Читать книгу Only in America - Matt Frei - Страница 9

I am used to it now. After five years of living and travelling in America I start unbuckling my belt automatically as soon as I leave the check-in area of an airport. I wear shoes that can be kicked off easily. I no longer bother packing shaving cream in my hand luggage because it will be confiscated, and as I disrobe in the ludicrous pyjama party that has become airport security I think of those who are responsible for every act in this elaborate, involuntary striptease. The coat and additional ID check are, of course, courtesy of Osama bin Laden. So is the confiscated Swiss Army penknife that my father gave me when I was a boy. The separate screening for the computer predates bin Laden. It is, I believe, an Abu Nidal legacy. The shoes, of course, are a gift from Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber. I have nurtured a special place of loathing for him even though he never actually managed to detonate his sneakers. The confiscation of creams, aftershave and medicine bottles goes back to the liquid bombers who tried to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic in 2006. What happens if someone uncovers a plot to conceal a bomb in their boxer shorts or panties?

The Transportation Security Authority, or TSA, has managed to recruit people who would normally be stuck on the breadline without any qualifications, put them in a uniform, told them that they are the front line in the war on terror and encouraged them to unleash a barrage of humourless officiousness on the paying passenger. When I showed some annoyance about having to part with a newly acquired bottle of expensive aftershave, the screener, whose belly hung over his belt like a blubbery white sporran, shouted at me: ‘Sir, are you doubting our Homeland Security guidelines?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Some of them are absurd!’ This was the wrong answer. I was immediately rounded on by two of his superiors who took me into a special booth and gave me a search that involved just about everything apart from the intrusion of a gloved hand.

On flights from New York to Washington you had to exercise heroic bladder control because you were not allowed to get out of your seat for thirty minutes prior to departure in case you wanted to loiter with intent by the cockpit. This ruling only applied to the cities of New York and Washington. On any other destination you are permitted to use the loos at the front. In any case the cockpit doors these days are as secure as Fort Knox. Once I forgot this dictum, got out of my seat as we were approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and was screamed at by a stewardess as if I was charging at the cockpit door with an axe. ‘Sit down NOW!’ she hollered, only seconds after asking me sweetly if I wanted another cup of coffee. Why, I wondered, had she offered me the drink if she didn’t now allow me to make room for it in my bladder? In theory the passengers were probably on my side. In practice none of them was showing it. Everyone looked down at their newspapers or folded hands. I sat down, chastened, like a naughty schoolboy, and crossed my legs, hoping to feel the plane descend soon.

At Washington National Airport a huge American flag is draped across the departure hall. In Europe such an exuberant display of patriotism would make the headlines. Here it is standard. Soldiers in desert fatigues and crew cuts shuffle through the airport on their way to Iraq or Afghanistan or heading home after another deployment. America is unmistakably at war. Uncle Sam feels fearful, vulnerable and pissed off. When strong countries feel weak strange things happen.

Washington’s other airport, Dulles, which receives international flights, has become a fortress. For non-US citizens the immigration line can last up to two hours. The use of mobile phones is strictly forbidden as if the tired and bedraggled passengers were about to call in air strikes. Here that famous American spirit of welcome and friendliness has taken leave of absence. Once I turned up at Dulles after a tediously delayed flight from London. The queue was of biblical proportions. My surreptitious use of the BlackBerry had caused the ‘customs arrival overseer on duty’ to have a seizure. Then I committed the ultimate faux pas. In filling out my visa form I described myself as a ‘resident’. It seemed logical to me. I was living in the US at a fixed abode. The customs officer, whose neck was wider than his face and whose face was as red as the alarm buzzer on his desk, looked at me as if I had just burned the Stars and Stripes on his desk.

‘You are not a resident!’ he decreed.

‘I beg to differ,’ I hissed back, perhaps too eagerly. ‘I reside here. I pay taxes here. I own property here and my fourth child was even born here, which makes her a full-blooded American.’

The neck reddened. Somewhere inside the folds of flesh an Adam’s apple stirred. His grey eyes, as minute as a tick in a questionnaire’s box, signalled a combination of triumph and rebuke.

‘You are a non-resident alien.’

