The Lost Continent (18 page)

Consider: in 1985, a bizarre sect called Move barricaded itself into a tenement house on the west side of town. The police chief and mayor considered the options open to them and decided that the most intelligent use of their resources would be to blow up the house – but of course! – even though they knew there were children inside and it was in the middle of a densely-populated part of the city. So they dropped a bomb on the house from a helicopter. This started a fire that quickly grew out of control and burned down most of the neighbourhood – sixty-one houses in all – and killed eleven people, including all the children in the barricaded home.

When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption. Just as I was driving into town I heard on the radio that a former city councillor had been sentenced to ten years in jail and his aide to eight years for attempted extortion. The judge called it a gross breach of public trust. He should know. Across town a state review board was calling for the dismissal of nine of
the judge’s colleagues for taking cash gifts from members of the Roofers Union. Two of those judges were already awaiting trial on extortion charges. This sort of thing is routine in Philadelphia. A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke.

Q: What is the difference between Bud Dwyer and Bud Lite?

A: Bud Lite has a head on it.

Yet for all its incompetence and criminality, Philadelphia is a likeable place. For one thing, unlike Washington, it feels like a big city. It had skyscrapers and there was steam rising through vents in the sidewalk and on every corner stood a stainless steel hot dog stand, with a chilly-looking guy in a stocking cap bobbing around behind it. I wandered over to Independence Square – actually it’s now called Independence National Historical Park – and looked respectfully at all the historic buildings. The main building is Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was drawn up and the Constitution ratified. When I was first there in 1960, there was a long line stretching out of the building. There still was – in fact, it seemed not to have moved in twenty-seven years. Deep though my respect is for both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, I was disinclined to spend my afternoon in such a long and immobile queue. I went instead to the visitors’ centre. National park visitors’ centres are always the same. They have some displays in glass cases that manage to be both boring and uninformative, a locked auditorium with a board out front saying that the
next showing of the free twelve-minute introductory film will be at 4 p.m. (just before 4 p.m. somebody comes and changes it to 10 a.m.), some racks of books and brochures with titles like
Pewter in History
and
Vegetables of Old Philadelphia
, which are too dull even to browse through, much less buy, and a drinking fountain and rest-rooms, which everyone makes use of because there’s not much else to do. Every visitor to every national park goes into the visitors’ centre, stands around kind of stupidly for a while, then has a pee and a drink of water and wanders back outside. That is what I did now.

From the visitors’ centre I ambled along Independence Mall to Franklin Square, which was full of winos, many of whom had the comical idea that I might be prepared to give them twenty-five cents of my own money without their providing any product or service in return. According to my guidebook, Franklin Square had ‘lots of interesting things’ to see – a museum, a working book bindery, an archaeological exhibit and ‘the only post office in the United States which does not fly the American flag’ (don’t ask me why) – but my heart wasn’t in it, especially with piteous and unwashed winos tugging at my sleeves all the while, and I fled back to the real world of downtown Philadelphia.

Late in the afternoon, I found my way to the offices of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, where an old friend from Des Moines, Lucia Herndon, was life-style editor. The
Inquirer
offices were like newspaper offices everywhere – grubby, full of junk, littered with coffee-cups in which cigarette butts floated like dead fish in a polluted lake – and Lucia’s desk, I was impressed to note, was one of the messiest in the room. This may have accounted in part for her impressive rise at the
Inquirer
. I only ever knew one journalist
with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what you will; but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.

We drove in my car out to the district of Mt Airy, where, conveniently for me – and for her too, come to that – Lucia lived with another old friend of mine from Des Moines, her husband, Hal. All day long I had been wondering, vaguely and intermittently, why Hal and Lucia liked Philadelphia so much – they had moved there about a year before – but now I understood. The road to Mt Airy led through the most beautiful city park I had ever been in. Called Fairmount Park and covering almost 9,000 rolling acres, it is the largest municipal park in America and it is full of trees and fragrant shrubs and bosky glades of infinite charm. It stretches for miles along the banks of the Schuylkill River. We drove through a dreamy twilight. Boats sculled along the water. It was perfection.

