Exile on Main Street
- 30 Sep 08, 05:16 AM GMT
Wall Street might be reeling from Congress's vote to reject the US government's $700bn financial rescue plan. But I was more interested in what Main Street thought.
To be specific, Main Street, Memphis, Tennessee. I could see that this stretch of downtown already had its own economic woes to contend with. Around me were fading storefronts and panhandlers asking for change.
But this seemed as good a place as any to ask voters how they felt about the failure of the bail-out.
Jennifer also went out to ask people for their views and this is what they told her:
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Opinion polls have suggested that the public were strongly opposed to the package. Most people I spoke to, however, seemed resigned to losing out no matter which decision Congress made.
Denesa Segrest was clutching a copy of her mortgage agreement when I encountered her. The 47-year-old mother of two had her own financial crisis to worry about: she had missed the last two instalments on her home loan and was desperate to escape foreclosure.
Her eyes moistened as she told me how she was unable to sleep at night for worry. It was like losing a relative, she said. When she'd taken out her mortgage four-and-a-half years ago, her monthly loan payments had totalled $705. Now they were $1,150 - more than half her income.
At the same time, her husband had lost his job and she had had to pay for two operations. Recently, she had started working as a housing counsellor to help others avoid the traps into which she had fallen.
I took her to watch the bail-out vote as it came unfolded on TV. She sat impassively as the "no" tally reached 218. I asked whether she wanted Representatives to back the bill.
"We're damned if they do, damned if they don't," she replied quietly. "Everyone's going to be touched by it in some way."
But Jerry Lovett, 40, definitely wasn't happy that the vote had failed. His clothing store was struggling: he'd just had to lay off one of his three employees following a drop in sales.
This was normally his day off, but he'd opened up because he needed the business. Although a committed Republican, he was annoyed at the Congressmen and women who had rejected the proposals.
"I'm disappointed," he said. "Something needs to be done pretty quick. Doing nothing is not an option.
"What's sad is that Nancy Pelosi was on TV earlier saying that they'd struck a deal. But it looks like the same old political garbage took over."
Two doors down, Palestinian-born Rida Abu-Zaineh, 51, was fatalistic. He'd been running the Peanut Shoppe for the past 15 years. But he was worried how much longer it could stay open.
"Look at it," he gestured at his empty store. "Business is terrible."
He didn't know whether or not the bail-out would have helped him. But he didn't like the idea of his taxes acting as a safety net for failed Manhattan banks.
He had a message for John McCain and Barack Obama.
"Use the money they were going to spend in Wall Street and make the lives of blue-collar people better," he frowned.
"I'm not voting for either of them. They don't deserve my vote."
Until today, I'd been impressed with the level of political engagement among Americans. But as I left his store, I wondered how many citizens would come to the same conclusion as Rida before election day.
Memphis blues
- 29 Sep 08, 08:57 PM GMT
Jennifer Copestake has also been touring Memphis, asking people about the state of the economy. Here's her report:
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Amazing Grace
- 29 Sep 08, 11:00 AM GMT
In a country where showbiz and religion are well acquainted, the Full Gospel Tabernacle church in Memphis must top some sort of chart. Its resident pastor is a genuine, bona fide music legend.
Al Green recorded a string of soul classics in the early 1970s, including Take Me To the River and Tired of Being Alone. However, he turned to God following an incident in 1974 in which a girlfriend doused him with a pan of hot grits before shooting herself dead.
Ordained as a minister in 1976, Green has preached at the Tabernacle ever since. I turned up for a morning service wondering if the stardust of his other career might have been sprinkled on the act of worship here. What I found instead was a modest building in a working-class black neighbourhood, where the unabashed enthusiasm of the faithful was infectious.
I'd never been to a gospel service before, and the force of the choir struck me as soon as I stepped through the doors. The congregation, maybe 200 strong, was clapping, dancing and singing. I hadn't realised you were allowed to have this much fun in church.
During a rare break in the music, myself and the other visitors were asked to stand so we could be applauded: normally I'd be mortified to be singled out like this, but I felt genuine warmth from those around me.
Al Green himself was a captivating preacher. He delivered his sermon underscored by a live band, and would break into song when duly inspired. The congregation whooped their appreciation as he rhapsodised about God's mercy and love.
He was sensitive enough to their concerns, too, to address a subject that was clearly worrying his flock: Congress's Wall Street bail-out and its implications for their homes and livelihoods.
"Get us out of this mess," Green implored the Almighty, to cheers from the congregation. "Help the country out of this financial crisis."
Worshippers called back their approval: uh-huh. That's right. Tell it like it is.
Green wasn't just relying on the Lord to deliver the United States from economic turmoil, however. Later, he acknowledged that he had hopes for a more earthly force, too.
"I'm no politician," he said. "But the senator from Chicago - it seems like he's got some good ideas."
Winning support from a pastor has not, of course, always benefited Barack Obama in the past. But given his popularity in this room, Al Green seemed a good person to get on-side.
Outside the church, members of the congregation were, if anything, even more vocal about their anxieties over the bail-out.
When Edith Walker-Wilkins spotted my notebook, she wasted no time in telling me how tough things were for people in Memphis. The 58-year-old was juggling several part-time jobs, and it was an affront to her that Wall Street banks were being handed so much in public funds when ordinary people were struggling.
Edith produced a blank voter registration form from her handbag. If she met anyone in the street who hadn't filled one in, she told me, she would thrust it into their hands.
"We're in need of change," she told me. "You have people who are starving, people with no health cover.
"If the economy had been managed properly in the first place, we wouldn't need this bail-out."
She wasn't the only one who was angry. Barbara Perry was a big Al Green fan who had come all the way from Baltimore, Maryland, to hear him preach.
After a visit to Memphis's National Civil Rights Museum, Barbara, 65, was also passionate about exercising her hard-won freedoms. "If someone doesn't vote," she told me, "they should be beheaded."
Barbara had been a Hillary Clinton supporter right until the former First Lady dropped out of the race, but was now right behind Obama.
She'd be fine whatever happened on the markets, she said - she was retired, and her mortgage had been paid off. But she worried that her daughter now stood little chance of getting on the property ladder.
I asked what she thought of the deal on Capitol Hill. "I just hope that it's going to benefit everyone," she replied, with an eyebrow raised.
But I did meet one worshipper who was right behind the deal. Herman Paterson was a deacon at the church. He also ran an interior design firm, and had seen orders drop by 20%.
He wanted Washington to stimulate the market, and was confident that Congress's deal would do the trick.
"I think it's a good idea overall," he said. "It will be a good shot in the arm for the higher echelons.
"A lot of the money requested will trickle back down to the lower echelons."
Different visions of how the economy should be run, sure enough. Al Green certainly presides over a broad church.
The world's a stage
- 29 Sep 08, 06:00 AM GMT
Friday's presidential debate may have ended in a draw, according to the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee. But the paper says there was one clear winner: the University of Mississippi, which had invested so much in the stand-off.
I've already noted how relieved locals were when John McCain showed up. They sensed a big pay-day was up for grabs.
