Introduction

Taken in by America is a “by the way” telling of the story of how America came to be as it is, of what makes the American tick. It’s a tale of two people, outsiders—an Australian couple who spent a year in the land of the free from May 2006 to May 2007 then a further two months in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election—and the story unfolds as they travel around the USA, taking rooms in motels, renting, subletting, and being guests in American homes. And it’s a tale of two siblings, hostile twins who combine to form the Union.

The colonial American’s seventeenth-century Puritan origins taught him to mask his real identity. The nineteenth-century trader carried on the masquerade, selling confidence while giving nothing away. Trade is in the American’s blood, its twin aspects of sweet commerce on the one hand and the confidence trick on the other giving rise to the courteous ‘hail fellow, well met’ American for whom you are fair game.

These elements of the story are laid out early on, as we travel across the terrain that gave rise to the Connecticut Yankee—Phineas T. Barnum being the foremost exemplar. By the time we’re nearing Hollywood, the American is on the verge of realising his manifest destiny and it’s clear that his nation is governed by Mercurius—the ancient Roman god of trade, commerce and profit who emerged as the trickster spirit of modernity.

The American doesn’t think of himself as a product of pagan mythology but insofar as it’s rooted in religion his is an essentially mediaeval outlook. He takes it for granted that there’s a transcendent overseer, a guiding hand that strives to shepherd him toward the Good and which rewards his efforts at self-transformation with the promise of redemption. Yet he’s thoroughly modern, too, this dual entity, and is just as much the product of the Scottish Enlightenment which flowered in the lead up to the American Revolution in 1776.[1]

Taken in by America is no scholarly tome but a form of adult entertainment, a burlesque—for America itself is a burlesque, an exaggerated copy of the classical republican ideal. And neither is it a travel guide—though a mine of information on how travellers might make the most of any time spent in the USA is contained herein—but an argument, developed around historical and contemporary anecdotes, which leads to the conclusion that America is a stacked deck.

Chapter   1    Mercury V8

“If he’s the Democrat candidate for the 2008 presidential race,” Meryn served notice, “I’m coming back.”

It was February 11th 2007 and we had just left Philadelphia, Mississippi. Ronald Reagan delivered his first major campaign speech as the Republican Party’s 1980 presidential candidate in that town. He had gone there to court good ’ol white supremacist Dixiecrats. Meryn was responding to the news from Springfield, Illinois, that Barack Obama had just announced that he was running to be elected president of the United States of America in 2008.

Like Governor Reagan before him, Senator Obama had blown the dog whistle. Unlike Reagan, though, Obama was sending a message to educated Americans—by announcing his candidacy in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown—that they should help save the Union.

Meryn had been sold on the junior Senator from Illinois by a colleague with whom she had shared a room at a Chicago conference in the Spring of 2005 and we’d both witnessed Obama’s impressive style during a visit to the Capitol in Washington D.C. in late 2006. There was no doubt about his capacity for the top job, I suggested, but nothing would stand in the way of Hillary Clinton’s being nominated as the Democrat candidate in the presidential election so I wouldn’t be booking annual leave for late 2008.

We returned to Australia from the USA in May 2007 but Meryn reckoned we’d be back. We were, touching down in Chicago, Illinois, sixteen months later, to drive through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, the Virginias, Indiana and Missouri in the weeks leading up to the American presidential election then back to Illinois for the big event on Tuesday November 4th 2008. That journey reaffirmed my belief that America merely masquerades as a Christian nation, being governed all the while by the pagan deity, Trickster.

I boarded the Jumbo—Meryn was attending a conference in Glasgow and would meet me in Chicago—alongside numerous gum-chewing passengers and settled in for the long haul across the Pacific. The in-flight entertainment was portentous: Fawlty Towers’ conman, Lord Melbury; Andrew Denton’s interview with Jerry Seinfeld; and the Oscar winning Civil War and Reconstruction era epic ‘Gone With The Wind.’ Tocqueville stayed in my bag.

Los Angeles International Airport’s ranking immigration authority declared the whole planeload of green forms null and void due to shoddy use of the guillotine so while my fellow travellers went back to the drawing board the travel visa in my passport took me to the front of the queue. The black officer who allowed me entry to the USA was enthusiastic about we non-Americans wanting Obama to become the next president. He made it clear that he, too, wanted Barack to be number 44 but asked “What is it about the rest of the world? Why is everyone so keen on an Obama victory?”

Around at gate number whatever it was for the domestic leg to Chicago, a middle-aged American introduced himself to the woman sitting behind me by remarking on the fact that she, like his wife, was a knitter. He moved effortlessly from that tidbit of information to the news that his son was on his third marriage despite the fact that he, the father, was doing good works in the Church. The woman assured him that Jesus would heal the wound. I could almost certainly guarantee that Meryn would not be within earshot of such intimate conversation between strangers as she sat in the departure lounge at England’s Manchester Airport. The American has childlike faith in the power of redemption.

At Chicago’s O’Hare a young Australian woman who had missed her connection to Denver thought that American airport staff were “all dickheads.” Not so, I said, just disorganised; it’s the flip side of the emphasis on freedom. “Dickheads,” she insisted, as she climbed in to share the shuttle to the motel. Meryn arrived later that evening and next morning we took the ‘El’ to Diversey, a short walk from our chosen car hire franchise, stopping off Downtown, for a delicious Mexican lunch and an hour or two examining Donghia fabrics in the otherworldly Merchandise Mart.

