Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  Virginia, like Maryland, snuggles right up to Washington, DC. So much so that it is a relatively short walk from the White House to Arlington, VA, where the National Cemetery has its home.

  I cross over the Potomac River and point the cab down the long straight drive to Arlington. It is November 11th, Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday for the British, Veterans Day for the Americans. As it happens today is a Sunday and a beautiful one at that. Not a cloud in the sky, the sun glinting off the dazzling uniforms of the cadets and young soldiers who usher visitors to their places for the ceremony. For it is on this day at Arlington that the nation publicly commemorates and honours its veterans: tickets are hard to come by, but I have slipped in on a press pass. This is not quite the same as our Cenotaph ceremony, for Veterans Day is dedicated to the survivors, the ‘vets’–there is another day, in May, which is dedicated to the fallen. All around me, streaming into the amphitheatre where the ceremony will be held, I see men (and some women) with medals swinging from their chests.

  On the way in I notice the fields surrounding the amphitheatre, filled with white tombstones in rows so regular that they play strange games of parallax and perspective with the eye, making a cat’s cradle of their symmetry. Diagonals become ranks and files which, as you walk past, become long diagonals again. Each white point in the line a life. No crosses, crescents or stars of David, just simple white tablets. The latest tombs commemorate lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  I get into my press place and survey the scene before me. Veterans of every description and in every kind of weird tunic, jacket, beret, cap and trousering, each offered in different colourways and textures, are filling the amphitheatre. There are purple silk blousons with gold lettering, light blue tunics with silver–it is all very bewildering. I head for a group of grizzled fifty-and sixty-year-olds, mostly bearded, long-haired and dressed in leather: they look scarily like bikers. They proudly announce themselves to be a Hell’s Angels chapter of veterans. One of them, an ex-army chaplain, explains to me that the Hell’s Angels ‘movement’ started out as a group of Second World War vets. I wonder that such a counter-cultural grouping should be so faithful to mainstream America.

  ‘Do you approve of where the government sends its soldiers and how it treats them?’ I ask.

  The chaplain starts to answer with a fairly damning view of the way the military is run by its political masters when his eye freezes at a point somewhere above my left shoulder. He stops speaking.

  ‘Er…you were saying?’

  * * *

  VIRGINIA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  VA

  Nickname:

  Old Dominion, Mother of Presidents

  Capital:

  Richmond

  Flower:

  Dogwood

  Tree:

  Dogwood

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Bat:

  Virginia Big-eared bat

  Motto:

  Sic semper tyrannis (‘Ever thus for tyrants’)

  Well-known residents and natives: George Washington (1st President), Thomas Jefferson (3rd), James Madison (4th), James Monroe (5th), William Henry Harrison (9th), John Tyler (10th), Zachary Taylor (12th), Woodrow Wilson (28th), Patrick Henry, General Robert E. Lee, General Douglas MacArthur, General George Patton, George Marshall, Edgar Allan Poe, William Styron, Tom Wolfe, Cy Twombly, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Patsy Cline, June Carter Cash, Jim Morrison, Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Sandra Bullock.

  * * *

  He smiles but says nothing. Someone behind him, inside the knot of Hell’s Angels, has signalled to him not to speak any further. He quite literally says not one word more to me. Whether this is military discipline or Hell’s Angels’ discipline I cannot be sure: either way it frightens me.

  ‘Every kind of weird tunic, jacket, beret, cap and trousering, each offered in different colourways’: note the strange man in the background.

  Patriotism starts at an early age in America.

  A startlingly well-presented young officer with blazing epaulettes, white gloves and dazzling sword is more prepared to talk, albeit in a rather rattled-out ‘sirry’ kind of style. His cap is so low down over his eyes that I never quite manage to meet his gaze.

  ‘Lieutenant Payne, sir. I am a serving member of the US Navy, but I do have a special role. My shipmates and I are part of the US Navy ceremonial guard, sir.’

  ‘I can’t help noticing your sword. A shine like that doesn’t come about by accident.’

