Farewell America
After six years, The Observer's award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer
Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America's real capital, Chicago, 'city of big shoulders', as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.
Now it's time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister - I was appointed that May morning in 1997 that brought Britain's Conservative night to an end. Blair's love for America seems to have deepened since; but love is both the strongest and most brittle of sentiments, and mine has depreciated. I still love that adrenaline rush, the desert light, those big shoulders; but something else has happened to America during my six years to invoke that bitter love song by a great American, BB King, 'The Thrill is Gone': 'And now that it's all over / All I can do is wish you well...'
I arrived in an America regarded by the world as 'cool'. One can never be sure whether a President defines the country or vice versa, but this was Bill Clinton's America.
I'm not quite sure what 'cool' means in any context beyond a vague positive, but the Clinton administration turned even Washington into a vaguely 'cool' place; one could spend a relaxed evening listening to the Allman Brothers Band with someone who had all day been advising the President of the United States over takeout pizza (George Stephanopoulos, who, admittedly, left the administration, disillusioned).
Meanwhile out in the world, intervention by the US was either welcomed by the persecuted of Haiti and Kosovo or else craved by (but culpably denied) those in Bosnia and Rwanda - as a force of deliverance, not of empire. Clinton's declared quest did not always aim to embrace only the Americans. Terrorists then were spawned by the homegrown Right; proud to murder hundreds of their own countrymen, women and children with the Oklahoma bomb of April 1995, a bloodbath I covered during a brief American sojourn exploring the armed 'patriot' network in which Timothy McVeigh - by no means a lone wolf - operated. Strange now to recall that stench of charred masonry, the floodlit wreckage, the rescue workers spluttering dust, the tearful, wandering bereaved displaying pictures of their 'missing'... (scenes that would return to a different America, from a different quarter, six years later).
There was a deafening, bewildered silence that prairie night in the Iguana diner on the edge of Oklahoma, broken only by such musings as that of a man asking: 'What is it people have got against us, that they want to come killing our kids?' The honest answer: a despised 'federal government' headed by a man the Right - even beyond McVeigh's militias - regarded as a usurper in the White House.
During my first full year here there was a lynching in east Texas: James Byrd, a black man, was chained to the back of a truck by three whites and dragged to his death, severed into 75 pieces. The subliminal connections were obvious: Mississippi Burning; the smell of evil that hung in the muggy air as thick as the sweet scent of pine trees, as I ended those days with a drive, a little dazed, listening to Emmylou Harris's 'Waltz Across Texas Tonight'. But Jasper, Texas, was not a cliché. When the hooded Ku Klux Klan paraded through town a few weeks later, most of the crowd which faced them down was white. When the murder trials began, sure enough: slat blinds broke diagonal shafts of sunlight, and the fan whirred around - straight from the movie - but 11 whites on the jury elected the single African-American as foreman and sentenced a white racist, Billy King, to death for killing a black man. This in east Texas, the most racially vicious slice of the Deep South; something was afoot even in that corner of Bill Clinton's America; not a result but maybe a beginning.
Then, of course, there was the man himself. Bill Clinton loved it: I remember him in Arkansas, working a rope line to the bitter end, greeting stragglers long after the band had packed up and gone. And Monica was not the only girl who went weak at the knees. She just happened to be the one who took his fancy - and even that said something about him. It is surreal to consider the weeks I laboured over the political implications of uses for a cigar, and that an American President was subjected to a television grilling about 'anal-oral contact'. The right-wing opposition called him a liar; Hillary Clinton blamed a 'vast right-wing conspiracy'. They were both right.
There are perennial American themes that even Good Time Bill could not paper over. Those which cut a riptide beneath the most memorable places in my working America were: poverty and race. They define the nation's poorest county: Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Badland of the Lakota Sioux, where I marched for land rights under a banner of Crazy Horse. Here, around the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, sighs the wounded pride of a people caught in a deep well of poverty, battling alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment at 65 per cent. And yet that pride burns again: the young - rebuking their parents' generation - are returning to tribal history and ancient lore, horsemanship and their language of old. Poverty and race define the Mississippi Delta, where the blues began, beneath the crossroads in Clarksdale between highways 61 and 49 where the greatest of bluesmen, Robert Johnson, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his wizardry on the guitar.