But the Appeal concentrates on the political celebrities, if you can call them that, who were in town: ex-Democratic White House contenders John Kerry and Bill Richardson; Republican Governor Hayley Barbour of Mississippi and Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina; plus TV anchor Katie Couric and debate moderator Jim Lehrer.
Not to forget the candidates' wives. Cindy McCain appeared, we are told, "in a bright red pantsuit", while Michelle Obama was wearing "a more-muted pink dress".
I don't think any of these figures could be used to support Jay Leno's thesis that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Is the paper trying to suggest otherwise?
Sequestered in Memphis
- 28 Sep 08, 02:47 AM GMT
If you're going to see Memphis, you might as well do it from a 1955 cream Cadillac. The city's most famous son, Elvis Aaron Presley, drove a pink version of the same car - but then he was the King of Rock 'n' Roll, and I'm just a pasty Scottish blogger, so I suppose there's no point trying to compete.
This is the stop I've been most looking forward to on my tour across the States. Like millions of others, my introduction to America came through its music. And here's where so much of the modern USA's sound was created.
The King and BB King, Sun Studios and Stax Records - depending on whom you listen to, this is the Home of the Blues, Soulsville USA, or the birthplace of rock. As a sufferer of musical OCD, I couldn't wait to hit the record stores.
My driver was Tad Pierson, a 56-year-old Kansas native who moved here because of his love of blues, and now runs American Dream Safari tours. So much American music had been born of interplay between black and white, he told me, and Memphis, with its proximity to the Mississippi Delta, had been perfectly positioned to exploit this.
Take Elvis himself, for instance. Tad drove me to the home in which the future megastar lived from 12 to 16 - a nondescript apartment in a housing project on the north side of the city.
Under segregation, this had been an all-white area, and Presley had attended an all-white school. Isaac Hayes's classes were held at another black-only institution a few hundred yards away.
"But obviously there was interaction between the black and white families round here," Tad argued.
"Elvis borrowed heavily from black culture - musically, stylistically. He'd go to black churches, not so much to worship, but to listen to the music."
As a result, after Elvis recorded That's All Right (Mama) at Sun Studios in 1954, listeners initially assumed he was black. But, Tad believed, it was Elvis's ability to sell such songs to white audiences, as well as bring traditionally white influences into the mix, that made rock 'n' roll so potent.
And then in 1957 you had Stax founded on the other side of town. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the soul label released a string of fantastic records by mostly African-American artists - Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Carla Thomas, and Hayes among them.
But, as Tad pointed out, "Stax was integrated at a time when, unbelievably, that wasn't accepted". The label's founders were white, as were half the members of the house band, Booker T and the MG's.
And Memphis's history was not, sadly, all about harmony and tolerance. Tad drove me to the church where Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his prophetic "I've been to the mountain top" speech. The following day he was assassinated at the city's Lorraine Motel, preserved today as part of the National Civil Rights Museum.
And although these communities could boast a rich musical history, poverty was clearly still a huge problem here. We cruised through neighbourhoods filled with boarded-up commercial properties and crumbling houses.
For Tad, though, the lack of conspicuous consumption was a bonus. It was the shabby yet brightly-coloured juke joints, blues clubs and soul food cafes that brought him here in the first place.
"They're depressed landscapes - business that aren't in existence, old beat-up signs, decay," he admitted.
"But the landscape has a memory. When I go new suburbs it's all brand-new shopping malls - that's when I get depressed. I come away thinking that I need a nap."
Suddenly, Tad spotted someone he knew. "Hey, Pee-Wee," he called to an elderly black man across the street. "Come meet my friend."
Charles "Pee-Wee" Mason, a cheerful 72-year-old, gripped my hand. Business was booming, he told me. As well as his own butcher's, he rented out a modest strip of stores - a fish market, a burger bar and a cheque-cashing service.
To boost trade, he would invite blues bands to play on the forecourt on Friday and Saturday nights to entice customers.
"No tickets," he said. "They just come. Hopefully they spend some money.
"I've been here since 1969. It's been good to me.
"It's a very tight economy, but we're surviving."
This neighbourhood seemed an inauspicious location to find optimism amid headlines proclaiming financial gloom.
But Tad left me with his theory that his countrymen and women's view of prosperity could be encapsulated by its most celebrated resident.
"Elvis graduated High School in 1953 age 16," Tad told me. "Four years later he paid cash for Graceland. It's an American dream story.
"But the end of his life, excess and success destroyed him. The American dream - it's starting to fray around the edges."
Political football
- 27 Sep 08, 06:56 AM GMT
The University of Mississippi's students had a good excuse for a party. It's not every day that the main candidates for the White House show up on your campus, after all.
As Senators Obama and McCain slugged it out in the presidential debate, hundreds of young voters were watching on an outdoor big screen just yards away. Never mind Spin Alley, this was where the real action was.
It was a boisterous, good-natured crowd. Obama would score a point, and his supporters would cheer and wave their placards. Then McCain would land a blow, and his fans would roar their approval too.
I really enjoyed the atmosphere. It made me want to attend a Mississippi Rebels game.
And I was impressed with the level of engagement. I can't imagine so many British students showing such passion for Gordon Brown and David Cameron.
But in a crowd this partisan, this was never going to be about weighing up the respective merits of the candidates. It was college football by other means.
On one hand, you had Geoff Brown, 22, who was holding up an Obama poster when we got chatting.
McCain hadn't offended Geoff. But the Democratic candidate was pressing all the right buttons for him.
"I'm loving Obama tonight," he smiled. "He's talking about all the things that affect people in Mississippi - jobs, the economy, healthcare.
"OK, I'm partisan. But these are the issues that win people over."
But then you had someone like Ashley Durkee, a 25-year-old clinical psychology graduate student.
She'd already been leaning towards McCain before the debate. And the Republican's robust stance on the military had pushed her further into his column.
"This is his area," she added. "I would have expected him to do well on these issues, and I thought he was impressive.
"I feel like his idea about national security and how to keep the country strong were really convincing. Obama didn't match him."
Throughout the crowd, the pattern repeated itself.
Jacquelyn Brubaker, 27, was another spectator whose views were already well-entrenched.
The Bush years had not been kind to Jacquelyn. She had earned two degrees - a Bachelor's in social work, and a Master's in education - but was working in a bar in Oxford because it paid better than the roles for which she was qualified.
"America's ready for change," she said. "Obama talked about investing in things like education, moving our troops from Iraq to Afghanistan - this is what we need right now.
"John McCain continues to prove that he's out of touch with the American people."
At the same time, though, there was Matthew McDowell, 28. Majoring in physics after serving in the Navy, Matthew left the debate with exactly the opposite impression.
"I think they're both impressive performers," he said. "But with Obama, it's about giving a speech.
"With McCain, it's about delivering facts - his voting record, what he's done in the past. That's what resonates with me."
You can credit Obama's charisma, McCain's gravitas or Sarah Palin's appeal to the Republican base. But in Mississippi, at least, I don't think either candidate will lose because of lack of enthusiasm among their core voters.
Debating society
- 26 Sep 08, 07:26 PM GMT
When John McCain announced he was stepping on a plane to Oxford, Mississippi, the town breathed a sigh of relief.