He left it at that. In his book he had delivered the ultimate insult. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought, yearning – briefly – to return to my own planet. Since Alice, our youngest child, has an American passport on family holidays we now place her in front like a human shield, holding up her precious blue document. It breaks the ice. Sometimes. I can fully understand America’s careful attention to security. But the one thing not to point out at the airport customs desk – unless you want to get deported – is that the biggest threat in terms of the number of people actually killed is thoroughly home-grown: road rage, school shootings – there is one on average every six months – shopping-mall massacres, disgruntled employees who avenge an overlooked promotion by blasting their boss with an M16 … America makes it very easy for someone with a grudge to buy a gun.

The fortress of Dulles Airport is located in the state of Virginia where it is much easier to buy a gun at the age of eighteen than a beer. A short drive from the airport there is a gun store that proudly announces: Open 364 Days a Year. Closed ONLY on Christmas Day. It was a Bushmaster rifle legally acquired by a man with an undetected history of mental instability that caused a terror spree soon after we moved to the United States.

October should be the kindest month. The blazing heat and the humidity of summer have yielded to cooler breezes. It is the perfect time of year to arrive in Washington. The children can play outside without having to be doused in industrial quantities of mosquito repellent. The evening air is filled with barbeque smells. We were counting our blessings. No more trips to Afghanistan or Pakistan. Despite fresh and searing memories of the attack on the Pentagon, Washington, DC, seemed safe. And then something changed.

Only a few weeks after our arrival we found that playgrounds were becoming emptier, until they were completely deserted. Schools forbade their pupils to play soccer on open fields or venture out into the sunshine during breaks. It was as if everyone apart from us had been issued with silent orders to evacuate. A hidden plague was stalking the open public spaces of the capital, spiriting away children. Many schools took the added precaution of masking windows with black cloth. Classrooms were turned into dark caverns, as if their inhabitants were underage vampires who could not be exposed to natural sunlight. But this bizarre behaviour wasn’t just confined to children and schools. I remember filling up at our local petrol station on Connecticut Avenue. There were five other cars. I noticed the inordinately tall taxi driver next to me – many of them are Eritrean or Somali – crouching down while he was filling his tank and looking over his shoulder as if he was whispering furtive words of encouragement as the petrol gushed into the tank of his Lincoln. I started bending over, too. And then so did everyone else in the petrol station, bowing in deference to their vehicle. But this wasn’t reverence for the automobile taken to new heights. It was a matter of personal security. We were taking cover.

No one wanted to stand out or be exposed, especially when the enemy might be hiding in a nearby forest or among roadside bushes. Wheeling the rubbish bins onto the street in front of our house became an even more onerous ritual. Now it was conducted with brisk efficiency and a nervous glance over the shoulder. One year after 9/11 the citizens of Washington were terrified once again. But it wasn’t Osama bin Laden or rumours of an imminent Al-Qaeda attack that triggered this wave of paranoia. It was the murderous rampage of a seventeen-year-old Jamaican called Lee Boyd Malvo and his forty-two-year-old mentor/godfather, John Allen Mohammed. For three weeks the pair cruised the heavily fortified area of the Nation’s Capital picking off on average one civilian every two days. They killed ten and injured six, including a fourteen-year-old schoolboy waiting for a yellow bus. He was shot in the stomach.

They shot an elderly man mowing his lawn, two people at a petrol station, a bus driver in his seat as he opened the door to passengers and an FBI analyst who had just emerged from the Home Depot megastore with rolls of wallpaper and floor matting. They felled their victims at random, while they were engaged in the most mundane acts of daily life. This grotesque game of Russian roulette gripped the city and captured the imagination of the rest of America. What was novel about this killing spree was that it took place in the predominantly white neighbourhoods in and around the capital. Violent death in African American areas like Anacostia or Southeast Washington was so commonplace – and continued unabated during the sniper period – that it was banished to the inside pages of the Washington Post Metro section. Unless the crime was particularly horrific, no TV crew would be sent to cover the event. But the Washington snipers terrorized the usually placid suburbs of the capital at a time when the city had been turned into a veritable fortress. They made a mockery of the whole notion of homeland security.