Our eight-week tour was immediately threatened by my new Visa card having ‘DEBIT’ emblazoned beneath the logo. Meryn didn’t help any, either, by taking the side of the car rental people when they pointed out that without a credit card there was no way I could complete the pre-arranged deal to hire a small automobile for eight weeks. She followed the logic of their argument whilst I stuck doggedly to the single-minded notion that, America being the quintessential trading nation, I would not leave empty handed were I to stand my ground.

The car rental staff (one of them holding a well thumbed copy of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying) hung in there but eventually relented, unprepared to squander the goodwill on which the business prided itself. Phew. A financial crisis narrowly avoided. The only available vehicle was a ridiculously outmoded (with petrol at $US4.20 per gallon) V8 Mercury and we used it to get back to the Elk Grove Village motel. I would fight that battle on the morrow—which turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day.

Meryn and I were looking out over Downtown Chicago from the Hancock skyscraper when the car hire company called to say they’d swap the gas guzzler so we headed south in a Dodge Avenger and came to rest in Lincoln, Illinois, founded in 1853, and the only town in America named after Abraham Lincoln before he became president. Lincoln had helped survey the town and been counsel for the company whose railroad was its raison d’être.

The courthouse, there, subsequently played host to the Circuit Judge and a group of lawyers (Lincoln among them) on their regular two-month fall tour of the Illinois Eighth District.[2] Meryn was enamoured of the building, still standing, and took pains to measure the breadth-to-length ratio of the window frames. Her house was being rebuilt while we took our two-month fall tour.

The sun had set, the camera was back at the motel, and we’d already lost a day to the V8 so she completed a back of the envelope calculation and emailed the architect. Lost a day, that is to say, on our way to Oxford, Mississippi, where Barack Obama and John McCain would engage in the first of what are euphemistically referred to as televised ‘debates.’

Illinois was celebrating the sesquicentenary of the seven famous Senate race debates between incumbent, Stephen Douglas, and challenger, Abraham Lincoln. Those stump speech contests in 1858 had taken Douglas’ opponent to national prominence as the make-or-break 1860 presidential election loomed on the horizon.

We could not take the advertised celebratory stroll around Charleston (where the fourth debate had occurred) and spend a couple of days in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, so chose the latter. I went in to a motel, there, and ran through the checklist of basic requirements concerning whether or not they had a non-smoking room with free wireless internet, MSNBC TV, fridge, and a microwave. They did, so I fetched Meryn to sign the paperwork.

The Gujurati desk clerk was able to differentiate our accent from that of other non-American English speakers so we followed up on that and learned that he’d been a university student in Australia until expelled part way through his course by the Howard regime. Meryn mentioned the Haneef case; he knew it well and was amused when she vent her spleen against Australia's self-appointed deputy sheriff representing George Bush’s interests in Southeast Asia, the (now deposed) Prime Minister.

We turned on Andrea Mitchell’s lunchtime show. The deepening financial crisis had moved apace since the subprime loan scandal had reared its head in our Boston motel in the winter of 2006-7.[3] Ms. Mitchell’s guests, political pundits, were coming around to the realisation that Trickster pulls the strings of American capitalism.

Downtown, at the Illinois Capitol, we were entertained by a group of children whose grossly overweight supervising teacher admonished the pupils to get some exercise and take the stairs; she made her point forcefully, then entered the elevator and rode up to meet the excitable group of grade schoolers as they were herded into the Senate Chamber by a young docent.

The school kids were to provide the audience for a meaningless ratta-tat-tat rote spiel that nothing would prevent the docent delivering in its entirety in the allotted time. It reached us as an uninterrupted staccato stream of consciousness, right down to the “doesanyononehaveanyquestions” ending exactly four minutes on from the initial cannon burst. An extraordinary feat, to be sure, but devoid of any semantic content—the frequent mention of Barack Obama’s name notwithstanding. Meryn had read both of the increasingly famous Illinois Senator’s books and so filled me in on his time in that place as a State legislator.

I returned the favour with respect to Lincoln’s having represented Sangamon County in the Old Capitol building on Sixth Street. It was there, at the State Capitol, in 1858, that Abraham Lincoln announced he wanted to be the next Senator for Illinois, and there, while we were driving through Mississippi in February 2007, that Obama had told an enthusiastic crowd that he wanted to be the next President of the United States of America.

We visited the Lincoln home—nowadays another of those high standard National Parks Service (NPS) sites—and pressed the buttons on the mechanical model of the slain president’s funeral procession. Later, we paid the entrance fee at the much talked about Lincoln Museum opposite the Old Capitol Building on Sixth Street and devoted an afternoon to its various digital exhibits but, ever the old fogey, I preferred the NPS’s more prosaic approach to the subject.

Just after sunrise on the autumnal equinox, the Dodge pulled into the Oak Ridge Cemetery off North Grande and slipped through an array of Stars and Stripes. Gliding past graves, it veered left at a mausoleum and came to a dead end. There was nothing for it but to walk the final leg. A sign posted on a makeshift chain wire fence informed visitors that Lincoln’s tomb was undergoing renovation. So we got back in the car and drove to the town which had been the region’s pre-eminent centre of commerce in antebellum America: St. Louis, on the Mississippi River.