The Republican candidate's decision to show up for 2008's first presidential debate - having previously called for it to be postponed - meant that this little college community could hold on to its moment in the spotlight.
The event is a very big deal here. The University of Mississippi has spent around $5m preparing to host it. And the acres of red, white and blue livery outside every store and business in the town is testament to the amount of cash locals hope to make from the temporary influx of media.
Courtney Gordon, 31, had as much of a stake as anyone in ensuring it went ahead. Her gift shop, the Lilypad, was selling piles of debate memorabilia - election-themed badges, books and mugs - which would have been worthless in the event of a cancellation.
"When I heard it was going to happen after all, I was just so relieved," she said.
"Not just for me, for the whole town. So many people have invested so much in the debate. It's going to put us on the map.
"If it had been postponed, that would have meant we wouldn't have been the first to hold the debate - and that would have devalued the whole event for us."
It wasn't only local people who had been hoping that Mr McCain showed up, however. Just around the corner, I met 40-year-old Marvin Brown, who had come down from Chicago with a stall full of Obama t-shirts.
Marvin has been following the Illinois senator around the country with his wares. "Wherever he goes, I go," he told me. He had never doubted that the debate would go ahead as planned.
I broke the news to him that Mr McCain was on his way.
"Is he? I'm not surprised," Marvin said.
"All that was just political manouvering. He was always going to show up.
"I'm looking forward to the debate. Obama will come out on top - he understands the ordinary man better than McCain does."
Not everyone was lining their own pockets, however. In the town's square, John Herbert, 46, was charging passers-by to pose with cardboard cut-outs of Obama, McCain or Sarah Palin. ("We couldn't get hold of Joe Biden," he admitted).
John was raising funds so that his 16-year-old daughter Chelsea could attend the Edinburgh Festival next summer with the Oxford High School Theatre Group. A McCain supporter, he acknowledged that his favoured candidate's standing would have been damaged in this safe Republican state had he pulled out.
"I think a lot of people round here would have been really angry if he hadn't come," he admitted.
"Now, though, I think everyone's just really pleased. We're going to be number one after all."
Southern comfort
- 26 Sep 08, 08:49 AM GMT
I can't get over how much food they serve over here. You can see from my photo that I'm no picky eater. But in most diners I've visited, it's impossible to order anything smaller than my head.
I'm not complaining, however. Where have pinto beans, hash brown casserole and turnip greens been all my life? You might not be rid of me as soon as you thought, Americans. There's no way I'll fit on that plane home.
All my gluttony got me thinking, though. Surely one route to understanding a people's collective soul is through their stomachs?
John T Edge agrees. In particular, he has made it his mission to understand how the South has been shaped by its cuisine as director of the Southern Foodways Alliance - based at the University of Mississippi, where James Meredith fought for equality all those years ago.
I was invited by John, 45, over to his house for a barbecue so he could explain further. Why not, I thought (and besides, it would have been rude to turn him down).
As he laid out plates of fried chicken, devilled eggs, pimento cheese sandwiches and moon pies, he recalled how a black woman was employed to prepare his family's meals during his middle-class childhood in Georgia.
Whatever that said about the legacy of Southern race relations, he argued, it showed him from an early age how black and white could find common ground at the dinner table.
"Food is a big deal down here. This was a place where you couldn't share a lunch counter with folks who looked different without starting a riot," he added.
"But it was also a shared experience. Fried chicken started out as something cooked by blacks, but they brought it into the homes of the whites who employed them.
"That's why it's so important. We find our shared humanity in what we eat."
With an Obama placard on his front lawn, John was confident that a common palate was bringing previously antagonistic groups together.
But for his colleague Melissa Hall, 40 - born in Kentucky, now resident in Mississippi too - Southern cooking had always been intrinsically egalitarian.
"When you eat in the South, you're expected to share," she said.
"The reason they serve so much is that there's such recent folk memories of not having enough."
Why, she asked, were Italian and French peasant dishes imitated by the world's best chefs, while the notion of taking their American equivalents equally seriously seemed strange to many?
It was a good point. And it's true that the influences on Southern cuisine - African, French, Scots-Irish and so on - show how the South has had a more cosmopolitan history than is readily perceived by outsiders.
Also at the barbecue was 40-year-old David Waller, a chef at Taqueria del Sol Atlanta, Georgia, in town to provide catering for tonight's presidential debate.
He specialised in Mexican food - sure to increasingly make its mark on the southern palate if demographic forecasts are correct.
"Mexican and Southern food are actually pretty similar," he said.
"You don't want to waste anything. You use everything you can."
Given the number of Americans who've told me how worried they are about the economy, maybe voters are about to renew their taste for both?
Student politics
- 26 Sep 08, 08:13 AM GMT
I feel sorry for scholars at the University of Mississippi. One minute their very own campus is due to host a presidential debate. The next, one of the contenders wants the plug pulled.
The editors of the Daily Mississippian, Ole Miss's student newspaper, don't conceal their anxiety. Over a photo of John McCain, the splash headline asks: WILL HE SHOW?
A leader column argues that the Republican contender must honour his commitment to attend: "Now more than ever, we as Americans desperately want to hear the voices of our future leaders."
I hope I, as a member of the media, am not inconveniencing them too much, either. The campus, another article says, "is bracing itself for the influx of reporters".
Oxford Town, Oxford Town
- 25 Sep 08, 05:20 PM GMT
Barack Obama may have fight on his hands if he gets to take part in tomorrow's presidential debate at the University of Mississippi. But it won't be as fierce a battle as that faced by another man of colour in the same place a generation previously.
When James Meredith enrolled at "Ole Miss" on 1 October 1962, he was greeted by a violent mob, furious that he was the first black student to break the campus's colour bar.
Two people were killed and dozens injured in a confrontation that pitted the forces of President John F Kennedy's liberal administration in Washington against this segregationists' citadel of the Deep South.
Images of Meredith, flanked by US marshals as he faced the missiles and jeers of protesters, came to define the end of the Jim Crow era. As Obama prepares to walk the same route 46 years later, James was surely the man to reveal how far American race relations have come in such a short space of time.
Resplendent in his white suit, blessed with a rich, booming voice, James Meredith made it easy to understand where he found the chutzpah to make his stand against white supremacy all those years ago.
But as we stood outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, it was clear that his defiance and bravery stemmed from the same idiosyncrasies that have kept him firmly apart from mainstream black politics.
You weren't to call him an African-American because he believed that to be "hyphenated" was to be a second-class citizen. You shouldn't refer to him a civil rights campaigner, because his battle extended further. The confrontation at Ole Miss wasn't a riot because governments don't riot. And so on.
Casting his mind back to the day he walked through the town of Oxford to attend Ole Miss for the first time, he said that he had succeeded thanks not to campaigners, but the US military.
Anticipating that Mississippi's police, under the authority of hardline governor Ross Barnett, would not enforce desegregation rulings, President Kennedy had ordered marshals and the National Guard to ensure that Meredith could show up safely.
