the Fremont Street entrance a huge blue-painted cast-iron arch with shooting stars straight out of The Jetsons announces a once fashionable welcome. In the empty car park a plastic bag drifts about on the eddies and heat currents come off the asphalt, which is where I come across Wayne sitting in a plastic outdoor chair in the shade against the old office wall. Wayne is a completely toothless Vietnam vet, covered in tattoos, who says he’s been living here for years, and seems to be considered something of a community leader. Every now and then one of the residents walks past and shoots the breeze. Wayne has time for everyone and everything – even a journalist from Australia. ‘Australia, hey! I don’t know much about that place,’ he gums, ‘but I fought in Nam with a few Aussies. Good fighters they were too. By the way,’ he asks, ‘where’s Woop Woop?’ I explain that ‘woop woop’ is more a concept than an actual place; a part of the Aussie imagination. The outback. The back of beyond. ‘Funny that,’ he says. ‘I saw a movie once called Welcome to Woop Woop and I always wanted to know where that was. Had a real horny chick in it. Yeah, she always wanted it all right. Anyway, is it true that you all kill kangaroos for pet food?’ I assure him that it is in fact the case and that I hadn’t had the pleasure of ever seeing the film. ‘Oh, well you should. That chick was horny.’ The residents love their angel. She’s the guardian of all those who live under her, apparently. Her motor no longer works, of course, but she does still spin with the wind and whenever a storm is coming she turns to face it head on. They like that sort of 184

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fortitude and defiance here and there’s something about the residents that has a bit of that in them too. They’re down, but they’re proud, and they feel special. They just happened to end up at the Blue Angel and in this part of town that’s a big deal. That marks you out from those who have to stay in soulless places like The Desert Inn next to the Slightly Sinful nightclub that advertises its own special stimulus package – the $10 lap dance. ‘Thing is they want to put a strip mall through here eventually,’ Wayne tells me. About five years he reckons, but by then he’ll likely be gone anyway. ‘They want to take the Angel before that, though,’ he says. ‘They want to put her up the business end of Fremont. They think it’s all going to come good.’ They’ve been saying that for 50 years down here. The recession hit this end of town the moment they moved the casinos up to the strip in the 1960s. But up there they’re now getting to know what that feels like. Las Vegas used to be not just the ‘entertainment and fun capital of the world, where the clock never stops and the doors never close’ but also the convention centre of the world during the 1980s and 1990s. Understandably, that sector of the market has taken a huge hit in the past few years. If companies do still have the money to send their execs off for a boozy weekend of bonding it’s hardly the sort of thing they want to be seen to be doing at the moment. Even so, the highly paid suits who have the job of selling the joint are still keen to put a gloss on it. You’d never know the place was on its knees listening to this crowd. Fair enough, their job is to move the product but, in the grand old tradition of gaming resorts the world over, they’re pretty good at talking up their hand. My meeting with John Bischoff from the Las Vegas Convention 185

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Authority is overseen by not one, but two media minders. One is a smooth-talking guy in his thirties, who looks like Clark Kent trying to look like a Wall Street banker. His pouty young offsider looks like a Playboy centrefold trying to look like a Wall Street secretary. Bischoff is the sober face of reason, a man who somewhat surprisingly tells me he doesn’t gamble. He should, he has perfected a fine poker face. In the twelve months before I got here shares in Las Vegas casino companies have fallen, on average, by almost 90 per cent. Station Casinos, the largest suburban casino operator in Vegas, has already filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and some of the big players like The Sands and MGM look like they might follow. Harrah’s, the world’s largest casino company, is reportedly just holding on, but the vice president of the Las Vegas Convention Authority insists things are looking pretty good. ‘Just like everywhere else in the world,’ he says, ‘Las Vegas has been impacted by the downturn. But the thing is we have so many visionaries.’ And he lists them. ‘Steve Wynn turning on Encore . . . the MGM project coming online with City Center. The Venetian . . . The Palazzo. There are so many indicators that things are about to go through the next stage of evolution, so I’m very happy about the trend into the future.’ Hmmm. His minders are certainly keen he stays on message, too. When I suggest after the interview that he’s doing his job well, maintaining the optimism in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, Clark Kent steps in to wind it up. It’s a move that seems to perplex the boss but certainly impresses the blonde, which was probably the point. But John Bischoff isn’t the only one who’s still seeing the glass half full, or at least filling up again. The recession may have hit hard but it is almost impossible to find 186

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anyone who doesn’t think they’re just one roll of the dice from the next winning streak. I head out one afternoon with Bill Marek, a big bear of a man and another Vietnam vet who calls Vegas home. Unlike Wayne at the Blue Angel, though, life has been a little kinder to Bill. He is now one of the city’s real-estate foreclosure specialists, but he spent much of his misspent youth working on the strip in the showroom of the Frontier Hotel. Bill’s met all the big stars – Dean Martin, Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack – but his favourite was Elvis. He reckons he’s never seen anything like the public adulation of The King, and in turn he says Elvis was always the perfect gentleman. Bill also reckons the strip was a much better place in the old days when the mob used to run it. Before the corporates moved in, he says, it was more exciting, it had more to offer and everyone knew where they stood. There were rules and everyone knew what they were and knew what the consequences of breaking them were too. As he’s giving me the tour of the latest property on his books – a huge six-bedroom four-bathroom house in a gated golf community on the northern fringe of the Vegas suburbs that was worth over three million dollars in 2008 and is now on the market for just over one million – Bill recalls the time, back in the old days, when one of the dealers got caught stealing. ‘They took the guy into the kitchen and you could see the fear in his eyes. They sacked him on the spot, of course, and threw him out of the building but two days later I saw a picture of his corpse in the paper. They picked up his body somewhere out in the desert. Well, that’s how they dealt with things back then. They sent a message. If you steal from us we’re going to kill you. It was a different world.’ 187

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Sure was. Like a lot of Americans Bill has an easygoing manner about him. He loves to talk, he works hard and he plays golf at least once a week. He’s a happy-go-lucky guy until he starts on about Barack Obama. Bill doesn’t like Obama, that much is clear. Not many people in the Vegas business community do. The state governor tried not to accept any of Obama’s stimulus money and Obama, in turn, went on to urge the rest of the nation not to splurge their stimulus payments on a weekend in Vegas but rather do something useful with the money. Bill reckons Obama is inexperienced and dangerous and he’s ‘ruining the country’. He doesn’t like what’s happening to healthcare and he doesn’t like the way history seems to be repeating itself with the war in Afghanistan either. ‘It’s just like what happened in Vietnam,’ he says. ‘We lost that because the politicians lost their nerve and listened to the media too much. Those journos didn’t understand. They were seeing all this bloodshed and what have you, but they never looked at the bigger picture. We dropped the ball on that one and we’re doing it again in Afghanistan. We have to stay and fight and teach our enemies a lesson.’ Big Bill really didn’t need much winding up on all this. Once he started he was off. He launched into a robust defence of Bush and Cheney and enthusiastically announces that all the torture allegations levelled against the CIA were a ‘bunch of bullshit’. ‘We’re just scaring them. This is war. What do people expect from war, I mean they’d do a lot worse to us. We should be givin’ ’em hell and we shouldn’t be handing victory to our enemies.’ There are a lot of people in this country who feel that way and there are a lot of people who have the polar-opposite view. 188

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There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground on this issue or on many others, certainly not on ‘the war’ or on healthcare. Like a lot of people in Vegas, Bill is benign and cheery on the surface but get him on to anything political and you get both barrels. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told that Obama is taking the place down the road to socialist ruin. The reason most often cited by those who say this is healthcare. As if a universal healthcare system, or indeed any system that has any government involvement in it at all, is going to turn the country into a collectivist wasteland. For anyone coming to this argument from outside it’s a strange phenomenon to behold. It’s an argument that has no recognisable parameters. And let’s be clear, one thing they are not here in Vegas is socialist. In the end I don’t quite know what to think of Las Vegas. It’s in trouble but it’s a long way from dead. I came expecting to see a city demoralised by the numbers, crushed by the raw data of the economic downturn. And yes there is evidence of that every­where, but there is also an unbridled optimism that I hadn’t experienced in cities that haven’t been hit nearly as hard as this. In a motel just a block from the Blue Angel I met Larry Allen who had come here with his three young sons just three months earlier. He came because he still believes in the Vegas dream, and he came because he thinks he can make a go of it in a city that doesn’t care about his past. He’s paying US$850 a month for two bedrooms, a kitchen sink and a small table to eat off. His boys do their homework on the floor in one of the bedrooms. Within a week of getting here he landed a job at a local restaurant earning US$10 an hour. ‘It’s okay for the moment,’ he says, ‘but it can get better and 189

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it’s going to get better because I’m going to make it happen. Yes I am.’ Larry is throwing the dice and he still thinks Las Vegas is the best place to do it. Larry came to Vegas as a refugee from California.

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Dan Walters leans back in his chair and a smile cracks across his broad face. ‘The thing is most of you think California is a liberal sort of place, but none of you go to Weed,’ he says. ‘When reporters come here from the East Coast they go to San Francisco and West LA, that’s not California, believe me. You should go to Weed. It’s up north on the way to Oregon. They only have one policeman there but he’s easy to find, he’s the only black guy in town.’ I promise him I’ll try to get to Weed some day, even though apart from the name it doesn’t really sound like it’s got much going for it. Right now, I’m sitting in his office trying to get him to explain to me why it is that California is in such a mess. Dan has the look of a man who’s had a comfortable life pontificating behind a desk, which pretty much sums up exactly what he’s been doing for the past 30 years. He’s a true newspaper sage from the old school and he’s been writing a column on Californian politics for various Sacramento newspapers for all that time. These days 191

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that’s all he does – one column a week. He readily admits he doesn’t need the money anymore but he’s the sort of guy who just can’t hang up the spurs. ‘You can only polish the boat so many times,’ he says. These old hands, reporters with a great back-story and a lifetime’s worth of anecdotes, are the sorts of people the newspaper business is losing fast. There doesn’t seem to be much space left anymore for the old contemplative approach to column writing. The broad, well-informed big picture has been overrun by the Google generation of instant experts, the professional outrage artists or the avalanche of ill-informed bloggers. In the future there may not be any Dan Walters types around at all, and to be honest they’re already a scarce breed. When you find one, they’re worth their weight in expenses receipts. As the scribe of Sacramento, Dan has a sort of told-you-so air about him. His office is littered with the paraphernalia of a focused life. There are photos of him as a younger and much thinner man with Jerry Brown when he was governor in the 1970s, and there’s a cluster of Terminator action dolls lined up on his desk in front of a picture of him with the ‘Governator’, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Dan Walters has seen it all and he’s been writing about a state in crisis for at least twenty years. ‘We’re just ossified,’ he says. ‘We’re stuck in a structure that is totally illogical, totally irrational. It just can’t work.’ For the casual visitor California’s problems become apparent as soon as you leave LA airport and try to navigate the crumbling freeway system. In the 1970s people in LA used to boast about the freeways. In my short stay here as a boy my father and I used to spend some Saturday afternoons just cruising around on them. We had a small four-door Dodge and there was nothing quite 192

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like slipping Creedence Clearwater into the four-track, turning up the volume and going for a drive. Back then the LA freeways were some of the most sophisticated in the world. Now they’re an embarrassment; clogged with traffic at almost any time of day, crumbling, potholed and truly frightening to drive on. The city has grown around them, expanded with them but now outgrown them. I sat in a bar in Glendale on one visit – on a good day a 40-­m inute commute up the I-5 from downtown – and listened while a young woman devastated her evening on double martinis and spilled out her loathing for the city she lived in. ‘It’s not a city,’ she said, echoing the famous Dorothy Parker quip about LA being 72 suburbs in search of a whole. ‘It’s a clutch of boring suburbs held together by a system of inhuman asphalt arteries.’ Emboldened by her third happy hour special she declared she was ‘moving to Paris’ as soon as she could. She came from somewhere in the Midwest, she said, and she’d been living in LA now for about five years. Like many she’d come hoping to break into the movie business. There is individualism in LA, there are ‘scenes’ around some of the beaches, and there is a certain California Cool that defines a few of the more artistic corners of some West Hollywood neighbourhoods. But sometimes it seems everyone you meet in LA who doesn’t belong to the Latino LA subculture is still trying to break into the movie business somehow. Everyone’s on a journey, particularly the wait staff in the bars and restaurants of West LA. They’re either serious young dramaturges or silicon-pumped and buffed look-at-me types who still believe the next big break is just around the corner and they’re on the way up. A handful of them make it, most don’t. Some of them move on, some 193

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grow old and bitter and some just can’t afford the next appointment with the plastic surgeon and head home to the Midwest to complete their accounting degree. Others – particularly the very young, the American Idol wannabes and the runaways who arrive with stardust in their eyes – crash and burn completely, and LA’s skid row is littered with the casualties. On 7th Street just east of Spring, young white kids sleep rough alongside homeless black meth addicts. Seventh street is another case study in American urban decay. As it staggers out of downtown, east towards the river, it deteriorates rapidly. The high rise and the faded deco 1920s grandeur quickly give way to the cheap crack rooms and the shabby weekly hotels full of the desperate and addicted. That’s not the California that fits the sunshine and Hollywood glamour image most of the rest of the world has of it. And while it’s true LA is not Weed, it is also true that the town of Weed is not the weed that made The Haight in San Fransisco either – but it is all California, one of the most complex societies in America, if not the world. With dozens of ethnic groups and huge economic diversities; hamstrung by a moribund political system and crumbling infrastructure; wracked by a fiscal crisis; and socially challenged by an uncontrollable demographic explosion, LA’s been heading down for decades but it is now close to the tipping point. California has taken the political system given to the nation by the founding fathers, put it on steroids and created a hyperdemocracy where every single individual has a potential veto power over everything. Individuals can propose Constitutional amendments – voter initiatives they’re called – and plenty of them have got up. It’s a system that’s paralysed the legislature and the Californian budget and made the state almost ungovernable. The most famous of them all was the first big one – Proposition 194

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13 – which put a 1 per cent cap on the value of property. Other voter initiatives have locked in spending formulas for everything from parklands to roads and after-school care. And so these propositions have resulted in a large percentage of the state’s budget resources being allocated in advance. Then there are the voter initiatives like the three-strikesand-you’re-out law, which has led to a blowout in the prison population and a corresponding hike in costs. It’s a fiscal straitjacket that has left the politicians quaking with indecision and paralysed by polling. No politician wants to be seen to be pushing for tax increases or to be characterised as soft on crime. The only successful politician here has to be a populist because to oppose a popular but perhaps unsustainable law – like the three-strikes law – is to court certain political death. Old hands like Dan Walters are beyond despair. The system is broken and self-interest has won. ‘If we don’t fix it,’ he says, ‘I think California, as sad as it may be, is headed down the road to kind of a cultural and political tribalism where state-wide matters like education, transportation and water just go unaddressed. Everyone fends for themselves, and the whole political process just becomes more irrelevant than it is today. That’s a sad future.’ It’s a complicated mess but the bottom-line equation is a pretty simple one. There’s not enough money coming in and there’s too much going out. As a result the state is running 25 to 30 per cent deficits some years and at times it’s been forced to issue IOUs to pay debts. Who’s going to fix it? Jerry Brown, now into his second incarnation as governor, is giving it a shot but before him it was Arnold Schwarzenegger who talked a lot about the problems but in the end solved none of them. 195

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When I first saw the Terminator in the flesh he was just six months short of finishing his term. As a politician some say Arnie made a good movie star but you get the sense that he didn’t see all that much difference between the two roles. Both require a certain ability to appear earnest, empathetic and believable, whatever the situation. Basically both require a well-polished ability to bullshit. Arnie’s got that in spades but, like I say, by the time I got to him his term was almost up and he seemed more than happy to just about admit defeat. It was a press conference about the crisis in education funding with a roomful of teachers and education professionals from schools to universities. Let’s just say there was a lot of earnestness in the room. I asked him if he thought he should take some responsibility for the fiscal situation and whether he thought he’d left the hard decisions on the table for whoever was unlucky enough to become his successor. ‘I think it’s very clear since I came into office I said that we need budget reform. We have to reform the tax system and, of course, this is a very difficult thing to do.’ He fixed his still steely Hollywood jaw in my direction and delivered the killer grab that I’m sure he always held in reserve for any foreign reporter. I also made it clear that even though I’m a very strong guy and I played the Terminator in the movies and created all this action, but when it comes to this job I need a lot of help, I need a lot of lifting. There’s a lot of lifting that needs to be done and alone I can’t do it. We don’t have a dictatorship here, and thank God we don’t, so it’s not a one-man show. It’s important that the legislators do the same thing and the people also agree with that so I’ve had several attempts with the legislators to fix 196

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the budget system and it didn’t work . . . I went to the people, put it in a ballot, it didn’t work . . . He then went rambling off on a remarkable tangent about how even in the Olympics some people win and some lose, some get injured and some even get killed. ‘You just continue on to keep grinding away,’ he says, confusing everyone even more. The budget situation is so bad in California now that the government has proposed cutting the school year short by three weeks to save money. Like the freeways, the Californian education system used to be the envy of the rest of the nation but in 2009 the state reached a particularly dubious milestone. For the first time more money was spent on the prison system than on higher education. If a person has two or more previous serious or violent felony convictions, the sentence for any new felony conviction (not just a serious or violent felony) is life imprisonment with the minimum term being 25 years. Offenders convicted under this provision are frequently referred to as ‘third strikers’. So the lifer wings in the gaols are literally bursting at the seams. They were never very nice but now they’re really bad, dangerous, destructive and frightening places ruled by racially based gangs. The gang wars of the projects and the rundown inner-city ghettos are magnified inside, and on average two inmates are killed in gang-related violence in California’s prisons every week. The demographics of the prisons are an even more starkly confronting set of statistics than the big shift in California as a whole. There’s some great old footage that’s still around of Johnny Cash’s triumphant tour of the California prisons in 1969. As well as the thumping, passionate recording made at Folsom, there’s the 197