I had expected to see the Eads Bridge but the semi-trailers on the spaghetti flyover carried us miles into Missouri in their wake. This, even though it was early on a Sunday morning, reminded me that tackling the interstate is not for the faint-hearted. Having clocked up more than 25,000 rental car miles on our previous visit to the USA, you’d think it would all be second nature but it took some time to turn around and head back to the Downtown exit. Disentangled from the spaghetti, I pulled over on main street and stared out the window while Meryn scoured the Road Atlas in search of the nineteenth-century landmark.

A middle-aged couple strolled along the sidewalk. The woman blew a huge bubble of gum that burst all over her face but a protruding tongue cleaned up the mess and hauled it all back in without her breaking stride. Meryn soon found the Eads Bridge I’d been looking for and we made our way over. A sign near the entrance warned there was no access but approaching traffic proved otherwise so we rode over the River on the steel structure that first spanned the Mississippi in 1874.

St. Louis steamboat interests had fought long and hard to protect what they regarded as their water highway—America’s extensive navigable freshwater system—being superseded by rail transportation. The surest way to halt the train had been to stand in the way of any bridge being built across the Mississippi River. But, as Abraham Lincoln put it to the jury of the Effie Afton case in the United States Circuit Court in Chicago in September 1857, were the boat owners to succeed in this then instead of having the option of year round east-west railroad travel, the American would be limited to carrying on trade during those months when the Mississippi, free of ice, afforded relatively safe passage—would be prevented, that is to say, from realising his destiny to go west.[4]

Bridges were built, the steamboat gave way to railroads, and Chicago stepped into the limelight to challenge St. Louis’ status as the pre-eminent city on the western frontier. The writing was on the wall when St. Louis lost the right to host the 1860 Republican Party National Convention to Chicago and the whole thing subsequently spelled out when Mississippi River trade all but ceased during the Civil War. By the mid-1860s, Chicago had taken over as the dominant centre of regional commerce. St. Louis businessmen realised that they needed a bridge of their own.

The St. Louis Merchants Exchange called upon one of its own, J. B. Eads, to lay the groundwork for building that bridge. His salvage company had hauled the Effie Afton up from the river bottom after it had gone down following a collision with the pylons of the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi. And it was Eads who had designed and built the ironclad warships that Ulysses Grant used to defeat the rebels on the Cumberland, Mississippi, Tennessee and Yazoo Rivers.

Born in 1820 and named for his mother’s cousin (the future president) James Buchanan Eads had arrived in St. Louis on a steamboat that exploded and sank as it came in to dock. Thirteen years old at the time, he spent the remainder of his life coming to terms with and striving to conquer that river. Self-taught, like Lincoln, and no less ambitious, Eads established a salvage business to capitalise on the fact that paddleboat boiler explosions were commonplace on America’s arterial waterways. A successful businessman with ties to the White House—President James Buchanan was there from 1857 to 1861 and a Missouri colleague, Edward Bates, was Lincoln’s attorney general—Eads submitted a plan for constructing ironclad gunboats when war broke out between the North and South.

He’d no experience with design of warships before he started and none of building bridges either but Eads had supreme confidence and proposed to construct the world’s first steel bridge, incorporating unprecedentedly wide spans of more than 500 feet. Doubts about the integrity of his engineering threatened to drive off potential investors but Eads secured funds from those who, like Andrew Carnegie, were prepared to examine the track record and listen to his explanation of how he intended to apply the principle of the lever. Work commenced, allegedly at the spot where he had been pulled out of the freezing waters along with his mother and sisters when the steamboat sank in 1833.[5]

When it was nearing completion, the Army Corps of Engineers demanded the St. Louis Bridge be torn down. Eads enlisted President Ulysses Grant’s help, the Corps of Engineers backed off, and the Eads Bridge opened on July 4th 1874, paving the way for steel construction to become commonplace. We drove back across the Mississippi on the landmark and were satisfied. Ideally, we’d have capped off our St. Louis visit by stopping off at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers but it was upstream and inaccessible, Meryn reckoned, if the map was anything to go on. So we headed south instead.

A Mexican restaurant made a fine late afternoon lunch and we crossed the Mississippi from Missouri to Cairo, Illinois, where Mark Twain’s Huck and Jim had got lost in the fog and failed to take the bend up the Ohio from the Mississippi.[6] There was no mistaking it when we were there. A citizen of St. Louis who’d come to Cairo to see the Ohio flow into the Mississippi for himself was disturbed by the sorry state of the park. Broken branches lay across the path and trash was scattered everywhere.

Hurricane Ike—more destructive, even, than Gustav, the hurricane that had enabled Bush and Cheney to skip the Republican Party convention in the Twin Cities upstream—must shoulder some of the blame, the citizen acknowledged, but the authorities in Springfield were failing in their duty to adequately manage the important site, he maintained.

Two years had passed since we’d looked down over the source of the Ohio from high on a hilltop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I stood, now, at its mouth, relieved to be free of the impossible demand that Detective Hamilton had made upon me back then.[7]

A massive grain barge came down the Mississippi from St. Louis and turned left to head upstream, crossing the clearly visible demarcation line where the blue water from the east was sucked under by the Old Man and went rolling on down to New Orleans. Ulysses Grant had been there in the early 1860s as military commander of the District of Cairo, his authority extending all the way up the Ohio to the mouth of the Cumberland River. James Eads met Grant at Cairo in January 1862 when the first of the ironclads, USS Carondelet, was commissioned.