"If I had not known that the president had already called up the military, and seen with my own eyes that they had been relocated, no way would I have ever went to the University of Mississippi," he said.
"There are a lot of political tricks that work sometimes. But the only thing that projects any people to the top spot is military conquest."
It was, he believed, a war between the federal government and that of Mississippi. As he made his way back then to the University's entrance, with violence erupting around him, had he not been afraid?
"Afraid that I might not accomplish my purpose," he asserted. "I'm still afraid of that."
When he eventually made it inside, the atmosphere was scarcely less poisonous. When he walked into a classroom, the other students walked out. He was taught amid a sea of empty chairs.
For a man of Meredith's character, however, this only heightened his self-belief.
"The teacher was there," he recalled. "They're not going to learn this superior information I'm going to learn. That put me ahead of them on the first day."
Perhaps he was right. Meredith graduated with a degree in political science and went on to qualify as a lawyer and work as a stockbroker.
After surviving an assassination attempt in 1966, however, he drifted further from the orthodoxy of the civil rights movement. He joined the Republican Party, made several attempts to enter congress and briefly worked for the ultra-conservative Senator Jesse Helms.
He wouldn't reveal who he was voting for in November. Still, he was keen to put Obama's nomination in context. It was "the same as the Dallas Cowboys having a black quarterback", he said.
"Obama has already done his job," he added. "He has placed the non-white in position forever to be a contender for power in America.
"My whole goal now is to shift the focus from race and colour to rich and poor.
"The real problem is that the rich are failing to carry out their obligations to the poor. That's what this crisis on Wall Street is about."
Just as in 1962, James Meredith was promising another one-man crusade.
Park life
- 24 Sep 08, 10:43 AM GMT
Fancy an easy dig at Americans? Then you'll probably want to use the words "trailer park" at some point. This one handy phrase conjures up every negative image of the US rural poor, whilst at the same lending you an air of aloof superiority.
All this made me want to go and actually see such a community for myself. I'd just crossed into Mississippi, the poorest state in the Union, and I hoped it would tell me something about low-income America beyond the archetypes.
The park I pulled up in, just outside Vicksburg, didn't look like some vision of feckless poverty to me. Most of the homes had recently been whitewashed and the gardens were neatly tended.
No-one chased me off their property with a shotgun. In fact, the people I met seemed genuinely pleased that someone had bothered to come and talk to them.
Jennifer also spoke to local children about politics and life on the park:
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I had expected the sort of caravans I always seem to get stuck behind on British roads, but Tina Abney, 41, put me right. She worked in the accounts department for a company that manufactured most of the prefabricated homes around me. Tina herself lived in one with her husband Dean, 42, and their two children.
"They're just like regular houses," she smiled. "They've got the same taps and sinks and floors. I like it here."
But, Tina said, the couple were currently living "from paycheck to paycheck". Her own working week had been cut from five days to four following a drop in orders. Dean was considering selling his new pickup truck because of the high price of gas.
"Times are tough right now," he chipped in. "I bet everyone on your journey has told you that." I nodded.
He hadn't decided how to vote yet. Neither candidate had convinced him yet that they understood his problems. "I'm leaving it until the last minute," he sighed. Tina would have backed Hillary Clinton had she been the Democratic candidate, but had been won over by Sarah Palin. "She'd be good for the country."
In a home around the corner, I picked up the same sense of resignation about the election that I had detected in Dean.
As an African-American, hospital technician Tim Washington, 42, appreciated the significance of Barack Obama's candidacy. But he wouldn't be voting in November, he said. Neither of the candidates had convinced him that they would make a difference to his life.
"In the past I used to keep up with politics," he explained. "I used to follow it. But I guess I just lost interest.
"I relate to Obama. But I don't really know what he's actually going to do."
If Tim was cynical about the way the country was going, he was positive about his community. Everyone on the trailer park got along well, he said - black, white, Hispanic, Asian. People looked after each other's kids, knew each other's names.
He was less enamoured than Tina with the houses, though.
"It's not like a real home. It'd blow down if a real wind came along," he said.
"But it's OK for me. If the people nextdoor move out, I want to buy their land and expand."
I was still very much in America, it appeared.
A broad church
- 23 Sep 08, 11:43 AM GMT
I've just come back from a church service in Dallas, Texas. What do you expect I encountered there? Revivalist preachers raging against abortion and homosexuality? Fire-and-brimstone denunciations of decadence and immorality?
How about a congregation made up mostly of gay men and women, holding hands as they sang about tolerance and compassion?
The Cathedral of Hope couldn't have been further from a stereotypical Texan place of worship if it had packed itself up and moved to San Francisco. Right in the heart of George Bush's red-state America, here was the kind of place that is supposed to exist only on the more exotic fringes of the West Coast, or in the nightmares of Pat Robertson.
But the ministry has been in the city since 1970. With over 3,800 members, it claims to be the world's largest gay church.
I decided to drop by for the morning service. As I took my pew, I noticed that most of the congregants were dressed smart-casual in chinos and polo shirts. Were it not for a preponderance of Obama badges on their chests, I would have said that they looked more conservative than their counterparts at the Radiant Church the previous week.
There wasn't anything particularly camp about it - not compared to most high Anglican churches back home, at least. It was, however, unambiguously liberal. The sermon was delivered by the visiting anti-death penalty nun Sister Helen Prejean, played by Susan Sarandon in the film Dead Man Walking. "I love this place," she declared, to whoops from her audience.
When the senior pastor, the Rev Dr Jo Hudson, began leading the service, I noticed that the liturgy had been tweaked somewhat to accommodate the audience. References to the Almighty were kept gender-neutral wherever possible: "Lord" was replaced with "Creator" throughout. Hymns like Rise Up O Men of God and Faith of Our Fathers were conspicuous by their absence from the hymn book.
Afterwards, I caught up with Dr Hudson. She'd been forced to leave her previous Methodist ministry after being outed to her superiors. I suggested to her that a lot of outsiders might be surprised that the Cathedral of Hope was flourishing in a place like Dallas.
"Well, when you're somewhere very conservative, then liberal-minded people are more likely to want to come together," she replied. "But I don't buy all this stuff about America being divided. At the end of the day, everyone here is a Christian."
She wasn't the only worshipper I met to have fallen foul of the church's more hard-line wing. Jerry King, 34, had been disowned by his family after they discovered he way gay. His father, a Southern Baptist preacher, had then denounced him from the pulpit.
But Jerry's faith hadn't ultimately been weakened. "I tried for a long time to be an atheist," he told me. "But I just couldn't do it."
He gestured towards the front of the church. "This is the kind of Christianity I believe in: compassion, love, forgiveness."
When I met a married lesbian couple back in Los Angeles, I'd noticed something similar: apparently ultra-liberal people, denounced as the enemy within by the hard right, actually conforming to fairly traditional values.
It's true that Cathedral of Hope had previously faced protests from extremists, such as the Ku Klux Klan and Fred Phelps' rabidly anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church.
But congregant Ronald Boson, 52 - a smartly-dressed financial services professional - told me that the vast majority of mainstream Christians in Dallas showed nothing but courtesy to his fellow worshippers.