  ‘There’s a lot of hours that go into that, sir. Behind the scenes. I estimate ten to fifteen man-hours, sir.’

  ‘Right. Well, it’s a big day, of course.’

  ‘I understand, sir, you have the same thing in England as well, sir. Which is a…could you explain, Poppy Day…is it poppy?’

  I am not sure my explanation makes much sense to him, but he is too polite to snort derisively.

  Meanwhile the ceremony has got under way with the sound of a military band. This is something Americans do very much in their own style, thanks to the distinctive sounds created for them by John Philip Sousa. ‘The Washington Post’, ‘Liberty Bell’ (used by Monty Python as their theme tune and impossible to listen to without expecting a giant raspberry sound to cut it off), ‘Stars and Stripes for Ever’–all the classics are played to us with just the required pizzazz as, behind the amphitheatre and out of sight, the Distinguished Party lays a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

  Next tune up is the rousing Marine Hymn, ‘From the Halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli’. I am beginning to get into the mood. When a young girl in military uniform sings ‘America The Beautiful’, I feel a lump rising in my throat. As the Distinguished Party comes on stage and everyone rises for a lusty verse of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ I feel wetness in the eyes. It is preposterous to be moved by the patriotic paraphernalia and national iconography of another country, but I cannot help it.

  The Distinguished Party is no less a figure than Dick Cheney, the Vice-President. He surveys us with that peculiar distant, yet triumphant look of humorous disdain he shares with Soviet leaders saluting their military parades. Grey-suited and pasty-faced, he makes a speech about freedom. It is very hard I should imagine, even if you think Cheney and his war are justified, not to picture the newly buried bodies lying in the earth all around while he reels off his mind-numbing clichés. This would be true whatever one thought of any war–it would be true for example at this same ceremony during the Second World War–but it is especially difficult to listen to a speech which keeps using that word again and again and again and with such little justification other than the twisted logic of formulaic patriotism. I register thirty uses of ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ before I give up counting.

  Veterans take their place for the ceremony.

  I believe most Americans fully and honestly believe that they live in the freest country in the world. There is perhaps justification for that. In pure libertarian terms America is certainly freer and less encumbered than most nations. Freedom is the national given here. In America they like to talk about ‘the taste of freedom’, and ‘the smell of freedom’ a great deal. It seems to follow therefore, in the minds of politicians at least, that everything America does must automatically be ‘in the name of freedom’. The United States of course, like any country, acts in her own interests, as she should. But a certain kind of batty logic assumes that as ‘the beacon of freedom’ America’s own best interests must also always naturally coincide with the best interests of freedom. Not just America’s freedom, but Freedom with a big ‘F’, Freedom as a kind of abstract entity, a goddess, Lady Liberty. Therefore to invade a country and pound it into dust and leave it in anarchy and ruin is done ‘in the cause of freedom’. Likewise anyone who dislikes American foreign policy is ‘an enemy of freedom’. It is a most peculiar formulation and an upsetting abuse of reason. It is very like the way, in a communist country, everything
is done ‘in the name of the people’ and anyone who opposes it is ‘an enemy of the people’. Well, it follows, doesn’t it? Hum. True freedom, surely, would include freedom from this kind of windy tyranny of ideas.

  And then there’s the flag. If I tried to count how many Stars and Stripes I could see driving a hundred miles along an average highway, I would lose count or end up in a ditch. Here in Arlington it is easier to count the number of patches of space that are not occupied by Old Glory.

  In Britain we are so very different. Our flag faintly embarrasses us. I do not believe we would be any less patriotic if it came to a fight for our liberty and our sovereign independence, and I am sure most of us can get a bit weepy at the Last Night of the Proms or when listening to a Churchill speech or contemplating our landscape, traditions and history, but it really is not done to go on about it. Rudyard Kipling, regarded by many as the quintessential British patriotic writer, actually shows the heroes of one of his books, Stalky & Co, hissing and booing at a politician who goes on about the flag. You don’t talk about it. You feel it, if you do, but you don’t share it or write about it or make florid speeches about it. In America it is proudly different. The flag is everywhere. Americans seem to feel the need to give colour, shape and dimension to their sense of nationhood so that they can exhibit it and in doing so exhibit their patriotism and their belief in the values that made America the country it is. Only sneering liberal elitist atheist scum like me would raise an eyebrow at this outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual creed. And anyway, I am not American, so I don’t understand. And perhaps that is true. I do not scorn patriotism, and I do not think those who hoist the flag outside their homes are necessarily dumb white trash or right-wing yahoos. I know it is far from the case. But the two F’s, Freedom and the Flag, reinforce my sense of how different it is to be an American.

