a Washington D.C. diary, of sorts

There is a man who walks very slowly down my street every morning. He never walks on the pavement, always the road, keeping close to the parked cars. I spotted him once downtown. He’s not hard to miss. Dressed completely in black, he has a large sports bag slung across his back and a scarf wrapped around his head.  He walks with a gait that suggests he is listening to a particularly mournful Billie Holiday song; perhaps he has earphones on under his scarf. He looks like a weary ninja.

Never on the pavement, always the road. I want to stop him and ask, why do you never walk on the pavement?

**

I generally try not to think too much about paths, and choices. I rarely look more than a few months ahead. I fall into jobs. Trip into relationships. Stumble over music and literature. I like to think this is because I am the right-handed child of left-handed parents; my sense of direction is so skewed that I am happy to let the waves of life push and pull me every which way until they dump me where they think best.

If I am to be honest, I’m a lazy toad who can’t be arsed to make decisions and would much rather someone else make them for me. Particularly because then I would have some other fuckwit to blame when things go wrong.

Interestingly, I suppose, this is not a true reflection of my behavior once I have started a job into which I have fallen. I am rather decisive then. I have had jobs where the decisions I made, had they been the wrong ones, could have resulted in major pointing-and-shouting fuck-ups for the entire world to see. But that’s work. This is life.

So. I continue to take small hops from pavement to road to pavement.

**

Moving to D.C. was a classic Hebe hop. Two years on, it has proved a pretty epic leap.

If the great Ed McBain were alive today, and so minded, he might describe D.C. thus: the city is a woman, envied for her beauty and her history, despised for her politics, smothered by the constant attention of opinion. In the game of ‘shag, marry, murder’, D.C. is the woman men want to sleep with solely for the satisfaction of bitching about it afterwards.

A few months after my arrival, standing smoking in the street, I thought ok city, here I am: do your worst. Moments later, as I bent down to put the cigarette out, I got whacked in the face by an angry, ranting homeless man wielding a piss-stained blanket.

**

My current job is not as stretching as my last. This enormous change in circumstance, with its sudden abundance of free time, was not unlike a baby discovering its feet for the first time: what the hell are these and what do I do with them? So I walk. And walk. And walk.

This city was built for walking. Tree-lined streets and wide boulevards lead to monuments and museums, galleries and gardens and parks, bars and restaurants and roof-top terraces, theatres and clubs. And stretching above, unmarked by skyscrapers, the vast, forever-blue sky.

My favourite walk, the one I insist all visitors take with me, is along Q Street from 14th all the way to Wisconsin Avenue, block after block of beautiful row houses, higgledy piggledy with turret windows and French slate and verdigris, all shades of pink and cream and brown and lemony-yellow. With the advent of spring, the tiny front yards are filled with pansies and hellebores and tulips, the pavements sticky with browning magnolia petals.

Of course it’s not all pretty. The city has its problems, as all major cities do. The homeless guy who loiters on the roundabout near my apartment, bawdily wishing me a good evening as he pees into a trash can (I am always amazed he can do this hands-free). The panhandlers, standing wearily with arms outstretched on the corners of cross streets, the invisible lines encircling them drawn by the passersby – we, me – who give them a wide berth.

The underfunded public transport system, the lack of decent housing in poorer neighbourhoods, the reliance on cheap, unhealthy fast food for want of fresh fruit and vegetables, the city’s constant struggle for power over its own budget, the disenfranchisement of the entire population and the battle for statehood … I could go on. You get the picture.

**

Where else but in this small city of 600,000 people, where inhabitants change from year to year as jobs reach the end of contracts, would I meet and become friends with people far removed from my usual group? In London, you have your friends. You don’t need any more. Here, you are open to widening the circle. “My blog,” I told a departing friend, “is called ’New Friends, Better Friends’, not ‘New Friends … Oh Fuck Off Then’.”

I have even made friends through social media, something I would never have done back home. “Do not,” warned someone as I went to meet a couple I had chatted to on Twitter, “go back to their apartment. They might want a threesome.” My new friends were forever after known as The Thruple.

As for dating. Well. I live in a gaybourhood where the only single, heterosexual men in my age group are homeless. This is a young person’s city. A badly dressed young person’s city.  Take a walk downtown on a Saturday night if you fancy a little DIY retinal surgery.