"You know, thirty years ago there were places in this town I wouldn't have gone as a black man," he added. "But things have changed.
"It's the same with gay people. Spend some time here and you find we're just like you."
A mighty wind
- 22 Sep 08, 10:44 AM GMT
Think of Texas and you think of oil. I always did, anyway - Dallas has a lot to answer for. I was slightly disappointed on crossing the state border not to spot any cigar-chomping tycoons in Stetsons and cowboy boots.
What I did see, however, might come as a surprise to those who associate George W Bush's backyard with black gold. The skyline, I noticed, was dotted with wind turbines. This didn't look like JR Ewing country to me.
Contrary to its gas-guzzling reputation, however, the Lone Star State can stake a claim to be wind power capital of America. Some 3% of its electricity already is generated in this way, a figure that is certain to rise as it pushes ahead with a massive programme of expansion.
What's even more interesting about its status as a powerhouse for green energy is that it has been pioneered not by environmentalists, but by a very Texan energy baron.
Up in Pampa, oil billionaire T Boone Pickens Jnr is spending $10bn building 2,700 wind turbines across 200,000 acres of panhandle. Pickens is a fervent Republican who funded the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, widely credited with securing Bush's re-election during the 2004 presidential campaign.
But I wanted to visit the real boomtown for wind power in Texas: Sweetwater, a small community of 11,000 which will have over 1,500 turbines spinning around its surrounding countryside by 2009.
I went to see Robert and Nadene Petty, both 67, on the ranch bought by Robert's father in 1928. As well producing cattle, cotton and wheat, their family's 13,000 acres forms part of the Sweetwater wind farm.
They're paid to host 40 turbines on their property, as part of a deal which has helped keep many farms in West Texas in business.
Robert was no touchy-feely eco-warrior but a typical Texan Republican who told me he didn't care for Barack Obama's "liberal Democratic ideas". Pump-jacks bobbed for oil across his land underneath the windmills.
But he was proud that he was doing his bit to save the planet.
"I reckon farmers and ranchers were the first environmentalists," he said. "It's our job to preserve the land."
There had been some local opposition, Nadene admitted, when the first turbines went up in 2006. But almost everyone in the area was now behind them, she said, because they were generating so much cash.
"Plus, our cows love the windmills," she laughed. "They lie down in their shadows in a big long line."
I wandered into Sweetwater to see if I could find any opposition to the turbines. Not a single person I encountered had a word to say against them. Had I been back in Scotland, I knew, I would have encountered a very different reaction.
One reason for this might be that wind has brought more than 1,000 much-needed jobs to this area.
I met 22-year-old Marina Ortega, who was studying to be a turbine technician at Texas State Technical College in Sweetwater. She told me that she hoped she had found herself steady employment for life.
"I wanted to take this course because wind power is the future," she said.
"If you're looking for a career that will last you 20, 30 years, this looks a pretty safe bet."
It was starting to make sense to me now.
Before I left town, Sweetwater's mayor Greg Wortham - a former New York attorney who returned to Sweetwater to set up the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium - told me that Texans' natural pragmatism had convinced them that renewables were the way forward.
"People in Massachusetts and Vermont talk about green this and green that," he said.
"But when it comes to actually building wind farms, they don't want to spoil their scenery.
"We just like to get things done. Because of the oil, people understand energy around here. If I could vote for T Boone Pickens and Al Gore on the same ticket, I would."
It's not a hook-up I would anticipate any time soon. But it sounds like it would be a winner in Texas.
Think global, act local
- 22 Sep 08, 05:59 AM GMT
Grabbing a copy of the Clovis News Journal as I stopped for a sandwich in eastern New Mexico, I spotted that the paper had landed a creditable scoop: an interview with Barack Obama. As we've seen, the Democratic candidate is making a big push for the state, and I was curious to see how his rhetoric of hope and change would sit alongside coverage of local burglaries and the fortunes of the Clovis Wildcats.
The reporter did well to catch Senator Obama out on the first question: had he ever been to Clovis, Portales or Tucumcari? "I have not," came the diplomatic reply, "but as I've travelled through New Mexico, it is just a remarkable state."
But the candidate had been well-briefed on the issues of concern to voters in the Journal's circulation area: the future of a nearby Air Force base, water conservation and the need to lay more broadband lines. "We've got to make sure we've got a federal government that's respecting the ways of life of eastern New Mexico," he said, controversially.
A question about whether state governor Bill Richardson would find a job in an Obama administration was neatly side-stepped ("I'm not going to spill the beans now, because I haven't won this election yet"). But I was impressed with a system that obliges a man who could become the most powerful in the world to get back to grassroots like this.
In the interests of balance, the Journal promised to interview John McCain in the coming days. I'll be out of state by then, but let me know if anyone spots it.
Oud awakening
- 20 Sep 08, 05:10 AM GMT
On 4 November, Rahim Al-Haj will be a first-time voter. His eyes were wide with boyish enthusiasm as he told me how excited he was at the prospect of exercising his democratic right. But Rahim was no callow 18-year-old straight out of high school.
Imprisoned and tortured in his native Iraq for his opposition to Saddam Hussein's regime, Rahim, 40, became an American citizen at a ceremony on 16 August, having arrived here as a refugee eight years ago.
"I cried that day," he told me. "And the very first thing I did afterwards was fill in a voter registration form.
"My polling card arrived this morning. I picked it up and did this," he said as he mimed kissing it.
"After 40 years, I can't wait to vote freely at last."
But Rahim didn't want to be thought of as a dissident or a political activist. He's an exceptionally skilled musician, one of the world's most accomplished players of the oud - a lute-like stringed instrument whose origins date back over 5,000 years.
I asked him to play for me. He obliged with a quick-paced, melancholy composition. His affinity with the instrument and the gentle, mournful sound it produced was striking.
"It's much more intimate than a guitar," he explained as he strummed. "You have to hug it like you'd hug your wife or girlfriend."
As a small boy, his bond with his oud was so strong that he used to sleep with it in its carry case. His love of music won him a string of awards and a place at the Institute of Music in his native Baghdad.
But it was Rahim's passion for composing and performing that forced him into exile. He used his talent and popularity to speak out against the regime by writing songs which protested against the Iran-Iraq war.
The authorities didn't hesitate. His recordings were banned and he was thrown into prison at the mercy of Saddam's torturers.
"But worst degradation was that they took my oud away," he recalled. "I'd practice playing on my wrist. It was as though I could hear the music."
After he was released from prison during the first Gulf War, Rahim fled the country using false papers. But because musicians had to declare their instruments before leaving Iraq, he had to leave the oud behind.
He went to Jordan before settling in Syria, where he met his wife and stayed for eight years. But when Iraq and Syria restored diplomatic relations in 1998, he had to leave again - this time for the USA.
The United Nations refugee agency sent him to Albuquerque, New Mexico, because they thought the desert landscape would remind him of home.
At first it seemed strange to him. It wasn't the bustling New York-style metropolis he had expected. But as he learned English and made friends, it became his favourite place in the world.
