Only in America. Matt Frei
from above. All this just to get one old man to the office.
This is all part of the theatre of power that is Washington’s only real industry. It is what defines life inside the so-called Beltway, the ring road that circles the capital and which has become a metaphor for the insularity of the world’s most powerful capital.
No one I know has anything good to say about the Beltway. And I’m not just talking about the people stuck in one of its twelve almost permanently congested lanes. At night the Capitol Beltway, also known more formally as Interstate 495, looks like an oozing river of red and yellow dots. Whether you’re travelling clockwise or anti-clockwise you’re almost always moving at a snail’s pace. But the Beltway conjures up much more than the M25 around London or Paris’s Périphérique. The humble 495 is seen as the membrane around a political cocoon, the frosted glass encasing the hothouse, the cordon sanitaire which separates those who dwell within from the world outside.
‘Inside the Beltway’ has become shorthand for the insularity of the American capital. It was first coined in 1983 by Mike Causey, a columnist for the Washington Post. Today the phrase is received by the rest of America with a mixture of awe and disgust. Mainly the latter. It evokes a shadowy world of Byzantine machinations and deceit. It lends itself to unflattering alliteration. The Beltway Boys is a TV talk show on the FOX News Channel whose content sounds distinctly kinky but which offers nothing more titillating than pundits chewing the political cud. In Washington politics is sex. Here power has its own brand of pornography. ‘Beltway Bile’ was the name of a column in a local Maryland newspaper. ‘Beltway Bosoms’ was the name of an unsuccessful lap-dancing bar on the seedy Florida Avenue and perhaps the only time that the notions of intercourse and interstate have merged in one name. The one word you never, ever, hear in conjunction with the Beltway is ‘wholesome’. And that is unfortunate because most of America cherishes ‘wholesome’. No other capital city of a great nation has allowed itself to be defined by its ring road. But, then, no other capital city worth reckoning with has ever been created solely for the pursuit of politics.
Washington was founded in a malarial swamp by a general-turned-president in 1790. He liked the spot on the Potomac River mainly because it was only seven miles from his plantation at Mount Vernon. It was convenient enough to reach after a two-hour ride but far enough to keep the riff-raff at a distance. He then named the tiny settlement of shacks after himself, appointed a French architect called Pierre Charles L’Enfant to design the capital of the New World on the drawing board and designated its shape as a 110-square-mile diamond. Early Washington was really no more than the eighteenth-century equivalent of modern Dubai, without the sand, the bling, the excellent duty-free shopping and the Russian hookers. When L’Enfant suggested that the city should be named ‘Washingtonople’, which he considered a little less crass than just ‘Washington’, he was promptly sacked.
All in all, it was an inauspicious beginning for a city that has never been much loved. Not even the residents who enjoyed their flirtation with destiny here have had nice things to say about it. When Lyndon Johnson left the White House crippled by the Vietnam war and unwilling to run for re-election, he told his audience: ‘I’m going home to Texas where people notice if you’re sick and care if you die!’ A former mayor of New York once quipped: ‘It’s half the size of the Queens cemetery and twice as dead!’ Fred Thompson, the lawyer-turned-actor-turned-senator-turned-actor-turned-presidential candidate, once compared the capital of power to the capital of movies: ‘Washington has all the veneer of Hollywood,’ he said with a drawl that rolled like one of his favourite Cuban cigars, ‘but none of its sincerity!’