**

Although no longer employed in the world of politics, regular readers of this blog (er, there’s an email sign-up button, yeah? USE IT) will be aware of my continuing fascination/borderline stalking of all things political.

Exchanging one capital city, with its petulant, shouty politics, for another with a political system more baffling than a denim two-piece and the kinds of personalities you might meet in a focus group on a Saturday night, has been revelation. Not perhaps on the scale of the Second Coming, fair enough, but there are parallels with the struggle between good and evil. Also, a necessary reminder that politics doesn’t have to always be serious. Because, Newt.

**

I love this city. It has helped me to understand that whether you walk on the pavement or on the road, the main thing is to keep going. There’s probably a bar somewhere at the end of the block.

The Republican Party: dead or still twitching?

Less than three in ten Americans view the Republican Party in a favourable light, a CNN poll found this week. And in other breaking news, I’m still flat-chested.

Timed to coincide with the publication of the GOP’s 2012 election ‘autopsy‘ (their word – because why wouldn’t you name your report into what went wrong with the term for a thorough examination of a corpse to determine the manner of its death?), the CNN poll came a day after the end of the party’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual national gathering of key figures and activists.

If GOP Chair Reince Priebus needed further evidence to illustrate his autopsy findings that the party is “scary“, “narrow-minded” and “out of touch” – other of course than the 65 million two-fingers the party received in November – the conference provided him with a laboratory of living, breathing examples that may prove that Mary Shelley was right all along.

Giving a platform to the likes of professional lunatics Sarah Palin, the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre and Donald Trump (and it doesn’t matter that Trump spoke to an empty room in a graveyard slot, the fact that he was invited while New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was not speaks louder than a tourist on the metro) was like poking a corpse with a stick. Yep, it’s still dead.

Rand Paul departs the Capitol after his filibuster by @Dharapak

Or is it? The conference didn’t serve just to amplify the death rattle. The ‘future’ of the GOP, Senators Marco Rubio (for the young ‘progressives’) and Rand Paul (for the awkward squad), gave rousing speeches although neither said much of great interest; it is far too early for them to do anything other than give their supporters a little cheer to show the party hasn’t completely flatlined. Rand was the winner of the CPAC straw poll, the end-of-conference indicator of conservative feeling, although this was off the back of his impressive 13-hour filibuster over drones, so an unsurprising victory.

There are parallels with the Tories in 1997. Deeply unpopular, the party faced an overwhelming battle after it was dumped out of office to prove it was in touch with an electorate that considered it nasty, uncaring and old-fashioned.

The difference here is that the Tory party recognised this and worked to incorporate compassionate conservatism into its narrative; the GOP as it stands now seems too in thrall to its financial backers, and either oblivious to, or too frightened to acknowledge, the significant changes in the social issues important to the country in which it lives, a country recognising, for example, the rights of people to legally declare their love, the unfathomable power of the gun lobby, and the rights of women to have control over their own bodies.

Perhaps I am being unfair. Indeed there has been an encouraging softening by some in the party of the once-rigid opposition to citizenship for undocumented workers, and the autopsy report reflects this. And perhaps it is too soon. It is, after all, a mere four months since the election. The GOP autopsy does at least hold a mirror to the face of the party.

The GOP has an opportunity to apply the ideals and values that once made it a popular and respected party to the brave new world that it aspires to lead.  If the party doesn’t have the courage to ruthlessly jettison those who are determined to keep it strapped to the gurney – and that includes its current leadership – it will remain encumbered by restraints, seeing just one thing from the low point afforded by its more extreme base.

Good view from back there, yeah?

By Pete Souza

haggis

I originally wrote this post some time ago, but recent events mean it is time for an update.

So. A wee bit of sheep offal and some oats and they shit themselves.

You can buy a hunting rifle and a pound of bath salts off some bloke down the high street, but can you get any haggis here? NO YOU CAN’T. It is banned.