Rahim's career flourished. He played with symphony orchestras in New York and teaches music at the University of New Mexico. In 2008 he was nominated for a Grammy. And like any American, he exercised his constitutional right to complain about the state of the nation.
"America is a wonderful place - the country is gorgeous and the people are so open and welcoming," he said.
"But Americans are very isolated. The only people around them are the Mexicans, who they treat badly, and the Canadians, who are just like them.
"If I can do anything while I'm here, I'd like to help them understand other parts of the world."
I asked him how he was planning to use his first-ever free vote. The answer came back on the beat: Obama. The occupation of his homeland had been a disaster, he said.
"I had mixed feeling when Saddam was overthrown because he was such a terrible man," Rahim said. "But I also saw the devastation and the suffering that my people experienced as a result of the invasion.
"When there's a snake in your house, you don't destroy the house to get rid of it. But there have been four million people displaced in Iraq, one million dead, Shia turned against Sunni.
"It isn't just about Iraq. We need change at home too. Ask anyone about how the economy's affecting them. The Americans have suffered under Bush, too."
Before I left, we embraced. He made me promise never to take my right to vote for granted again.
Latin class
- 19 Sep 08, 09:14 AM GMT
The sound of ranchera and the smell of burritos filled the air around the New Mexico State Fair in Albuquerque. This was good news for my taste buds, but bad news for my waistline. I love Mexican food in the same way that most men love their wives, and a week on the bus had done little to help my exercise regime.
I wasn't the only visitor to the area. Yesterday, Barack Obama was in upstate Espanola, pitching his message to the Hispanics who make up 44% of New Mexico's population.
It's not difficult to see why. George Bush took this swing state by a whisker in 2004. Yet whereas over 40% of America's Hispanics are estimated to have voted for the Republican presidential nominee in 2004, it appears that John McCain may now be trailing his rival within the community nationwide by up to 30 percentage points.
Earlier, Jennifer spoke to New Mexico's Hispanic Governor Bill Richardson, who said such voters would be crucial come November:
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To find out why the Latino vote appeared to be shifting towards the Democrats, I struck up a conversation with 25-year-old Emmanuel Ortega, a Masters student from Albuquerque.
Emmanuel was born in Los Angeles but raised on the other side of the border in Juarez. He was frustrated by conservative anti-immigration rhetoric, he said, when people like his father, a construction worker, had stepped in to do the jobs that American citizens didn't want.
Bush's decision to build a 2,100-mile fence along the border with Mexico had been the final straw, he added.
"I don't know any of my family and friends who are planning to vote Republican," Emmanuel said.
"With the border, it's like they're sending out the message that people like me aren't welcome.
"And the economy is hurting us just the same as everyone else."
On the other side of the Fair, however, Fernando de Baca, 70, told a different story. The chairman of Bernalillo County Republicans argued that the Latino emphasis on hard work and family values, plus the Catholic church's opposition to abortion, made the community naturally conservative.
He offered another, blunter, reason why he believed John McCain would do well in New Mexico.
"The truth is that Hispanics came here as conquerors," he said. "African-Americans came here as slaves.
"Hispanics consider themselves above blacks. They won't vote for a black president."
I wasn't sure about this, though. Virtually all of the Hispanic voters I spoke to told me they were supporting Obama.
So I asked Gabriel Sanchez, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico's department of political science, whether he thought communal tensions were likely to play a role.
"I doubt there are more than 10% of Latinos who think that way - and half of them probably won't even go out to vote," he said.
Gabriel stressed that Hispanics were not a homogenous group. Mexicans in the south west, Puerto Ricans in the north east and traditionally Republican Cubans in Florida did not behave identically, he said.
"But in this election, I think Latinos are going to behave just like other Americans and vote with their pocket-books.
"Obama has poured millions of dollars into reaching out to them. If he succeeds, then he wins the election."
The Democrat may hope so. But this is one section of the electorate that refuses to be pigeonholed.
Run for your life
- 18 Sep 08, 01:30 PM GMT
I was gasping for air as I jogged beside Kaitlin Yepa through the humid New Mexico night. "How long does it take before you start to lose your breath?" I wheezed. "I don't know," came the cheerful reply. "Maybe an hour?"
We'd been on the road for, at most, five minutes. But then Kaitlin, 15, is a Native American - a people for whom running has become a form of communal survival.
I'd read all the statistics before I came here. How Native Americans suffered from the some of the highest rates in the country of teen suicide, alcoholism and poverty.
And earlier, as I was driven through Pueblo of Jemez, I'd seen the reality of these figures before me.
Underneath spectacular, bright red mountains were the reservation's peeling, ramshackle adobe cottages. Ancient pick-up trucks heaved their way up dusty side roads. At the request of my hosts, and out of deference to their traditions, I didn't take any photographs there. What I saw was beautiful, yet utterly bleak.
No-one there I visited was keen to talk about the hardships they faced, however. These were proud people. They wanted to tell me how much they loved running.
The sport has deep roots in their culture, something elders have tried to harness to keep their young people away from addiction and unemployment. The Wings of America cross-country team, based in nearby Santa Fe and composed of young Native American athletes, has won a boys' or girls' national title every year since it began competing in national contests in 1988.
Kaitlin belongs to the Jemez Eagles Running Club and trains for one to two hours a day, seven days a week. She told me that she loves the feeling of freedom it gives her, as well as the sense of achievement she gets from winning races.
"But I also hope that it can win me a scholarship to go study somewhere," she added.
"I'd like to go out of state. My mom always tells me that Jemez isn't going to go away anyplace."
This was exactly what Benjamin Mora, 40, hoped for when he set up the Eagles in 1995. After he became a state athletics champion while at high school, universities across America clambered over themselves to offer him a scholarship. His education degree had given him a good career as a teacher, and he was determined to show successive generations how to copy him.
"My grandfather told me that he used to run everywhere," he told me. "If we had to get somewhere, he'd say: 'Why don't you go run?' That's how we always did things."
The tragic, bitter history of the Native Americans was clearly extremely raw with Benjamin. He told me about the cruelty of the Conquistadors and the betrayals of Theodore Roosevelt.
It still angered him, he added, how his parents and grandparents had been taken away from their homes as children, separated from their culture, punished for speaking their own language, Towa.
I asked about the election. He couldn't see either McCain or Obama offering much to his community. "Even though I'm a Democrat, I haven't decided yet."
What struck me, though, was his that his anger appeared to be directed at the denial of Native American culture rather than the poverty and hardship that his people faced. Was he not enraged at the gap between their quality of life and that of middle America?
He gave me a look of pity. "I've got all my family here. I'll never be hungry. I'll never be homeless. How many rich men can say that?"
He was right. Still, it was obvious to me what his people were running from. What nobody can predict is where they will end up.
The view from Santa Fe
- 18 Sep 08, 09:39 AM GMT
It looks a bit nerve-wracking on Wall Street.
I asked some voters in Santa Fe, New Mexico (a pretty liberal place, on the whole) what they reckon the state of the financial markets means for them and whether it would affect how they vote.
Michael McMinn, 57, mortgage banker
I've been in the mortgage business for 29 years, and I've seen these things come and go in cycles.