Autumn had begun. The Dodge now carried us over the Ohio past leaves changing colour on the trees to Mayfield, Kentucky, where we spent the night. Jerry Seinfeld had stayed in room something or other and his key was on display, along with the newspaper article about how a fellow entertainer had told him Mayfield Super 8 was a good place to stay. It was okay but nothing to compare with the splendid sight, next day, of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers which flow almost side by side as they prepare to empty their contents into the Ohio upstream from Cairo.

Ulysses Grant’s capture of Fort Henry on February 6th 1862 meant that he and his men “had a navigable stream open to us up to Muscle Shoals, Alabama.”[8] The follow-up victory of Fort Donelson, ten days later, might have opened the way for Federal forces to end the American Civil War swiftly, according to Grant, but

Providence ruled differently. [General Halleck failed to seize the initiative and] Time was given the enemy to collect armies and fortify his new positions; and twice afterwards he came near forcing his north-western front up to the Ohio River.[9]

Whatever the case, Ulysses S. Grant was promoted to Major-General because of the Federal victory and, as the excellent documentary we viewed in the National Parks’ Service theatre explained, it’s where the great Civil War hero came to be known as “Unconditional Surrender Grant” in another of those curious coincidences which characterise American history: in 1854 Simon Buckner had loaned a destitute Grant money to return home from California; now, here he was, a Confederate general at Fort Donelson left to surrender to Union General Grant’s forces because his commanding officers had fled the scene.

In view of his having been a Good Samaritan to Grant eight years earlier, Buckner hoped to be given some leeway. Grant sent word to Buckner that he could have credit but that “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” The Confederate from Kentucky understood. In 1885, he visited his old friend and former adversary a fortnight before Grant’s death and was a pallbearer at the funeral.

Hamilton had been on to something, I thought. I had no desire to catch up with him, of course, but the thought of travelling downstream to New Orleans from the source of any one of those west Appalachian rivers—the Cumberland, Ohio, Tennessee—had begun to take root.

Chapter   2     Seeing Double

We arrived in Los Angeles in May 2006, Meryn and I, and hit our first snag at immigration. The uniformed officer took fingerprints and informed us that our fresh new five-year visas did not allow entry into the USA for a whole year. The sentence took on greater authority in being pronounced with a Russian accent but was softened somewhat by the fact that this official was an attractive blond in her mid-thirties whose own mother, she told us, was only ever permitted to stay for six months at a time.

Our protests that we’d gone to considerable expense to obtain the visas—that the consulate official in Melbourne had wished us well for our planned year of travel in the USA, that we had return flights for then—made no impression so we stopped talking and listened, reading between the lines that, come November, we could leave for some European destination and return from there to the USA for another six months.

Bloody hell. We would have bought return tickets to London with stopovers in the USA had the consulate put us in the picture about the unspoken rule. We were unaware, then, that America is a pair of hostile twins, that since consulate and immigration officials work for different departments what the one tells the individual traveller will invariably be at odds with whatever the other says.

Still, we were in, and so collected our baggage and breezed through customs with confidence, pinching ourselves at being back in the USA—for an extended stay. Jet lag and another hour passing through security for the connecting domestic flight to JFK did not suppress our great delight in being there. A couple of hours later, noses pressed against the Perspex, we were staring down at the snow on the Sierra Mountains. That leg of the Sydney to New York flight is invariably lightly booked so we each had a window seat to begin with and then a middle row to stretch out on when ready for sleep.

A night in Manhattan’s Sixty-third Street YMCA and a three-hour Greyhound ride the following afternoon saw us at Union Station, New Haven, Connecticut. One of the first built outside of New York, the nineteenth century New Haven train station stood at the junction of two railroads, the one north to the capital of Connecticut, Hartford, and the other east to New London. My aversion to taking taxis is ever under challenge at these moments but there was nothing especially difficult about finding a bus and making our way to the student apartment we’d sublet for the summer.

A month before taking my year off from work I’d asked an under-thirty colleague at the office whether he had a particular website to recommend concerning our obtaining accommodation in the USA. “Craigslist dot com.” He tossed it off with that youthful air of owning the territory, mildly despairing of a hard question concerning digital technology ever being put to him (or his generation) by someone my age. “Craigslist” was the right answer, of course, especially as regards summer accommodation in New England. The supply, there, of apartments for a three-month stay from late May far outweighs demand and our accommodation was a done deal prior to our arrival.

Rather than try to explain the route, our driver took us beyond the bus terminus to the corner of Trumbull and Whitney so that it was a short walk to Orange Street where Mordecai, the law student from whom we’d sublet, awaited us. He showed Meryn around while I lugged the suddenly very heavy bags to the third floor residence. The hand knitted pullover which had easily warded off the chill wind turned against me during the climb and by the time all of our stuff was in the bedroom I was shy of stairs and dependent upon Meryn for the lay of the land—Mordecai having vacated in a heated rush to be with his lover in Manhattan.

It was immediately apparent that we had taken over the lease on a bachelor pad and that, once we’d cleaned up the kitchen it would suit us very well. I shook hands with Declan, Mordecai’s roommate, who, we’d been told in email exchanges during the negotiations for the lease, spent most of his waking hours at the hospital. Declan welcomed us and insisted that we should feel free to use the tins and condiments left behind by Mordecai since he, Declan, always ate at Subway and knew nothing at all about that part of the house.