Robbie Burns Day without haggis is like the nativity without Jesus. Clearly I can’t just pop out and pick up a bag of offal, so making my own is out of the question (the question being, can I cook? no I can’t).

fuck yes

A ban on food made with sheep lungs has been in place since 1971. The BSE crisis in the late 1980′s confirmed American opinion that any meat products coming out of the UK were patently oozing with uppity maggots. For forty years, expats in the US have been denied the right to a proper Burns supper followed by a wee spot of haggis hurling. They could, I suppose, make do with a popular American dish called chitterlings, which is steamed pig intestines that have to be cooked with half an onion to mitigate the unpleasant odour.

Something else that has been denied to a large number of people for many years is the right to vote in Washington. Yes, 600,000 people are disenfranchised in the nation’s capital. You can pick up your jaw from the floor now.

Residents are allowed to vote in Presidential elections every four years (the recent election saw a 92 per cent turnout), but they do not have voting representation in Congress. This is because, for various historical reasons I won’t go into for fear of getting it wrong and looking like an arse, D.C. is not a State.

The Obama administration attempted in 2009 to legislate to enfranchise D.C. residents, but couldn’t get the votes needed after the Senate adopted a Republican amendment to the bill to repeal, amongst other things, the ban on semi-automatic weapons in D.C.

Oh yes. Votes for guns. It would be like adding an amendment to the Health and Social Care Bill stipulating that a surgeon must get his entire head inside a bong for at least half an hour before scrubbing in. He’d be asking the nurse to pass the biscuits rather than the scalpel.

But things could be changing. President Obama has signaled that he may use his second term to right this wrong. His first step has been to add D.C. license plates with the city’s slogan ‘Taxation Without Representation’ to the fleet of presidential cars. The White House said in a statement: “President Obama has lived in the District now for four years, and has seen first-hand how patently unfair it is for working families in D.C. to work hard, raise children and pay taxes, without having a vote in Congress.“

This has given statehood advocates fresh hope, and lawmakers have introduced bills to make D.C. the nation’s 51st state. Senator Tom Carper said that D.C. citizens “serve in our military, fight in our wars, die for our country, and pay federal taxes. But when it comes to having a voice in Congress, suddenly these men and women do not count. … It is incumbent upon those of us who enjoy the right and the privilege of full voting rights to take up the cause of our fellow citizens here in the District of Columbia and find a solution.”

In the UK we take for granted our right to parliamentary representation. There are few things in life that I get rather uptight about, but the failure to take part in the democratic process is one of them (other things guaranteed to drive me to a seething fury include people who wear sunglasses on the Metro – can i give you a hand? oh sorry, you’re not blind – and Kay Burley). I love voting. My nose gets all crinkly when I walk into a polling station. I remember sitting in my parents’ car when I was little, waiting for them while they voted and having that deliciously shivery feeling that something very important was happening.

Voting provides you with the opportunity to influence long-term political direction and as a massive bonus it gives you the right to have a bloody good rant about the government. What, you didn’t vote? Well shut your pie-hole, then. You are hereby considered mute.

Unless of course you live in D.C. where you don’t even have the choice. No vote, no voice, no haggis. Not yet, anyway.

glowing in the dark

6.30am on Monday morning, and the temperature was at freezing point. I had lost all feeling in my toes and my face was numb. One of thousands of volunteers at President Obama’s inauguration, I had been on the National Mall for two hours, shivering, hopping from foot to foot like a penguin, willing the sun to come up and give me the illusion of heat. The organisation of so many volunteers that morning had been a somewhat haphazard affair and I was, to be honest, a tiny bit fractious.

And yet.

“I am just so goddamn happy to be here!“, exclaimed the woman, clutching a large American flag to her chest, smothering the Obama and Biden badges pinned to her coat. I pointed her towards the entrance.

“I can’t believe it! I’m here! I’M HERE TO SEE MY PRESIDENT!” She yelled the final words, tipping her head back and waving her flag skywards.

Imagine you are that woman. You have travelled for two days to get to your nation’s capital. You have shelled out to pay for an expensive hotel room you will barely spend time in. It’s cold and dark, and the only warm place within reach is a portaloo. The badges on your coat are the only things that are stopping your heart from bursting out of your chest.

Now replace the word ‘President’ with the words ‘Prime Minister’. Can you imagine feeling such utter joy at the prospect of witnessing your elected political leader take office?

