Listening to Obama’s America

Several years ago, when my son was in his first year in a college near Philadelphia, I phoned him for one of my weekly chats with him. It was his Thanksgiving break and he was on a Greyhound to Pittsburgh. He said the journey reminded him of the Simon and Garfunkel song America (Cathy I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh/Michigan seems like a dream to me now/It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw/I’ve gone to look for America). I asked him if there was a Cathy with him (“ha ha,” he replied) and we wondered where Saginaw was. Frankly, in all these years that I have listened to the song, I have never bothered to check whether Saginaw really exists. It does. Journalist and writer Avirook Sen went all the way to America to look for it, and many other small towns that I have never heard of. He came back and wrote Looking for America, a fascinating travelogue that vividly captures the spirit of a time when the country was going through a severe economic recession, when more people lost jobs in one month than in the previous three decades. It was a time when Americans were doing some serious soul-searching: They were about to elect their first black President, a man who gave them hope, who promised them that he would reclaim the American dream. Sen travelled on buses and trains, stopping wherever he thought there was an interesting story to tell in the context of the impending election — stories about jobs, homes and healthcare, issues of race and religion, drugs and crime, war and peace. Like the one in a town called Gary where Michael Jackson was born, a city which has been in a permanent state of depression, where the shops on the main street have not opened in decades, and the black mayor explains to Sen why he wants Obama to win: “We’re spending almost 12 billion a month in Eyeraq and here in Gary, Indiana, we can’t get 12 dollars to fix a pothole”. In Dayton, Tennessee, Sen meets a woman who calls herself a Red Hatter — a gathering of women over 50 who, in her words, “regardless of what life has thrown at them regardless of what life has done to them they choose joy”. She is a McCain-Palin supporter and justifies war in a sort of good-versus-evil way (“people have died for the rights that we have”). They talk about Iraq, Afghanistan and young American kids going out there and dying and when Sen spots a tear in her eyes and asks her if his questions had upset her, she says, “No, no, no, no, no! Honey, I’m Southern. We cry as easily as we laugh”. Sen has an incredible ear for accents and nuances of speech, and narrates his stories with subtle details. He goes to Stone Mountain in Georgia where the Ku Klux Klan was born and where they still have an annual march (“It’s freedom of speech, I guess,” a black man tells him), and another man explains why he won’t vote Republican: if McCain wins and dies in his first year in office, it’ll be Palin who will run the country, “And she is an idiot”. He visits an exhibition on Noah’s Ark (“Q: Could the ark have housed 50,000 animals A: On the whole, most animals are quite small ”), and in a place called Dinosaur, Colorado, he sees a buck killed by two proud young boys, “its tongue limp and sticking out of one side of its mouth like a morbid caricature”. There’s a sad story of a Gujarati family who run a motel in Florida, speak little English, live an isolated existence and believe that “the black people are doing some bad business (meaning drugs).” And you wonder why these Indians bothered to come all this way to chase the American dream. In 1925, in the city of Dayton, Tennessee, in the Bible belt of America, a young man was jailed and tried for teaching evolution. The Scopes “Monkey Trial” captured the world’s attention. But Sen learns that the trial was less about God, man and ape and more about fame and money. It’s a hilarious story that I have never heard before: it seems the American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge a new law enacted by Tennessee that banned the teaching of evolution, that “man is descended from a lower order of animals”. So ACLU put in an ad for a teacher who would break the law for a fee, with all expenses paid. The enterprising people of Dayton realised that such a case would draw national attention. They got hold of a Mr Scopes, who no doubt was a teacher but had never taught evolution, grabbed a bunch of young kids and made him tell them a few lines about evolution. When the trial began, 200 journalists descended on the city. And Dayton became infamous and never regretted it. Sen is not a mere observer but also a great raconteur. His best encounters take place on Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains, when he is not looking for a story. My favourite characters are the man named Winston Salem who spits a lot; the train conductor who habitually flirts with women and warns the passengers not to stick their head out of the window because “it will come right off ”, and another conductor who asks him on a biting cold day, “Chai peeyega ” It seems he was a Buddhist and had spent some time in India. Looking for America explains a moment in history, the factors that brought Obama to the White House. But two years down the road, Obama is facing a crisis of confidence. And I wonder what the characters in Sen’s travelogue would be thinking now. Would the mayor of Gary still be proud of his friend “Buhrrrack” Is the man in Stone Mountain ready to give Sarah Palin a chance And what will the Red Hatter in Dayton say