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priceless footage shot for a documentary by Britain’s Granada TV of the concert in San Quentin. As the ‘Man in Black’ sings ‘San Quentin I hate every inch of you. You cut me and you scarred me through and through’, the audience of hardened criminals goes wild. Cheering, applauding, laughing. It’s a terrific moment but it’s most interesting for the fact that almost all of them packed into that mess hall are white. In San Quentin today the overwhelming majority of the inmates are Latino or black. There’s a sprinkling of white guys but they keep pretty much to themselves and most of them are in the low-security areas. For all that, San Quentin presents as something of a museum. It’s somewhat like a clichéd Hollywood set – all clanking steelbarred gates, cell doors with outsized keys and a dusty exercise yard with a few rusting chin-up bars. There’s still a sense of foreboding, even violence, but it is also theatrical and evocative – the prison from central casting. The thick, imposing stone walls sit brooding over some of the finest real estate on the San Francisco bay. Developers must drive by and drool, thinking about the bonanza that could be theirs if ever the place was shut down, as unlikely as that might seem at the moment. My interest in the California prisons was sparked after meeting Luis Rodriguez in Los Angeles and hearing about his time in the prison system, the role of the gangs and the strains and pressures the whole structure is under. To my great surprise an initial request for access to a Californian corrections facility was accepted, so just a few weeks later there we were, me and the Turk, in with the lifers at San Quentin. It’s the gritty realist type of place cameramen like Louie love – great ‘character’ – but neither of us could quite believe we were actually there. It’s the sort of thing that still surprises us about Americans and American 198

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officialdom – they say yes at the most unexpected times. I’ve never tried the same request in Australia but I’d be staggered if the New South Wales department of corrections would give a camera crew the same access to Long Bay. That said, it was pretty clear why San Quentin was the showcase prison for camera crews. Even the inmates are old. In the lifers’ wing the average age seems to be about 60, and that makes it pretty safe. Most of them haven’t got any fight left in them. Time and arthritis have reformed more of these guys than any rehab. Some of them have been in the prison system more than 30 years and most are friendly and engaging company, happy to answer questions and spill out their life story for the camera. They are also pretty pleased to be in San Quentin. Compared to some of the other facilities they reckon San Quentin is a doddle. As one very genial geriatric murderer put it, ‘You got the youngsters that are the super predators. They don’t have no sense of morals, okay, so they don’t have no values, so they don’t care. If they get off the chain you can’t pull them back.’ When the prisons are so crowded that most of the cells are occupied by twice as many prisoners as they were designed for and any free space like gymnasiums and cafeterias are now jammed with bunk beds to house the overflow, when things start going bad it gets really ugly. Lockdowns that go on for days are now commonplace and enforced segregation is often the only way to contain the violence. It’s a dangerous place to live but also a dangerous place to work. The prison guards in California are some of the best-paid screws in the world with fantastic conditions almost unheard of in the American labour market. They get to retire at 55 on a decent pension and their healthcare costs are paid for life. Still, it’s a tough job. 199

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‘We lock ’em down and starve ’em if there’s any trouble here,’ said one guard who was checking in for the day’s shift as we arrive. Despite their generous benefits prison guards are not a happy lot. When Johnny Cash was touring in the late 1960s California had fifteen prisons and just under thirty thousand prisoners. Now there are 33 prisons with enough room to house about ninety thousand inmates. The trouble is there are now nearly 170,000 of them. It costs this broke state US$49,000 a year to house each prisoner, a lot more than it costs in any other state in the United States. Like the budget, the prisons are in crisis and, like the budget, no one seems to have the political will or the courage to do anything about it. California is a basket case, there’s no doubt about it, but in some ways it’s a bit of a canary as well for the rest of the United States. It’s a lesson and a warning. California does everything bigger and not always better, including recessions. This one it’s embraced with wretched excess. The economy will turn around at some point for sure, but there are some long-term structural problems and a real shortage of impetus to do anything about them. In the end Arnie gave up but can Jerry Brown do any better? How strange it must have felt to him claiming victory again in 2010, some 36 years after he first stood on a stage and claimed victory. Having traversed the political landscape in the intervening period with attempts to get a Democratic nomination for the Senate once and the presidency three times, he’s now back where it all began. He even ended his short inauguration address in January 2011 by not quite singing the old song ‘California here I come (right back where I started from)’. History will record he was both one of the youngest governors of California and 200

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the oldest. He said he tried during the campaign not to mention the word ‘experience’ too often because what people wanted often was something new. Despite the nationwide swing to the Republicans and the record US$160 million dollars spent by his opponent, the former eBay executive Meg Whitman, California voted narrowly for the Democrat Brown. As he himself pointed out, in 2010 California was the great exception. Perhaps what Californians really wanted was a return to the past. Back to a time when California was working, when the public education system was the envy of the rest of the country, when it was just at the start of the hi-tech transformation. But in 2010 Jerry Brown also had to promise not to raise taxes without voter approval, all the while talking about the need to make sure public education has what it needs to create greatness. Today Brown must have plenty of moments when he can’t help but reflect on how different the times are and how much more vibrant and optimistic the state was during his first governorship. There are still great things happening in California. It is the world’s eighth largest economy, the innovators still churn it out in Silicon Valley, and the likes of Facebook and Google have become powerful global companies driving the new technological world. But for all that, California now seems almost unable to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. The devolution of power has made decision making all but impossible unless it reaches a point of unanimity – or close enough to it. Jerry Brown began his new term determined to give it a go. His first budget plan proposed slashing welfare spending in half, reducing healthcare coverage for the poor and cutting nearly 20 per cent from the state’s university system and a clutch of proposals for tax increases that had to be approved by the voters. This 201

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‘will be painful’, he said, ‘but we have no choice’. The Brown plan also shifted some traditional state functions, like fire and emergency response, court security, and some of the oversight of low-level criminals, to the local county bureaucracy. After his first year in office things had improved a little. With a steadily improving economy and a series of drastic cuts in public spending approved by the 2011 budget, the 2012 budget shortfall was down to $16 billion from the $26 billion a year earlier. But he still needed more cuts and he needed to go to the voters again to ask approval for more tax increases. What all this shows is just how difficult it is to get anything done with the system the way it is. The wheels spin but the major critical issues like transportation, water, education and the prison crisis just never seem to get addressed. Unless something fundamental changes then Jerry Brown, for all his determined bluster, isn’t going to be any more successful than Arnie was. Still, California has been here before and it has a history of recovering well, even leading the country out of recession. This time the old hands think it’s different. The population is growing faster than ever, putting even more strain on services. Because of Prop 13 the state’s property taxes are among the lowest in the country, personal income tax and capital gains tax are among the highest. After years of economic smoke-and-mirror tricks the state’s infrastructure is in desperate need of attention. For decades Californian politicians have been kicking the can down the road – now all the roads need serious attention. As Dan Walters says, ‘It’s shameful . . . and it’s doing long-term damage to California’s economic prospects because it denotes a sort of Third-World instability, a chronic inability to govern ourselves effectively.’ * 202

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A few months after Jerry Brown returned to the governorship I decide to take up Dan’s challenge and visit Weed. I head north along the I-5 from Sacramento and basically just keep going towards the border. This is not your trendy Napa Valley dotted with hobby farms and bankers’ vineyards; this is big industrial farming country. Billboards advertising local casinos and steakhouses dot the roadside and every second radio station is either talking about Christ and the ‘end of times’ or playing back-toback country hits. As I flick through the dial I come across the song ‘Way Out Here’ by Josh Thompson at least three times. He’s singing about God, guns and rednecks. After a few hours the flat plains begin to give way to the foothills of the wilderness area around Lake Shasta. As I climb further and further the wilderness closes in and the snow-capped mountains loom bleak against a clear Californian winter’s evening. The town of Weed is tucked in below one of these peaks: a cluster of houses, a lodge or two and a few motels. An iron archway that declares your arrival in Weed spans the entrance to the old ‘historic’ part of town. There’s a bowling alley, an old theatre and another cluster of older houses. I pull into the Townhouse Motel – only because it’s the first one I see as I enter town and it has a welcoming red neon sign out the front advertising rooms for $29.99 a night. As it happens the manager and his wife are recent immigrants from India. Theirs is a story that’s been repeating itself in this country for centuries – another immigrant family hoping to make a new life. The manager’s wife leaves to take their daughter to her afterschool tutor but once her husband learns I’m Australian he’s keen to talk about the cricket. Not much other call for discussing the finer points of the game around here obviously. We dissect 203

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Ricky Ponting’s time as captain for a few minutes while I fill out the required forms and hand over my card for payment. The rooms are small and clean – perhaps a little too clean. There’s an overpowering smell of lemon-scented industrial disinfectant that wafts through the place but then what can you expect for $29.99 a night – at least there’s a heater in the room. By now it’s seven o’clock and night is closing in. Just along the main street I find Pappa’s Place. The sign on the wall outside says they’ve been ‘Serving Vets first since 1955’. Inside it’s a big cosy space – a real American bar with pool tables, a shuffleboard and football memorabilia, knick-knacks lining the walls and homey sayings and wisdoms stuck up over the bar. ‘There are three things that’ll guarantee a long life,’ reads one. ‘1. Don’t shake a rattle snake. 2. Don’t piss off the barmen. 3. See number 2.’ There certainly aren’t any vets from any of the recent US wars among the dozen or so patrons but there is a black man and I’m pretty sure that despite the assertions of Dan Walters this guy is not the local policeman. It’s been a long time since he’s been on the public health insurance roll that’s for sure. The poor guy has only a couple of front teeth. There are a few others here who have similar dental challenges and most of this small crowd have been busy working themselves towards some very large future health expenses that none of them will be able to afford. Half-a-dozen of them are playing dice on the bar, the rest are playing pool. A local football game is blaring away on the TV. No one seems at all interested in that or initially in me, they barely glance up from their drinks and diversions, but the barman is a professional and knows how to make a stranger feel welcome and before long we are passing pleasantries. Gradually the ice begins to melt with the regulars as well. That’s the thing about bars in 204

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America, whether they’re top-end or dives, it’s almost impossible to avoid a conversation of some sort or other. Bars here, I’ve found, are some of the friendliest places in the country. People in bars seem genuinely interested and it can’t all be down to the drink. Americans on the whole have an unusual approach to drinking. Most respectable middle-class Americans wouldn’t be seen dead with a glass of wine at lunchtime for fear of being labelled an alcoholic, and the second bottle over dinner is usually frowned upon too. But get them in a bar for pre-dinner drinks and they’ll throw down three double martinis in short order. That tends to get the conversation going. And then there are the bars like Pappa’s Place, devoted to serious recreational alcohol consumption. Most of the patrons here look like they hadn’t actually bothered with the pre-dinner-time niceties or indeed the dinner. Before long people start introducing themselves, one of them is a bloke called Kevin. Kevin’s a big guy. He works at the local lumber mill and he has huge hands that are all knuckles and short calloused fingers puffed up from years of hard work and even harder drinking. He’s a nice friendly fella. ‘What do people do who don’t work in the lumber mill?’ I ask him. He shrugs, raises his bottle of Coors and motions down the bar to the other drinkers. ‘Not much else to do round here,’ he says. I know Dan Walters doesn’t think they’re too liberal up here in Weed but I’m not so sure. Maybe they don’t think much about politics of any sort. There are plenty of other small towns in this country I’ve been to where you know for sure what the politics are, where there are more often than not a few ‘Nobama’ posters in the shop windows, and bumper stickers declaring a love of freedom 205

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and a hatred of Obamacare. The one thing a lot of Americans like to do is post their political allegiance in a prominent public place. But not here. Not in Weed. The next morning as I head out in search of breakfast the trucks and cars parked outside the Hi-Lo Café give nothing away and inside there’s a big display of hats, T-shirts and stickers that all play on the marijuana theme the town’s name suggests: ‘I’ve been to Weed and couldn’t get enough of the joint’, that sort of thing. Well it is still California after all.

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12 Tales from the Motor City

For all its problems California is still an incredibly diverse economy. With Silicon Valley, it is the home of twenty-first-century innovation. In that sense California remains the envy of many other parts of the country, particularly the old industrial centres of the northeast; the rustbelt cities that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries grew strong on steel and manufacturing only to find themselves outclassed or undercut by globalisation and automation. Nowhere is that more evident than Detroit, the city that was once, quite literally, the engine room of the American economy. At the end of November, just after Thanksgiving, someone had written ‘HAPPY HOLIDAYS’ on the cyclone wire fence surrounding the abandoned Michigan Central Station in the centre of town. Whoever had done it had carefully and painstakingly placed white paper cups in the fence holes. The letters were sixfoot high and the message stood in stark relief against the dark skeletal remains of one of the great iconic buildings of this once 207

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powerful industrial metropolis. It had taken them quite a bit of time, but then time is one thing a lot of people here have. The station is an imposing eighteen-storey example of the Beaux Arts architectural period of the early twentieth century, and trains ground through this grand building until they finally ran out of puff in 1988. By then the city had been hollowed out by the car and the industry that builds it, and the place lost the will to fight on. But the old dame is so well made, so solid and so huge, that it has just sat here rotting and being vandalised ever since; too expensive to knock down and too big for any one use. Like all stations it was once a place that reflected the grandeur and the dreams of the people it served – a gateway to a new life for some, a departure for others; a place where, among other things, people left for and returned from war. Now it’s one of the many buildings people have come to refer to as ‘see-through’, one of the many brick-and-concrete signposts of decay in a city that sometimes looks like it’s been carpet-bombed by 50 years of industrial and social change. There is an effort underway to save it – there has been for years. But no one quite knows what to do with it or how to utilise all the space. The problem is the neighbourhood around it has become see-through as well. It’s easier to look beyond it. Most of the streets are littered with houses that are little more than shells; anyone who could afford to leave has long since done so and those that haven’t don’t have money to support fancy retailers or even, it seems, supermarkets. The only thriving businesses in this part of town are liquor stores. Every corner has one. Buying booze is easy, buying food isn’t, and no one has money for anything else. That November, in 2010, the national unemployment rate had just officially nudged up two points to 9.8 per cent. The recovery 208

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wasn’t going well and it would have been a particularly tough Thanksgiving for a lot of people who lived in the shadow of this overpowering and immensely sad edifice. This is the epicentre of Detroit’s decay – the Ground Zero of industrial collapse and the confronting urban chaos stretches for miles around it in every direction. Unlike the national rate, the unemployment rate here at this time was officially almost up to 30 per cent. Unofficially it was closer to 50 per cent. These are tough neighbourhoods like a lot of urban America, poor, black and socially deprived, but the scale of it in Detroit is the most startling thing, it’s 360 square kilometres of neglect. Until the 1960s downtown Detroit was booming; a city on the move; a city described in the old newsreels as a place ‘daring to reach up’. It was written about in the New York Times as ‘having more going for it than any other city in the north’ of the country. The inner city, in particular, was touted as an exciting place to live, with a thriving theatre district and a modern cosmopolitan pace. But the home of the great American car industry was devastated by the relocation of manufacturing and the subsequent white middle-class flight to the suburbs. The riots of 1967 signalled the start of the collapse but the unrest was fuelled by the discrimination and deteriorating social conditions that had been festering for years among many of the black residents. Again, this is a depressingly familiar story in many American cities. Riots were breaking out across the country – in Washington DC, of course, but also in LA, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia – and all of the cities shared the social, racial and economic stresses of the time. Detroit was no different in that regard but this city was essentially a one-industry town and when that industry packed up and moved out there was literally nothing left except the Motown 209

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music business. Even then, Berry Gordy took his hit machine to Los Angeles in 1972. All that’s left of Motown now is a rather sad tour of the Hitsville house where it all began. Nothing has been touched since the day the Gordy family moved out – or that’s what they say. The basement studio is still pretty much as it was too – small and cramped and constructed of masonite and cheap soundproofing. It’s hard to see how they got the bands in there but as we know the place churned out some wonderful music. Hitsville, at least, has been preserved but in many parts of the city it is as if social order and morality just walked away as well. Some neighbourhoods are almost post-apocalyptic environments; crumbling, skeletal remnants of industrial history, scarred and smashed and fighting to hold out against the force of nature slowly creeping back through the cracks and crevices. The old Packard and Fisher car plants are the most graphic examples. They are ethereal wasted places but there’s a strange and compelling beauty to them just the same. On the archway entrance to the Packard factory site some of the letters on the old sign have been smashed out but like a ghostly crossword puzzle it still asks those who pass under it to acknowledge the drama of the industrial decline it represents: ‘MO_OR CITY _N_USTR__L PARK’. There are thousands of square metres of abandoned floor space here. Every window was long ago broken, and everything of any value stripped from the inside. Now it’s littered with garbage. A few old fibreglass boats sit beached incongruously inside the ruins amidst the refuse and the little mounds of syringes and other drug paraphernalia. But the guts and innards of this corrosion are surprisingly photogenic and like many film crews and magazine feature writers before us 210