A presidential inauguration may be what Tony Blair might like to call ‘the people’s coronation’, and of course the President of the United States is also the head of state and we have one of those too; indeed the sight of Obama and the First Lady dancing at the inaugural balls was not unlike the tradition from centuries past of the monarch eating dinner as hundreds of ordinary people filed past to gawp at him or her.

But what I saw on Monday morning was a different kind of patriotism, one owned and not bestowed. Fought for, not inherited. Perhaps layer upon layer of British history had made me blasé, arrogant even, about our political system. Perhaps my time spent working in the center of power had diluted the awe and wonder I should feel at a process so precious, so personal to millions across this country.

The tens of thousands of people who stood between me and the President on the National Mall couldn’t block my view of a country that retains a youthful exuberance and fierce pride in its elected leaders and the system that elevated them.

The woman with her flag and her badges - I didn’t catch her name - took my weary, cold cynicism and punched it in the face. And while my toes continued to burn in the dipping temperature and I eventually lost all feeling in my nose, I had a little glow for the rest of the day.

You just put your lips together and blow, Joe

The trombone.

It is not, on first sight, the sexiest of instruments. It is played by making the air inside the instrument vibrate, and has a sliding mechanism to change the pitch. Typically positioned towards the back of an orchestra, the trombone is up against the flighty, flirty violin, the seductive flute. A stalwart of the brass family, at one point in its long history the poor thing was called the sackbut (literally ‘push-pull’), the name producing a number of delicious variations such as sackbutte, sagbut, shagbolt, sacabushe and shakbusshe.

Last week, I watched the trombone section from the National Symphony Orchestra play in a bar on U Street as part of their ‘In Your Neighbourhood’ community engagement program. They did a nice line in Mendelssohn and Beethoven, got the audience swaying with some Gershwin, then surprised the crowd with their take on Lady Gaga, The Police and the James Bond theme tune. It was ace. I shall not be able to look at a trombone in the same way again.

A few days later, humming a Gershwin number, I read an article on White House efforts on gun control and it struck me: Vice President Joe Biden is the trombone of the White House orchestra. JOE BIDEN IS A BIG OLD SEXY TROMBONE.

President Obama may be the conductor and Hillary the first violinist, but Joe is the reliable, solid man at the back, the longest-serving member of the orchestra, occasionally let loose to perform a solo piece to entertain the audience.

A fixture in the Senate for over thirty years, Biden can claim to be the most experienced politician in the White House. Margaret Thatcher famously proclaimed “Every Prime Minister needs a Willie“: Joe Biden is Obama’s Willie. His empathy and relaxed manner, his ability to connect with blue and white-collar America, hides a rough determination and ambition that has carried him successfully through four decades of politics. He is the behind-the-scenes point man, sent by Obama to lead negotiations on complicated and sensitive issues, most recently with respect to the fiscal cliff and now on gun control. Biden knows how to play his adversaries and his colleagues, often winning with charm and sense rather than relying on politico-babble and blunt comments (although he can do blunt pretty well, eh Paul Ryan?); he convinced wavering Democrats on the fiscal cliff talks with “This is Joe Biden and I’m your buddy“.

The sound of a trombone can be brassy, brilliant, powerful and overpowering, yet beguiling and soft when required. The trombonist uses the lips and facial muscles in a particular way to play the instrument. This is called the embouchure. Biden is a master of this. He is guaranteed to open his yap and embouchure the pants off a grandmother, or utter completely the wrong thing at the wrong time. Joe being Joe is the trombonist’s version of water build-up in the instrument’s spit valve: it’s gotta come out sometime.

Two of my favourite Joe spit valves:

“Stand up, Chuck, let ‘em see ya.” – Joe to Senator Chuck Graham, who is in a wheelchair.

“A man I’m proud to call my friend. A man who will be the next President of the United States — Barack America!” – Joe at his first campaign rally with Barack Obama after being announced as his running mate, 2008.

Biden’s performance during the election campaign and since – saving Obama’s ass by creaming Paul Ryan during their debate, his photo calls with bikers and babies, those aviator sunglasses, his fiscal cliff triumph – has set him on the path of national treasure-hood. If further convincing were needed, look no further than this:

Hot or what. There is even a White House petition for a Joe Show:

We petition the Obama administration to: authorize the production of a recurring television program featuring Vice President Joe Biden.