  After an unbelievably wearisome reading out of the names of important members of various staggeringly specific veterans’ affairs committees (committees for Disabled Jewish Tennessee Marines, Catholic Naval Veterans of New Mexico, etc., etc.) I also come to the conclusion, with a rare fierce stab of my own patriotism, that ghastly, doomed and mediocre as much of Britain may well be, when it comes to pageant, display, pomp, ceremony, precision and processional style we still have something to teach the New World.

  WEST VIRGINIA

  ‘After a struggle with maps and in-car Sat Nav devices I find myself in the middle of nowhere, about a hundred miles from the back of beyond.’

  I drive my taxi along dirt tracks and through woods in search of a legendary entity which looms so large as a symbol in America that it is easy to forget that it actually does exist as a physical reality. I am in search of the Mason–Dixon Line.

  But first I cross another line, this time it is the Eastern Continental Divide. A continental divide is a ridge of land which separates two watersheds. I really did not know this until it was explained to me. My knowledge of geography, as I have said, is pathetically shallow, so forgive me if I am relating the obvious. To be perfectly honest I did not really know what a watershed was either, except in the sense of a time after which you can safely say ‘tits’ on national television.

  Mason–Dixon

  I look out of the cab window. The dramatic Appalachian scenery does not seem any different, but here is the big sign by the side of the road: ‘Eastern Continental Divide’. Any drop of water that falls on the eastern side of the divide, I am told, will eventually drain into the Atlantic Ocean, any water that falls on the western side will drain into the Gulf of Mexico. Further west lies the Great Continental Divide, to the west of which all waters flow into the Pacific, to the east of which all waters flow into the Gulf of Mexico, and therefore, in reality, into the Atlantic. I think I have got that right. Anyway, it puts me in the mood for dividing lines.

  Bill, with me athwart a Mason–Dixon stone.

  In the popular imagination the Mason–Dixon line is what separates the North from the South. In reality it is a boundary line that was created before Independence by two British surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, in order to settle a border dispute between Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia (although actually at the time there was only one Virginia). The line was marked by stones every mile and ‘crownstones’, in honour of King George, every five. They still exist and I am keen to find one. I have always taken pleasure in the strange properties of boundaries, frontiers and lines of demarcation. They are powerful, be they ever so notional and arbitrary. The equator of course is not arbitrary, but the meridian is, and the Mason–Dixon line could not be more so. And yet to this day people talk of affairs ‘south of the Mason–Dixon line’ as if it has real meaning.

  After a struggle with maps and in-car sat nav devices I find myself in the middle of nowhere, about a hundred miles from the back of beyond outside a small house in the garden of which a man is exercising his rather fierce-looking dogs.

  ‘I wonder if you can help me?’ I call to him from the fence. ‘This sounds a daft question, but what state am I in?’

  ‘Pennsylvania.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, and turn to leave.

  ‘West Virginia.’

  I turn back. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Pennsylvania.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re stepping on the state line, son.’

  The man, whose name is Bill, agrees to take me to a place where he thinks we may be able to find evidence of the almost 250-year-old line.

  Under forest litter not a hundred yards from his house we do find a genuine Mason–Dixon milestone. It is no more than a big boulder with a date carved in it. Worn and mossy. But it tells me that from now on I shall be travelling in a different America.

  With my back to Bill and Pennsylvania I point the taxi south, down the Appalachians and towards West Virginia’s capital, Charleston. Dixie here I come.