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we are drawn deeper into the bowels of one of America’s most fascinating stories. Louie is absorbed, as always, in creating the magic of television. So many lives, so many shifts, so many stories haunt the rusting girders and swinging door jambs. As I look back through the hole we crawled through I see a car pull up next to our van, which we’d left out in what must have been in its heyday the employee’s parking lot. Perhaps we shouldn’t have left the doors open, I think, as I work my way back outside, hoping whoever it is that’s taken an interest is merely curious and not dangerous. The driver sees me approaching and slides the window down. ‘I thought this might have been a car-jacking or something,’ he says. ‘You don’t see cars like this with their doors open and all this stuff hangin’ around inside around here. What ya’all doin’ here? Don’t you know what kind of neighbourhood you in?’ Apart from me and my new concerned friend there’s no one else in sight. It seems empty and benign enough but I’ve already worked out this is the kind of neighbourhood where the shadows hold secrets, where the bad deals are done and the stray bodies are dumped. These old places still have stories. I explain why we’re here and the guy in the car gives me a sort of bewildered look. Like he’s thinking ‘why on earth would anyone want to film this?’ ‘You might want to lock up your car,’ he says, and then drives off. I head back into rubble to find Louie getting creative. ‘It’s a frame within a frame,’ he says, explaining his excitement at finding a great shot through a collapsed wall. After an hour or so wandering around the old factory site we come across a small American flag hanging above a locked and intact steel 211

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garage door, the same as the many millions of other little acts of suburban patriotism played out all over the country. There’s no one around but clearly someone’s living here among the ruins. There are half-eaten car bodies and spare parts littered around the ground and among it all is a table and two chairs that have obviously enjoyed their fair share of al fresco dining in the warmer months. It takes a while to adjust to the economic gloom but after a while you start to see there is still plenty of life in these deadlooking spaces. People have to live somewhere. Around the corner we stop to fill up with petrol. The casing for the hose handle has come away from the pump and I have to wrestle it out, but it still works. This place is a TV mini-series unfolding before us. Huge wrenching sobs are coming from a woman in the front seat of the car in the lane to our right. A lanky guy with a hoodie covering his head and wearing several coats piled one on top of the other to ward off the cold is leaning against the wall in front of us, so obviously the local drug dealer he doesn’t need to advertise to anyone. He’s looking across at the impossibly beautiful woman on our left. She’s wearing an expensive fur coat and knee-high boots but she’s driving a nothing sort of car – a Ford Taurus or something similar – that seems to be listing to one side. The paint is peeling off it and rust is poking through. The little door that covers the petrol cap has long since been torn off. Where is she going, I wonder. * Two million people used to live in downtown Detroit. According to the 2010 census there are now just over 700,000. Today, not far away on General Motors Drive, the CEO of GM is launching the first almost all-electric car. Designed, conceived and built in 212

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the United States at an on-road cost of around US$40,000 it’ll be a long time before anyone here will be able to avoid the fuel queues, but the words most often used to describe it are ‘game changer’. To say there’s a lot of hope riding on the ‘Volt’, as it’s called, is an understatement. It is already seen as a symbol of the rebirth of the US auto industry, an industry so close to collapse just a few years ago that it needed the federal government to step in and bail it out. So there’s a lot invested in this car – there’s money, of course, but there’s also a lot of pride. The Volt is almost a settling of scores after years of giving ground to the Japanese, the Koreans and the Europeans. America can do it again is the message. This is cutting-edge American technology. The crowd of local workers and dignitaries cheers when one of the GM suits tells them what they all know to be true: ‘The negativity that’s been directed at this city over the decades has been relentless.’ As it turned out, even with considerable government-funded incentives, the Volt didn’t exactly excite the wider car-buying public. Maybe one day. But the thing I’m finding interesting about Detroit is the energy and the optimism that seem to be everywhere alongside the disillusionment. Some here are cowed, but the city doesn’t feel defeated at all, quite the opposite in fact. It is easy to be shocked by this post-apocalyptic Mad Max set. It is easy to think of it as America’s Rome – plenty of people have made that comparison in the past. It does magnify the problems of urban decay and industrial decline, and it does underline the worst of America’s urban despair and economic segregation. But look a bit closer and you find Detroit is not just a story of endurance, it is also brimming with pride and above all creativity. For all its faults, problems and blemishes, some people have stayed and, in 213

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fact, some are starting to come back, entranced by what is one of the most unique and interesting urban environments in the world right now. Even those who have fled to the suburbs, and barely notice the fraying infrastructure on either side of the freeway as they drive to work, speak enthusiastically about the history of the city and its place in the national fabric. They prefer to live where they can shop at Giant and Walmart but they lord the renaissance of Detroit and all the possibilities and potential locked inside the grand architecture. These days the dead factories are crawling with artists attracted by the creative and the economic environment. The space is cheap for one but it’s also organic in a way that other cities no longer are. Young people are buying up warehouse spaces and transforming them into living, working places again. And even though most of them weren’t even born back then, many of them say it’s like Lower Manhattan was in the 1960s – only there’s so much more of it. Scott Hocking is one of them. He was born in Detroit some time in the 1970s I’d guess, and he is as much a part of the blue-collar fabric of the city as he is a mentor of the emerging artistic community. He says this idea of the place actually getting better, of a renaissance, has been around for decades. He can remember when they built the Renaissance Center back when he was a boy. There was hope then too, but things just seemed to get worse. But Scott is an optimist, someone who sees ‘beauty in the transformations of decay’. While he readily admits the place still has a lot of problems even with the collapse of the auto industry and the economic crisis, he says he’s started to feel a momentum in the past couple of years. ‘Something started to change,’ he says. ‘It was almost as if we 214

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hit some kind of metaphorical bottom and things started to slowly move back upward.’ Scott is one of those who’ve made a career out of the uniqueness of Detroit. He uses the empty space as a canvas and a commentary. His studio is the abandoned industrial environment of downtown, like the Fisher body part factory. On one floor he built a pyramid out of more than 62,000 wooden floor blocks that used to line the floors. It took him eight months. In another section he took old TV sets that he found in one part of the building and placed them on top of some of the still-standing roof pillars. That work is called Garden of the Gods. The photographs of the work are extraordinary textural commentaries on the fragility of our built environment. He says he likes to look at it as nature at work. ‘Cities are born and cities can die and cities can be re-born, just like the seasons or anything else on the planet. The same way that it’s beautiful to see someone build an amazing architectural piece it’s also beautiful to watch how nature can take that thing apart.’ Scott was onto the possibilities of Detroit a long time ago. He’s well established now as one of the leading chroniclers of the organic changes that are underway. He lives in a warehouse in what is now perhaps one of the most rapidly gentrifying areas near the university. It’s not exactly the equivalent of New York’s meat-packing district (there are still plenty of vacant houses and busted-up buildings), but there’s a noticeable vibe. Even if the yuppies do eventually price the artists out of this area there are plenty more just like it not far away. Scott takes a philosophical view of it all. He tells me he liked Detroit when people didn’t like Detroit, and he likes it still. 215

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‘I’m sure I’ll like it in the future as well,’ he says. A bit further into the badlands Olayami Dabls runs an African bead gallery wedged between Grand River Avenue and the Jeffries Freeway. Over the years he’s gradually taken over the vacant blocks and the empty building next door as well. In the paddock outside he’s been building a sculptural installation called ‘iron teaching rocks to rust’, which he says is a metaphor dealing with the social and political issues of black and white people in America. He starts trying to explain it to me and I can sort of see what he’s getting at. I understand the iron-and-concrete metaphor, sort of – ‘We’re all iron essentially,’ he says – but I get a bit lost around the significance of the washing machine that sits at one end of the paddock. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter what I think or if I get it or not, Dabls is an interesting and engaging guy and Detroit is giving him the freedom to do what he wants. And what he’s done with the house next door is truly amazing. He says he’s turned it into an N’kisi house and it’s covered in mirrors and bright colourful bits and pieces that make it shine amidst the gloom of Grand River Avenue. In an area that has been trashed over and over again – where empty houses are regularly torched for sport and perhaps sometimes just for warmth, the Dabls house and the outdoor sculptural installation have been left alone. In fact, the house is attracting people to this part of town that would otherwise never set foot in it. There are other things happening in the city too. There are community action groups and urban farmers taking over some of the vacant lots. There are preservation societies hoping to save some of the best of the old buildings, there are some new industries even looking at moving in. People talk with great hope of Detroit one day becoming a centre of excellence in medical 216

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technology and other hi-tech industries. There’s a good vibe, there’s optimism, but it sits alongside the brutal and unforgiving reality of drugs and violence and social dislocation that is script fodder for crime writers and TV docu-dramas. For all that hope and promise, for the moment at least, Greater Detroit is still a motor city. The auto industry has seen some tough times but it is still the biggest thing going for it now. And as the national unemployment rate continued to tick up, the car industry started to defy the national trend. In 2008 it was one of the more visible examples of the economic collapse but by the end of 2010 it had begun to make a remarkable turnaround thanks in no small part to the controversial $85 billion dollar federal government bailout – a proposal that at the time saw quite a few lament the fact that the fed was now guaranteeing everything from the Wall Street banks to the gearbox in the family car. GM was rebadged as Government Motors, but without the bailout few now doubt that the car industry, one of the great stories of American enterprise, would no longer exist. Some still believe the market should have been allowed to run its course and force the industry to adapt. The truth is the industry had to adapt anyway and the flow-on effects of letting it fail would have been a disaster for Detroit and for the wider US economy. It’s surprising how widespread the view about the necessity for the government to step in is, but it’s probably no surprise you’d hear it in the offices of the US Auto Workers Union, which is where I met Mike Green. Mike is the president of the UAW local branch 652 in Lansing, an industrial town about an hour’s drive west of Detroit. His family has been building cars for General Motors for four generations. Mike is a big jovial man and a typical blue-collar boy 217

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who now has the slightly pasty indulged look of a lifelong union official. He is proud of his history and his family’s contribution to the industry and he takes great pleasure in showing me his grand­father’s union membership card and recounting some of the historic battles for workers’ rights that have made the UAW the bête noir of conservative politicians all over the country. It’s no secret that the benefits and conditions won by US auto workers certainly did help to make American cars the most expensive to manufacture in the world and the industry one of the most uncompetitive. It wasn’t just that they were making cars that weren’t as good as the Japanese and the Koreans, but American car companies just couldn’t do it for the same price. By the end of 2008 GM was losing US$4000 on every car it made. Clearly something had to change, even the union bosses could see it by this time and they’ve also had to make some historic sacrifices to keep the industry alive. Mike’s son is the fourth generation in his family to work on the production line but he’s earning half the salary of those who were employed before the crash. Mike still holds firm that if the federal government hadn’t stepped in to save it the industry would have collapsed and the effects of that, he says, would have been devastating. ‘Every one manufacturing job out here supports between seven and ten people in the community,’ he reckons. ‘If GM went down, it would probably have taken Ford and Chrysler with it. But just the GM part itself would have been a million jobs with the manufacturing jobs and the jobs that are attached to that. Now can you imagine if a million more jobs were lost on top of it? Where would we be?’ The auto industry is cited as one of the great successes of the Obama stimulus. And it’s no surprise that the auto workers, at 218

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least, are some of Obama’s most fervent supporters. And a lot of other people in Michigan agree with them. But it’s a success that has resonance across the country too – or at least the Administration hopes it does. It has become one of the platforms of the re-election campaign summed up first by the vice president, Joe Biden: ‘Osama Bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.’ Plenty argue about the effectiveness of the auto bailout but it is hard to take issue with the remarkable turnaround of an industry that was so close to bankruptcy. In 2010 GM posted a US$4.7 billion profit, the first since 2004. By 2011 the company had regained its spot as the world’s number one auto maker with sales of more than nine million vehicles. That’s good for the company, good for America and good for Detroit, but it’s not the answer to the city’s long-term structural problems. The auto industry will never employ the numbers of people it did before and remain profitable. Like a lot of rustbelt America, Detroit will have to find new ways to remake itself but, like Rome, it’ll take a while to rebuild.

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13 West Virginia – Songs in the hollers

That hint of promise that hangs over Detroit as it struggles to adapt to the twenty-first century’s realities is nowhere to be found in McDowell County in West Virginia. This is the equivalent rural metaphor for the boom and bust of America’s great manufacturing era. Detroit may have been the engine room but these are the valleys that powered a good deal of it, firing up the mills that made the steel that ended up as Chevvies and Buicks. These impenetrable ‘hollers’ as they call them around here also became the symbolic allegory of rural isolation and small town introspection, but the people in them developed a unique culture built on the hard work, danger and camaraderie that sprang from the one industry that fed them – coal. McDowell and other counties in the south of West Virginia were built on coal. Local historians like to call what happened here from the early 1900s to the 1960s a ‘Coal Rush’. Much the same as the goldfields that attracted millions of prospectors to the American West the coal rush became an El Dorado of 220

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sorts. Hundreds of thousands of migrants flocked in from all over Europe and men from other parts of the country also poured into the little towns that sprang up around the rapidly developing industry. And just like in the goldfields, bars, gambling houses, legitimate businesses and brothels sprang up everywhere. The local coal companies even put on so-called Saturday Night Specials, trains that would call in at the nearby towns and transport the single men to the local bordello. In the early days, in particular, this was tough, dirty, men’s work. Today, in the slowly dying rundown communities around Welch, the old-timers still talk and sing about one of the more infamous places of ill-repute known as ‘Cinder Bottom’: If you go to cinder bottom Put your money in your shoes Because them women in black bottom Got them black bottom blues If they managed to get out of the grips of the women of Cinder Bottom with any money left in their pockets, more than a few of them were bailed up, robbed and sometimes met their end on the outskirts of town at a place called Dead Man’s Curve, or so the story goes. There’s a lot of folklore and legend in these valleys – and these days not much else. The coal rush came to a pretty abrupt end once mechanisation made it easier to get the black stuff out of the ground with less and less manpower. There is still a huge appetite for coal in the American economy – it’s still the energy source that provides nearly half the nation’s electricity – but it’s just much cheaper and easier to get it elsewhere and many of the mines in McDowell 221

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County are now closed. In the 1950s there were 400,000 ­m iners in West Virginia. Today there are fewer than 25,000 and the flow-on effects of that have been devastating. Life is slowly leaching out of the hollers and the towns that once thrived down here. No one knows this better than the local McDowell County state senator, John Fanning. Since 1931 Fanning’s family has been the local undertakers. They run three funeral homes in the area, one in Welch, one in the provocatively named town of War, and the other in his hometown of Iaeger. When asked about his profession he likes to joke that he’s a ‘southern planter’. Most of the other businesses around here are either dead or dying but things are going okay for the Fannings. ‘We might doze,’ he says, ‘but we never close.’ Like a lot of older people in the area John Fanning has been a firsthand witness to the decline of the region. The senator was born in 1934 and came of age at a time when this part of West Virginia was booming. Today Iaeger is not so much crumbling, rather flaking and rotting away. The walls, windows and roofs of many of the houses that are still standing are peeling off and simply falling apart. The river that runs through the town was obviously once the focus of development as the place took off and the coal money pushed progress relentlessly forward, but it’s a sad sight now. John takes me out to the car park at the back of his funeral business. The place looks like half of the towns I saw in Bosnia after the war. The empty buildings appear to lean over the river, sagging into each other. Their decrepitude lends the air a melancholy mood that John only reinforces with his description of what was once a thriving business district. ‘Up there,’ he says, pointing to the opposite bank, ‘that was a 222

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bank. On top of it were apartments. This was a hardware. That was a grocery store. Next to it was a restaurant. That was an old hotel with a business in the bottom and a theatre right there . . . ’ He can still picture it like it was. I’m having a lot of trouble. ‘Yeah, we had three doctors in this little town. We had two dentists. We had our own theatre. We probably had six hundred people here. Good people too. Steady employment. Good Christian people. We had nice people here.’ They knew how to have fun, he tells me. You couldn’t move on a Saturday night. There were four pool rooms and a lot of the miners from around and about would come into town to drink beer and spend their wages. But the jobs have gone and John sees this as not just a local problem but more an exaggerated example of a wider national malaise. ‘We’ve outsourced our jobs. We have not done a good job in protecting ourselves. We have let it all evaporate and get out of here. Where do you find anything that’s not made in China or Taiwan? America has to wake up. It’s not only McDowell County,’ he says. ‘It’s not only West Virginia. It’s the United States of America. Jobs!’ West Virginia is a working-class state in decline. You might think that would make them more prone to vote for Democrats like John Fanning but they tend to swing here. The success of the Republican Party since the Reagan years has been its ability to capture what were once the locked-in Democrat votes of white working-class America. In the 2008 election Republicans took 68 per cent of them nationwide and here in West Virginia they are certainly expecting to do well with this demographic again. The state did vote for Bill Clinton in the 1990s but it has been solidly behind the Republicans in every election since then, and 223

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they certainly don’t see this Democratic president as an ally. The locals won’t say it out loud but they’ll grumble enough about the black man in the white house, so you get the message. Colour is an issue here. They also think he’s not much of a friend to the coal industry and they readily buy into all the Republican posturing about the EPA (the powerful government Environmental Protection Agency). They’re right. Coal is ­t wentieth-century fossil fuel technology and there’s a considerable amount of pressure on to find alternatives but it’s not going to happen soon. The real problem in this part of West Virginia is the infrastructure and the access. The glory days of the coal life as it once was are gone and they’re never coming back, but the geography of the place also makes it extremely difficult for anything to develop that might replace it. There’s nothing else. The land’s too steep to farm and the transport corridors are restricted by the mountains and the hollers. There are no multilane freeways down here. It goes without saying that the opportunities are limited. It’s a country of old people. The young people who stay either lack the will or the skill to go elsewhere. McDowell County has some of the worst education outcomes of anywhere in the United States, some of the worst poverty rates and one of the biggest drug problems in the country. The urban underclass of America is mostly black – out here it’s white. Not so long ago the MTV personality Johnny Knoxville fronted a fascinating and disturbing documentary that followed the lives of the White family: a celebrated clan that had been made famous initially by the patriarch D. Ray White, a local Appalachian tapdancing legend and a sort of folk hero in these parts until he was murdered in 1985. The Whites are from neighbouring Boone 224