Forty per cent in this land that politics forgot live below the poverty line, drawn at $16,000 per annum. Even here, where a late sun strokes the billowing cotton, there is a healthy market in crack cocaine. Pastor Benny Brown of Jonestown, near Clarksdale, remarks: 'I don't really call this a rural area; more a "reservation"; a black poverty reservation.' 'Sometimes I wonder,' pondered old Ruby Walker, sitting on her porch surrounded by cats, soon after her daughter had been killed in a shoot-out, 'if they ever did really do away with slavery here.'
Poverty and race also define the country I call 'Amexica' that runs along either side of the Mexican border, belonging to both countries and neither. The conurbation comprising El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, is a microcosm of new America; during my time here, Hispanics overtook blacks as the biggest ethnic minority. Juárez is a strong if blemished place, a harsh but pulsating city which is and is not part of the United States; its luminous colours are unmistakably Mexico but most of its workforce labours in US-owned sweatshop factories.
In ancient Mexican lore there lies behind the sun that shines a black sun which leaves this world to shed light upon another. The Aztecs believed the black sun was carried by the god of the underworld, and was the maleficent absolute of death. And behind the sunlight of the 'Amexican' desert there is some maculate black light which gives nothing back; un-shining behind the music, the bustle and hot peppers tumbling from every open storefront. For in Juárez, the most depraved crime in the Americas continues, unpunished: the mass abduction, abuse, mutilation and murder of some 345 young women to date, invariably employees of the new American factories that pay rock bottom wages but do nothing to protect them. Here was a parable - in a single narrative - of the scourges in our American-led global economy. If there was a programme called 'Desert Island Articles', and I was permitted to write only one during my years in America, it would be that.
Strangely, it was an event with little bearing on indigenous Anglo-Saxon America that brought out the inimitable best, the essence, of New York: the 2002 World Cup, when hard-working immigrant America, of whatever generation or skin colour, took over.
Every national team played at home in some cranny of the city - in home-language bars and cafes to festoon with flags and weep or whoop. American citizens wearing rival shirts - Nigerian, Ecuadorian, Russian, whatever - would pass each other on the street with a dichotomous glance and smile of recognition that said, simultaneously: 'Hail, fellow' and '**** off'.
The time difference was punishing; games televised at 2.30am, 5.30am and 7.30am. Immigrant New York, myself included, gave up sleep for a month. Up to Harlem by night: the Cafe Africa in 'Little Senegal' around 116th Street, to watch the Lions at 2.30. After their team qualified for the quarter-final, the Senegalese danced and ran across the tops of parked cars through a ghetto dawn. Straight on, though, to Third Avenue for England or Ireland, to Queens for Turkey or Poland, and thence to grab a perch at the packed Caffè l'Angolo in SoHo for the Azzuri against Mexico, here a local derby. 'Ecco la vera America' - behold the real America - said a correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Milan, and he wasn't far wrong.
Most of America, however, shared the approach of the White House, and its reply to Mexico's President Vicente Fox after he invited President Bush to a mutually convenient location on the border to watch their respective countries play each other, as a gesture of friendship. Fox was informed by an aide that 'the President will be asleep at that hour' (2.30 am). I, however, was wide awake at the Cafe Margarita with Marco the existentialist Mexican hairdresser, who afterwards had to take three days off from working on the heads of the rich and beautiful, such was the pain of defeat at the hands of los gringos. By contrast, I was obliged to change immediately into a suit and - fuelled by tequila - board a plane to Boston and address a conference on war crimes. I was unable to find anyone in the departure lounge or at the conference who knew about their country's lusty performance.
The gyre has turned three times in America since the Monica scandal engulfed Clinton's presidency. First, after November 2000, with that long wrestle between George Bush and Al Gore; counts, recounts and hanging chads. As even a Democrat pollster remarked at the time, the moment James Baker III arrived to handle Bush's side, the result was a foregone conclusion. Baker - lawyer to the Texas oil industry for decades and former Secretary of State to President Bush senior - was one of The Firm.
It is incumbent upon journalists, I think, to distrust conspiracy theories. But the problem with the conspiracy theory of the machine that lifted George 'Dubya' Bush to high office is that it never lets you down; you wait for the trip wire, but walk on. This is hardly the place to recount my inspections of that mechanism but I did spend many weeks listening in Texas and days at the Securities and Exchange Commission sifting through box files, to become acquainted with its workings.