I shut my eyes to the mould and took the plunge behind the shower curtain. Meryn, meanwhile, made the kitchen fit for human consumption to occur in, and went through the cupboards to boot. All towelled and fresh, I came out of the bathroom to the prospect of buckwheat and matzo balls. I knew about buckwheat cake from Sonny and Brownie’s cover of ‘Sail Away’ but had never dined out on it.

Buckwheat, then, was the first addition to our range of home cooked meals. If you can find the grain at all it will probably be in the Kosher aisle but few supermarket staff seem ever to have heard of it—or at least not that product as pronounced by a fifth generation Australian.

Mordecai’s was a ‘cooked in’ kitchen. And the larder was only half of it: there was a full range of pots and pans, crockery, cutlery, coffee machines, and Tupperware type storage containers together with enough rolls of aluminium foil to have the Bush Administration indict us on WMD production charges.

True to Mordecai’s word, Declan appeared only at rare intervals. When he did flit through one morning I asked about the smell of gas in the kitchen. He recalled that he and Mordecai had smelt gas, too, when they first moved in but that the real estate agent had had it checked and no leak had been found. One gets used to it. Well one doesn’t but it would clearly be bad form to make a fuss so, as difficult as it was for me with my squabbling Irish Catholic upbringing, I bit my tongue. We were subletting and should take up issues only with Declan and/or Mordecai; they’d then intercede with Honey Pear—her downstairs—the prickly real estate agent whose ubiquitous For Rent signs blighted the neighbourhood.

That directive—that all communication be funnelled from sub-lessee to lessee to landlord—fell at the first post because Ms. Pear lost no time in obtaining our (sub-lessee) cell phone number for her office girls to dial daily. American telecommunication corporations have “got you coming and going” to use a Merynism: they charge the customer for both made and received calls from the moment the number is dialled.

The Pear assault drove me to distraction. First thing in the morning the phone would ring with notification that the agency would be showing someone the apartment at 2 pm or tomorrow at 10 am or on “Saturday morning around eleven.” I thought that by paying the rent we’d have the run of the place but Honey had us pegged as patsies, de-facto caretakers who’d clean up and learn to come and go in accordance with her schedule of inspections for would-be post-August tenants.

Ms. Pear and I came face to face when one of her minions phoned to say the painters would be in the next day. “Oh no, no, no,” I protested, “This is too much.” The painters, it was agreed after we had traded points of view about the payment of rent, could begin once we’d paid our final day’s rent and moved out—three months hence. And could they please stop phoning to say they were bringing someone through? Email exchanges with Mordecai had established that the lease entitled the agent to bring anyone in with a couple of hours’ notice. If that’s how it worked then so be it, I said, but why must we suffer the annoying phone calls? They promised to desist, but it was an agreement honoured in the breach.

Things weren’t turning out the way we had ’em planned.[10] Still, New Haven was a delightful university town and we enjoyed being there. Comcast gave us the sixth series of The Sopranos—we’d not seen the fifth yet—as well as Big Love. We crossed paths with Declan over News Hour with Jim Lehrer and acquired a taste for Book TV with its platform for authors. The fact that the piles of books which lay about the apartment leaned to the left struck me as all of a piece with the pink fridge magnet that claimed watching some 1950s’ musical had made Mordecai gay.

Of course everyone knows that gay men are thick on the ground in the Republican Party so being homosexual in America does not necessarily incline one to the progressive side of politics. Being open and honest about it does that. That Declan’s first loves were history and philosophy explained the book on top of the stack nearest the television set—Robert Fogel’s The Fourth Great Awakening & the Future of Egalitarianism. Not what one might expect of a trainee surgeon at Yale; nor would you imagine him spending the summer working to get a Democrat in the White House and yet he did, as a volunteer for JFK, John Forbes Kerry, in 2004. Long faces all round.

We liked Declan. Warm, busy, easy-going, he was our type of guy. So it came as a surprise, to be sure, when he told us that he would be leaving for California and thought we might like to meet Bob, the poet who’d be subletting his bedroom. We should have seen it coming. Still, a 35-year-old would probably be able to fit in with a couple of old fogies just as well as an intern?

Roaring twenties music was coming through the hi-fi system the night Bob came round. I turned the volume down as Declan introduced us and subsequently turned it off so as to re-assure our new flatmate that he wouldn’t be subjected to my musical taste once he’d moved in. He liked all kinds of music, Bob said, just so long as it wasn’t too loud. That was a good sign, one which counterbalanced the Rastafarian visage.

It soon became clear—he relocated the internet router and hi-fi system from the living room to his bedroom and piled dirty dishes in the kitchen sink—that Bob was 35-going-on-15. Born and bred in New Haven, Connecticut, of Haitian parents, he was fond of playing with his telephone—beeping from this to that option for twenty minutes at a time—in the kitchen. At 3 am. I asked if he wouldn’t mind playing with the device in his bedroom since our room adjoined the kitchen and we preferred to sleep through the wee hours? The bewildered look he gave me suggested that he judged me to be from Mars.

We had our moments, Bob and I, where we tried to find common ground. For his part, he assured me that he was not a Rapper but a Hip-Hopper, the latter having a respect for women which the former lack, apparently. And he took it upon himself to be my New Haven guide, starting with the “three streets named after the guys who invented New Haven.” Try as we might, though, we found none—common ground that is.

Patience is a virtue, I know, but I drew the line at the type of nonsense Bob passed off as knowledge. He told me, for instance, that AIDS was created by the CIA in order to wipe out black men. And he and his buddies had come to the conclusion that President George W. Bush ordered that explosives be planted on the various floors of the Twin Towers in readiness for the nine-eleven attacks, which explosives were timed to go off at regular intervals following the impact of the aircraft.