The only things that can enter Washington airspace without strict permission from the Department of Transport or the Pentagon are pigeons and bald eagles. A day before Ronald Reagan’s funeral in June 2004 the executive jet belonging to the Republican governor of Kentucky caused widespread panic on the ceremonial Mall and triggered the evacuation of the Capitol because the pilot had failed to log his plane’s arrival. Antiaircraft Patriot missile batteries stand alert on a hill behind the domed Capitol and a phalanx of CCTV cameras supposedly records every suspicious movement. Police cars sit on just about every street corner ready to pounce on unruly drivers, as I have discovered repeatedly to my own cost. And yet for three weeks this overwhelming uniformed presence did nothing to make us feel safe. The Washington snipers had opted for something so simple and crude that the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t thought of it.

They had converted an ordinary blue Chevrolet into a killing machine. The back seat had been ripped out to allow the shooter to shuffle into the boot on his stomach. Here an orange-size hole had been made just above the number plate to allow the muzzle of a Bushmaster rifle to be poked through. From this position the young Malvo – he pulled the trigger in most of the killings – was able to kill Linda Franklin with a single shot to the head as she wheeled her shopping trolley into the covered car park at the Home Depot in Fairfax on a busy Monday night. Her husband had opened the car. He looked round to see his wife dying in a pool of her own blood. Penny and I had planned to go to the same Home Depot the following morning to buy supplies for our new house. We cancelled the trip. A week after the killings started the police received a tip-off about the shooter. (It was only at the very end of their hunt that they realized two gunmen were involved.) According to the tip-off the assailant was driving a white truck. For builders, bakers, refrigerator maintenance men, postal workers and plumbers this is the delivery vehicle of choice and for an entire week the streets of Washington were lined with white ‘box trucks’ held up by twitchy police officers.

It was at about that time that police stopped the car used by the snipers, because it was veering from one lane to another on a Maryland highway. The officer checked the two occupants’ IDs but never searched the vehicle. The snipers got away undetected and went on to kill another five victims. Had they not repeatedly sent letters to the police which were thinly veiled pleas for recognition, containing crucial details about their identity, they might just have driven to the next state and disappeared. In the end it was a truck driver stopping at a roadside motel in the middle of the night who discovered their car and called the police.

I had lived through my share of hairy moments but I never felt such relief as the day the snipers were caught. Everyone did. The playgrounds filled up fast, schools removed the black tarpaulins from their windows. There was no more crouching at petrol stations. And yet the city had been left with a bitter realization: how easy it is to terrorize people who have become used to a sense of security. We had just experienced a very crude but effective form of homespun terrorism, which took the authorities three weeks to neutralize despite all the means at their disposal. What about something more sophisticated? The very notion of ‘homeland security’, that folksy concept that combined heartland images of curtain-twitching vigilance with the Pentagon’s sophistication of unmanned surveillance drones, had been held up to ridicule. It turned out to be a fitting prelude to a year of terror alerts and paranoia. America, the country that possessed the mightiest military ever known to man, was feeling vulnerable. And when powerful nations feel threatened, they are prone to overreact.

Six months after 9/11 the new Department of Homeland Security devised a ‘terror threat advisory system’, a colour chart that was used to alert citizens about the degree of perceived danger from any potential terrorist attack. Red is severe. Orange, high. Yellow, elevated. Blue, guarded, and green, low. You cannot avoid the colours or the adjectives associated with them. Go to any airport in the United States and you will hear the same computerized baritone advising you that ‘the terror threat advisory level is currently at yellow or elevated’. That’s where it seems most of the time. In fact, since the system was put in place it has never gone down to green and only once to blue. For three months in 2003 Hawaii was let off the leash and lowered its coding to ‘guarded’ before moving it up again to ‘elevated’. There was no obvious logic to this move. Indeed, the Attorney General’s office, which is in charge of setting the codes, is under no obligation to publish the criteria or explain to a worried public why the colours have changed.