I wanted, just for instance, to find out which company bought Dresser Industries, once the world's biggest oil services company, of which Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandfather) was director and for which George Bush senior opened up the West Texas oil basin. It was Halliburton, recent beneficiary of a contract in Iraq, where Vice President Dick Cheney made his fortune after being Bush senior's Defence Secretary. And on it goes. President Bush broke all records in the history of campaign finance to get 'elected'. One of his biggest donors was 'Kenny Boy' Lay, CEO of the Enron Corporation, operator of one of the biggest company frauds ever. And among Enron's lav ishly paid consultants was, inevitably, Ralph Reed, former head of the right-wing Christian Coalition, recommended to the board by Karl Rove, the Svengali figure who managed all Bush's campaigns in Texas, and is now the most powerful man in the White House.
The entwinement of politics around the corporate boardroom had been rehearsed during Bush's governorship of Texas - once a nation, and most Texans would love it to be so again. But the Union prohibits that. So: if Texas cannot be a nation, make the nation into Texas.
For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans. Their names are now more or less well known: Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Douglas Feith. In a series of papers they devised a blueprint for unchallenged and unchallengeable American power, military and political, across the globe, with the Middle East and Iraq as fulcrum. All that was needed to realise that dream - said a document produced by one of their many think-tanks, the Project for the New American Century - was 'a new Pearl Harbour'.
The second turning of the gyre came, literally, out of the blue. Like a good reporter, I missed the first of al-Qaeda's hijacked planes slamming into the World Trade Centre. But we grabbed coffee and ran down Sixth Avenue, against the fearful flow of people in time to catch the North Tower collapse into its own dust. I may owe my life to the policeman who blocked our way as I demanded to be let through his cordon, brandishing my press card, just as the South Tower tumbled in front of us.
No one could forget the vortex of shock, grief, dignity and insanity that followed. My block became a carpet of candles and flowers and New York was wrapped in the American flag and the stench of incinerating flesh. One could be forgiven for not realising immediately that this was America's moment of opportunity in the world. As Le Monde's headline put it: 'Now, We Are All Americans'; never before had America so many friends across the planet - or so we thought. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice used that same word, 'opportunity'. But opportunity for what? The White House and Le Monde did not, it turned out, share the same notion of what 'We Are All Americans' meant. The other day the same paper carried another headline about America: 'Seul contre tous' - alone against everyone. Well, almost everyone.
This is no time to recount the drive to war in Iraq, the third turning of that gyre, except to say that all the authors of the 'Project for the New American Century' are now senior members of, or close advisers to, the Bush administration. And to add that as early as last October a former senior analyst at the CIA, Mel Goodman - in close touch with his erstwhile colleagues - was telling me how the agency's assessment of Saddam Hussein's weaponry was 'cranked up' by political cadres within the administration.
I did not go to America to be a columnist or one of those people Michael Frayn derides in a hilarious essay asking 'What is a Man of Opinion?' There are American voices which describe my own reflections more capably than I can, be it in words, pictures or music; some of which I here invoke - as valued friends, but, more importantly, as voices that cannot be easily ignored.
I had the honour and pleasure of befriending Susan Sontag - one of the world's greatest writers - in New York. 'People project a lot of different things on to America,' she says, 'but it is the consistencies that are most striking. Look, Arnold Schwarzenegger may become the next governor of California; does that mean the way of life in California will change? Of course not. But places get their tone and colour from individuals. It would be a new era in the myth of California, just as the transition from Clinton to Bush was a new era in the myth of America.
'I think what we are seeing now, represented by the policies of the Bush administration, is an old American tradition, an imperialist tradition that has existed since the middle of the nineteenth century. But we are in for a busy ride. Reality has a way of landing in your lap and punching you in the nose. "Empire Lite" may not work; and are the Americans really ready for heavy Empire?'
I had the honour and pleasure of befriending David Turnley - one of the world's greatest documentary photographers - in New York. 'There was this crucial period,' he says, 'after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when America was no longer centre stage; it moved to the sidelines and developed this sense of detached superiority. The era in which I grew up - in which to be a good American was to question everything America did - came to an end.
'And so we are left with an America which sees the world as a football game: you win or lose. It has lost all sense of nuance. And even though Americans do not like foul play in football - a clip in the back from behind - we are encouraging it in the world. We have become a nation with no idea what it means to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza, and no idea why people such as al-Qaeda - with whom I have no agreement at all, I hasten to add - dislike us so much.'