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County but the scene is much the same. Over the years the family has degenerated into something that was best described as The Sopranos meets Coal Miner’s Daughter. The Whites are bad-assed, redneck, drug-crazed, gun-toting outlaws, and as a result they’re compelling viewing. But around here that’s not unusual. Up and down these gullies there are ­people like them everywhere. Just a few blocks from John’s funeral home we found our own version of the Whites stripping one of the more recently abandoned buildings of anything of value. There were half-a-dozen of them and they were carrying off anything they could – wood, windows, bricks and aluminium, especially aluminium. There’s real money in recycled metal. Brian and Nadine were leaning on their pickup taking a smoke break. They both had tattoos snaking up most of the exposed parts of their bodies and Nadine had two particularly bruising inkblots that appeared to be bleeding down her neck. They were so bad and it was such a botched tatt job that I couldn’t for the life of me tell what they were supposed to be. Brian had track marks running the length of the insides of both arms and two gaping red welts in his vein where the most recent hits went. His baseball cap read ‘West Virginia’ and he was wearing it back to front in the dude fashion. But he didn’t seem to be too proud of his home state. ‘There ain’t no opportunities here . . . [government] cheques, food stamps and drugs, that’s all we got. That’s about it.’ ‘This place is really awful . . . it really is,’ Nadine chimes in, laughing along with her stoned boyfriend. They were both off their tree. ‘There ain’t nothin’ to do,’ she says. They were enjoying the thought of being outrageous on tele­ vision but they were serious with it. They grew up in this area they said and had both tried to leave at different times but always 225

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ended up drifting back. It’s cheap. They know the scene and drugs are easy to find. Brian bashed a big piece of aluminium siding he’d just thrown in the back of the pickup. ‘Money! We get this stuff and sell it to buy more drugs to numb ourselves from the reality.’ Like everyone around here his family history was in the coalmines. His father was a miner. Would he ever consider going down the mines? I asked. ‘No, not at all,’ he replies as quick as a shot. ‘Would you go underground and get killed? I’m not goin’ down there. My back’s messed up . . . my knees is messed up. I’m history and I’m only 37 years old. Been on drugs all my life. Everything you see ’round here’s on drugs.’ Nadine told me her 13-year-old son had only recently been put into a youth detention facility for dealing drugs too. Desperate stuff but not an unusual story. There are thousands of people like this around here. Lost, drugged up, and no future to speak of. ‘Now you got to have a college education and all that,’ Brian says. ‘I guess we was left back in the pack. Anyways, you should come over to our place and film us makin’ moonshine. I make a mean spirit.’ I bet he does – I wished we had more time. There’s not a lot of love around here for this lost tribe of West Virginian youth. To the older folk this generation are like people from a different planet. They know the opportunities aren’t there for them but the drugs, the violence and the government cheques have warped them they say. People like Jimmy Gianato, who say they’ve worked hard all their lives, can’t quite come to grips with the change. 226

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Jimmy is a ghost from a different time. He runs Gianato’s store in the neighbouring town of Kimball. He was born above the same shop that his father first opened in 1923. It’s a clapboard postcard of a building in what was once a very pretty little town. There are miners’ hats hanging on the walls and shelves of neatly stacked cans of Campbell’s tomato soup, glass jars of hamburger pickles and rows of boxes of cornflakes. There’s a collection of old photos of his parents, his brothers and sisters and a few local celebrities snapped visiting the shop. There’s also a shot of JFK who stopped in during the 1960 presidential campaign. Jimmy’s had a good life and McDowell County has been kind to him but he readily admits there’s not much of a future here anymore. His kids have all moved elsewhere – ‘They wanted bigger things in life’ – but they’ll have to carry Jimmy out of his shop in a box. Not just because he knows nothing else and wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he were ever to retire, but the way he sees it he couldn’t sell the business anyway. ‘Nobody wants it,’ he says. ‘Everything here is coalmines and without it there’s nothing else. Without coal we’re in trouble and . . . well, we are [in trouble]. After the coal’s gone it’ll be finished. [This place] will be like a little mountain area but I guess there won’t be nothin’ here.’ The thing you notice after a few days in these parts is that it seems like you almost never see anyone between the ages of 30 and 60. There are good reasons for that obviously. But the saddest thing is the hole this generational flight has left in the place. The old-timers are good people. They’ve worked hard all their lives. They’re proud of their little towns even though they’re falling apart. For them this is home, and if you’re of a certain age you’re not going to move anywhere else. On the other hand, many of 227

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the young folk who have chosen to stay are lost and hopeless. It’s a problem that’s made West Virginia the butt of many jokes and a magnet for seemingly sensational documentaries like the Johnny Knoxville one. The old-timers are understandably very sensitive about it and many of them are working hard to try and preserve what’s left. The one thing they do have is history and it seems that’s an avenue that has opened up a few possibilities. There are people working on things like a coal museum, and there’s a proposal for a coal theme park with actors and re-enactments to draw the tourists back to the glory days of the coal rush. They are all good worthy projects but none of them are going to bring back the jobs that have been lost. In 2011 a Gallup Poll measuring confidence and optimism put West Virginia at the bottom of every other state. Forty-four per cent of West Virginians viewed the nation’s economic conditions as negative. In fact every state in the nation other than the District of Columbia was pessimistic to some extent but none came close to West Virginia. But the despair here seems to be less about the current economic gloom than about the cumulative indignities of a one-industry economy that has been moribund for decades. As one local puts it, they’ve hardly felt the current great recession here because ‘we’ve been down so long it looks like up to us’. Nonetheless, for a first-time visitor it is confronting. The empty decaying houses and factories, the rusting mine machinery left standing when the last man walked off the site, these are skeletal reminders of a much better time. Maybe the old timers don’t see it anymore. They live here and, just like the see-through buildings of Detroit, they look through the empty houses and dead towns. And as it turns out they were happy enough to talk to us about it for the cameras but maybe they don’t realise the 228

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impact of what they’re saying. When we put our West Virginia story to air the response was extraordinary. It seemed to take off in those little corners of the net that are reserved for the swirling conspiracies of the digital age, where the mainstream media gets dissected and distorted by the frenzy of those convinced by their own opinions. The coal days seem to have left a deep scar and a sort of injured resentment among the people who still call the place home. As they see it, the world – and the media in particular – is out to get them. But it is what it is. Our report was as straight as could be but it had an emotional power that jumped out from the opinions and honesty of the locals we spoke to and, of course, from the pictures of the reality of life there. Still, it would be an understatement to say not everyone liked it. Well you get that. I’d done stories on plenty of disadvantaged parts of the nation in one way or another before and never had a reaction quite like the one that followed this one. For a week after the story went to air the phone in the office rang with a coordinated indignation that spread through the net space of the McDowell County hollers. Some didn’t like what people had told us but mostly they objected to the way the place was portrayed. They didn’t like the camera’s take on their reality. It was like they were forced to see what they had managed to filter out on their own. ‘Don’t y’all think about comin’ back down here any time soon,’ was one of the more considered responses. They’re different in West Virginia, that’s for sure. The coal life and the relative isolation have bred a resilience and uniquely Appalachian identity. This is a place they write songs about. But even as it’s dying the place is kept alive in books and movies. There is a rich cultural identity that even the locals have a strange 229

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love–hate relationship with. The old-time fiddle and the claw hammer banjo playing have become an unwanted Appalachian cliché to some, but there’s still music in the place and some of them at least are proud of it. As one old-timer with music in his blood and coal dust in his veins told me, ‘My friends that I’ve met on the internet that live in other places they say it must be very cool to live in a place that people write so many songs about. They say, “No one’s ever written a story or written a song about where I live.” And a lot of people want to come here and see this place that a lot of people have written songs about . . . I can see why they would.’

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14 Obamacare

In a country with no shortage of big problems one issue came to define the first half of Barack Obama’s first term more than any other – healthcare. Many now believe the one-eyed focus on getting a health bill – any health bill – through the political process cost the president more than it was worth but at the time it seemed to consume the entire political process. When the president should have been directing his attention to the economy and to getting people back in work, the argument goes, he was instead buried behind the scenes, trying to find a pragmatic path through his own party to deliver what has been the holy grail of every Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt first tried to introduce a national health insurance program in the 1930s. There are many things about the American social contract that are broken but few of them compare to healthcare. It is a haemorrhaging financial mess, a prime example of the rotten culture of corporate politics, an unjust and discriminating policy failure that has become over time an extraordinary impediment 231

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to employment mobility and the major cause of bankruptcy in the country. Fifty million people, one out of every six people in the United States have no health insurance at all. The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than almost anywhere in the developed world and a general life expectancy rate that lags below places like Chile and Cuba, and yet for those that do have insurance the system can undoubtedly produce some of the best health outcomes found anywhere. But it does so with a culture of over-servicing that pushes up costs to a point that would be considered totally unacceptable in every other developed economy in the world. Any argument about healthcare quickly gets bogged down in statistics and figures but the figures in the United States are startling. Despite the lack of health coverage, in 2010 America spent about US$8000 per year per person on healthcare, twice as much as any other country in the OECD. Across the country nearly half of all bankruptcy filings were due to medical expenses and the cost of insurance premiums, which are spiralling out of control. In 2010 the health insurance cost for an average family was US$14,000, a figure that was projected to rise to US$28,000 by 2020. Treating a serious health problem in the United States can cost a lot of money. For a start the United States has higher administrative costs. The system employs more nurses and equipment per patient than anywhere else. There is a higher ratio of specialist to primary care doctors, and the specialists are much more familiar with the newest and most expensive equipment applicable to their specialised area of medicine. American doctors also approach the way they treat disease differently. The US system has more of what’s called ‘standby capacity’ than anywhere else as well; that is, equipment just lying around waiting for someone 232

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to use it, just in case it’s needed. For instance there are four times as many MRI scanners per capita in the United States than there are in Canada, so it’s hardly surprising that Americans get 2.85 times as many MRI scans as their neighbours across the border do and financing for this over-servicing is open ended. There are no fixed budgets and no limit on how many services can be used and at what cost. The question to ask is, are Canadian healthcare outcomes that much worse? The answer, of course, is, on the whole, no. There is no doubt for those with the means the US healthcare system can deliver some pretty good outcomes. It’s what doctors here call ‘Cadillac’ care, even though many would be just as happy treating most healthcare problems with a Dodge if it actually resulted in better prevention and more access. The other big reason for the overinflated cost of healthcare in America is malpractice. The United States is a nation of lawyers (a place like Palo Alto in the Silicon Valley area of California has one lawyer for every 65 residents) and what this does is encourage defensive medicine. Doctors prefer to rule things out wherever possible rather than just deal with what may be in front of them. As a new resident in America your first visit to a doctor can be a confronting experience. First, in middle-class communities at least, it’s hard to find a GP willing to take you on and when you do you’ll find they’ll only agree to have you as a new patient if they can be absolutely sure they know what they’re dealing with. This requires an expensive array of tests, including full blood work, chest X-rays, cardiograms, faecal analysis and more. You name it, the doctor wants to know what’s wrong with you now and what might be wrong with you in the future. To miss anything could lead to a crippling malpractice suit. 233

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To try and really understand the healthcare debate in this country is to delve deep into the national psyche. As one of the nation’s more eminent health policy academics explained it to me one day, the principal reason why Americans don’t have healthcare cover is that they are either too sick or too poor to get insurance or they just don’t want it. Which on the face of it seems fairly obvious but the difference here is cultural. In order to ensure a system of universal coverage Americans would have to agree on the need to subsidise the poor and compel those who aren’t poor to take up insurance with penalties of some sort, but the American public has had a long, historical, deep-seated anxiety about both subsidisation and compulsion. This is why America is the only industrialised country on the planet not to have a fully functioning public healthcare system and certainly the only one to become so divided and politically hot tempered about introducing one. It’s impossible now to separate the politics from the healthcare debate. This issue has become an unassailable political talisman for Republicans. At the time of the congressional vote many openly admitted that their opposition to it was motivated more by a desire to prevent Barack Obama getting a win. Although they were opposed to the idea of the Obama healthcare plans – derided as Obamacare – everyone agreed that there was a crisis in healthcare and that something had to be done to fix it. The bill was also dismissed by many on the left as a compromise because it didn’t include a so-called public option – basically Medicare for everyone. It was completely opposed by every Republican in the house because, well, because it presented an historic victory for President Obama and was further proof of the creeping ‘socialism’ that his presidency represented. It was finally 234

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passed with a vote of 219 to 212 on the night of 21 March 2010. As the cries of ‘yes we can’ echoed around the East Room the president declared that the legislation ‘will not fix everything that ails our healthcare system but it moves us decisively in the right direction. This is what change looks like’. Change, though, will be slow. Most of the reforms don’t come into effect until 2014. By then the bill will eventually ensure that the millions of Americans who are still uninsured will have some form of health insurance. They will finally be ‘compelled’ to purchase insurance through state-based exchanges with subsidies available for the working poor. But one of the most important aspects of the bill will prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition. This too will only come into effect for adults in 2014, although it began to apply to children just six months after the bill was passed. The healthcare law has divided America but it is hard to underestimate the impact of these pre-existing condition provisions. Almost everyone knows someone like Peg Schadt. Peg lives in a small town in upstate New York, just past the city of Scranton, which has been famously pilloried as the setting for the US TV version of The Office, which says it all really – it’s the US version of the English town of Slough. Peg’s story is extraordinary but all too common in a country where fighting with health insurance companies is for many people just one of life’s rituals, like a flu shot or preparing a tax return. In the 1990s she and her husband, Dick, moved to the Carolinas after he took early retirement. They downsized their house and spent what was left on a small grocery store. As she put it – the ink was barely dry on the contract when he got sick. What he 235

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thought was a bad flu turned out to be post-polio syndrome, a problem that can affect polio sufferers many years after they get over the initial disease. For various reasons she says their insurance company put up the red flag and denied their claims. The fees for treatment they said were over and above the customary charges; his medicines were experimental, they claimed; and on it went. Peg and Dick were forced to pay US$1600 a month on top of their insurance charges for his necessary care. Of course, they couldn’t work during this time and before long they had to sell the grocery store. Within two years they were declared bankrupt and their house was foreclosed. Everything they’d amassed over 30 years of marriage had to be sold and by 1999 the strain had ruined the marriage completely. Dick moved into a small trailer in North Carolina and Peg went home to her mother’s house just outside Scranton. In 2005 Dick passed away and in 2006 Peg’s mother died of colon cancer. At this point Peg was earning US$1100 a month working part-time in a grocery chain. In one year her health insurance premiums increased from US$186 per month to US$308 – a third of her total monthly income. She had to let the health insurance lag. At least she has a roof over her head, Peg reasons as she is telling me about her unfolding nightmare over a coffee in the kitchen of her mother’s house – small but neat as a pin and furnished with cheap but presentable pine furniture. The kitchen is the heart of the house. A coffee mug tree dominates one end of the Formica bench and small framed photos of her daughter and her late mother cluster down at the other end. The year after she lost her health insurance Peg turned 60 and after looking at her family history a doctor told her she really should think about getting checked for any possible developing 236

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colon cancer problems herself. She rustled up the funds for a check-up and subsequently had 27 polyps removed. ‘The surgeon said to me, “you’ve got to come back every year”,’ she says, ‘but I can’t afford it.’ The catch is that she now has a pre-existing condition and no insurance company will come near her. She can’t get insurance even if she could afford the inflated premiums. At 62 years old her only hope is that everything stays okay until she makes it to 65 and qualifies for Medicare. ‘Unlikely,’ she says. ‘I’m a ticking time bomb but I have no options.’ There are millions of people in America like this and you can find similar stories everywhere. Driving into a small town in Pennsylvania one day I pulled in to a Starbucks for coffee. They had a sort of local noticeboard on the wall and alongside the ads for puppies and cleaning ladies there was a heartfelt appeal to help fund a local man who urgently needed a heart transplant. His health insurance would cover the transplant the notice said but for whatever reason was refusing to fund the anti-rejection drugs he’d need to take forever afterwards. He wasn’t going to last until 2014 and his friends were hoping to raise $50,000 before it was too late. Obama’s healthcare reforms will help a lot of people if they’re not repealed but in the end they too are a pragmatic political compromise. The left of the Democratic Party is less than impressed, they wanted a public option, and the right – the Republicans – want nothing to do with it at all. Every one of the hopefuls running for Republican nomination before the primaries in 2012 declared repealing Obamacare a top priority, even Mitt Romney, who introduced a similar scheme to Massachusetts during his term as governor. In an attempt to appear bipartisan 237

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Obama even claimed his plan was in part based on the Romney Massachusetts bill. There are some similarities but this simply put Mitt Romney on the defensive and forced him to be even more strident in his opposition to the national health plan. He stumbled for months trying to find a formula that would play to a Republican conservative base for whom Obamacare has become an ideological line in the sand. Eventually he settled with the argument that he believed the state plan was just that – good for a state like Massachusetts – but in no way suitable for the nation as a whole. Whatever the merits, healthcare proved to be, as predicted, a potent issue with the voters in the midterm congressional elections six months later. Everyone may know someone in trouble in one way or another with their healthcare but few who actually have insurance want the status quo changed. The biggest concern for many is that the new plan will change the benefits they already have and push premiums even higher – a point not lost on Republicans, who claim that’s exactly what it will do at every opportunity. Plenty of healthcare professionals as well are critical of a plan that will end up being even more reliant on employers funding the health insurance industry and strengthening the power of the insurers, and will put more pressure on the public purse by pushing up the overall cost of care. Treatment costs will continue to rise, drug prices will continue to rise and doctors’ incomes will continue to rise. ‘There will come a time when healthcare costs will eat up the entire budget. Until then nothing will be done,’ one of them said to me not long after the Obama bill passed. But for the political right in America the healthcare bill amounts to an attack on the fundamentals that underpin American society. 238