When they did change it was big news, as if the whole nation was taking part in a mass show-and-tell experiment. ‘Did you hear? We’ve gone to orange!’ It was a common talking point competing with the din of cutlery at the American Diner on Connecticut Avenue or the flatulent steam nozzle at the La Baguette Café on M Street. It engaged people’s attention. It rekindled their most recent fears. It made them call home. What was less clear was why the colours had changed. Had a new plot been discovered? Were we about to be attacked? Was it the latest Osama bin Laden video release that was really a code for triggering a wave of suicide bombers? Sometimes the administration obliged with possible explanations. The Attorney General had announced the unmasking of an alleged Al-Qaeda sleeper cell or a piece of intelligence about a potential threat to container ports. At first twitchy citizens lived on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but after a while the colour codes became like a faulty burglar alarm that keeps going off. First people stopped paying attention, then they started wondering whether the administration was manipulating the codes and treating us like a Pavlovian dog. The comedy shows started to make fun of it all.

‘There were more warnings issued today,’ Jay Leno told The Tonight Show audience, ‘that another terrorist attack was imminent! We’re not sure where. We’re not sure when, just that it is coming. So, who is attacking us now? The cable company?’ David Letterman chimed in on CBS. ‘Homeland Security has already warned about new terrorist attacks and it must be pretty serious because President Bush has already ignored three memos about this.’ This was just a tiny sample from a growing catalogue of derision which was enriched when it was discovered in 2005 that the deputy press spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security had been arrested for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old. ‘This fifty-nine-year-old guy, Brian Doyle, was arrested for exposing himself to a young girl in Florida on his webcam and sending her porno on the internet. It’s nice to know,’ said Leno, ‘that our surveillance cameras are being put to good use in the war on terror!’

Then the conspiracy theorists got to work. Brigette Nacos, a social scientist from Columbia University, began to track the uncanny coincidence of code changes and spikes in the President’s popularity. She then plotted the graph to a timetable of the 2004 presidential election campaign. Bingo! We were being taken for a ride, she concluded. Eventually, even the hapless Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, had to admit that the system ‘invited questions and even derision!’ Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, with an honest face and a firm handshake, admitted to me that he hated his job. ‘It’s a pretty thankless task, to manage a super-department of 170,000 bureaucrats and to live and work in a world of constant threats.’ A few months later he resigned and you could hear the sigh of relief all the way from the White House.

Perhaps the low point of the colour-code system was reached in November 2003 on the day the Department of Homeland Security hastily told people to prepare for the eventuality of a chemical attack. The result was panic, confusion and a collective scratching of heads. The following morning I was waiting for my train at the Cleveland Park metro station. The middle-aged woman standing next to me grabbed my arm. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing inside the carriage which had just swished to a halt. ‘There are too many people asleep.’

‘So?’

I didn’t actually say the word but I threw her an involuntary look, somewhere between disdain and surprise.

‘They might have been gassed!’ she added in a whisper.

Clearly mad, I thought. The doors opened and I walked in, leaving the woman on the platform, shaking her head. Then I looked around. Out of fifteen commuters in the carriage half were indeed asleep. My normal instinct would have been to join them and nod off, hoping not to miss my stop. I resisted. Then it dawned on me. It was nine in the morning! I should have been squashed in a throng of other passengers, fighting for half an inch of elbow room, trying to revive the blood circulation in my trapped feet. This was Thursday rush hour … and the subway was emptier than it was on a Sunday. Now that did make me feel uncomfortable. Penny had beseeched me: ‘Take a taxi. Don’t take the tube!’ No, I thought, I won’t let Osama dictate my commute.

Three stops to Dupont Circle. Only three but I counted them in and I counted them out. Suddenly the train jerked to a halt between Cleveland Park and Woodley Park. We must be somewhere below Connecticut Avenue, I thought to myself, while all the other passengers continued with uninterrupted slumber. Near the Uptown cinema. They’re still playing The Lord of the Rings, even though no one seems to be going these days. Cinema … confined space. Great for gas. Just like the subway.

I started reading the emergency directives: face forward, press the red button, don’t panic, walk slowly in single file. Fine for misuse: $2000 or jail. Surely they would understand. We are in an orange alert, after all. My stop. I got out, relieved. But the escalator had broken down and it was a very long walk up the steps towards the crisp blue winter sky. I got to the top and bumped into a man with a megaphone holding up a copy of the Bible: ‘We are all damned,’ he proclaimed. ‘Hell awaits every one of you!’ His voice was fuzzy. Perhaps his loudhailer was running low on batteries. The city may have been on orange alert, but my imagination was already running on red: the ‘what ifs?’ had vanquished the ‘so whats’ and I forgot to buy my grande latte.

