(Long) Weekend 13: Mr Jones goes to Washington

The only city in America which I had visited prior to this year's trip was Washington DC, when I came for a conference last year.  So I already knew. I liked it, which is one of the reasons I came back here for the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

I realise I am starting to divide America into places I like and places I don't, on the basis of very short visits and first impressions.  Perhaps I am turning into my mother who famously while cruising dismissed an entire country (I think it was Vietnam) as not worth a visit after visiting it for about 6 hours. I shall try to avoid too many snap judgements.

Anyway Washington was definitely on the favoured list, and I was looking forward to three days visiting some of the sights I hadn't been to previously.  I'd already seen the White House (smaller than you think), the Lincoln Memorial (bigger than you think) and walked the Mall taking in the National Museum of the American Indian (very interesting).  So this time I decided to focus on things I hadn't seen before.

My first stop had to be a laundry: two weeks of travel with just one suitcase had always meant I would run out of underpants around now.  Having phoned to check they were open on Thanksgiving, I caught the Metro out to a laundry offering a "wash and fold" service and left my clothes before catching a different train to Arlington cemetery (which I am going to post about separately).

I love the Washington metro.  All the stations consist of large single "caverns" with high vaulted ceilings, curved like hobbit holes built of concrete blocks, and within these caverns run two or sometimes three levels of trains and platforms on overlapping mezzanines.  It all feels beautifully open.  The ticketing system is slightly confusing, and potentially unfriendly to foreigners (once again the machines required a US billing address zip code before they would accept a credit card), but with a bit of effort I mastered it.

I visited some of the monuments I had never made it to previously: the Martin Luther King Jr.  memorial, and the impressive FDR Memorial, which consists of a mini landscaped sculpture park marking many of the great man's achievements.  I also visited the Museum of American History, and saw the original "Star Spangled Banner", the very flag which inspired the National Anthem by surviving the British attack on Baltimore in 1814.

So what can I say about Washington DC?

(1) Franklin D Roosevelt's achievements are celebrated as part of history, but I cannot imagine that any president could get elected on the basis of his politics today.  I am sure the Tea Party Republicans would call him a socialist, would probably try to use the fact he was in a wheelchair against him, would bring the government to a standstill rather than allow him to use public money to combat poverty and unemployment as he did in the 1930s.  It is strange to see statutes of homeless people as part of the FDR memorial when the homeless people on the street of Washington DC today seem much worse off.  It feels like modern America wants to believe that the war on extreme poverty has been won, that this victory is one of its historic achievements, but maintains this aspect of its mythology by ignoring what is going on now.

 (2) Nevertheless, it is hard not to be impressed here by what the USA has become in a relatively short space of time.  Sometimes the British mock the Americans for their "lack of history", however I actually quite envy their discrete and relatively uncomplex origins story, it means it can be presented in a way that people can understand and feel part of, and it can be pretty moving too.  I was impressed by the original flag that inspired the poem, "the Star-Spangled Banner" (the tune being an old  English one).  The museum even made a virtue out of the fact that "every generation reinterprets the anthem in its own style", which is a far more charitable view of the phenomenon which I have previously observed and commented on.

(3) The American museum was quite selective in what it said about Britain.  For instance we were mentioned quite extensively when we were the bad guys, but elsewhere we were subtly glossed over.  For example, a display on modern American culture mentioned Archie Bunker as an iconic TV character in a show that tackled prejudice head-on, without mentioning that it was a rip-off of our own Alf Garnett.  And the discovery of DNA was apparently down to a US scientist without mention of his UK collaborators or Cambridge university.

(4) I learned that Lincoln's famous "emancipation proclamation" only freed the slaves in those southern states which had seceded, but there were in fact three states which remained part of the Union where slavery remained until after the Civil War was won.  The African American section of the museum was particularly interesting, and there is a new museum of African American history being built at the moment.