According to Bob, then, the two aircraft did not so much cause the collapse of the World Trade Center as provide convenient cover for the Bush Administration’s having done so. Apart from violating Occam’s sound advice that explanations should not be multiplied beyond the necessary, Bob’s conspiracy theory flew in the face of all that we knew about America in general and the dysfunctional Bush Administration in particular. The various departments could not have co-operated in any such diabolical plot to govern by fear.

Connecticut third floor apartments are notoriously stuffy in summer, we now learned. Ninety-five degree Fahrenheit temperatures and increasingly heated exchanges over the router interfered with sleep and left me irritated and irascible. Deep-throated Harley Davidsons roared through the streets after midnight drowning out the sound of distant gunfire.

It got worse. One night, a constable in an armchair sat at the doorway of a medieval building, flanked by men in brilliantly coloured robes. A pair of trumpeters led a motley parade of men on horseback, two by two. These were followed by a group of noblemen even more brightly attired than those at the head of the parade, attended by servants and puffed up with their own self-importance. There were horses, too, and trumpeters, but no pairs. And bringing up the rear was a single horseman, attended by even more lackeys.

A noisy group of bystanders alternately cheered and jeered at the aristocrats in the passing parade. Their waxing and waning communicated itself to the rest of the onlookers, who now became noisy and partisan. I was somehow separate from the throng but held in thrall, and on edge due to the din. A single voice detached itself from the madding crowd and was yelling directly at me, just as if I was responsible for the division that had taken hold. I awoke, scared and shaken. The hi-fi was on in the other bedroom and I could just make out the words ‘mother fucking.’ I pressed a button on my travel clock. A little after midnight. Bob must have been rehearsing his poem in readiness for a performance at the Hip-Hop Club. Time to get away.

We’d gone to New Haven for our first three months in the USA because Meryn wanted to conduct research in a Yale archive. She, too, had sleepless nights. Her tossing and turning was occasioned by long days in the vault copying extracts of hand-written documents from the 1830s that were too fragile to be photocopied. A chance encounter with a fellow researcher, however, provided her with a solution to the problem: she adopted his technique of photographing the sought after records with a high-resolution digital camera.  It was as much a boon for me as Meryn because we now had time to get out and about.

In June we rented a Chevrolet Cobalt for a week-long tour of Massachusetts. Setting out from New Haven we approached a set of traffic lights and were surprised to see a semi-trailer—Americans call them tractor-trailers—emerge from a narrow lane on the right. More surprising, still, the driver of the huge rig seemed intent on turning a very tight corner to come toward us.

He’d never make it, we agreed, and watched with interest to see how he’d get out of the fix. Interest turned to amazement and thence to wonder as it dawned on us that the semi-trailer was making a U-turn! In the blink of an eye the tractor-trailer went head first back down the narrow lane. We saw but didn’t believe. The light changed and we moved slowly through the intersection and east to the Connecticut River.

It was one of New England’s wettest months on record. The car, though, had good quality windscreen wipers, heater, demisters, and even power-steering—all the mod cons. Their very competitive rental-car market virtually guarantees that whatever you drive in the USA will be trouble-free. Unless you hit an elk and have it come kicking and screaming through the windscreen. Kangaroos aren’t in the race.

Make no mistake; it is a race. Hurtling up the wrong side of Interstate-95 at 65 mph (miles per hour) in driving rain is a wake-up call. And you daren’t slow down. ‘Keep up, or cause an accident’ is the code of the road. Heading for Providence, Rhode Island, I took an unexpected turn onto Route-1 South while Meryn had her head buried in the road atlas. “What’d you do that for?” she yelled. As navigator, she gave the directions. “I got into the wrong lane,” I lied.

I couldn’t tell her what was going on but wouldn’t be able to cover it up either, by the looks of things. Meryn acquiesced. To immediately correct a navigational error on the freeway is to court death so we had long ago agreed to persevere on any unwanted course until the danger had passed.

Aliens from a mirror image road system where one keeps to the left, we had found ourselves in all kinds of unanticipated trouble with our initial venture onto the highway outside Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport in 2005. When Meryn said to make a right hand turn I went left, and vice-versa. And when she said “Turn left” she sometimes meant “Turn right.” We quickly adopted the terminology to “Turn soft” or “Turn hard;” it works as well to say “Take a hard” or “Take a soft.” North and south, on the other hand, give rise to a more intractable problem having to do with the hemispheres either side of the equator: instead of the sun traversing the Northern sky from right to left it does the opposite in America—from left to right across the Southern sky.

Unbeknownst to me before I got out from Down Under, my good sense of direction is tied to the position of the sun. And since it is second nature, I instinctively know where I am—in Australia. The situation was reversed for me in the USA. While my sense of where A is in relation to B remained intact, the cardinal points were rotated through 180°. The upshot was that I had to think through where north, south, east, and west were. This necessity to consciously orientate oneself was disconcerting—Meryn had emigrated from England to Australia as a twelve-year-old and instinctively associates April with springtime—but relatively inconsequential by comparison with the switch from the left to the right hand side of the road.

The interstate system, integral to President Eisenhower’s defence strategy, was a mixed blessing. It made railroads obsolete, laid the tracks on which global warming runs, and yet saved small towns from being overrun with passing trade. Trade is to the American what fear of authority is to the Australian. Passing trade leaves the interstate freeway and travels along the backroads slowing in stages from 55 mph on the outskirts to 25 mph on Main Street.