When I got to the office London was on the phone requesting a piece about the ‘panic buying’ of duct tape and plastic sheeting. It was all over the wires. I rang one of my most reliable sources. On the mobile phone I could hardly hear Penny’s voice for all the commotion. ‘Where are you, darling?’

‘I’m at Stroessniders,’ she said. Stroessniders is our local hardware store. ‘It’s mayhem here. Everyone is fighting over plastic sheeting.’

The last time she had bought plastic sheeting was for Amelia’s birthday parties to use as a cheap picnic blanket. Now her fellow shoppers were trying to follow the ‘Homeland Security terror threat advisory’ broadcast on the news the night before. This urged people to get hold of plastic sheeting to insulate their basements from any potential chemical attacks. Penny wondered if she should join in.

I called the crew and we raced up to Stroessniders. Penny had already gone, presumably busy measuring the windows for insulation, but the shop was crammed with women. Some in tracksuits, some in furs, some in hysterics, all tearing at bags of plastic sheeting as if their lives depended on it. Which, perhaps, they did. A new load of sheeting had arrived and was greeted at the door as if it were a shipment of rice and milk powder in an Afghan refugee camp. I noticed that people weren’t filling their shopping trolleys with just duct tape and sheeting. Torches, batteries, huge bottles of water, candles and matches were all flying off the shelves as if the whole of Washington was preparing for a long stint in a fallout shelter.

Bill Hart, the store manager, didn’t know whether to be delighted or distraught. He had sold two years’ supply of plastic sheeting in one day, he told me. But he himself didn’t have a clue which room to designate as the bunker in his own house. In aisle six (Glues and Adhesives) a heated discussion was under way.

‘For Chrissake don’t turn the playroom into your panic room! It’s below grade!’ The man seemed to know what he was talking about. He had horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair. He looked respectable, knowledgeable and authoritative. But he was also wearing a blue bow tie. Was he a mad professor or just mad? In the general absence of expertise everyone else was listening as if the shopper in the bow tie held the Chair for Applied Sciences at Georgetown University. ‘Chemicals don’t rise. They fall,’ he intoned, looking round at his audience, waiting to be challenged. ‘That’s how all those Kurds died in Iraq.’ I was about to pitch in and ask about the up or down movement of radiation, bacterial agents, mustard gas … but thought the better of it. Allan, the laconic Australian cameraman, was busy filming. I was busy trying to remember my O-level chemistry, but the only thing I remembered was that I had failed.

When I returned home that night my wife had packed a bag with extra clothing for the children and nappies. There were torches in every room, enough spare batteries to illuminate the whole neighbourhood, twenty litres of mineral water and three roles of duct tape; $1000 in cash had been stuffed into a sock in a drawer. ‘The ATM machines are bound to fail,’ she explained. I told her about the scene at Stroessniders, but she refused to see the funny side.

‘How many rolls of sheeting did you get?’

‘None,’ I confessed. ‘I forgot! Too busy filming,’ I explained feebly. Penny gave me one of those looks that best translates as: ‘Don’t you care about our four children!’

‘What do you want for dinner?’ I tried to change the subject.

‘I don’t care but don’t touch the tins!’ she added sternly. ‘They’re emergency rations.’

We spent the rest of the evening working out an evacuation plan. Everyone seemed to think that prevailing winds head north. So we should head west. West Virginia. Kentucky. But we only had a map of Maryland … and that was north. The BBC had conjured up an alternative evacuation plan for the office. This would involve taking a barge down the Potomac River to the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay. No one seemed to have worked out how we would get to the barge, whether the authorities would stop all river traffic, whether the good vessel would be fast enough to escape the dangers or, indeed, what would happen to our families stranded at home with rolls of duct tape, plastic sheeting and tins of baked beans.