All of this is happening because of poor investments in the sub-prime market. Mortgage lenders were giving out loans to people who just couldn't afford it.
The markets are in a bad way. But I think the overall economy is still in pretty good shape. We'll get out of this.
I don't think it matters too much who wins. They'll just appoint advisers who'll tell them what to do.
Janice McCoy, 67, book-keeper
Times are definitely getting tougher - I can see from my clients' books that they're making less.
But I think that it's going to get better. The government is doing the right things to get us back on track.
It's the Democratic Congress who are responsible. They're sitting around doing nothing so that Bush gets all the blame.
I really hope John McCain wins the election. Obama's liberal policies would be a complete disaster.
Talene Osborne, 53, bespoke seamstress
The people I work for say that they haven't done as much business this summer as last year.
So I suppose the crisis is going to affect me sooner or later.
I'm quite worried about the financial markets because I don't have health insurance and that leaves me vulnerable.
All I can really do is be careful with my money, just in case.
I've had it with the Republicans. This is all their mess.
Charles Koroneos, 57, retired salesman
I've been watching my spending because I'm extremely worried about what will happen.
I blame the Republicans. They've spent so much money on this war in Iraq that they can't afford to get the economy back on track.
The beneficiaries of the AIG bail-out will just be rich CEOs. I believe we should set a limit on how much they can make.
I hope Obama gets elected, but it'll take him another eight years to put right all the damage done by Bush.
John Cabaniss, 60, environmental director for a car firm
I, personally, am going to be OK because I've invested my money safely.
But I'm concerned about the impact on others. A lot of people are going to lose out.
For me, the real long-term issue is energy. We need to diversify and invest in renewables if we don't want to store up a whole load of problems for the future.
What we need is change. I think either Obama or McCain will provide that. What's important is that we get rid of Bush.
Linda Ellison, 56, shopkeeper
Every time I watch the news, it's really frightening. My business is doing OK, but how long will that last?
It's bad enough that the price of gas keeps climbing. Now we've got to worry about the stock market too.
My son has just graduated from business school. I've advised him not to look for a job until the election is decided.
We've been headed in the wrong direction for too long. What we need is a government that encourages manufacturing.
Low culture
- 18 Sep 08, 07:15 AM GMT
The culture wars are refusing to die down in New Mexico, according to the Albuquerque Journal. David Coss, the Democratic mayor of liberal Santa Fe, has pulled out of addressing an evangelical conference in the city after spotting a statement on the organisers' website comparing homosexuality to "Sodom and Gomorrah".
Given that Santa Fe has the second-highest percentage of same-sex couples in the US, Mayor Coss's decision sounds like smart politics. "If there was a Catholic conference on eliminating a woman's right to choose, I wouldn't participate in that either," he adds.
In response, the organiser of the event, Pastor Kyle Martin, is waspish. "The Scriptures say homosexuality is a sin, the same as pride," he tells the Journal.
It's easy to dismiss such stories as the well-rehearsed posturing of the nation's entrenched red and blue camps. But the passions enflamed by such spats perhaps help to explain another item in the paper.
It reports that officials fear over 1,000 new voter registration cards received in one county alone may be fraudulent. The clerk's office in Bernailillo has called in prosecutors after receiving forms offering the details of people who were already registered, it continues.
I don't know if it's the fact this is a crucial swing state, or something to do with a scorching climate. But politics sounds like a tough old business in New Mexico.
Fingers on buzzers
- 17 Sep 08, 09:36 AM GMT
In 1950 Ralph Edwards, the presenter of popular NBC radio quiz Truth or Consequences, set his listeners a challenge. If an American town were willing to rename itself after his show, he would broadcast its 10th anniversary episode there.
One sleepy settlement decided that it needed the publicity badly enough. On 31 March that year the citizens of Hot Springs, New Mexico, went to the polls. The change of name was approved by 1,294 votes to 294. On 1 April, Hot Springs officially became Truth or Consequences.
It sounds like the plot to some Frank Capra-esque feelgood comedy. But press attention gave the local tourist trade a much-needed boost. NBC also agreed to organise a Ralph Edwards Fiesta in the town on 1 May each year.
Though the residents had sacrificed something of their identity, their decision literally put Truth or Consequences on the map.
The story seemed to me to encapsulate the country's attitude to its heartlands. Americans idealise small towns - remember the reaction Bill Clinton received after his Place Called Hope speech?
But - as in the part of the world where I grew up - the encroachment of big chain stores has been blamed for snuffing out local identity. Now Truth or Consequences' 7,289 residents have their own Wal-Mart.
As the sun shone on Ralph Edwards Park I met Ed Irwin, 48. He was born in the town and had fond memories of growing up there. "It was great here when I was a kid," he recalls. "In the fiestas, you'd win things like entire encyclopaedias as raffle prizes. I got to meet all the big movie stars."
Now, though, he was worried that his way of life was being eroded.
"Our corporations, our government - they've lost all sense of individuality," he complained.
"That's what living in a small town is all about: doing your own thing. So I don't want no socialised health care, I'm going to take personal responsibility for myself."
He didn't like either of the main presidential candidates much, he said, but he was leaning towards McCain: "Sarah Palin's not some big-time politician. I think she understands people like me."
This very American preference for rugged individualism is one I've encountered already.
But Obama supporter Patch Rose, 42, offered a different take on what it meant to live in a place like this.
After having had a malignant brain tumour removed in 2005, Patch's insurance company had billed him for 10% of his medical costs: some $40,000. He was working to pay it back when disaster struck - the cancer returned.
"I couldn't afford to pay any more," he recalled. "I was just going to hold a big party and say goodbye to everyone."
But Truth or Consequences wouldn't let him. The town rallied round. Local painters donated artworks. The furniture store chipped in with a microwave and the golf club handed over a set of irons. An auctioneer - more used to dealing with cattle and goats - agreed to sell them at a special event.
The total raised - $13,000 - was enough to ensure he could have his second operation. Patch remembered the auction with amazement.
"We had cowboys, we had artists, we had Republicans, we had Democrats," he said.
"I think that's what small-town America is all about - that sense of community."
His wife Cookie, 51, said she didn't believe that her husband would still be alive if they had stayed at their previous home in New York.
"If we'd been back in Brooklyn, people would have been sympathetic - but I don't believe they'd have done anything like this," she added.
So is a place like Truth or Consequences all about individuality or community? I'm not sure. But it's possible that Americans value towns like this much because, ultimately, they want both.
Green ink
- 17 Sep 08, 09:18 AM GMT
If small-town America really does offer a window into the nation's soul, I wondered if the local press might offer me a leg-up to clamber through it. If nothing else, the financial crash stories in the big city dailies were starting to unnerve me.
The Herald of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, didn't have anything about John McCain or Barack Obama in its pages. Even council and state politics took second place to heavy flooding in southern Sierra County and the forthcoming 21st annual Festival of the Cranes.
But at a time when the economy is supposed to be at the forefront of most voters' minds, I was intrigued to see how many column inches were devoted to environmental issues.
