Battling the bitter cold we took the bus downtown, where a woman thought I was mental as I tapped the glass like I’d never seen that particular material before. I didn’t want to tell her that glass is actually a liquid, and in a thousand years that particular window would have slowly melted so that the bottom of it was ten times as thick as the top, as it would have blown her tiny mind.
We alighted said bus at 17th and walked towards the Washington Memorial, the giant white Egyptian obelisk that dominates the city’s skyline. Consulting the map, this city seemed to be a town for memorials, statues and museums of past fallen heroes when at war with the English, the French, the Indians, the Japanese, the Vietnamese, the Iraqi's - you name it these guys have fucked them up... Statues and cemetaries are everywhere, but somehow the city is devoid of soul.
All these people have died in the name of their country, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly, all no doubt thinking it was a lovely and honourable thing to do... 1776, 1914, 1941, 1960's, 1991, Gettysburg, The Alamo, Wounded Knee, Pearl Harbour, Saigon, Tikrit... and for what?
So their fat fucking grandchildren could sit on their fat fucking arses watching jailbait Hannah Montana undress on their rear seat DVD players, collecting mechanically separated McNuggets and drinking three-pint cups of cherry coke from drive ins before they get pregnant at fifteen from the one good sperm that Trey the Jock will produce in his lifetime.
Grandparents by thirty five, their ancestors spinning in the grave, secretly wishing they had surrended to the Japs or the Yankees.
Cussing.
Lots.
Happening upon a white house, Natalie asked if it was “The White House” I concurred that it was, but she wouldn’t believe me… So much so that I began doubting it myself. I remember talking at primary school how everything in America was bigger and better than home on Blighty. In what may have been my first piece of stand-up comedy I eulogised on the difference between the minutiae that Coronation Street dealt with compared to Dallas or Dynasty and how our prime minister’s residence, 10 Downing Street was little more than a terraced house compared to the size and exuberance of The President’s.
How wrong I was. It was tiny!
We deliberated as to whether this could be the single most important seat of power in the world and finally I convinced Natalie it was. We were well disappointed. When I’d seen this building decimated at the hands of an invading alien force in Independence Day, or every time I’d seen it on the news, I figured it would be ma-hoosive.
We saw the vegetable patch that the Barack and Michelle Obama plan to use and the President’s own one-hole golf course on the lawn outside. If you look closely you can see the tiny blue flag on the eighteenth hole.
The treasury building next door was more impressive, but not as white. Natalie seemed concerned at the lack of security, I didn’t tell her of the anti-aircraft guns mounted on the top of the building and suggested she should climb the gates to ascertain if there was any security. We walked around and took some pictures before seeing George Washington’s column and the lake leading to Lincoln Memorial.
We walked the downtown area, seeing some secret service men and more civilians who had convinced themselves they were real-life spies from 1970's films...
and made it as far as the Senate on Capitol Hill. Their equivalent of The Houses of Parliament, I think. Much more impressive. We walked through the freezing weather until our brains and feet ached and made it home to a ham and cheese sandwich and an early night.
The next morning we visited the statue of the dudes raising the flag at Iwo Juma, after the famous picture Joe Rosenthal took. Made famous of course by Clint Eastwood.
We sauntered passed a giant building that turned out to be a giant organ donated to the American people by the Dutch. I think they were taking the piss. At Arlington National Cemetery we took some snaps. Viewing them on the computer Natalie thought there was a ghost of a man walking in amongst the graves but it was just a road sign. Quite a spooky road sign in fairness.
I’d have liked to have seen the statue of Abraham Lincoln but I guess bumping into the incumbent President himself made up for that.
I only got one picture of him in my baseball cap, but we sat drinking white hot chocolate in a Starbucks and tried to fix the world for twenty or twenty five minutes. He vowed to pull all troop out of Iraq by 2010 and I promised to make my bed in the morning.
He was cool.
But he doesn’t know if there really are aliens at Roswell nor who shot JFK.
Plausible deniability n’all that.
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