The evacuation plan lasted about three months before it was shredded, forgotten and replaced with nothing. Nevertheless the whole experience veered somewhere between the absurd and the sobering. We didn’t have a clue and nor, it seemed, did the authorities. It soon became clear that if the Nation’s Capital was subject to another terrorist attack the only thing we could count on was mayhem. At the end of 2003 a disgruntled tobacco farmer from Virginia drove his tractor all the way up I95 into the heart of Washington, DC, and parked it in the rectangular reflector pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. It was a protest about a rise in the tobacco tax. The secret service initially thought it might be an impending terror attack. The man was targeted by police marksmen and Washington traffic ground to a complete halt for six hours. Memorial Bridge, one of the main escape routes, was closed and the city put on a spectacular display of road rage. God help us all if there was a genuine attack. It was a sentiment shared by many that day.

That night I listened to the radio on our screened porch, enjoying a post-traumatic stress cigarette. The local station introduced one of a whole regiment of retired colonels and generals who have benefited from the extraordinary growth in terror analysis and fear-mongering. The voice of ‘our in-house terror and security consultant’ boomed with unflappable confidence. A veteran of many wars, he was now a warrior of the airwaves. A nervous caller from Arlington asked about the effects of a dirty bomb.

‘I can assure you, Gene,’ said the colonel, ‘that if a dirty bomb went off half a mile from this building, you would be doing more damage to your health if you were smoking a cigarette outside.’ I looked at my Malboro Light glowing in the dark and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So much for ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’! Roosevelt is surely spinning in his grave while today’s political masters are telling us that the only thing we need to fear is the absence of fear. Fear is good. It keeps you alert. It also sets impossibly high standards of success in the ‘war on terror’. Since we came to the United States the country has apparently thrived on being afraid. First there were the colour-coded alerts. The word TERROR still flashes across our screens in a truly terrifying whoosh, especially on Fox TV, which would be bereft if America were universally loved. There is the obvious fear of terrorists wanting to blow up New York and Washington. Oddly, though, the fear of another terrorist strike grows the further away you are from the places that were actually hit. In lower Manhattan life got back to normal almost as soon as the rubble was cleared and Ground Zero became a large hole in the ground waiting to become a construction site. Property prices in the immediate vicinity slumped for a few months before resuming their astronomical climb. A big city like New York takes tragedies in its stride. The spirit is indeed unbeatable. But go to Omaha, Nebraska, or Martinsburg, West Virginia, both places that no self-respecting terrorist would ever bother with let alone find on the map, and the population is cowering behind triple-locked doors in fear of the extremist Muslim hordes.

If it isn’t the Caliphate that’s trying to topple the American way of life, it is the ‘superbug’ that could wipe out entire school communities in a day. If you watch Lou Dobbs on CNN, an anti-immigration campaigner masquerading as a broadcaster, you would think that the flood of illegal migration across the border means that we will all be made to sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ in Spanish and eat tortillas instead of hamburgers. If that isn’t enough, you can always rely on the Chinese to terrify you. It was bad enough when they were taking away hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs but now they are also trying to poison our toddlers by selling us toys laced with lead paint. In the run-up to Christmas 2007 some of the cable TV networks launched campaigns helping hapless Americans spot ‘toxic toys from China’, which they might have wanted to buy for their grandchildren. And if that’s not scary enough, just remember that China also owns most of America’s debt. The Yellow Peril is drowning in a sea of greenbacks. The Chinese could sink the dollar even further by dumping it on the market. ‘Beijing has become our banker’, as one commentator put it in the New York Times. ‘And you never pick a fight with your banker!’

The many fears that stalk America these days are the flip side of the enormous successes and the social mobility the country has experienced in recent years. The booming town of Culpeper, about eighty miles south-west of Washington, is a case in point. I got to know the place at the end of 2007 because the BBC chose to adopt the town as a way of measuring the political pulse of America in the run-up to the 2008 election. Finding a representative patient in a country as vast and complex as this might seem absurd, but Culpeper embodied many of the changes yanking America in different directions. It was located in the middle of Virginia. A traditionally conservative state that had voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, it had turned against the Republican Party because of a combination of factors: the unpopular war in Iraq, the President’s advocacy of immigration reform, the declining economy and a general, queasy feeling that America had lost its way. Virginia had become a bellwether state. It could swing either way during the election. Its traditional certainties had been undermined by new anxieties and it found itself in mid-transition from rural backwater to expanding exurb.