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It is the ultimate counterargument to government intervention in a private life. What gives the government the right to mandate that everyone take out health insurance? Individuals should be responsible for their own health outcomes, they cry. Ron Paul – a libertarian and perennial Republican presidential hopeful – was asked famously during a debate in the softening-up period before the primary votes in early 2012 if society should let an uninsured person die if the choice was to treat for free or not to treat at all. Paul answered by saying, ‘What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself. That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody — ’ The audience cheered, cutting off the congressman’s thoughts mid sentence. Wolf Blitzer, the CNN personality hosting the debate, then asked him if he thought then that ‘society should just let him die?’ At that point a few people in the audience shouted out, ‘Yeah’. Ron Paul, who happens to be a doctor by training with a specialty in obstetrics and gynaecology, harked back to the days when he was practising in the 1960s, days when ‘the churches took care of them’. This is a simplistic solution to the healthcare realities of the twenty-first century but Republicans have a few constant talking points that emerge whenever they’re campaigning against the ‘socialisation’ of healthcare. Apart from Ron Paul’s appeal for the churches to take back their role, they say people are never turned away from hospitals and that costs are skyrocketing because too many people have simply stopped taking personal responsibility for their healthcare. That much is certainly true but it conveniently dodges the reality that too many people are also arriving at the hospitals far too late and an early intervention by 239

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a doctor could have saved the taxpayers thousands of dollars and possibly saved quite a few lives as well. One Harvard University study suggests that a lack of insurance causes up to 45,000 deaths a year. There are two reasons for this, the study says. One is that the uninsured have a much harder time finding care even at a public hospital because many have closed in recent years or cut back their services. The other is that improvements in medical care for insured people with treatable chronic conditions, such as high blood pressure, is obviously not available to the uninsured. ‘As healthcare for the insured gets better,’ one of the study’s authors says, ‘the gap between the insured and the uninsured widens.’ But for the political right it’s more than just a financial concern – it’s a cultural one. Whether the Obama health plan does finally get up or not, he will inevitably be remembered as the father of healthcare – as the man who tried to change the social contract between citizen and state. One of the most prolific of the many right-wing columnists, Charles Krauthammer, sums it up this way. ‘This is the last major brick in the construction of a social democracy on a European scale,’ pointing out that at least 50 per cent of the US health system is already taxpayer funded anyway under Medicare (care given to everyone over 65) and Medicaid (care given to those considered below the poverty index, which in 2010 stood at an income of US$22,500). ‘We have elderly care, we have our help for the poor – this turns healthcare into an entitlement that there’s never been. It’s a very large diminution of individual responsibility; large increases in the size of the state and huge increases in debt.’ 240

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Krauthammer describes Obama as ‘the most radical president in memory. A man with a vision of America as far more social Democratic and European than it has ever been. He’s not a flaming Marxist but he is a man who sees America with a destiny far closer to the European welfare state than to the more dynamic liberty oriented American republic.’ The thing is, to an outsider – to anyone who’s grown up in a first-world country other than the United States – these arguments just seem weird, and it’s impossible to convince many Americans, at least many of those with insurance, that alternatives to their healthcare system can be any good at all. They just don’t believe that other systems deliver good health outcomes. And sure, every health system has its problems, but Europeans, Australians, Japanese are not being sent into bankruptcy by their health bills. They are still paying less per head for health outcomes that are, when looked at across the board, far better than those in America. Generally the poor in the rest of the First World are not going without basic medical care because they can’t afford it. In that sense Krauthammer is right. This is a change for America and it is a move towards a more European model, but does that alone spell the end of the dynamic liberty oriented American republic? At this point in history neither the European model nor the American model seem particularly dynamic and healthcare isn’t to blame for that. Still, in the American political fight, Europe is a dirty word. Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts introduced what is still considered to be the model for the Obama health plan, is constantly accusing Obama of planning to transform America into a European welfare state. But then Romney’s transition from a Massachusetts moderate to ‘Conservative Presidential Candidate’ has been remarkable. The Tea Party types 241

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and the more conservative wing of the Republican Party fought hard to keep him out. Some just didn’t believe that Mitt Romney, the Mormon moderate with the 1950s department store mannequin good looks, was the one who had the best chance of beating Barack Obama in 2012. After all the shouting, venting and town hall rage, the countless Tea Party express bus tours, the demonstrations in Washington and the fancy dress historical re-enactments, you would think that even for this group of angry, anxious Americans that the presidential candidate for their party would be someone who embodied those views and values. Instead, they’ve been prepared to fall behind someone who has flipped and flopped on key conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage and who has inflicted on his own state the prototype for the one thing that above all else moves America closer to the detested European social model than anything else. Obviously the hatred of Obama is a bigger motivating factor than the fight for the sort of values many of them believe in. That’s politics in America, you might say, fractious and bitterly contested at the edges but ultimately compromising and pragmatic. It was Winston Churchill who famously once said you could ‘always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else’. While a clear majority of Republicans believe Mitt Romney is the right thing there are more than a few in the ranks who think he’s a safe choice that may in the end not offer a big enough point of difference to unseat the incumbent. As the celebrated conservative columnist Mark Steyn says, Romney doesn’t frighten the horses, but ‘Reagan didn’t take out Jimmy Carter by being cautious and Clinton didn’t take out George Bush ­senior by being cautious. You don’t knock off incumbents by being safe 242

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and Romney is a very safe guy.’ Except, strangely enough, for the issue about his faith. In a country where no one can run successfully for president without professing a true Christian faith, this Primary race was different. Both Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman are Mormons. By most accounts both these men as contenders for the Republican nomination should have been uncontroversial. The biggest hurdles they should have had were more ideological. But Jon Huntsman, in particular, turned out to be just too liberal for the Republican primary voters. He was an internationalist at a time when the party was on a far more isolationist trajectory, and also a former ambassador to China appointed to the job by Barack Obama no less. He had no chance of convincing the right of the party of his bona fide conservative credentials then, Mormon or not. Mitt Romney also faced some tough scrutiny about his commitment to true modern Republican conservative values but Romney has worked hard at transforming himself from what Newt Gingrich called ‘that Massachusetts moderate’. In the end the Republican Party will do what it usually does, and that is endorse the candidate with the Primary track record. Like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and John McCain before him, Mitt Romney has run unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination before. In his second tilt he ran a much more disciplined campaign, and was helped in the primaries by the fact that there were so many other conservative ‘anyone but Romney’ candidates who stayed in the race for too long. Unlike some of his opponents Romney knows where the traps and pitfalls are, he knows how to control the media message and he’s as clean as it comes. There are no compromising videos or claims of sexual harassment, just one faithful marriage and a picture-perfect gaggle of children and grandchildren. 243

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He has fought off attacks from the right, remarkably enough, on his corporate record and the ethical behaviour of his corporate buyout firm Bain Capital. But one of the big problems both he and Jon Huntsman had was fending off the hostility and suspicion about their faith, which is, after all, America’s own unique take on the Christian scriptures. For Romney this was familiar territory. He faced the same hostility when he ran in 2008 but this time – certainly in the early days – it went far beyond the usual internet speculation about whether he wore the magic underpants or not.

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From the spot where Brigham Young and his band of pilgrims first caught sight of the Salt Lake Valley you can see why he would have said as has been claimed, ‘This is the place. Drive on.’ Anyone else might have said ‘Holy shit! Get a load of that! What a landscape! What a valley! What a view!’ But by all accounts the then leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not a man who had much acquaintance with the exclamation mark. This was a man who went on to organise the building of a city with streets wide enough for a wagon team to turn around without ‘resorting to profanity’. To this day Mormons are a sober lot unlikely to ever let a foul word escape their lips or let their emotions get the better of them. Looking out from that same bluff on the hill, north of what is now Salt Lake City, the valley stretches out as far as the eye can see. The huge plain is sheltered by an arc of mountains on the left. Off to the right the Salt Lake from which the town takes its name glistens. It must have been quite a sight back in July in 245

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1847; a prairie rich with possibilities and as isolated and protected as any religion on the run might want. Today from up here Salt Lake City looks every bit the heart of the corporate religious empire that it is, although approaching it by road, up State Street from the south, it can look a bit like Albury–Wodonga on a bad day. Eventually the car yards, pawnshops, strip malls and burger chains fall away to reveal the sanitised and manicured bureaucratic headquarters of the Mormon Church and the temple at the heart of the western hemisphere’s fastest-growing brand of Christian faith. Temple Square is the destination for anyone who comes here. Today it’s wedged between the towering edifice of the church’s office building – a soulless concrete high-rise block with a map of the world etched into the façade, which wouldn’t look out of place in Minsk – and its equally huge and soulless conference ­centre, which has the appearance of a new world parliament designed by one of Mussolini’s architects. But back in the 1800s the temple and the square would have struck fear and awe into anyone who saw it. It’s as impressive, momentous, omnipotent an expression of religious fervour as can be found anywhere, and Temple Square is as important to Mormons as the Vatican is to Catholics or Mecca is to Muslims. From the very beginning the Mormons were convinced they were on the right path and the carriers of the one true faith. Extraordinary really when you consider this was a branch of Christianity founded by a man called Joseph Smith as recently as 1830. Smith was considered a prophet by his followers and a fraud and a charlatan by many others, including the authorities in his native New York State. In 1826 he was found guilty by a New York court of being ‘a disorderly person and an imposter’. Show 246

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me a prophet that wasn’t thought of like that in the early days you might say, but young Joseph Smith’s road from tenant farmer’s son to apostle was pretty colourful, and given its fairly recent germination a fair bit of it was documented for posterity. Joseph Smith wasn’t the only one spruiking a new take on the gospels back then either, but his story struck a chord with many and before too long he had a band of followers who would have been the envy of any wannabe messiah. They believed him when he told them the angel Moroni, a personal envoy of God, had divulged to him the location of a treasure trove of golden tablets that had been buried under a rock 1,400 years earlier. With the help first of some magic spectacles and a few magic rocks as well, Joseph managed to find and translate the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and write them all down in what was to become The Book of Mormon. Once the work was finished the golden tablets, we’re told, were returned to the angel. The church says there are now 150 million copies of The Book of Mormon in print. It’s been a phenomenal success and so has Mormonism. There are now thought to be more than fifteen million Mormons around the world, five to six million of them living in the United States. All of them believe, among other things, that Jesus visited the Americas, that the Garden of Eden was actually in Jackson County, Missouri, and that the American Indians are the lost tribe of Israel. They believe their supreme leader, known as the president, prophet, seer and revelator, talks directly to God. If they’re particularly devout they wear ‘sacred’ underwear as well. They don’t swear, smoke or drink alcohol or coffee and naturally enough 10 per cent of their income is tithed to the church. From the very beginning the Mormons were shunned. Joseph 247

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moved his followers out of New York and began a long and slow pilgrimage west. First to Ohio then Missouri, where they put down roots for a few years. Joseph then declared he wanted to be known as the prophet Muhammad of North America. After a succession of bitter confrontations with the locals, the Latter-day Saints moved on to Illinois and it was here in 1843 that Joseph announced that God had revealed to him the ‘new and everlasting’ covenant of plural marriage. It was a revelation that allowed him to eventually marry, by some estimates, as many as 48 women, and, more importantly, resonated throughout Mormon and American history and still does to this day. The American establishment found the whole issue of polygamy confronting from the start but by 1890 it was openly trying to crush the Mormon faith. In 1890 the Supreme Court upheld a federal law that abolished the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints’ corporate charter and authorised the US government to seize its property. The court argued that polygamy was ‘barbarism’ and ‘contrary to the spirit of Christianity’. The Mormon leaders didn’t have much choice but to give up the polygamous lifestyle or face having their assets confiscated. But by then they had weathered some pretty tough treatment and persecution. In 1844 Joseph Smith was assassinated by a mob in Illinois and the church was then taken over by Brigham Young, the prophet who eventually led the pilgrims to the Salt Lake Valley three years later. All of this helps explain how Americans view their own country’s highly successful take on the gospels. And while many Americans don’t care much either way, some are suspicious and others are hostile. The evangelical wing of the Christian right, for instance, views the Mormon Church as not just another branch of Christianity like the Presbyterians or the Methodists; they see it 248

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as a heresy and a cult and believe many of the beliefs and practices are contrary to what they regard as mainstream Christianity. To others it’s just a bit weird, a bit like a cross between the Amish and the Scientologists. The truth is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is far more politically active and successful than either of them. That frightens a few people too. For all of that, though, in the last couple of decades or so, the hostility had by and large been reduced to indifference, even disinterest. But as 2012 approached something changed. Suddenly America began looking at the whole Mormon idea a lot more closely and a lot of people started talking about what was being described as the ‘Mormon Moment’. Mormonism took a hold of American culture at various levels in ways that it had never done before. The writers of the South Park animation comedy penned a musical called The Book of Mormon, which became the biggest box office hit Broadway had seen in more than 50 years. The musical pokes affectionate fun at the Mormon lifestyle and beliefs but it does so in a way that puts it alongside the absurdities of all religious belief. It’s rude, coarse and positively modern but built firmly on the Broadway musical tradition. The New York Times describes it as ‘a newborn, old-fashioned, pleasure-giving musical . . . the kind our grandparents told us left them walking on air if not on water’. The day after that review came out bookings had to be made months in advance and tickets became almost impossible to get hold of unless you were lucky enough to get one of the half-a-dozen tickets that were offered in a lottery outside the theatre every night. Off Broadway, two television programs dealing with the polygamous lifestyle of fundamentalist Mormons were also drawing big ratings: Sister Wives, a reality TV series revolving around 249

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the life of a family of one man, Kody Brown, his four wives and their sixteen children; and a drama called Big Love, based on the real-life experiences of another polygamous family from the Salt Lake City suburbs. On top of that not one but two Mormons were in the race hoping to win the Republican nomination for the 2012 election. Both Huntsman and Romney have impeccable Mormon pedigrees that stretch back generations. Mitt Romney’s greatgreat-grandfather, Parley Pratt, was one of the original followers of Joseph Smith. He was also a Mormon apostle who had twelve wives. His great-grandparents were polygamous too. They moved to Mexico to escape US anti-polygamy laws. His great-­grandfather, Miles Park Romney, had five wives – and even married one of them in 1897, more than six years after the official church ban on plural marriage. More than anything else, more than the belief in the golden tablets, the Missouri Garden of Eden, the wacky underwear and the personal revelations from God, this is the issue that frightens and concerns most Americans. The mainstream Mormon Church hasn’t preached the gospel of plural marriage since the 1890s but plural marriage remained a reality for many members of the church and the leadership of the church for decades after that. It wasn’t until the 1930s that they moved aggressively against the practice. Since then polygamists have been immediately excommunicated. But the faithful split into two camps, with the polygamists claiming that the mainstream church had lost its way and strayed from one of Joseph Smith’s most important teachings. Plural marriage to them is quite literally the path to salvation. The apostles in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, refuse to recognise the fundamentalists as Mormons at all and the church hierarchy has spent a great deal of time, 250

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effort and money trying to convince the wider public that this is the case. The biggest misconception abroad about Mormonism is about where they stand on the whole issue of polygamy. The polling shows that more than 80 per cent of people asked are confused about the church’s position and, as even the church admits, the TV shows and other pop culture elements that highlight the polygamous lifestyle of those who call themselves ‘Fundamentalist Mormons’ isn’t helping them get their message across. The high-profile trial and imprisonment of one of the most notorious fundamentalist Mormon leaders, Warren Jeffs, hasn’t helped either. Jeffs is serving a life sentence in a Texas prison for crimes including the sexual assault of children. He is the declared prophet of one of the most fundamentalist of the ‘fundamentalist Mormon’ sects – a group from the twin towns of Hildale and Colorado City on the Utah–Arizona Border. It’s a good five-hour drive to Hildale from Salt Lake City but it’s a journey back in time through a stark, beautiful western desert landscape. This is an isolated, closed and troubled community that adheres to a particularly strict interpretation of the Mormon gospels. The women wear traditional nineteenth-century ‘prairie’ dress and braid their hair in a formal style that was probably unfashionable even in the early 1800s. As the prophet and seer of this community Warren Jeffs ran it as his own personal fiefdom. Even though he’s now locked up he’s still said to be revered as the power here. His word is law and over the years he’s excommunicated anyone who he considered to be a threat to his authority or who challenged his controversial and illegal activities. Jeffs not only engaged in sex with minors but he actively encouraged and conducted underage marriages. This is the far reaches of extreme fundamentalism and the sort of behaviour that most other fundamentalists would find abhorrent. 251