Vice President Joe Biden has a demonstrated ability to bring people together, whether at the negotiating table or at the neighborhood diner. We, therefore, urge the Obama Administration to authorize the production of a recurring C-SPAN television program featuring the daily activities and interactions of the Vice President with elected officials, foreign dignitaries and everyday American families. Such a program would educate the American public about the duties and responsibilities of their Vice President, while providing a glimpse of the lighthearted side of politics even in the midst of contentious and divisive national debates.

I met Joe Biden a few times in my former life. I was officially working, so had to be all professional and sensible and fuckity-dull. But if I could have, I would have LICKED HIS FACE.

I leave you with the three most important players of the last four years.

what is the city but the people?

Here’s a fun fact about Marco Rubio, the 41-year-old Republican Senator from Florida: his first job was building cages for exotic birds.

He’s not the first politician to start small; Ronald Reagan washed tables in a women’s dormitory, Jimmy Carter worked on his father’s farm and Barack Obama worked in an ice-cream shop. (My first job was as a cashier in a supermarket. I would regularly restrain myself from slamming tins of baked beans onto the feet of kiddies who, ignored by harassed parents busy emptying enormous trolleys, would climb up to play on the conveyor belt.)

Now that the election is over and the GOP is hiding in a cupboard rubbing cream on its slapped arse, political buzz is focused on where the party goes now and who should take it there. Rubio is one of the young generation of Republicans being touted as a possible candidate for 2016.

A politician since the age of 28, Rubio came to national attention when he entered the Senate in 2010. Ticking all the boxes of the GOP youth wing - a conservative, Catholic son of Cuban immigrants, married with four shiny children, charming on the stump, looks good in chinos and pale blue button-down shirts - he had been thought of as a possible VP for Romney, and was given a high-profile speaking slot at the Republican National Convention.

Rubio is a small, neat man, rather stocky and pear-shaped. His hair, slightly fluffy at the front, looks like it may be receding. Yesterday I sat in the back row of a small room in a D.C. museum and watched him being interviewed. While he doesn’t have the physical presence of say, a Santorum or a Gingrich, he is quietly effective at stilling a room. Perhaps it is because he looks so young and unassuming; he wouldn’t look out of place in khaki shorts leading a troop of Boy Scouts.

When Rubio gives a speech, he pauses every now and then to make sure his point has hit home. He is funny, charismatic. When he is interviewed, however, he turns into Henry James; why use just one word when twenty will do? In amongst all the predictable guff he uttered (will you run in 2016? “I want to focus on being a real good US Senator”) I picked up the following words: kids, faith, struggle, dreams, success, belief, family, values, principles, jujitsu (yes he said that, respect). Brevity is not a characteristic that comes naturally to politicians, but Rubio better get used to not saying the same thing five different ways if he wants people to listen.

After the interview I attempted to write a list of the issues that Rubio had spoken about. It was easier to remember the names of all the boys I had kissed in my teens, and I had pretty much blanked out those pitiful years.

The only thing that really stuck in my mind was Rubio’s response to the question ‘is homosexuality a sin?’ He replied that his faith teaches that it is indeed a sin, as is lying, stealing, coveting your neighbour and wearing turtle-necks if you’re a guy (I made that bit up but damn, it should be a sin).

But wait, what’s this? You will be reassured that after condemning the homosexual population of America to a hell with no cocktails or show tunes, Rubio stressed that he isn’t going to get all judgey-wudjey on your gay ass. Glad he cleared that up.

Rubio and others such as Paul Ryan and Bobby Jindal are scrambling to distance themselves from the negative messages that oozed from Romney’s campaign. I am reminded of David Cameron’s attempts in 2005 to dispel the view that the Conservatives were the nasty party, a label that returns again and again. The GOP is still in shock that it misjudged the electorate so badly, but there is recognition that things must change within the party, as Rubio said yesterday: “We have to apply [our] principles to the 21st century“.

The GOP has its work cut out convincing the public that they can embrace, and speak for, all Americans. Rubio maybe the man to start that process. What do you think?

 

i approve this message

I am bereft.

No more debates, polls, rallies, speeches, commercials, interviews, reports, documentaries, photo-calls, in-depth articles, out-of-their-depth articles, profile pieces, diary pieces, speculative pieces, twitter-spats, commentators and talking heads.