In New York I had the honour and pleasure of befriending John Cale, who, with the Velvet Underground and his prodigious output since then has proved himself one of the world's greatest rock musicians. Cale, like me, comes from Britain (Wales); but unlike me will never return. However he says: 'My love affair with the US, which began with music, took a dive when I heard that Clear Channel Communications [a vast network of local radio stations owned by a close friend of President Bush] had forced the Dixie Chicks to withdraw their statement of criticism of the Bush regime. And with the latest power outage, the level of trust in the regime (never great?) has also nosedived. Who knew that, of the three power grids constituting the US system, one was solely for Texas!
'The generosity of this once great country (of which I am now a product) is being obscured by a political fervour derived from something akin to the parody of the Communist manifesto that was around in the Sixties - "What's yours is mine, and what's mine's my own." I see a "dauphin" in the White House while powerful figures range in the background, making resource theft a way of life... Meantime, I will stew in the poisonous atmosphere Karl Rove slides under my door each morning. I'll write a song or two, turn up the volume and bury my dead.'
America was always a dichotomous, Janus nation - born of a revolution by democratic visionaries such as Tom Paine but built on genocide and enslavement. Enriched by immigration but made greedy by power and wealth. It was always a question of which America was in the ascendancy at a given time. I think that during Clinton's presidency there were elements of that democratic America to the fore. Or at least there were by contrast to a country now redefining its role as an international citizen, a country where democratic rights, enshrined in the Constitution, are eroded largely by consent.
I am not leaving the country in which I arrived. The cafeteria in Congress changes 'French Fries to 'Freedom Fries'. Students are urged to monitor and report academics who oppose the occupation of Iraq. An Egyptian-American friend had a visit from the police after his seven-year-old son refused to sign a letter from his school to troops serving in Baghdad.
One's love for and faith in America, therefore, would always be tested by counterpoint between opposites - as is that of the rest of the world. The longest queues for visas are invariably in those same countries where the American flag is burned most frequently, often where the liberties that America does afford are in short supply. But it is not uncontroversial to posit that George Bush's America is not regarded as 'cool'; that it's not just me - that the world's American thrill has gone too.
There are many, invariably woolly, ways to measure how America is perceived in the world: one was the relative absence of anti-Americanism on the planet's streets until the invasion of Iraq. More instructive probably are the fortunes of quintessentially American commercial brands on the global market. Just this month, a survey by the RoperASW consultancy found that for the first time ever overseas sales by Nike, Microsoft and McDonald's have fallen by 14, 18 and 21 per cent respectively).
My faith - if not the love affair - was resurrected just in time, during my last week, by an American muse specialising in the uplift of one's personal and political condition. This resurgence took place not in the US but half a mile from where I was born in the form of a hurricane that blew through the Shepherd's Bush Empire during the London heatwave: Hurricane Patti - aka Patti Smith. It was a ninth birthday outing for my eldest daughter, Elsa. The storm had blown for over two hours as Patti surged into her anthem and invocation, 'The People Have the Power', and then a recitation of America's Declaration of Independence, that noble affirmation of democratic principle, casting off the yoke of Empire: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights... When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a government...'
Then the text started to do something curious; Thomas Jefferson's indictment shifted from King George III to a living namesake: 'The history of the President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations...'
Afterwards, backstage, the poet of rock and roll gave Elsa the black ribbon that had tied back her hair during the tour. Thank you then, Patti Smith, for my daughter's birthday presents: the ribbon and, more importantly, a glimpse of the America with which I fell in love. And for giving that America - still there, still restive - the voice it deserves.
Back in New York there's a bar called Nevada Smith's, where life revolves around football. To walk in is to enter a warp not only of place but also of time: because of the five-hour lag between US Eastern and British time, Nevada's is full on Saturday and Sunday mornings with people dressed in whatever colours, pints in hand, glued to the screens, singing songs we know and love from rainy afternoons in England, just as the rest of New York is thinking about breakfast.
The result is that those better-heeled New Yorkers walking silly little dogs or setting out for Eggs Benedict and a tedious directory of 'today's specials', are confronted by such scenes as that after last season's Worthington Cup final: a flowing river of unusually dejected Mancunians and jubilant Scousers along Third Avenue, one over the eight, bellowing heartily. So that a nation which is only just getting to grips with the global David Beckham phenomenon is faced with an early-morning rendition of: 'Beckham, oh Beckham; get yer hair cut, yer missus is a slut..'
Oh well. Becks has decided to leave England now; but me... hmm... must be time to go home.
After six years, The Observer's award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love
Sunday August 24, 2003
The Observer
Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America's real capital, Chicago, 'city of big shoulders', as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.