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From the highway there’s not much about Hildale that sets it apart from any other isolated western desert town. There’s a small sign that announces our arrival there, a petrol station and a half-empty house with a collection of old pickups rusting away out the front. But turn off into Hildale proper and things change. The town sits cowering below an enormous red rock bluff. Many of the streets are unpaved, the houses are big but unkempt, and within a block or two it’s apparent that this is no ordinary town. It’s a place where no movement goes unnoticed. As we drive in the few people we pass watch us go by with suspicion. No one’s approached us or said anything but it’s clear we’re not welcome. Children run inside to relay the news of a strange car in the streets. Curtains flutter. Younger children are ushered inside out of sight by women in traditional dress. Before long a white van with tinted black windows starts shadowing us. At this point we haven’t even taken the camera out. No one would know who we were or what we wanted but they’ve seen enough over the years to be wary of any stranger. After all, the way they live is technically illegal in the state of Utah even if no one’s actually been prosecuted for polygamy since the now infamous raid of 1953. Back then this place was known as Short Creek and one night in July the authorities moved in and arrested the entire town of four hundred people. The children were separated from their parents and made state wards and the men were imprisoned. But the raid backfired. The images of crying children being taken from their parents ignited sympathy within the public and set off a wider debate about freedom of religion and the power of the state. Within two years the children were released from state care, the men were released from prison and the community was back at Short Creek more determined than 252

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ever to withdraw from the world and look inward. Short Creek has become part of fundamentalist legend, seared into the sermons preached by the elders and taught to the children from the earliest age. Since then the authorities have largely been content to leave the polygamists alone provided they don’t break other laws – such as those pesky underage marriage laws. There has obviously been plenty of media interest in the community over the years and it’d be fair to say not much of it would have been sympathetic. We can tell they don’t like us already so we pull in at the town hall hoping to at least touch base and try to fend off some of the hostility while we explain why we’re here. As we pull in to the car park the white van pulls away into another street and disappears. A middle-aged bloke with that Brylcream look straight out of the 1950s comes out to meet us before we even make it to the front door. He says he’s the town clerk and warns us that while he can’t prevent us filming on the public streets, we shouldn’t expect anyone to be ‘overly receptive’ to our presence. But ‘heck’, he says chuckling, ‘take your chances’. That’s enough for us. We decide to position ourselves outside the one supermarket and just see what unfolds. It’s visually so different that nothing much needs to happen for the camera to illustrate just how weird and unusual this place is. Groups of women in long flowing dresses, with hair piled up in those old-fashioned braids, a preschool class of little kids in dungarees being shepherded across the road and old men with sun-ravaged complexions and flannel shirts who give us the hostile stare as they fill up their pickups. Before long cars full of younger men start driving past us at speed, just close enough to give us a message. The white van hasn’t returned yet but now a black one shows up and positions itself directly in front 253

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of the camera. Every time we move the van moves too, constantly trying to block the camera shot. We can’t see the driver through the tinted windows but he keeps up a menacing rev on the big V8. Eventually the supermarket manager comes out to move us on – at least to the other side of the street. He’s polite about it but he makes it clear enough that it’s time we thought about leaving. He doesn’t want us here and neither do his customers. ‘They’re just pressed about it,’ he says. Fair enough. We move on to another spot a few blocks away and the white van slips into view a bit further up the road. It stops there watching and waiting while we get the camera out again and start picking off shots. More cars come by closer now and at greater speed. The young men in them shout at us as they drive past. It’s too fast to hear exactly what they’re saying but we don’t need the specifics. Everywhere we go now the white van follows us at a distance, just keeping watch. At one corner we come across two women loading horses into a trailer. We walk up to them and ask if they’d mind if we filmed them. They refuse to answer or even make eye contact, but there are plenty of other eyes looking our way. Within a minute another car – a sedan this time – comes towards us. It approaches at barely more than walking pace, the driver is talking on his mobile phone and it’s obvious there’s now a lot of frantic communication going on about our presence. The driver doesn’t get out of the car, he just stops and watches, occasionally speaking in to the phone. The women carry on ignoring us and put their horses into the trailer. By now we’ve got enough vision, it’s clear no one is going to talk to us, and the atmosphere is getting more and more tense. It’s time to move on. The white van follows us to the edge of town. We leave feeling we’ve got about as much as we can from the 254

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Hildale experience. I had been warned that they wouldn’t be very receptive by my only contact with the polygamist groups, Anne Wilde. Anne was part of a plural marriage until the time her husband died. Since then she’s become one of the most articulate and convincing advocates of the polygamist fundamentalist lifestyle. Her story, like that of many others, is a tale of a life lived in the shadows. Until recently the fundamentalists like her chose to live in ordinary suburbia rather than in isolated communities, and tended to keep their lifestyles to themselves as much as possible. Often, of course, that’s not possible. There are a surprising number of polygamous families living in the suburbs of Salt Lake City and the surrounding cities like Provo, in particular, and their neighbours certainly know how they live. On the whole people here keep to themselves but the fundamentalists do feel they have been driven unfairly to hide their lifestyle. Now they’re starting to speak out in public in ways that their neighbours and the mainstream church are finding more and more confronting. They have become emboldened by the popular culture embrace and fascination with their lifestyle. Some of them are writing books, others are speaking out in other ways, and increasingly they are engaging with the media. But it’s still hard work getting to the more isolated communities and Anne Wilde is one of the keys to that. Through her work as an activist Anne has become a respected and well-regarded spokesperson for the polygamous community. Having her put your case is perhaps the best way to get an entrée into the communities that are still suspicious and nervous about the media. Anne put us in touch with a community called Centennial Park a few miles down the road from Hildale, across the border in Arizona. The residents of Centennial Park 255

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broke away from Warren Jeffs’ fundamentalists in the 1980s and have adopted a much more modern approach to their lifestyle. The women still dress modestly but in more contemporary clothes. The streets are clean and well kept and the residents have embraced the digital information age. Their houses are filled with the usual twenty-first-century trappings like iPads and flat-screen TVs – items of modern convenience banned by the elders who control the Hildale community just up the road. After a couple of days of back and forth telephone calls and email exchanges, the Cawley family, a bit reluctantly, agree to let our camera in on their lives. Michael Cawley is a teacher at the local school; he has three wives, Rose, Connie and Theresa, and a total of sixteen children. He’s not old enough to remember the 1953 Short Creek raid but his mother was one of the children ripped from her family and put into foster care. His childhood was defined by those stories. In the last few years he says he’s become more and more convinced that the time is now right to speak out and to defend a way of life that is an essential part of his religious conviction, but it’s only in the last few months he’s actually started to act on that. He’s done an interview with the Oprah Winfrey TV network that isn’t scheduled for broadcast for some time so our interview will be the family’s first public appearance. His wives are of the same mind as him, fiercely devout, determined and almost militant in their outlook. Only two of the wives, Rose and Connie, were home on the day we turn up and they all agree it is time to talk frankly. Rose is the oldest woman in the house and Michael’s first wife. In the division of labour that every fundamentalist plural marriage comes to, she is the one who has taken on the role of home mother. She looks after the children, cooks the meals and 256

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organises the house. The other women work. It’s an arrangement that suits them all. It brings in more money to the family and the women say it empowers them and gives them far more freedom and choice than most traditional marriages. Rose’s position in the family is pivotal. She’s not just the home mother because she’s not the match of the others in any way, far from it. She commands considerable respect and it’s clear she’s the more outspoken and driven of them all. With us she’s quick to dismiss the rejection of the mainstream church and the misconceptions many others have about the lifestyle. In fact, they are all keen to dispense with some of the more salacious questions that many of us have as well. No they don’t all sleep in the same bed. Each of the women has their own room and Michael shifts from one to the other on rotation. He has three separate sexual relationships with his wives and these are as complex as any monogamous relationship. As he says it’s not one marriage but multiple marriages and, ‘for anyone who’s married to one woman you know the work it takes to keep that marriage. Imagine doing that two or three times, honourably. It’s just more work.’ Still he seems to be enjoying it. He is openly affectionate to both of the wives at home that day and there does seem to be a lot of love flowing around the kitchen. Rose is dishing out the family meal of corn and potatoes as well as servings of religious conviction. The Cawleys, like all fundamentalist Mormons, believe they are living the true path and that the mainstream church caved on a basic tenet of belief. ‘They just didn’t have a strong enough faith to know that the heavenly father would open up the way,’ Rose says. ‘They gave in to those pressures and the pressure was to get rid of plural marriage out of your religious beliefs.’ 257

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They also think it was all about money, all about retaining their wealth and their property under pressure from the federal government. They’re probably right about that. As the grandiosity of Temple Square and the surrounding infrastructure would suggest this is a church with a lot of money and assets to protect. But hey, it’s not the only one of them. Still, the polygamists have made a choice. They have no real church infrastructure or organisation. They have their prophets but they operate on a much smaller scale, and they have held firm in their beliefs despite the campaigns and the laws that are railed against them. But the ironies stack up one after the other. The defenders of the Constitution – the freedom of religion crowd – can’t come at religious beliefs that allow plural marriage. If not for this desecration of the sanctity of marriage most of the fundamentalists actually measure up as pretty good conservatives. The church says the fundamentalists are not even Mormons but if anything they’re even more righteous and devoted to the teachings of Joseph Smith. They read and adhere to The Book of Mormon. In fact, the fundamentalists argue they adhere to those teachings much more closely than the mainstream church who, Michael Cawley says, ‘need to examine what the Mormon faith is because they have separated from many of the ideals and those truths’. For mainstream Mormons, even those like Mitt Romney who are steeped in the heritage of the church and who can trace their own family history back through to the polygamous past, the fundamentalists are an abomination. It is true that the practice of polygamy is a long way from the modern Mormon reality, but for all that the church recognises that it still has a PR problem. Even as the Mormon movement took hold across the country the inner 258

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circle of the church hierarchy signed off on an advertising campaign of its own to try to change the Mormon image. Ads feature ordinary people doing ordinary things, throwing Frisbees, fixing motorbikes, playing with their children, surfing – you name it. The message is Mormons are ordinary people. This is described by insiders as an extraordinary development. ‘A surfer girl who has a tattoo and some spaghetti-strap clothing – unheard of!’ But it’s a development, like anything that happens in the church, that’s been sanctioned from the very top. The Mormon Church has a strict hierarchical structure. Its rules and policies are set by the fifteen men at the top – the inner sanctum. At the very top is the prophet or president. He, and it is always he, has two counsellors below him who form what’s called the First Presidency. Below them are the twelve apostles – simply referred to most often as ‘the twelve’. These are the men who interpret the revelations from God and make the decisions that steer the church. As you would expect they are an imposing symbol of power for the believers and many express surprise that we managed to secure an interview with Jeffrey R. Holland, one of the twelve. But I can only assume the timing was right and the church certainly took our interest and our program seriously enough to grant the interview. Jeffrey Holland has a touch of the Efrem Zimbalist Jr about him. Picture the suave coiffed 1960s TV star with a few extra kilos and a few extra jowls and you’re almost there. It has a lot to do with the coiff in his hair and the thin lapels on his dark suit, but also his open and engaging television demeanour. Everyone agrees Holland, the former head of Brigham Young University, is the church’s best salesman. Securing the interview with him took a lot of time and careful explanation about what the story 259

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we were shooting was about, who we were and how many people watched, and so on. More than the usual amount of email exchanges and telephone conversations were held with the church media spokesman, an always polite but insistent and particular man named Dale Jones. Dale is thorough and inquisitive and carefully prods me over a few weeks about the nature of the story, who else we were talking to and what angles we were taking. He somewhat remarkably professes initially to have no knowledge of the fundamentalist communities on the border that I tell him we are planning to visit and insists, as everyone in the church does, that the fundamentalists aren’t Mormons anyway. In the end, though, he accepts the premise of our story and can’t be more helpful. He comes through with everything we ask for: access to the famous tabernacle choir, a cherry picker to give us a great shot of the temple itself and, of course, an apostle prepared to bat off all the pesky questions and spin for the church with gravitas. ‘It’s a little frustrating to have some of the fundamentalist groups that have had a lot of publicity lately referred to as Mormon groups or subsets of the Mormon Church,’ Holland tells me during a long interview in the studio in the bowels of the imposing Conference Centre. ‘We really have tried very hard to be clear publicly and privately that we haven’t practised polygamy for over a century. We did,’ he says. ‘We did in the early days of our church but we haven’t since the late 1800s and it’s a little frustrating to have these fundamentalist groups resurface and it’s often around these TV shows.’ Back and forth we go for about 30 minutes. Elder Holland is extremely comfortable and confident fielding all the questions about the fundamentalists and polygamy, about the renewed 260

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focus on the church, about the church’s own Mormon moment campaign and about the more controversial aspects of the recent political involvement in actively supporting and funding the Proposition 8 Amendment in California, which effectively killed off any hope for the legalisation of same-sex marriage in that state, at least for now. ‘With same-sex issues,’ he says, ‘that’s not just a practice for us, that gets to be biblical, that is scriptural, that is something on which the Lord has spoken. We do have the history of Sodom and Gomorrah.’ The one issue that does throw him is the Mormon Church’s historically unsavoury position on black people. The Book of Mormon describes black people as being cursed with the colour of their skin. It wasn’t until 1978 – well after the rest of America had agreed that official segregation was no longer appropriate or just – that African Americans were given full participation in the church and allowed into the priesthood. ‘I honestly don’t know why it took so long,’ is all Holland can muster. But it is also clear, he says, that this church policy and rule can be changed only by way of revelation. The president of the church – that’s the one who speaks directly to God – has to come to a revelatory position. He has to be told by God to change the church doctrine. And it wasn’t until 1978 that he was. With their plans for global growth such a position is also not in their interest abroad. One of the places the Mormon Church is growing the fastest outside America is in Africa. But here in the United States you still don’t find too many African Americans in the congregations. In the end that may be one of the really big challenges Mitt Romney faces in convincing people about his faith and his role in the church. It’s not just the evangelicals with 261

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their concerns about the heretical nature of the Mormon beliefs, or the gay people who view the church’s outright political interference in the whole gay marriage fight as too much, or those who still can’t quite fully get the insistence that polygamy is no longer a mainstream practice who might be reluctant to vote for him. There are a lot of others who will question him about his position on the whole black issue and his support as a missionary for a church that had at its core a belief that black people were somehow inferior. Will it be too much of a hurdle? Is America ready for a Mormon president? Back in Centennial Park Michael Cawley certainly doesn’t think so. ‘I don’t think America is ready for a Mormon president,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t think that America was in 1844 when Joseph Smith was attempting to run for president and ended up being martyred.’ Yes, that’s right, Joseph Smith was actually the first Mormon who wanted to run the country as well. ‘I think that the political views in the country wouldn’t accept the Mormon president if he was somehow to make it,’ Michael insists. Of course, they said that about the first Catholic elected to office as well. In a presidential race Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith is going to be a handicap but, as weird as the Mormons are, if he wins and he’s successful, liked and well regarded, and if his presidency is judged favourably, then the issue of Mormonism would probably be put to rest. If not, then it might be a while before a Mormon tries again.

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As the German aristocrat Otto von Bismark once noted, ‘politics is the art of the possible’. That has certainly been true of the Obama presidency, but every leader knows history deals up the framework around which the politics is wrapped. Even before he took office, history had dealt some big challenges for America’s 44th president. The two biggest were the wars and the economy. Afghanistan is going to take some time to wind down and although the Iraq withdrawal was formalised at the end of 2011 the United States will certainly be involved in both countries for some time. Obama, though, can take credit for setting the end dates of the formal military engagements. And that, along with other careful and surprisingly cautious foreign interventions, such as the action in Libya, not to mention the assassination of Osama Bin Ladin, will no doubt contribute to the overall impression that Barack Obama has been what they like to call here ‘a successful foreign policy president’. But the economy is different. 263

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There’s no doubt Obama inherited a difficult situation. In 2008 the economy was a mess. In just eight years George W. Bush had squandered a US$155 billion surplus with a financially disastrous ‘war of choice’ in Iraq, and he had introduced tax cuts that favoured the rich to the extent that, by the time they run their course in 2012, the average saving for the bottom 20 per cent of American wage earners will be just US$45 a year but the savings for those on more than $1 million will be an average of US$162,000. Remarkably for a president from a party that likes to make a big noise about entitlement programs, George W. Bush’s Administration also introduced the single biggest increase in entitlements in four decades in the form of the Medicare prescription drug benefit – a program that was supposed to cost US$400 billion over ten years but has since spiralled up to an estimate of more than US$700 billion and has overall made prescription drugs even more expensive than almost anywhere else. The economic turnaround in America has been dramatic. In the presidential debates in 2000 George W. Bush and Al Gore were actually arguing over how to spend the expected US$2.2 trillion surplus. When Obama took office the deficit for the fiscal year 2009 was US$1.4 trillion – the largest deficit relative to the size of the economy since the Second World War. The financial system was broken, the housing market was in freefall, 750,000 jobs were being lost every month, the stock market was plunging and exports, retail sales, manufacturing and consumer spending were all falling faster than they had during the Great Depression. But the financial crisis was deeper than just the deficit. In the words of the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, it was also caused by:

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a set of policy choices that we made as a country over a significant period of time, certainly the decade before that. So we saw financial institutions across the country take on a huge amount of risk without restraint, you saw the government of the United States living way beyond its means, borrowing . . . from future generations to finance a set of programs and tax cuts without paying for them. Geithner was talking to Jim Lehrer from PBS after nearly two years of the Obama Administration controlling the economic levers. Unemployment was still above 9 per cent, and the Democrats were about to get trounced in the midterm elections. ‘The crisis was made worse and was made much harder to solve because of the cumulative set of policy choices that happened in the decade before this president took office,’ he said. Back in 2009, just a month after the inauguration, the new Administration implemented the US$787 billion stimulus plan that helped stop the freefall, but the attack on the economic crisis then seemed to stall. It got lost in the politics of healthcare and bludgeoned by the renewed arguments from the Republicans about the dangers of debt. The recession did officially end and the economy pulled out of the tailspin but stimulus became a dirty word, debt continued to grow even faster, and two years later when the Administration had the opportunity to repeal the Bush tax cuts they extended them because the Republicans who complain so much about the deficit don’t want millionaires to pay more tax and the Democrats were spooked about making tax an issue in the 2010 elections. Geithner is said to have pushed for the tax cuts to finish at the end of that year as scheduled but Obama sided with the Democrats in Congress. So the rich got another 265