Mt Airy was out in the Germantown section of the city. It had a nice settled feeling to it, as if people had lived there for generations – which is in fact the case in Philadelphia, Lucia told me. The city was still full of the sort of neighbourhoods where everybody knew everybody else. Many people scarcely ever ventured more than a few hundred yards from their homes. It was not uncommon to get lost and find that hardly anybody could reliably direct you to a neighbourhood three miles away. Philadelphia also had its own vocabulary – downtown was called centre city, sidewalks were called pavements, as in Britain – and peculiarities of pronunciation.

In the evening I sat in Hal and Lucia’s house, eating their food, drinking their wine, admiring their children and
their house and furniture and possessions, their easy wealth and comfort, and felt a sap for ever having left America. Life was so abundant here, so easy, so convenient. Suddenly I wanted a refrigerator that made its own ice-cubes and a waterproof radio for the shower. I wanted an electric orange juicer and a room ionizer and a wristwatch that would keep me in touch with my biorhythms. I wanted it all. Once in the evening I went upstairs to go to the bathroom and walked past one of the children’s bedrooms. The door was open and a bedside light was on. There were toys everywhere – on the floor, on shelves, tumbling out of a wooden trunk. It looked like Santa’s workshop. But there was nothing extraordinary about this; it was just a typical middle-class American bedroom.

And you should see American closets. They are always full of yesterday’s enthusiasms: golf-clubs, scuba diving equipment, tennis-rackets, exercise machines, tape recorders, darkroom equipment, objects that once excited their owner and then were replaced by other objects even more shiny and exciting. That is the great, seductive thing about America – the people always get what they want, right now, whether it is good for them or not. There is something deeply worrying, and awesomely irresponsible, about this endless self-gratification, this constant appeal to the baser instincts.

Do you want zillions off your state taxes even at the risk of crippling education?

‘Oh, yes!’ the people cry.

Do you want TV that would make an imbecile weep?

‘Yes, please!’

Shall we indulge ourselves with the greatest orgy of consumer spending that the world has ever known?

‘Sounds neat! Let’s go for it!’

The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world’s population. If Americans suddenly stopped indulging themselves, or ran out of closet space, the world would fall apart. If you ask me, that’s crazy.

I should point out that I am not talking about Hal and Lucia in all this. They are good people and lead modest and responsible lives. Their closets aren’t full of scuba diving equipment and seldom-used tennis-rackets. They are full of mundane items like buckets and galoshes, ear-muffs and scouring powders. I know this for a fact because late in the night when everyone was asleep I crept out of bed and had a good look.

In the morning, I dropped Hal at his office downtown – correction, centre city – and the drive through Fairmount Park was as enchanting in the morning sunshine as it had been at dusk. All cities should have parks like this, I thought. He told me some more interesting things about Philadelphia: that it spent more money on public art than any other city in America – one per cent of the total city budget – and yet it had an illiteracy rate of forty per cent. He pointed out to me, in the middle of Fairmount Park, the palatial Philadelphia Museum of Art, which had become the city’s top tourist attraction, not because of its collection of 500,000 paintings, but because its front steps were the ones Sylvester Stallone sprinted up in
Rocky
. People were actually coming to the museum in buses, looking at the steps and leaving without ever going inside to see the pictures. And he introduced me to a radio talk show hosted by a man named Howard Stern, of which Hal
was a devotee. Howard Stern had a keen interest in sex and was engagingly direct with his callers. ‘Good morning, Marilyn,’ he would say to a caller, ‘are you wearing panties?’ This, we agreed, beat most early-morning talk shows hands down. Howard queried his callers with arresting candour and a measure of prurience I had not before encountered on American radio.

Unfortunately, I lost the station soon after dropping Hal off and spent the rest of the morning searching for it without success, and eventually ended up listening to a competing phone-in programme, which featured a woman who was an expert on dealing with intestinal worms in dogs. As this principally consisted of giving the dogs a tablet to make the worms die, it was not long before I felt as if I were something of an expert myself. And so the morning passed.