Now it's time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister - I was appointed that May morning in 1997 that brought Britain's Conservative night to an end. Blair's love for America seems to have deepened since; but love is both the strongest and most brittle of sentiments, and mine has depreciated. I still love that adrenaline rush, the desert light, those big shoulders; but something else has happened to America during my six years to invoke that bitter love song by a great American, BB King, 'The Thrill is Gone': 'And now that it's all over / All I can do is wish you well...'
I arrived in an America regarded by the world as 'cool'. One can never be sure whether a President defines the country or vice versa, but this was Bill Clinton's America.
I'm not quite sure what 'cool' means in any context beyond a vague positive, but the Clinton administration turned even Washington into a vaguely 'cool' place; one could spend a relaxed evening listening to the Allman Brothers Band with someone who had all day been advising the President of the United States over takeout pizza (George Stephanopoulos, who, admittedly, left the administration, disillusioned).
Meanwhile out in the world, intervention by the US was either welcomed by the persecuted of Haiti and Kosovo or else craved by (but culpably denied) those in Bosnia and Rwanda - as a force of deliverance, not of empire. Clinton's declared quest did not always aim to embrace only the Americans. Terrorists then were spawned by the homegrown Right; proud to murder hundreds of their own countrymen, women and children with the Oklahoma bomb of April 1995, a bloodbath I covered during a brief American sojourn exploring the armed 'patriot' network in which Timothy McVeigh - by no means a lone wolf - operated. Strange now to recall that stench of charred masonry, the floodlit wreckage, the rescue workers spluttering dust, the tearful, wandering bereaved displaying pictures of their 'missing'... (scenes that would return to a different America, from a different quarter, six years later).
There was a deafening, bewildered silence that prairie night in the Iguana diner on the edge of Oklahoma, broken only by such musings as that of a man asking: 'What is it people have got against us, that they want to come killing our kids?' The honest answer: a despised 'federal government' headed by a man the Right - even beyond McVeigh's militias - regarded as a usurper in the White House.
During my first full year here there was a lynching in east Texas: James Byrd, a black man, was chained to the back of a truck by three whites and dragged to his death, severed into 75 pieces. The subliminal connections were obvious: Mississippi Burning; the smell of evil that hung in the muggy air as thick as the sweet scent of pine trees, as I ended those days with a drive, a little dazed, listening to Emmylou Harris's 'Waltz Across Texas Tonight'. But Jasper, Texas, was not a cliché. When the hooded Ku Klux Klan paraded through town a few weeks later, most of the crowd which faced them down was white. When the murder trials began, sure enough: slat blinds broke diagonal shafts of sunlight, and the fan whirred around - straight from the movie - but 11 whites on the jury elected the single African-American as foreman and sentenced a white racist, Billy King, to death for killing a black man. This in east Texas, the most racially vicious slice of the Deep South; something was afoot even in that corner of Bill Clinton's America; not a result but maybe a beginning.
Then, of course, there was the man himself. Bill Clinton loved it: I remember him in Arkansas, working a rope line to the bitter end, greeting stragglers long after the band had packed up and gone. And Monica was not the only girl who went weak at the knees. She just happened to be the one who took his fancy - and even that said something about him. It is surreal to consider the weeks I laboured over the political implications of uses for a cigar, and that an American President was subjected to a television grilling about 'anal-oral contact'. The right-wing opposition called him a liar; Hillary Clinton blamed a 'vast right-wing conspiracy'. They were both right.
There are perennial American themes that even Good Time Bill could not paper over. Those which cut a riptide beneath the most memorable places in my working America were: poverty and race. They define the nation's poorest county: Pine Ridge, South Dakota, Badland of the Lakota Sioux, where I marched for land rights under a banner of Crazy Horse. Here, around the site of the Wounded Knee massacre, sighs the wounded pride of a people caught in a deep well of poverty, battling alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment at 65 per cent. And yet that pride burns again: the young - rebuking their parents' generation - are returning to tribal history and ancient lore, horsemanship and their language of old. Poverty and race define the Mississippi Delta, where the blues began, beneath the crossroads in Clarksdale between highways 61 and 49 where the greatest of bluesmen, Robert Johnson, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his wizardry on the guitar.