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break as foreclosures continued to march up suburban streets and still the unemployment rate remained above 9 per cent, the longest period at that rate since the 1930s. ‘I inherited this mess,’ the president kept saying, and ‘it’ll take time to turn it around.’ And yes that’s now more than obvious, but the blame shifting only works for so long. Even in 2011 some polls were showing that only a slim majority of people still blamed George W. Bush for the economic problems but the gap was narrowing. Inevitably it became Barack Obama’s economy. In 2012 the economic crisis is Barack Obama’s. And the statistics are profound. This president will almost certainly face an election with the highest unemployment rate of any postwar leader. Chronic longterm unemployment is now worse than it was during the Great Depression. Almost 40 per cent of the unemployed are still unemployed for more than six months. In fact, many Americans have become so discouraged they have dropped out of the labour market all together. America hasn’t experienced a decline in the labour force like this in nearly 60 years. Before this period the country’s ability to create enough jobs to absorb a continually growing pool of people was the envy of the world, but there is a feeling that the restructuring that began in the early 1980s has finally caught up with them. It’s almost as if this last recession is an exclamation mark at the end of a long period of transition. Recessions always leave behind a legacy of transition and America has never been all that good at dealing with that legacy. The great manufacturing and steel cities of the so-called rustbelt states of the mid west and the northeast are an example of this. Detroit, as discussed earlier, is one of the more obvious. But the scars of the great manufacturing crisis that really made itself felt in 266

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the United States from the early 1980s and onwards can be seen in countless other cities – from places like Toledo and Cleveland in Ohio, which have, like Detroit, suffered from the white flight to the suburbs and beyond, to towns like Braddock in the Monongahela Valley outside Pittsburgh, once the most powerful and productive steel-manufacturing centre in the world. In the 1970s there were steel mills up and down the valley. The industry employed 80,000 people and 20,000 of them lived in Braddock. Today Braddock is home to one of the last of the mills left standing but the modern steel industry now employs just one person for the ten that it used to, and the people who work at the US Steel Edgar Thompson steel plant no longer live in the local community. In fact there are less than 2000 people who call Braddock home these days, and they do so largely because they’ve got nowhere else to go. Once again the ones that are left behind are those without the resources to leave, and they are overwhelming, disproportionately, black Americans. In the good years Braddock had its own newspaper that ran the slogan, ‘What Braddock Makes the World Takes’, on its front page every day. Braddock Avenue was packed with theatres, department stores and hardware stores. No one can quite remember exactly how many bars there were – 30, 40, maybe 50 according to some. Today there’s a family dollar store and a small meat market but there’s only one bar left. Like a lot of these places Braddock has been decaying for 30 years but the transition does seem to have reached a new phase. They are now finally getting around to pulling down some of the old empty shells of buildings. There are gaping holes of green on Braddock Avenue. There’s even an urban farm on a two-acre plot growing specialty vegetables for the fine dining restaurants of nearby Pittsburgh – a strange sight with the belching steel mill smoke stacks behind it. And 267

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there is a sort of urban renewal underway, spurred on by a new proactive and interventionist mayor who’s trying to lure artists and small businesses to the town to revitalise the empty spaces and the industrial architecture. But here too the poorest and most dispossessed seem to be missing out and the renewal has divided the community, some of them seeing it as yet another way of ­forcing more ignominy on the people who have been disenfranchised for decades. Latoya Frazier is one of them. She was born in 1982, at the moment it all started going bad for Braddock. She grew up here, she says, without any idea of what it once was. She used to hear her grandmother talking about how it had been: a place of booming businesses, a melting pot of industry and commerce. ‘That was never real to me,’ she says. ‘I could never fathom that because I grew up when the library was abandoned and the high school was closed.’ Like a lot of those people who grew up in Braddock, Latoya no longer lives there, but she’s full of anger about what happened. She lives in New Jersey and has become a successful photographic artist. A good deal of her portfolio is based on documenting the lives of those she says have been forgotten. ‘In America, people have a historical amnesia about disenfranchisement,’ is the way she puts it. Braddock is another of those places that have barely felt the effects of this recession because they’ve been going through the painful economic trough for such a long time anyway. It’s an example of how the country moves on through recession and restructuring without looking back. Those who can keep up move on with it, on to high-tech and medical industries, to computing and software. Not always a bad thing but there is a tendency to forget 268

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about those people who are left behind. The American workforce has always been seen as highly mobile, willing to move anywhere in the country for work. Until recently that has been true, but increasingly those with jobs are reluctant to move to new ones for fear of losing their healthcare benefits and those without jobs find they haven’t got the skills needed for the new industries. In many ways Braddock and other places like it can be seen as a microcosm of a bigger structural problem in the United States. Between June 2009 and June 2011 median household income fell by 6.7 per cent – a bigger statistical fall than any since the 1930s. Home values in most of the country are worth only two-thirds what they were in 2006 and homeownership rates have dropped to the lowest level seen since 1965. How much of this is directly Barack Obama’s fault may still be a subjective argument but he now definitely owns it. The problems are enormous and extremely difficult but more could have and should have been done. Obama will no doubt pay a price for that at the coming poll. As conservative commentators like to point out, no president has won a second term with unemployment above 7.2 per cent but the Republican answers to this are also failing to inspire the electorate. Many, many people are unhappy but this anger crosses political lines. The discontent manifested first in the Tea Party but as time progressed and the economy remained stubbornly depressed many others started to express a sense of loss and frustration as well. For the first time Americans began thinking that their children’s lives may not be as good as their lives. A lot of people started to wonder if America’s position in the world was changing and if the best days of the United States were behind them. In the autumn of 2011 that frustration boiled over on the left as well. In a mirror image of the Tea Party demonstrations earlier in 269

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the Obama presidency the Occupy Wall Street movement, with its undirected and undisciplined anger, seemed to come out of nowhere. From a street march of a few hundred young people dismissed initially as rent-a-crowd anarchists, the Occupy Wall Street movement touched a nerve and almost immediately began to grow and attract a much more diverse crowd. Like the Tea Party these people felt that corporate politics and corporate economics had failed them. Young Brooklyn hipsters struggling with college debts and unable to find jobs were joined by parents worried about their children’s education and the lack of opportunities. Grandparents, pensioners and church groups all turned out as well. Many of them expressing a frustration that the system was no longer working and that doing anything through the usual channels didn’t seem to help. As one priest who brought his entire congregation along one Sunday tells me: Congress is frozen. Nothing happens. The government seems not to be able to get anything done. The president can’t get anything done. The Congress is ruling that corporations are people for heaven’s sake. It seems ridiculous and nobody can get any help. Our older people are looking at cuts in social security and Medicare while the richest people in the world have tax breaks. This is not justice. This is not mercy. This is not compassion. This is not what we’re about. These people are also angry that the America they grew up with or had expected to grow into was changing. Their priorities are different from the mostly monochromatic Tea Party activists but their anger at what they regard as a failure of elite power at every level to deliver for ordinary Americans is 270

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the same. Above all else, the Occupy protestors blame corporate America and greed for the crisis, and corporate politics for allowing it to happen. They want answers and solutions even though they don’t know what those answers are. And, as the economy continues to stagnate, this group of Americans no longer believes the reassurances that the market can fix itself and that eventually everything will return to normal. The resonance of the Occupy Wall Street protest is precisely because the target is Wall Street. No one much likes bankers and Wall Street is a convenient place around which all these grievances can coalesce. The protestors recall the reckless lending by the banks, the subprime loans, the mortgage-backed securities and the inter-bank loan market. Even if they don’t fully understand the rhetoric they know how it has hit them. Americans also know they have paid hundreds of billions to bailout many of the banks left standing in the hope of preventing the entire collapse of the system. Then they watched as less than eighteen months later the same bankers rewarded themselves once again with huge bonuses. It’s true that having been just a flutter away from insolvency the banks turned their corporate houses around and posted big profits again, but the people who turn out at the Occupy protests don’t really believe the fundamentals of the banks’ operations have changed. When the rest of the country is still bleeding, when there are sixteen million people looking for jobs, when foreclosures are still hollowing out neighbourhoods all over the country and every­ one’s wondering how they’re ever going to afford to send their children to college, people don’t seem to view the reduced bonus of just US$9 million that Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, awarded himself in 2009 as much of a sacrifice. Of course, none of it’s simple. Without the bailouts the economy 271

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would have likely gone into freefall and the present would look even bleaker than it already does for many. As the traders themselves point out, if it weren’t for the banks there would be no credit and not only would businesses large and small be unable to expand and farmers be unable to retool but also the protestors wouldn’t be able to borrow to buy the smart phones and iPads that are as fashionable in a street march these days as tie-dyed T-shirts and folk songs were in the 1960s and 1970s. But such is the anger and the discontent in the public mood at the moment that arguments over the fine print and detail are almost irrelevant. The success and wide appeal of the Occupy Wall Street protest, and the Tea Party movement for that matter, show that, while they may have differing views about how to fix the problem, many have just given up listening to the excuses. The feeling is there’s something fundamentally wrong and that the system itself is broken. Inevitably the Occupy movement also lost steam but not before it ricocheted around the world. The economic concerns and frustrations of Americans have as much global impact it seems as the country’s overall economic outcomes. America sneezes and we all get a cold. American activists come up with a protest idea and like burger chains the rest of the world decides to get in on the franchise. What happens here sets the global agenda in many ways, and whoever ends up being president has a huge impact on all of us, but the judgement is to be made by American voters. In the 2012 election, as in almost every other, the protagonists from both sides will have that old Clinton-era maxim ringing in their ears: ‘It’s still the economy, stupid.’

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17 Election 2012

It took Mitt Romney until the Wisconsin primary in early April to give a convincing appearance of wrapping up the long and bitter process to become the Republican challenger to Barack Obama. Of course, it would take him a lot longer to secure the majority of delegates and make it through the convention, but by Wisconsin he’d had at least a few conclusive wins and showed consistent appeal in the more moderate states. He’d even convinced enough people in the conservative southern states that the group of people often referred to in GOP-speak as ‘the base’ would show up and vote for him in November. And, importantly, he’d been given the imprimatur of the patricians from the establishment wing of the party as well. George Bush Snr and Barbara had posed in comfy armchairs with him and declared he was their pick. George W. Bush, though, kept his counsel for a while longer but his brother – number two son Jeb, the former governor of Florida and for a while the man thought of as a possible white knight who would come in and rescue the party from the 273

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lacklustre candidates vying for the primary endorsement – also gave his blessing. House and Senate leaders too finally got on board. Not long after that Rick Santorum realised it was all over for him. By then it was clear he wasn’t going to get the numbers to win even his home state of Pennsylvania. Newt Gingrich finally surrendered to reality at the beginning of May and it looked very much like what had been a divisive, although at times highly entertaining, Republican primary contest would return to the predictable and somewhat tedious trudge towards the inevitable: the final selection of a candidate that looked to be the most patrician with good family connections – as was the case with the Bush family – or, if that’s not possible, a good war record. None of the Republicans in this race qualified on either of these grounds, so the nod from the Republican royal family carried a lot more weight in 2012. The primary process was first introduced in the early twentieth century as a way to return some of the initial democratic power to the people, to give the voters a say at every stage of the process – an idea that grew out of the so-called Progressive Era of reform – and to take some of the power out of the hands of the party leaders and backroom schemers. Appropriately enough, the first primary bill was passed by the state of Wisconsin in 1903 and it let the voters choose their party’s convention delegates through a ballot. By the time the 1916 presidential race came around more than half of the then 48 states had given the people the right to choose their party’s convention delegates. But these preliminary elections fell out of favour over the following years. The voters seemed to lose interest in the whole idea of reform and the top contenders found they didn’t necessarily need the 274

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primaries to win the nomination. It wasn’t until the advent of television that the primaries again began to seize the public’s imagination and play a decisive role in the nomination of the eventual candidate. The era of the image-driven campaign allowed candidates to build a national profile like never before but, like much of America’s political process, time and the speed of modern communications have rendered the primaries more than a little anachronistic. And, of course, money has corrupted them. The primaries are now largely a performance that fascinates a few, employs many and bores a whole lot more. The election year of 2012 began with eight Republican hopefuls on the main bench. The spread included for the first time two Mormons, Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman; Herman Cain, a former pizza company CEO; Michele Bachmann, a tele­genic congresswoman fired up with religious and fiscal fervour; Rick Perry, an equally telegenic but bumbling Texan governor; Ron Paul, a 76-year-old anti-war libertarian who has a surprising but significant amount of support among younger voters; Newt Gingrich, the former house speaker; and Rick Santorum, the oldschool Catholic-morals crusader and former senator. From the beginning Romney was considered the favourite, but for a good period of time there was a poll-fuelled flirtation with almost every one of the others except Jon Huntsman – the rank and file (or the base) seemed to have real problems with Mitt Romney and they simply saw Huntsman as Romney-lite. At first, though, the polls showed a surge for the former pizza company CEO, but Herman Cain’s candidacy was destroyed by stories of his peccadilloes. Nothing upsets a campaign more than sexual indiscretions and the pizza man had a remarkably energetic and newsworthy history of them. Then for a while Michele 275

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Bachmann looked like she might occupy the same space in the public zeitgeist as Sarah Palin had. At least the base seemed to like her but when it came to the crunch there were other conservatives they preferred. Disappointing results in the early primaries wiped out her chances. The next one to surge was Newt Gingrich and he set the Republicans into open warfare. None of the candidates were ever quite as problematic for the establishment as Newt, and none were as interesting, brave or comical, either. Newt is a lobbyist’s briefcase full of contradictions. He’s the man who as speaker led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his dalliances with Monica Lewinsky and who at the time was having his own extramarital affair. He claims that his pursuit of Clinton was about the law and the Constitution but his rhetoric back then was laced with a moralising tone and the supercilious righteousness that politicians seem to be able to all too easily justify. The consummate Washington insider who built a lucrative career as a man of influence in the years after he left the house, the man who among other rewarding contracts was paid more than US$1.5 million by the government home lender Freddie Mac, began his run for the White House as an antiWashington candidate. As the polls rose in his favour he began to talk about his nomination as a fait accompli. ‘I’m going to be the nominee,’ he said early on. ‘It’s very hard to look at the polls and not think the odds are very high. I’m going to be the nominee.’ To which George F. Will, the celebrated conservative columnist, replied, ‘He is given to grandiose rhetoric. Particularly about himself as a transformative figure. A De Gaulle one day, who knows the next. Self-regard is one of his virtues.’ It was pens and expense accounts at dusk in a duel that stretched 276

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across downtown Washington. The lobbying world and the opinion makers went at each other from Georgetown to K Street. Will led the pack for the opinion makers. You’d think Gingrich, the architect of the ‘Republican Revolution’ that took back the house in the 1990s for the first time in 40 years and the man who shut down the government in 1995 rather than compromise on the Clinton budget, would be a Republican hero, but he is instead one of the most hated figures inside the beltway on both sides of the political fence. He was a divisive and difficult house speaker, particularly for those on his own side, and no one’s forgotten that. He has few friends in the Republican congressional ranks and even fewer among those who make their living writing about them. Sitting in his quaint Georgetown office, surrounded by his colourful private collection of baseball memorabilia, George Will held nothing back when I asked him why he thought Gingrich would be a disaster for the Republicans: ‘If Obama was to run against Gingrich we would have a contest between two of the most narcissistic people in North America. Quite an achievement of our political system to produce that.’ The return fire came from across town, high up in one of the shiny office towers of K Street: ‘Well, George Will is a classic high-Tory twit.’ The late Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s press secretary during the turbulent 1990s, was occupying a splendid office in early 2012 on the lobbyists’ mile on K Street, furnished with zebra-skin chairs, all chrome and white walls stylishly broken up with a stunning collection of modern art and old movie stills of Ronald Reagan. ‘They’ve never liked each other,’ he said. ‘George Will didn’t like Newt when he was speaker. I tried to get them together but they were just oil and water.’ 277

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Tony Blankley has a long Republican pedigree. When he was still a teenager he campaigned for Barry Goldwater and he worked for Ronald Reagan before he teamed up with Newt. If anyone knows Gingrich, Tony Blankley does. He says Gingrich’s ‘strength is his ability to talk vividly and colourfully with powerful images’ about what he wants to accomplish and what’s possible for the nation. A few weeks later Gingrich made that point clear when he detailed his plan for a US moon colony. It will be populated with 13,000 people and if he’s president, he said, it’ll be up and running before the end of his second term. Will has a different take: ‘Newt Gingrich has a history of selfdestruction; he has a history of saying things that are just silly. He has a history of embarrassing himself and of self-restituting.’ But then Will is one of those Republicans who think the whole game in 2012 is lost and the party should instead start looking towards 2016. He doesn’t like Gingrich but he doesn’t think Romney can win either and he’s not the only one. Throughout the primary process that was the message the ‘anyone but Romney’ candidates were pushing. For months they attacked the liberal political positions of the Massachusetts moderate who was the architect of the state healthcare law that became the blueprint for Obamacare. How could he inspire and muster enough conviction in the electorate and convince the country to change course they asked? Romney was also perceived to be weak on some of the more substantive hardline conservative moral issues and that was also a point of difference they exploited hard. All of them made the case for the party to elect a true conservative. Santorum, in particular, embarked on a moral crusade. ‘This is not just about the economy,’ he said, meaning it should 278