And then there is the ultimate litmus test of the computer age. How many Google entries does Washington, DC, get? New York has 4500. Washington, DC, the capital of the free world, as it likes on occasion to be called, only a pathetic 111. Des Moines, Iowa, America’s capital of flat, rural tedium, isn’t far behind with 84. Middle Americans are disgusted by Washington, whose politics they see as the corruption of everything noble America stands for. When things go wrong it is easy to blame Beltway bile and equally easy to forget that it was the voters who originally made it happen. For its part Hollywood despises Washington like a movie gone wrong. The script had such potential, they mutter over their soy lattes. But they keep changing director. The actors aren’t up to much either. The set is stodgy. If only Steven, George or Marty could get their hands on Project Washington. The doyens of Silicon Valley look at it with the same anthropological marvel reserved for ancient, outdated hardware. Bill Gates and his philanthropic entourage descend on the city at regular intervals to appear before some congressional committee and to remind the politicians that he alone spends more money on solving AIDS and battling TB than they ever will. And yet there are those who have the opposite problem, those who fall hopelessly but discreetly in love with Washington, realizing that theirs is a love that dare not speak its name. It is the grubby and infectious love of power and it is felt most keenly by those who never exercise it. It is the love of eunuchs, a species that includes academics, lobbyists, policy wonks, economists, diplomats and think-tank types, many of whom have dipped their toes into the waters of influence by serving in an administration. It also includes the ultimate low lifes: journalists. I don’t think I have ever heard any of the above say they dislike Washington. I look around my daughter’s school playground and it is full of parents gossiping feverishly about who is in and out while vigorously pushing swings or egging on children dangling from monkey bars. Once you have examined the entrails of Washington any other form of vivisection seems dull.
The newspaper and broadcasting editors of the world recognize the fatal attraction of Washington. ‘Frei, you must not get stuck in the Beltway’ was an exhortation I heard repeatedly from my bosses when they dispatched me to the United States. ‘Of course not!’ I replied earnestly and I meant it. But a year later the magnetic pull of the capital worked its magic, the ring road became like a force field I didn’t dare crash into and I found more and more excuses not to leave. George Bush, his wars, his scandals and his determination to reshape the world are a great help, admittedly. This is, after all, vintage ‘Inside the Beltway’ material. Even my bosses wouldn’t want me to miss it. And yet whenever I manage to escape they celebrate the fact as if I was a child learning to walk. ‘Great to see that you’ve managed – finally – to get out of the Beltway!’ is one of the highest compliments paid to any correspondent resident in the city.
Consider the wise words of Betty Jean Crocker, the sixty-year-old owner-manager of the Chateau Surprise Bed and Breakfast in Cambridge, Ohio. When I confessed to her that I lived in the Beltway she looked at me with a mixture of pity and puzzlement, as if I had been recently bereaved: ‘I’m so, so sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘You can’t be seeing much of America then!’ I replied feebly that I had already visited thirty-seven states. Had I been an American her response might have been less pitying and more judgemental. Had I been a lawyer or a lobbyist she would probably have shown me the door. Saying that you live in Washington has the same effect on people outside the city as announcing that you work in life insurance. A grimace spreads across their face like an oil slick.
What Las Vegas is to sin, Seattle to coffee, Hollywood to movies and Detroit to cars, Washington is to power. The city is – somewhat unfairly – associated with one industry alone. And that industry is the most despicable, corrupting, wasteful, unproductive and yet coveted of them all. The fact that it is vacuum-wrapped inside the Beltway makes it all the more unpleasant. Power in Washington is like a prize pickle, obscene, awe-inspiring, grotesquely nurtured beyond recognition and totally unpalatable. There is so much of it you can taste it in the air. Power is the faintly sour odour of well-scrubbed men in suits rushing to meetings. It is the shrill sound of a motorcade racing through unmenacing streets ferrying the Jordanian minister of finance to a meeting about debt relief, as if he was being rushed to hospital after an attempted assassination. It is the whirr of the President’s three helicopters: the one he actually travels on and the two decoys that accompany him just in case someone ill disposed to the leader of the free world wants to take a potshot. In Washington power rules the air and the roads. It can also dictate the way people live and eat. No one drinks at lunch time because no one wants to be caught off guard. Power even inspires the chat-up lines. ‘Would you like to see my yacht/Porsche/six pack’ is not nearly as impact-charged as ‘Do you want to come to a working breakfast with this senator