Forty per cent in this land that politics forgot live below the poverty line, drawn at $16,000 per annum. Even here, where a late sun strokes the billowing cotton, there is a healthy market in crack cocaine. Pastor Benny Brown of Jonestown, near Clarksdale, remarks: 'I don't really call this a rural area; more a "reservation"; a black poverty reservation.' 'Sometimes I wonder,' pondered old Ruby Walker, sitting on her porch surrounded by cats, soon after her daughter had been killed in a shoot-out, 'if they ever did really do away with slavery here.'
Poverty and race also define the country I call 'Amexica' that runs along either side of the Mexican border, belonging to both countries and neither. The conurbation comprising El Paso, Texas, and Juárez, Mexico, is a microcosm of new America; during my time here, Hispanics overtook blacks as the biggest ethnic minority. Juárez is a strong if blemished place, a harsh but pulsating city which is and is not part of the United States; its luminous colours are unmistakably Mexico but most of its workforce labours in US-owned sweatshop factories.
In ancient Mexican lore there lies behind the sun that shines a black sun which leaves this world to shed light upon another. The Aztecs believed the black sun was carried by the god of the underworld, and was the maleficent absolute of death. And behind the sunlight of the 'Amexican' desert there is some maculate black light which gives nothing back; un-shining behind the music, the bustle and hot peppers tumbling from every open storefront. For in Juárez, the most depraved crime in the Americas continues, unpunished: the mass abduction, abuse, mutilation and murder of some 345 young women to date, invariably employees of the new American factories that pay rock bottom wages but do nothing to protect them. Here was a parable - in a single narrative - of the scourges in our American-led global economy. If there was a programme called 'Desert Island Articles', and I was permitted to write only one during my years in America, it would be that.
Strangely, it was an event with little bearing on indigenous Anglo-Saxon America that brought out the inimitable best, the essence, of New York: the 2002 World Cup, when hard-working immigrant America, of whatever generation or skin colour, took over.
Every national team played at home in some cranny of the city - in home-language bars and cafes to festoon with flags and weep or whoop. American citizens wearing rival shirts - Nigerian, Ecuadorian, Russian, whatever - would pass each other on the street with a dichotomous glance and smile of recognition that said, simultaneously: 'Hail, fellow' and '**** off'.
The time difference was punishing; games televised at 2.30am, 5.30am and 7.30am. Immigrant New York, myself included, gave up sleep for a month. Up to Harlem by night: the Cafe Africa in 'Little Senegal' around 116th Street, to watch the Lions at 2.30. After their team qualified for the quarter-final, the Senegalese danced and ran across the tops of parked cars through a ghetto dawn. Straight on, though, to Third Avenue for England or Ireland, to Queens for Turkey or Poland, and thence to grab a perch at the packed Caffè l'Angolo in SoHo for the Azzuri against Mexico, here a local derby. 'Ecco la vera America' - behold the real America - said a correspondent for La Gazetta dello Sport of Milan, and he wasn't far wrong.
Most of America, however, shared the approach of the White House, and its reply to Mexico's President Vicente Fox after he invited President Bush to a mutually convenient location on the border to watch their respective countries play each other, as a gesture of friendship. Fox was informed by an aide that 'the President will be asleep at that hour' (2.30 am). I, however, was wide awake at the Cafe Margarita with Marco the existentialist Mexican hairdresser, who afterwards had to take three days off from working on the heads of the rich and beautiful, such was the pain of defeat at the hands of los gringos. By contrast, I was obliged to change immediately into a suit and - fuelled by tequila - board a plane to Boston and address a conference on war crimes. I was unable to find anyone in the departure lounge or at the conference who knew about their country's lusty performance.
The gyre has turned three times in America since the Monica scandal engulfed Clinton's presidency. First, after November 2000, with that long wrestle between George Bush and Al Gore; counts, recounts and hanging chads. As even a Democrat pollster remarked at the time, the moment James Baker III arrived to handle Bush's side, the result was a foregone conclusion. Baker - lawyer to the Texas oil industry for decades and former Secretary of State to President Bush senior - was one of The Firm.
It is incumbent upon journalists, I think, to distrust conspiracy theories. But the problem with the conspiracy theory of the machine that lifted George 'Dubya' Bush to high office is that it never lets you down; you wait for the trip wire, but walk on. This is hardly the place to recount my inspections of that mechanism but I did spend many weeks listening in Texas and days at the Securities and Exchange Commission sifting through box files, to become acquainted with its workings.