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also be about conservative moral values – abortion, family values, contraception, freedom, God, history and healthcare – and, furthermore, Republican moderates never win. As the establishment pushed the idea that only Mitt Romney had the broad appeal needed to swing independents, Santorum began to channel Ronald Reagan. At meetings of the Republican faithful all over the country he repeated the line that Reagan had pitched when he was told that the moderate candidate was the best choice. We need to bring the centre to us, he stated, not cave in to the centre. The trouble with that argument, though, was apparent to many –  even on his own side. More than 30 years after Reagan, fiscal conservatism still has some appeal but increasingly moral conservatism doesn’t. Talking about regulating contraception, espousing anachronistic views on women in the workplace, and denigrating gays is no way to win over a majority of independents. Sex is popular and most Americans don’t want their politicians to interfere. The 2012 primaries, like most others in recent times – except perhaps the Democratic primary in 2008 that saw Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fight it out until June – did eventually follow the predictable and time-honoured pattern and fall to the establishment-backed frontrunner. But as 2012 unfolded it was clear there was more than just the usual political hostility at play. For the Republicans this was a contest as much about the soul of the party as it was about the candidates themselves. Primaries often push candidates to the extreme edges of their orthodoxy simply because it’s only the rusted-on true believers who are voting in these contests. Righteous, overblown statements from the hustings are par for the course but this one appeared to be different. It was an extension of the debate that had been coursing through 279

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the Republican Party ever since 2008, and certainly since the emergence of the Tea Party movement. It was all the more ferocious as well because of the unbridled amount of cash injected into the process by what’s known as the super PACs (political action committees). The Supreme Court decision in the 2010 case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the way for an unprecedented torrent of political funding. Congress first banned corporations from funding federal campaigns in 1907. President Theodore Roosevelt said back then that such a prohibition would be ‘an effective method of stopping the evils aimed in corporate practices acts’. After the Second World War the ban was extended to include labour unions as well but the law was considered to be weak and largely unenforceable. The laws were toughened up after Watergate when Congress created the Federal Election Commission to enforce them. But in 2010 the Supreme Court overruled two earlier decisions, made in 1990 and 2003, which had upheld limits on corporate spending in federal elections. In this case, as it often does, the court voted along ideological lines with a five to four conservative majority, and ruled that the First Amendment protects the right of corporations to use their own money to support a particular candidate provided they do it at arm’s length. If organisations such as companies or unions (basically a collection of people with First Amendment rights) want to spend their money supporting a particular candidate then they have a Constitutional right to do so as long as they are wholly independent of the candidate. The court left it to Congress to define what would constitute illegal coordination. It was a stunning decision that has already had a far-reaching impact on the American democratic process. In a country not 280

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shy about spending big on politics this was a new dimension. As a result, the 2012 election has spawned a particularly aggressive form of political slush. Corporations are allowed to spend their money on any individual provided they’re not in cahoots with them but the Republican primaries showed what many had predicted – the whole thing is a charade. The candidates say they have nothing to do with the PACs that spend millions of dollars on their behalf in advertising to support them, but the super PACs – those spending beyond the previous legal limits – are open about the fact that they are run by former close political associates of the candidates themselves. If there’s no direct coordination it’s because there doesn’t need to be. The super PACs are encouraged by the individual candidates and they share fundraising lists with them. Millions of dollars have been injected into the campaigns and in the 2012 primaries each of the Republican candidates had their own super PAC supporting them and they spent millions of dollars on advertisements tearing each other apart. Watching members of the same party rolling out vicious, wellresearched political attacks on each other is something unusual. Newt Gingrich’s super PAC, for instance, produced a full-on docu­ mentary deconstructing Mitt Romney’s role as a ruthless Wall Street corporate raider for his company Bain Capital. The film was called When Mitt Romney Came to Town and accuses him, in the most brutal terms, of preying on the misfortune of people thrown out of work when Bain bought and restructured their companies. ‘This film is about one such raider and his firm,’ the ominous voice-over announces.

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Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital the day the company was formed. His mission: to reap massive rewards for himself and his investors . . . a story of greed. Playing the system for a quick buck. A group of corporate raiders led by Mitt Romney more ruthless than Wall Street. For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town. One elderly woman sitting uneasily in a lounge room chair says, ‘I feel that is the man who destroyed us.’ Tough stuff. Even Rick Perry started calling Romney a ‘vulture capitalist’. Pretty strange language coming from the party that claims to be the champion of free enterprise. The idea, of course, was to paint Romney as being out of touch – even unconcerned by – the financial struggles and concerns of ordinary people. Not hard to do when the target is someone with a fortune estimated to be somewhere around the US$250-million mark. The ads also painted him as an ideologically weak flip-flopper who will let no principle stand in his way of becoming president. It’s not that it was really any different in past primaries – Democrat or Republican – but with the help of the super PACs this political season has been so much more intense. The Obama campaign committee will barely have to lift a finger to denounce Romney; they just need to re-run what other Republicans have already said about him. And of course Romney doesn’t help himself, either. When he talks about money, or wealth, or assets, he often seems to live in a parallel universe. At a rally in Detroit he casually quipped that he liked cars and so did his wife. She has two of them – Cadillacs. He admitted to the fact that he gets speaking fees from time to time as well, although apparently ‘not very 282

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much’. Not very much turned out to be US$374,000. During one of the early televised debates between the Republican candidates he challenged Rick Perry to a casual US$10,000 bet to settle an argument over his healthcare record. And the remodelling proposals for the Romney’s holiday house in San Diego have become a national joke. He has plans to tear down the existing 300-square-metre house and replace it with one that’s 1000 square metres and purported to include a two-level, fourcar garage with its own car elevator. The family also owns a lake house in New Hampshire valued at around US$10 million and a townhouse in the up-market Boston suburb of Belmont. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that necessarily. In fact in the United States that sort of success and wealth is usually celebrated, but when his own party starts making wealth an issue and calling one of their own a vulture capitalist it’s hardly surprising that it gets news coverage or that the Democrats ­ jump on it. The ‘Romney is out of touch’ line was pushed hard throughout the year and inevitably became a major theme of the federal campaign. There are other narratives that have become part of the Romney political story as well, like the one about his dog. On a family holiday in the 1980s he put Seamus, the family’s Irish setter, into a kennel strapped on to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve-hour drive to a summer vacation. It’s become the stuff of legend for political columnists such as the New York Times’s Gail Collins. Just seeing how she could find ways to work it into every column became amusing in itself. There are parody web videos all over the internet. There are ‘dogs aren’t luggage’ T-shirts and Facebook groups. The dog story also feeds in to the view that Mitt Romney is not an ordinary guy – not only is he a 283

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Mormon and a multimillionaire, he also straps the family dog to the roof of the car. As any political operative knows a good part of the political battle is about managing perceptions. For much of the primary campaign Romney tried to distance himself from his liberal track record by toughening up his stand on immigrants and abortion in particular. Inevitably, he’s had to pull back to the centre on those issues as the race focuses on the contest against Obama. But then as his most senior adviser told CNN in a rare moment of campaign candour, when the race starts to turn back to the main event his candidate could be recali­brated like that children’s drawing toy where nothing is ever permanent: ‘It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.’ We found out early what the Obama campaign was going to hit. Obama framed this election as a choice between his careful government ‘investment in the future’ and the ‘thinly veiled social Darwinism’ he says is inherent in the Republican budget plan put forward by congressman Paul Ryan. It is the same budget plan that even Newt Gingrich described at one point as ‘rightwing social engineering’. The Republicans have tried hard to reframe the debate on their own terms, of course, as a choice between a big-spending Administration with no plan to bring the country’s debt under control and their vision of less government and more power for individuals. Obama’s top campaign adviser, David Axelrod, flagged the Democratic Party attack when he stated that Romney appeared to view the world through the ‘rearview mirror’. ‘I think he must watch Mad Men and think it’s the evening news,’ he said, referring to the hit TV show set in the boozy advertising world of the 1960s. 284

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He is just in a time warp. You have a guy who wants to go back to the same policies that got us into this [economic] disaster. He wants to cut taxes for the very wealthy, cut Wall Street loose to write its own rules and he thinks that this somehow is going to produce broad prosperity for Americans. We’ve tested that. It’s failed. The trouble Mitt Romney has is his lack of conviction. The Obama campaign has played to that consistently as did his Republican opponents. To appeal to his own party Romney has had to abandon many of his more moderate positions on abortion, on healthcare, on immigration and on energy policy and climate change too. The problem he has is the modern Republican Party is almost unrecognisable from the party that was around when his father, George Romney, was making his push for the presidency. The current zeitgeist has transformed the Grand Old Party in the last few years from what was once described as Ronald Reagan’s big tent of reasonably broad opinion into a frenzied club for religious zealots and science haters, where a fear of a multicultural and multiracial America is cheered, and where, despite the crushing debt and financial problems the country faces, no tax increases will ever be considered under any circumstances whatsoever. Apart from that, the simple truth is that in 2012 you also can’t be a credible candidate for Republican presidential nomination if you don’t question the science of global warming and climate change. This is already a long way from the position held by John McCain who went to the 2008 election with a policy that was only slightly different from the one Barack Obama had. Back then Mitt Romney had a policy that promoted a plan for making the nation’s automobile fleet more fuel efficient and also, 285

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as the governor of Massachusetts, he introduced the Climate Protection Plan, which he described at the time as one of the nation’s most ambitious plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Like the Kyoto Protocol, his state plan called for emissions to be reduced to 1990 levels by 2010 plus an additional 10 per cent reduction by 2020 through strict standards for the old coalfired power plants, promotion of renewable energy, encouraging ‘green’ building technology, energy efficiency, cleaner vehicles, and public awareness. He now says, ‘the idea of spending trillions of dollars to try and reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us’. All of this is up for debate in an election year. In an interview with the ABC in the White House in 2010 Obama stressed that building an economy that laid the foundation for long-term growth was his biggest priority but he also likened his task to attaching the legs to a stool: There are some legs to the stool that have to be put in place. Having a reformed healthcare system was one of them, having a strong financial regulatory system so that we never have the kind of financial crisis on Wall Street that we saw again, that’s a second component. A third component is what we just talked about in respect to energy, having a shift from the old energy models to a new energy model that’s more efficient and more self-sustaining, that’s a third leg. For all that, this election will essentially revolve around the debate about the size and role of government and, of course, the general health of the economy. If the economy is still looking like it’s improving when 286

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Americans are asked to vote in November 2012 then Obama has a good chance of convincing enough of the nation to give him another four years. If he is elected for a second term, if he can work with Congress, if Europe doesn’t tank, if the global economy stays afloat, if he can make a sufficient dent in the deficit at home, he has a small chance of becoming the transformational president he wants to be. Most presidents set the tone of the nation, few manage to change it profoundly. But the United States of America is bigger than any of its individual leaders and bigger than its peaks, troughs and challenges. History and circumstance have forged a truly great nation that is constantly changing, continually damned by its problems, but inspired by its promise.

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Epilogue

I came to the US with an open mind but, like many, I also carried some preconceptions. It’s a place we think we know because it dominates our popular culture like nowhere else. America is an easy place to stereotype but it’s not a monoculture. America’s strength is its diversity even if it’s one of the things that frightens so many of those who live here. This country is constantly evolving. As a society it’s more fluid than almost anywhere else – ­certainly more than any other world power. The demographics are shifting fast, and many Americans are angry about the pace of that change. They fear what to them seems like an increasingly uncertain American future, but much of our future – the world’s future – will inevitably be determined here in the bland suburbs of Silicon Valley. As the final deadline for this book approaches I find myself in California shooting a story on the booming tech industry and I’m reminded, as always, of the complexities and the paradoxes at the heart of modern America. This is the one part of 288

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the economy that’s actually doing well. America may not be the greatest manufacturing nation in the world anymore but it does still have the infrastructure and the culture to ensure that it is the world leader in ideas and innovation. China might be making the computers but Silicon Valley is still driving the vision. It’s home to the companies that are changing our world now – Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter – and this is where the people who will define our future are coming to develop and launch their ideas. They are not only Americans; the place is crawling with young tech-heads from all over the world dreaming up the next billiondollar company. The fastest growing area is the world of apps for mobile devices like phones and iPads, and workshops known in this business as incubators have sprung up all through the Valley and in San Francisco to help budding entrepreneurs realise their dreams. In the 1970s every kid wanted to be a rock star. Now the cool kids wear glasses, write code and want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Most of them have nothing much more than an idea; they’re living on borrowed money and sleeping in hostels or barely furnished apartments, but they’re here because this is the place that offers them an opportunity like nowhere else. This is a place that embraces people prepared to take risks and this is where the big venture capital money is. It’s a thoroughly modern example of why so many have been drawn to this country for so long and why many of the assumptions that are made about America can be so wrong. Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park used to be some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This is the capital of venture capital. It looks like little more than a well-manicured country club but it’s home to most of the money that’s bankrolling the tech future. In a sparse marble and glass office, one of the 289

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biggest investors in the business lays out the future as he sees it. Technology, he tells me, is allowing us to undertake a massive sociological shift – from geopolitical states to states of mind. He says people are increasingly wanting to find other people who think like them and act like them. Technology is opening up the world like never before, but also making it easier to find your own tribe. It strikes me that this is probably a good thing but might not always be. The tech-heads call it ‘disruptive innovation’ and no one really knows where it’s going. Already the disruption has devastated the ‘old media’ – that model is now all but broken – and it is also disrupting and, in some places, breaking the old political models as well. * There’s still a few months to go until the poll but the presidential campaign is now well underway. In fact Obama has been in the Valley for the last few days hosting fundraisers and talking up the tech boom. It’s no surprise that most people here seem to like him (this is San Francisco after all), but at the airport on the way out I have one of those conversations that show just how fractured America has become. Airports in this country are a levelling experience where everyone is hostage to bad food, cranky service and overpriced drinks. It’s a sort of warm up for the plane itself. I sit at a bar next to a middle-aged travelling businessman who tells me, between mouthfuls of burger, that the country is going to shit and that if Obama gets re-elected the place will be ruined. ‘And you know what?’ he says. ‘Obama’s not the first black president – he’s half-white anyway – but he is the first Arab president.’ 290

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‘He’s what?’ I’d heard a lot of conspiracy theories over the last few years, most of them fuelled by ignorance or straight-out fabrication reinforced by communities of like-minds on the internet. ‘Yeah. His father was an Arab and he lived in Indonesia.’ ‘But his father was a Kenyan.’ I say somewhat reluctantly, not sure if I really want to go there. ‘Yeah, but he was a Muslim and his mother also only converted to Christianity years after Obama was born. Well, that’s what I’ve read anyway. As far as I’m concerned that makes him an Arab.’ * My time here is almost up. I’ll be heading back to Australia after the election so I won’t be here to cover the second Obama term or the Romney presidency. Whoever it is, the arguments will continue to rage and those crazy corners of the internet will continue to screech with fury, lies and venom. But the transformation of America will continue. After all, Hope is an aspiration, not a plan, and change is constant.

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Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the opportunities afforded to me in my role as a correspondent for the ABC. It’s a job that opens doors to people I otherwise may never have met and to places I more than likely would never have got to in such a relatively short space of time. It would certainly not have been possible without the ABC’s continuing commitment to primary sourced journalism – a commitment that, as everyone in this business knows, is becoming rare. So thanks to the ABC and Kate Torney in particular who, as head of news, endorsed the project. During my time in the United States it’s been my good fortune to work primarily for two programs that have championed the notion of being on the ground, talking to real people and producing original stories. Thanks to Steve Taylor, the executive producer of Foreign Correspondent, and Ben Hawke who, for most of my time in Washington, was the EP of The 7.30 Report. Few people in the business know more about television than them. 292

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Writing a book is a singular experience but much of this one is sourced from my travels gathering material for those programs, and TV is ultimately a collaborative exercise. Thanks to the producers and researchers at FCP, particularly Vivien Altman, Trevor Bormann, Bronwen Reid, Ian Altschwager and Mary Ann Jolley, who all provided inspiration and advice. Thanks also to my good friend Michael Maher who was a thoughtful and entertaining collaborator and travelling companion. Thanks to all the people from all walks of life who I met along the way and who generously shared their lives, thoughts and ­stories with an Australian stranger. Thanks to Janet Silver, our dogged and determined producer in the Washington office. Thanks also to my other colleagues in the Washington bureau: Craig McMurtrie, Lisa Millar, Jane Cowan, Kim Landers and Woody Landay. Thanks to Louie Eroglu and Dan Sweetapple, my two partners on the road who both know how to make pictures sing. Thanks to Alan Tidwell and Bruce Wolpe who stumped up at short notice to cast a critical American eye over the manuscript and were generous with their guidance, corrections and advice. Thanks also to Paul Daley and Chris Hammer, two great mates, fine journalists and gifted writers who offered constant encouragement from the beginning. Thanks to my publisher Alexandra Payne and editor Joanne Holliman from UQP who believed there was a book to be written, even if at times I doubted it myself. Thanks for waiting so long to get it. Thanks to my mum, Rosemary, who has witnessed this perhaps unexpected trajectory and to my father, Bob, who saw it 293

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begin all those years ago but unfortunately didn’t live to see where it went. Finally, special thanks to my own family. My wife, Tracy Sutherland, a partner in every sense, always willing to embrace new horizons and challenges – it’s taken us a long way, together, and to our two girls, Ella and Neve, who have also approached this sometimes disruptive life with a great sense of adventure. I couldn’t have done it without you.

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