Crossing Narragansett Bay on the toll bridge from Conanicut Island, we checked in to a Newport, Rhode Island, motel. It had never been our intention to pay homage to Alan Bond but we enjoyed mingling with the yachting fraternity at the Marina. It was as hot, there, on America’s Cup Boulevard in June 2006, as it had been that September day in India, 1983, when, bemoaning the pitiful state of the reflecting pool at the Taj Mahal, I was disappointed to hear the latest score—Liberty 3, Australia II 1—concerning the famous boat race. When I learned, months afterwards, that the property shark had ended America’s 132-year winning streak and given convicts a good name it was Christmas.

The following morning we drove to Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there, at the tip of Cape Cod, that the Pilgrims disembarked from the Mayflower in 1620. I’d imagined being able to see both the famous harbour and The Atlantic from the road along the narrow spit but saw neither because of the vegetation that held the sand in place. It was something of a let down.

Whole crustacean was on offer at the café we called to for lunch but our selection was shoestring chowder with fringe benefit. We chose, that is to say, the least expensive dish on the menu and were spared, thereby, an introduction to the hostess. She chatted instead with the couple who had ordered lobster and told them she’d met her husband, the proprietor, when she’d stopped in for a beer. The rest was history.

Meryn and my eyes met. That’s why we were there—history. Cafés and bars are full of it. But it wasn’t just the knowledge of how the forty-year-old had come to be living out on Cape Cod that interested us. We learned, too, that it’s no better on the Florida Keys, that the road south-west from Key Largo is all scrub and no ocean as well.

Meryn took a turn at the wheel on our way to the motel at Hyannis. Shouldn’t she be closer to the middle of the road? No, but it sure felt like it. Being a front seat passenger made me a back seat driver. And being in America made the motel clerk from Gujarat, Mr Patel, homesick. “Ah, Australia,” he beamed when Meryn handed over her driver’s licence. We were welcomed as citizens of a civilized, cricket-loving country.

“Your Prime Minister played cricket in India.”

“Yes, we saw his bowling action on TV,” I replied—promptly, to head Meryn off at the pass. She hated John Howard. A nasty, mean-spirited, “lying rodent” (according to his colleagues), our then Prime Minister was a national embarrassment, and I didn’t like him. But Meryn hated him with a passion for deploying the politics of fear and didn’t mind saying so. We soon gained the impression that Mr Patel’s American customers didn’t like him, either—presumably because he gave short shrift to any guests from other than great cricketing nations.

A broken down old Buick couple struggled into the reception area and interrupted Patel’s recollection of having padded up with Garfield Sobers at Adelaide Oval during his student days. He quickly bustled them out in order to further develop his cricketing career but Meryn stumped him with a mischievous question about his degree from the University of the Pineapple in Parsippany, New Jersey, a framed copy of which hung on the wall.

He buttonholed us on the subject of Adelaide Oval when we returned the key to reception next morning. We made it clear that cricket isn’t our thing and wanted only to snap the graduation certificate and be out the door. Poor Patel—abandoned as always to baseball tourists fresh from Dunkin Donuts. But we’d left a jacket behind so I had to go back and face the music. There, at reception, a lithe black couple from the West Indies made everything right. I don’t like reggae; I love it.

Black clouds piled up over Plymouth, the next port of call, and rolling thunder heralded our arrival at the famous rock which commemorates the Pilgrims’ arrival in America. Having concluded that Plymouth was more likely to provide safe harbour, they had moved there from Provincetown after a few weeks. And, as luck would have it, were introduced to an English-speaking Patuxet Indian, Squanto, who happened to live there. They might have perished, this vulnerable band of colonists, but for Squanto. He was a gift from God, according to the Pilgrims’ long serving Governor, William Bradford, and Americans have ever since regarded the experience of redemption as of divine origin, and central.

There’s no denying the fact of the extraordinary coincidence which brought the Pilgrims to Squanto’s shore: the Mayflower had set sail for the colony of Virginia but drifted 500 miles off course to put down anchor at Cape Cod. There was next to no chance that there’d be an English-speaking Indian at journey’s end to guide them through the wilderness. It’s not surprising that the seventeenth-century Calvinist colonists credited God for contriving the meeting with Squanto.

Nowadays, we’re inclined to regard it as just one of those things; extraordinary, yes, but not divine. And if serendipity is divine, who’s to say that it’s the work of the Judeo-Christian God? Happy coincidence is, after-all, the hallmark of Trickster, that pagan divinity whom we still acknowledge on April Fools’ Day.

The colonists called their settlement New Plymouth. On April Fools’ Day, 1621, the Indian Chief, Massasoit, accompanied by Squanto, signed over the territory of Massachusetts to the white man. New Plymouth survived until annexed by the Massachusetts Bay Company of Boston and Salem in 1691. A year later Trickster turned up in the village of Salem and assaulted the senses of Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam.

It was raining cats and dogs when we were there, staring up at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and crouching down to examine seventeenth-century tombstones in the burial ground. Meryn is especially fond of the Puritan death’s head design which reminds everyman that all things must pass.