Goddamn it.

But oh man, what a year. Every moment of the Republican nomination battle and the ensuing election campaign has been an education into a political process so utterly baffling that trying to understand it must be how teenage boys feel when faced with a diagram of the female sexual organs.

Picking my favourite moment from the past year would be like asking a nun to choose her best outfit. There are however a few candidates:

Women. The utter dogshit of a mess the GOP got themselves into with their ludicrous, unnecessary and fundamentally dangerous ‘war on women’: omitting contraception from health care insurance, the introduction of vaginal probes, the offensive labelling of women as ‘sluts’, the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood, and the idiot senate candidates with their pro-life ‘legitimate rape, fakey rape’ arguments.

That the GOP leadership mewed pathetically at the worst offenders instead of censuring them appropriately underlined the vulnerability that political parties in the U.S. face where the concept of collective responsibility (and the sanctions that come with it) does not exist. It was also a major distraction from what the GOP really wanted to talk about: the economy.

The Republican strategy to win the female vote culminated in Ann Romney declaring “I love you, wimminn!” at the Republican National Convention, an embarrassing contrast with Michelle Obama’s statement at the Dem Convention that “women are more than capable of making our own choices about our bodies and our health care“. It was the Women’s Institute versus Mumsnet. In the election, unmarried women voted two-to-one for Obama. In other words, get your politics out of my pants, Mittens.

The Republican Candidates. The ‘Wait, What ..?’ Group Award goes to Newt, Rick, Ron, Mitt, Jon, Rick, Michele and Herman who took part in the political version of a talent contest but with no talent.

The Republican debates – twenty of them over ten long months – sparkled with the kind of crazy you have to pay extra for at a crazy convention. Rick Santorum proved the most fun/terrifying with his belief that radical Islamists are rampaging through Central America and his accusation that Obama has waged a war on religion so vicious that it will inevitably lead to a French Revolution-style manning of the tumbrels. Rick Perry impressed me talking about the “lavatories of innovation”. These are of course in the same bathroom as the sinks of invention and the bidets of advancement.

Newt Gingrich, though, holds a special place in my heart for suggesting that America should apply the Pope John Paul II template of foreign policy to both Iran and North Korea. I might be going out on a limb here but I’m not sure kissing tarmac is going to swing it. I’m not even sure North Korea has tarmac.

The balls-aching lunacy of all the candidates meant voters sensibly went for Mitt, the lesser of the crazies, but the fierce competition over so many months did lasting damage to the GOP, turning it into an object of media derision and forcing Mitt from his hitherto moderate position to one of severe conservatism, draining the party of more sensible support.

The Vice-Presidents. Paul Ryan was supposed to be Robin to Mitt’s Batman, the glowing future of the GOP who would get America excited about a Romney administration. The intriguing combination of nerd plus hunter (Ryan, Chairman of the House Budget Committee, taught his nine-year-old daughter how to shoot a .243 light-caliber Remington 700 bolt-action hunting rifle) got the GOP all sweaty-palmed until they realised that this would not result in the long-term bounce in the polls they had hoped for. Ryan sank faster than a dog in a vat of kibble. Personally I think Ryan was squashed by Mitt’s advisors at the first sign of an opinion. To make matters worse, he was then bitch-slapped in the VP debate by Laughing Joe Biden, who made up for Obama’s poor first debate with a combative and assured performance.

Clinton. Like a magnificent master plasterer, he filled in the cracks with style. Enough said.

David Axelrod’s mustache. Obama’s wingman Axe announced that if Obama failed to win Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota, he would shave off his mustache of forty years. The American Mustache Institute was outraged, stating “It’s incredibly irresponsible for Axelrod to be playing games with such an exceptionally powerful mustache”. According to the Institute, Axelrod’s mustache is a ‘chevron’, a style typically favored by law enforcement.

And then there’s Mitt’s disastrous European tour; his dismissal of 47 per cent of the population; the death sentence doled out to Big Bird on live television; Joe Biden and every photo-call he’s ever done .. I could go on, but I fear you would get bored and I would become rather maudlin.

Unlike the winner.

And what of the loser? He is a mug in a store on sale for $1.

Politics is brutal.