I drove to Gettysburg, where the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought over three days in July 1863. There were over 50,000 casualties. I parked at the visitors’ centre and went inside. It contained a small, ill-lit museum with glass cases containing bullets, brass buttons, belt buckles and that sort of thing, each with a yellowed typed caption beside it saying ‘Buckle from uniform of 13th Tennessee Mountaineers. Found by Festus T. Scrub-bins, local farmer, and donated by his daughter, Mrs Marinetta Stumpy.’ There was precious little to give you any sense of the battle itself. It was more like the gleanings of a treasure hunt.

One interesting thing was a case devoted to the Gettysburg Address, where I learned that Lincoln was invited to speak only as an afterthought and that everyone was taken aback when he accepted. It was only ten sentences long
and took just two minutes to deliver. I was further informed that he gave the address many months after the battle. I had always imagined him making it more or less immediately afterwards, while there were still bodies lying around and wraiths of smoke rising from the ruins of distant houses and people like Festus T. Scrubbins poking around among the twitching casualties to see what useful souvenirs they could extract. The truth, as so often in this life, was disappointing.

I went outside and had a look at the battlefield, which sprawls over 3,500 acres of mostly flat countryside, fringed by the town of Gettysburg with its gas stations and motels. The battlefield had the great deficiency common to all historic battlefields. It was just countryside. There was nothing much to distinguish this stretch of empty fields from that one. You had to take their word for it that a great battle was fought there. There were a lot of cannons scattered about, I’ll give them that. And along the road leading to the site of Pickett’s charge, the attack by Confederate troops that turned the tide of battle in the Union’s favour, many of the regiments had erected obelisks and monuments to their own glory, some of them very grand. I strolled down there now. Through my dad’s old binoculars I could clearly see how Pickett’s troops had advanced from the direction of the town, a mile or so to the north, sweeping across the Burger King parking lot, skirting the Tastee Delite Drive-In and regrouping just outside the Crap-o-Rama Wax Museum and Gift Shop. It’s all very sad. Ten thousand soldiers fell there in an hour; two out of every three Confederate soldiers didn’t make it back to base. It is a pity, verging on the criminal, that so much of the town of Gettysburg
has been spoiled with tourist tat and that it is so visible from the battlefield.

When I was little, my dad bought me a Union cap and a toy rifle and let me loose on the battlefield. I was in heaven. I dashed about the whole day crouching behind trees, charging over to Devil’s Den and Little Round Top, blowing up parties of overweight tourists with cameras around their necks. My dad was in heaven too because the park was free and there were literally hundreds of historical plaques for him to read. Now, however, I found it difficult to summon any real excitement for the place.

I was about to depart, feeling guilty that I had come so far without getting anything much out of the experience, when I saw a sign at the visitors’ centre for tours to the Eisenhower home. I had forgotten that Ike and Mamie Eisenhower lived on a farm just outside Gettysburg. Their old home was now a national historical monument and could be toured for $2.50. Impulsively I bought a ticket and went outside where a bus was just about to depart to take half a dozen of us to the farm four or five miles away down a country lane.

Well, it was great. I can’t remember the last time I had such a good time in a Republican household. You are greeted at the door by a fragrant woman with a chrysanthemum on her bosom, who tells you a little about the house, about how much Ike and Mamie loved to sit around and watch TV and play canasta, and then gives you a leaflet describing each room and lets you wander off on your own so that you can linger or stride on as it pleases you. Each doorway was blocked off with a sheet of perspex, but you could lean against it and gaze into the interior. The house has been preserved precisely as it was
when the Eisenhowers lived there. It was as if they had simply wandered off and never come back (something that either of them was quite capable of doing towards the end). The décor was quintessentially early 1960s Republican. When I was growing up we had some neighbours who were rich Republicans and this was practically a duplicate of their house. There was a big TV console in a mahogany cabinet, table-lamps made out of pieces of driftwood, a padded leather cocktail bar, French-style telephones in every room, bookshelves containing about twelve books (usually in matching sets of three) and otherwise filled with large pieces of flowery gilt-edged porcelain of the sort favoured by homosexual French aristocrats.