I wanted, just for instance, to find out which company bought Dresser Industries, once the world's biggest oil services company, of which Prescott Bush (Dubya's grandfather) was director and for which George Bush senior opened up the West Texas oil basin. It was Halliburton, recent beneficiary of a contract in Iraq, where Vice President Dick Cheney made his fortune after being Bush senior's Defence Secretary. And on it goes. President Bush broke all records in the history of campaign finance to get 'elected'. One of his biggest donors was 'Kenny Boy' Lay, CEO of the Enron Corporation, operator of one of the biggest company frauds ever. And among Enron's lav ishly paid consultants was, inevitably, Ralph Reed, former head of the right-wing Christian Coalition, recommended to the board by Karl Rove, the Svengali figure who managed all Bush's campaigns in Texas, and is now the most powerful man in the White House.
The entwinement of politics around the corporate boardroom had been rehearsed during Bush's governorship of Texas - once a nation, and most Texans would love it to be so again. But the Union prohibits that. So: if Texas cannot be a nation, make the nation into Texas.
For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans. Their names are now more or less well known: Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Douglas Feith. In a series of papers they devised a blueprint for unchallenged and unchallengeable American power, military and political, across the globe, with the Middle East and Iraq as fulcrum. All that was needed to realise that dream - said a document produced by one of their many think-tanks, the Project for the New American Century - was 'a new Pearl Harbour'.
The second turning of the gyre came, literally, out of the blue. Like a good reporter, I missed the first of al-Qaeda's hijacked planes slamming into the World Trade Centre. But we grabbed coffee and ran down Sixth Avenue, against the fearful flow of people in time to catch the North Tower collapse into its own dust. I may owe my life to the policeman who blocked our way as I demanded to be let through his cordon, brandishing my press card, just as the South Tower tumbled in front of us.
No one could forget the vortex of shock, grief, dignity and insanity that followed. My block became a carpet of candles and flowers and New York was wrapped in the American flag and the stench of incinerating flesh. One could be forgiven for not realising immediately that this was America's moment of opportunity in the world. As Le Monde's headline put it: 'Now, We Are All Americans'; never before had America so many friends across the planet - or so we thought. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice used that same word, 'opportunity'. But opportunity for what? The White House and Le Monde did not, it turned out, share the same notion of what 'We Are All Americans' meant. The other day the same paper carried another headline about America: 'Seul contre tous' - alone against everyone. Well, almost everyone.
This is no time to recount the drive to war in Iraq, the third turning of that gyre, except to say that all the authors of the 'Project for the New American Century' are now senior members of, or close advisers to, the Bush administration. And to add that as early as last October a former senior analyst at the CIA, Mel Goodman - in close touch with his erstwhile colleagues - was telling me how the agency's assessment of Saddam Hussein's weaponry was 'cranked up' by political cadres within the administration.
I did not go to America to be a columnist or one of those people Michael Frayn derides in a hilarious essay asking 'What is a Man of Opinion?' There are American voices which describe my own reflections more capably than I can, be it in words, pictures or music; some of which I here invoke - as valued friends, but, more importantly, as voices that cannot be easily ignored.
I had the honour and pleasure of befriending Susan Sontag - one of the world's greatest writers - in New York. 'People project a lot of different things on to America,' she says, 'but it is the consistencies that are most striking. Look, Arnold Schwarzenegger may become the next governor of California; does that mean the way of life in California will change? Of course not. But places get their tone and colour from individuals. It would be a new era in the myth of California, just as the transition from Clinton to Bush was a new era in the myth of America.
'I think what we are seeing now, represented by the policies of the Bush administration, is an old American tradition, an imperialist tradition that has existed since the middle of the nineteenth century. But we are in for a busy ride. Reality has a way of landing in your lap and punching you in the nose. "Empire Lite" may not work; and are the Americans really ready for heavy Empire?'
I had the honour and pleasure of befriending David Turnley - one of the world's greatest documentary photographers - in New York. 'There was this crucial period,' he says, 'after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when America was no longer centre stage; it moved to the sidelines and developed this sense of detached superiority. The era in which I grew up - in which to be a good American was to question everything America did - came to an end.
'And so we are left with an America which sees the world as a football game: you win or lose. It has lost all sense of nuance. And even though Americans do not like foul play in football - a clip in the back from behind - we are encouraging it in the world. We have become a nation with no idea what it means to grow up in a refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza, and no idea why people such as al-Qaeda - with whom I have no agreement at all, I hasten to add - dislike us so much.'