Puritan Judge Hathorne handed down his finding that Williams and Putnam had been visited by Bridget Bishop the witch, that her spectre had hovered over them. The American set out on a witch hunt, and got a taste for it. There’s some that say Judge Hathorne’s great-great grandson—the celebrated nineteenth-century writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne—couldn’t stomach what had been done in the family name and so changed it.

We headed for Concord but stopped to see Lexington’s handsome timber tavern where the minutemen had rendezvoused in 1775. Meryn spoke to a docent who was huddled beneath an umbrella. All done up in eighteenth-century breeches, knee-high boots, and three-cornered hat, he thought the British had come and took up the case of Paul Revere’s horse. We should have owned up about the accent but didn’t want to have to admit to knowing nothing about The Crocodile Hunter.

Paul Revere rode through Lexington in April 1775 and warned the minutemen—Massachusetts militia who were to be ready to fight at a minute’s notice—that the British had left their Boston barracks and would be advancing on Concord to confiscate the revolutionaries’ gunpowder and weapons cache.

Eighty-five years after the event, Henry Longfellow immortalised Paul Revere for riding from Boston to Concord. Poetic licence enabled Longfellow to ignore the fact that the hero had had to walk the last part of the 14 mile journey because the British took Revere’s borrowed horse out from under him. His name didn’t lend itself to legend but Israel Bissel’s 345 mile ride from Watertown, Connecticut, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to tell his countrymen that the American Revolution had begun was a no less impressive feat.

So near Boston, and so remote, the village of Concord took us by surprise. Hawthorne had moved there in the turbulent 1850s and lived near his friend and close contemporary, Emerson. A wise old owl, Hawthorne did not adhere to Emerson’s philosophy yet stood by him when the time came for a commemorative daguerreotype.

I’m not persuaded by the great Ralph Waldo either but posed for a photograph at the front door of his house. The camera caught Meryn a stone’s throw from Walden Pond, at Gropius’ house. Bauhaus modernism looked uncomfortable to me, nestled there in Thoreau’s backyard. I’ve since come to think of that 1930s’ architectural statement being not so much ‘uncomfortable’ as ‘at odds with itself’—American.

Framingham nestles in the shadow of a turnpike, a toll road, and would therefore be given a wide berth other things being equal. Meryn’s research subject—born the same year as Hawthorne, and possessed of as much visionary zeal as Emerson—had lived there, though, and that tipped the balance. We didn’t find the house and never figured out how to determine whether or not a given toll road was privately owned either. The interstate highways are impressive; the turnpikes, by contrast, are by and large poorly designed, not properly maintained, and unsafe.

Torrential rain put an end to a planned stopover in Boston so we headed for the port town of New Bedford. Timber, scarce in seventeenth-century England, was harvested by the boatload in colonial America and shipped back to the mother country. Bakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, wheelwrights, sailmakers, shoemakers, tailors and other craftsman took the raw materials that came to market from the surrounding farms and lots and transformed them into barrels, gloves, houses, jackets, ropes, ships, wharves, and so on. Port towns concentrated colonial wealth along the coastal strip of the Atlantic seaboard. New Bedford had the added advantage of being a nineteenth-century whaling port.

Whales oiled the wheels of international trade in the horse-and-buggy era and occasionally rammed whaling ships. Herman Melville was a year-old infant when the Nantucket whaler, Essex, was rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820. He read a survivor’s account of that ordeal after leaving New Bedford on a whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet in 1841 and, taking literary counsel from good friend and neighbour, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote Moby Dick, the first modernist novel.

Hawthorne’s Puritan ancestry haunts the pages of Moby Dick but Melville’s own forebears are there, too, no more convinced than Starbuck by Captain Ahab’s impotent boast from the quarter-deck that he would penetrate the mask. Melville knew that the first move an American makes is to don the mask.[11] His grandfather had dressed up as an Indian and thrown British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor in December 1773.

I was in the USA but five minutes before realizing that I’d have to cover up the fact that I was all at sea, that The Pequod I had charge of would be mashed to matchsticks if I did not open up my mind as Ishmael had. For now though, on dry land, I walked with Meryn around the town made wealthy from the trade in whale oil.

Wherever there has been wealth in America there’s a copy of Graeco-Roman architecture. New Bedford is no exception. Trickster is there, too, as Mercurius, the Roman god of trade, commerce and profit. The columns on the left of New Bedford’s Merchants and Mechanics Bank building don’t match those on the right. The plaque outside tells us that the reason we’re “Seeing Double,” there, is that when the Greek Revival building was constructed in the 1830s the merchants and mechanics contracted separate firms to carry out the work. It gradually dawned on me, over the following months, that it’s the story of the United States of America: the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

[That’s the story so far. If you’d like the next free instalment sooner rather than later, please visit the website www.takeninbyamerica.com or contact Gunfighter Press— gunfighter@takeninbyamerica.com]

References

[1] Why the American embraced Adam Smith yet rejected David Hume is beyond the scope of this book but appreciating that he did so puts us in the box seat when trying to make head and tail of what he’s on about and it’s what Taken in by America is all about.

[2] Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 8

[3] See below, Chapter 22, ‘Alias the Outlaw’

[4] See below, Chapter 6, ‘Twin Cities’

[5] John M Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 59

[6] See below, Chapter 7, ‘The Private Eye’

[7] See below, Chapter 7, ‘The Private Eye’

[8] U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 146

[9] Ibid., 163

[10] The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

[11] H. Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin Books, 1851), Chapter 36: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough.”

TibA Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter   1    Mercury V8

Chapter   2     Seeing Double

References