The town’s population had doubled in the last seven years. Half the new arrivals were migrant workers from Latin America, who spoke barely any English, had snuck across the border with Mexico – 1500 miles from Culpeper – and had come there in search of a job. Most of them had been employed by the construction companies turning the rolling hills of Virginia into what resembled a sprawling set for Desperate Housewives. These new, gated communities might as well be called Wisteria Lane. The houses look as real as cardboard façades in Hollywood and about as sturdy. Having ignored the town for decades, the Amtrak train to Washington, DC, now stops here to pick up a swelling number of commuters. There are now two Italian restaurants and a Thai on Main Street. At the coffee shop on Grant Street it is no longer good enough to opt for coffee with or without cream. You now have to choose between tall lattes, double-shot decaf frappuccinos and a grilled/toasted/baked panino with a bewildering choice of exotic hams and cheeses. The nineteenth-century façades of the houses in the ‘historic centre’ have been scrubbed clean and given a new lick of paint. Shops that were shuttered or empty a few years ago are now selling smart kitchen utensils, Italian designer furniture, Vietnamese throw cushions and pot-pourri. Home makeover fever has struck Culpeper, the surest sign of all that the town is booming. And yet our sample of citizens were vexed by the changes. The overriding fear was that the property prices that had shot up in recent years were now beginning to tumble. Culpeper’s new citizens were being hit on two fronts. The rise in petrol prices had made their long commute to the capital far more costly. At the same time the fall in property prices no longer allowed them to think of themselves as wealthy. The number of foreclosures had doubled to about a hundred in three months and dozens of the large newly built houses – called McMansions in the United States – remained empty and unsold. The universal fears about property helped to trigger some very particular anxieties.

Steve Jenkins, the burly football-coach-turned-town-councillor, describes himself as a son of ‘old Culpeper’. One of his ancestors was the town’s first soldier to enlist on the Confederate side. What fuels Steve’s passion today is America’s new war against illegal migration. ‘I don’t hate Mexicans,’ he explains in the last remaining diner on Main Street. (‘I don’t like that fancy cappuccino stuff.’) ‘But I can’t stand the fact that they sneak across the border illegally and then expect to be welcomed like real citizens. They don’t pay taxes and yet they fill the schools and use our hospitals.’ As he vents the muscles and veins on his oxen neck bulge and pulsate to the drumbeat of growing anger. He grinds his fists together. I am glad I have a legitimate visa, I think to myself. Steve is adamant that his anger stems from the fact that much of this migration is illegal. But it also becomes clear that, like millions of others, he’s afraid that America’s soul is being warped. ‘The illegal ones should all be deported,’ he says, thumping the counter and causing a few drops of pure American filter coffee to spill onto the stainless steel. ‘The rest need to learn English. Real good!’ Steve blamed the migrants for a whole host of ills, from a rise in the rate of burglaries to an increase in road rage. ‘The traffic is terrible here now. People used to stop for you when you crossed the street. Now they just plough through.’ On Grant Street I saw two cars driving so slowly they might have been kerb-crawling. The driving etiquette of Culpeper seemed to be a lot courtlier than anything I had encountered in Washington, let alone New York. But for Steve it was a matter of comparison with a lost era of perfect road manners, when Culpeper was smaller, poorer and everyone spoke English.

Betsy Smith, a former businesswoman turned Baptist preacher, is much less afraid of the new wave of migration. She has met quite a few Mexicans at her church. ‘They tend to be hard-working, God-fearing and law-abiding. They’re against abortion and the ones I have met are good Christians.’ What keeps Betsy up at night are the declining morals of the society that surrounds her. The first time we met her was at Halloween, clutching her five-year-old daughter who was dressed as an angel. But we didn’t find them at the traditional Halloween parade on Main Street. ‘That kind of Halloween is a celebration of evil. We don’t go in for that.’ Instead Betsy helped to organize an alternative parade, where members of her church were handing out leaflets on the Ten Commandments and Bible studies with the candy. The usual witch’s cavern and cauldron had been transformed into a crib and a manger. The fact that we were in a car park, marooned in the middle of a shopping mall next to a gun shop, didn’t seem to bother Betsy and her friends. They had carved out an alternative niche for themselves. Even in a small town like Culpeper they found the space to create their own social bubble, unbothered by the heathens around them who were themselves largely oblivious to the alternative sin-free Fall Festival Parade taking place in the church car park.