In New York I had the honour and pleasure of befriending John Cale, who, with the Velvet Underground and his prodigious output since then has proved himself one of the world's greatest rock musicians. Cale, like me, comes from Britain (Wales); but unlike me will never return. However he says: 'My love affair with the US, which began with music, took a dive when I heard that Clear Channel Communications [a vast network of local radio stations owned by a close friend of President Bush] had forced the Dixie Chicks to withdraw their statement of criticism of the Bush regime. And with the latest power outage, the level of trust in the regime (never great?) has also nosedived. Who knew that, of the three power grids constituting the US system, one was solely for Texas!
'The generosity of this once great country (of which I am now a product) is being obscured by a political fervour derived from something akin to the parody of the Communist manifesto that was around in the Sixties - "What's yours is mine, and what's mine's my own." I see a "dauphin" in the White House while powerful figures range in the background, making resource theft a way of life... Meantime, I will stew in the poisonous atmosphere Karl Rove slides under my door each morning. I'll write a song or two, turn up the volume and bury my dead.'
America was always a dichotomous, Janus nation - born of a revolution by democratic visionaries such as Tom Paine but built on genocide and enslavement. Enriched by immigration but made greedy by power and wealth. It was always a question of which America was in the ascendancy at a given time. I think that during Clinton's presidency there were elements of that democratic America to the fore. Or at least there were by contrast to a country now redefining its role as an international citizen, a country where democratic rights, enshrined in the Constitution, are eroded largely by consent.
I am not leaving the country in which I arrived. The cafeteria in Congress changes 'French Fries to 'Freedom Fries'. Students are urged to monitor and report academics who oppose the occupation of Iraq. An Egyptian-American friend had a visit from the police after his seven-year-old son refused to sign a letter from his school to troops serving in Baghdad.
One's love for and faith in America, therefore, would always be tested by counterpoint between opposites - as is that of the rest of the world. The longest queues for visas are invariably in those same countries where the American flag is burned most frequently, often where the liberties that America does afford are in short supply. But it is not uncontroversial to posit that George Bush's America is not regarded as 'cool'; that it's not just me - that the world's American thrill has gone too.
There are many, invariably woolly, ways to measure how America is perceived in the world: one was the relative absence of anti-Americanism on the planet's streets until the invasion of Iraq. More instructive probably are the fortunes of quintessentially American commercial brands on the global market. Just this month, a survey by the RoperASW consultancy found that for the first time ever overseas sales by Nike, Microsoft and McDonald's have fallen by 14, 18 and 21 per cent respectively).
My faith - if not the love affair - was resurrected just in time, during my last week, by an American muse specialising in the uplift of one's personal and political condition. This resurgence took place not in the US but half a mile from where I was born in the form of a hurricane that blew through the Shepherd's Bush Empire during the London heatwave: Hurricane Patti - aka Patti Smith. It was a ninth birthday outing for my eldest daughter, Elsa. The storm had blown for over two hours as Patti surged into her anthem and invocation, 'The People Have the Power', and then a recitation of America's Declaration of Independence, that noble affirmation of democratic principle, casting off the yoke of Empire: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights... When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a government...'
Then the text started to do something curious; Thomas Jefferson's indictment shifted from King George III to a living namesake: 'The history of the President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations...'
Afterwards, backstage, the poet of rock and roll gave Elsa the black ribbon that had tied back her hair during the tour. Thank you then, Patti Smith, for my daughter's birthday presents: the ribbon and, more importantly, a glimpse of the America with which I fell in love. And for giving that America - still there, still restive - the voice it deserves.
Back in New York there's a bar called Nevada Smith's, where life revolves around football. To walk in is to enter a warp not only of place but also of time: because of the five-hour lag between US Eastern and British time, Nevada's is full on Saturday and Sunday mornings with people dressed in whatever colours, pints in hand, glued to the screens, singing songs we know and love from rainy afternoons in England, just as the rest of New York is thinking about breakfast.
The result is that those better-heeled New Yorkers walking silly little dogs or setting out for Eggs Benedict and a tedious directory of 'today's specials', are confronted by such scenes as that after last season's Worthington Cup final: a flowing river of unusually dejected Mancunians and jubilant Scousers along Third Avenue, one over the eight, bellowing heartily. So that a nation which is only just getting to grips with the global David Beckham phenomenon is faced with an early-morning rendition of: 'Beckham, oh Beckham; get yer hair cut, yer missus is a slut..'
Oh well. Becks has decided to leave England now; but me... hmm... must be time to go home.