  Kanawha Eagle Mine

  I know what some of you may be thinking. Charleston. Gracious residential squares, tree-lined avenues, Spanish moss, gentlemen called Beauregard handing mint juleps to ladies called Beulah? Well, I fear you have Charleston, South Carolina in your mind. Charleston, West Virginia is quite another kettle of ballparks.

  Abe Lincoln announced that the upper west part of Virginia had been successfully integrated back into the Union in 1863, right plumb spang in the middle of the Civil War. As a reward he granted it separation from Virginia and new independent statehood for itself. The Union armies needed the one thing they still have here in abundance and which I am about to meet quite literally face to face.

  Coal.

  I meet Bob from the Kanawha Eagle Mine the night before I am due to make the descent with the morning shift. He is anxious to show me plans, outline safety procedures and prepare my mind for the colossal underground city I shall be exploring. And truly the mine is a kind of city. The whole area is divided, like Manhattan, into streets and avenues. I pass a sleepless night unable quite to imagine what it will be like. Images of Davy lamps and pickaxes and canaries in cages revolve in my mind like the montage of a school information film on the history of mining.

  Bob with a map of the underground city of Kanawha Eagle Mine.

  The day begins with the obligatory ‘let’s humiliate Stephen by dressing him up’ moment. A white newbie suit, gloves, boots, goggles and a Batman-style utility belt offering oxygen and a battery pack to power the miner’s lamp which is built into the helmet. For once I am not so concerned with how I look, for everything I put on is a safety feature. Safety is of the first importance to Bob and, to be honest, it’s pretty high up in my list of priorities too. The mocking of Health and Safety that is so fashionable suddenly seems a lot less clever and funny.

  Nonetheless, I do look a dick, obviously.

  Bob leads me to where the miners, almost all of them moustached, are smoking their last cigarettes and downing their last coffees before the descent. They greet me cheerfully enough. What they must think o
f this large Englishmen babbling questions at them at six in the morning I can only imagine, but they respond to all my excited enquiries politely and with dry wit.

  ‘This is Ron,’ one of them says, ‘he’s new.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t have a moustache. Is that allowed?’

  ‘I’m gonna grow one over the weekend,’ says Ron. ‘Then I’ll fit in.’

  ‘Go safe,’ they call as one as into the elevator and down we go. When the doors open at the bottom a huge rush of cold air billows towards us. I am told to make the most it, for as we penetrate the mountain it will only get warmer and warmer. The coal face is actually about two miles away but we do not have to walk. A train awaits. Actually, it is called a manbus which sounds like a rude Australian euphemism, but Americans don’t do that sort of humour, so manbus it is. It runs on rickety rails and reminds me of the conveyance used in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. ‘Ha, ha, ha, Doctor Jones! Very funny, Doctor Jones!’

  The walls of the tunnel glisten palely. ‘Everything’s white!’ I exclaim.

  ‘That’s what we call rock dust,’ says Bob. ‘Pulverised limestone. Coal dust is combustible, so we spray it. Decreases the combustibility of the coal so it doesn’t have the likelihood to ignite by itself. Plus it keeps it out of the miners’ lungs. People always expect a coalmine to be black and then the first thing they see is this.’

  I watch the walls flash by on this ghost ride. What a strange commute these men have. Every now and again I see black patches that glisten as if wet, the prize that has brought us down here.

  We come to the end of the line, dismount (which I am not able to do very nimbly much to everyone’s amusement) and walk towards the face. Well, not so much walk as bow, stagger, crouch, squat and limp. I find progress unbelievably uncomfortable. The floor is rutted, pitted and puddled and the roof so low that my neck has constantly to be dropped to one side. I am shown that I might find it easier if I grasp my hands behind my back and stoop, which does help but I am hating this. I want to escape, NOW, right this minute please, but I am too much of a coward to let anyone see what a coward I am. Every now and then the height of the ceiling increases enough for me to stand. What I finally understand is that we are of course walking through an already excavated seam; sometimes when they are mined out the seams are shallow, sometimes–rarely–they are deep enough to allow a man of six foot four to stand upright.