A half-page report told how a well-attended Bountiful Alliance Recycling Project meting had demanded a reduction in the town's landfill. A "walkability audit" had been conducted by locals to help those who wanted to walk rather than drive. And on the letters page, a representative of the local Sierra Club chapter called for action "to reduce our dependence on dead-end energy sources like coal".
We're warned that as the economy worsens, concern for the environment will increasingly be seen as a luxury.
But local newspaper editors know their readers well. Maybe green issues are going to be a bigger deal than the pundits think?
A political bloodbath
- 16 Sep 08, 01:44 PM GMT
The gunfight at the OK Corral is one of the defining tales of the American West. According to popular legend, the shoot-out erupted on 26 October 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona, when Wyatt Earp and his fellow lawmen attempted to disarm the cattle-rustling Cowboy gang.
This story of a man doing what he had to do and cleaning up a lawless town has inspired countless films, books and songs. What I hadn't realised, though, was that the real-life shoot-out was actually a pitched battled between Republicans and Democrats.
"You think this election is vicious?" chuckled local historian Ben Traywick, 81. He took me on a tour of the town and told me about a time when a political bloodbath wasn't just a figure of speech.
In 1881, John P Clum, the Republican mayor of Tombstone, represented the Eastern mining interests who wanted to make the area safe for commerce. He hired Wyatt Earp's brother Virgil as the local chief of police. The Earps were also Republicans, and several of them had served on the Union side in the Civil War.
The Cowboys, by contrast, made sure that the countryside under their control voted Democrat. Many had fought for the Confederacy before moving west, and resented northern plutocrats telling them what to do.
Of course, the platforms of both parties have changed radically since then. But gun control, law and order and the influence of big corporations are still hot issues.
What actually happened on that day is hotly debated, and many historians have given the Cowboys a sympathetic reading.
But I was interested in how the myth of the Earps and Doc Holliday doing the right thing and facing down the bad guys might have shaped American politics - in particular, when it came to foreign policy.
Ben told me he was a conservative Republican, so I asked him whether he felt the spirit of Wyatt Earp was alive in America today. He frowned.
"We've given up on the last three wars we've gotten into because the media and politicians told us they weren't working," he said. "We don't have anyone standing up for the people any more."
We walked on through Tombstone. Its main strip still resembled an 1880s frontier town, except that all the stores sold postcards and souvenir stetsons. I wondered what the gunfight's participants would have made of their town earning its living not from silver mining nor cattle-rustling, but tourism.
Every day a group of actors re-enacts the gunfight. I went along to watch them square off against each other. Afterwards, I got talking to Tim Fattig, 31, who played Frank McLaury, one of the Cowboys. He told me he tended to vote for Democrats, although not the sort that the real-life McLaury would have recognised.
"It's not a popular position around here," he smiled.
"But John McCain says he wants to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years. I don't think that's a good idea at all."
At least he and Ben weren't trying to kill each other. As for me, I was grateful to Tombstone for putting the present-day animosity between red and blue America into context.
Annie, get your gun
- 15 Sep 08, 06:24 AM GMT
Carol Ruh cried the first time that she held a gun. Visiting a shooting range in Arizona while on holiday with her husband, her anti-firearms views made the trip an upsetting experience.
But after she told the staff of her discomfort, she underwent an epiphany.
"It was one of those life-defining moments," she recalled. "The gentleman behind the counter said: 'It's not the gun that kills, it's the person behind it.' And that made a lot of sense to me.
"If your heart is that set on doing damage, you can use a chair, a baseball bat, a pen..."
Since that day, Carol's attitudes have changed completely. Having moved to Phoenix permanently, she now runs classes teaching other female shooters how to hone their skills and heads a group called the Arizona Women's Shooting Association. Every time she leaves the house she reaches for her handbag, her keys and her gun.
I'm sure you've guessed why I wanted to come to their range. As soon as Sarah Palin's place on the Republican White House ticket was announced, pundits around the world picked over the apparent disparity between the Alaska governor's femininity and her handiness with a rifle.
And here, too, the lady shooters didn't conform to the stereotype of gun enthusiasts as rabid, wild-eyed survivalists. They'd laid on sandwiches and soda for me and chatted away about their children and careers. They were nice people.
But I admit that I'm uneasy around guns. I mentioned in my initial post how I've lived through the import of many American phenomena to my homeland - some of them good, some of them bad. The senseless killing of schoolchildren with firearms fell squarely into the latter category.
Of course, none of the women I met at the range liked violence any more than I did. I could see that they came here for the pleasure of firing at paper targets. All the same, it seemed that guns symbolised something more to them.
"Darling, you're in the west," laughed Carol. "This was the way of life out here. The whole genre of America was built on the west. It's part of out culture."
I think she was right about this. Europeans have no second amendment, no folk memory of living in a frontier society.
And the same applies to other parts of the US, too. Carol said she wouldn't vote for Barack Obama because he and running mate Joe Biden, both supporters of gun control, didn't understand why she loved shooting.
I wanted to find out what made this culture appealing to women, though, especially after Carol's husband Pete, also a convert, told me that he believes they are better at hitting a target than men.
"Their hand-eye co-ordination is better," he said. "They're more patient. You don't get any of the macho stuff."
So I got talking to Andrea Barringer, 27, who was sporting a chunky Glock 9mm on her hip. She'd grown up around guns, firing her first shot at the age of five.
"I think it's a fun pastime," she told me. "I go out shooting in the desert.
"Plus, I'm a single woman. If I was ever in that situation..." She left the sentence hanging.
Andrea hadn't decided to vote yet, but liked the look of Sarah Palin - a "typical American woman" to whom she could relate.
So too could 56-year-old flight attendant Lorra Moore. She'd only been shooting for a year under Carol's instruction, but hoped that the Alaska governor's prominence would encourage more females to take up the sport.
"I think it will really help to deflect the fears of women who don't understand guns," she said. "They don't understand that they can use them as easily as a man."
There was still one thing I wanted to know, though. What did she have to say to those - both American and foreign - who saw massacres like Dunblane and Columbine as a priori arguments for gun control?
"Those incidents were horrific," she said. "But the bad guys are always going to get the guns.
"I want to preserve the right of the good guys to protect themselves."
I nodded. This very American debate would continue long after I'd gone. I got back on the bus with the sound of pistol-fire ringing in my ears.
In God we trust
- 15 Sep 08, 02:17 AM GMT
The Radiant Church in Surprise, Arizona, does a pretty good job of reconciling God and Mammon. With its own bookstore and drive-through coffee shop, the 22-acre campus felt more like an upmarket retail park than a place of worship.
This was quite deliberate. When he was building it in 1996, Pastor Lee McFarland - a former Microsoft executive - wanted it to look like a shopping mall. Hence the X-Boxes laid on for children and the free Krispy Kremes handed out to worshippers.
I came here because no less than 42% of Americans tell pollsters that they attend church each week. And as the Radiant church is one of the country's fastest-growing, I hoped it would give me some clues about which way religious voters were leaning.
When I arrived inside the main hall, a band was playing tasteful soft-rock with biblical-themed lyrics beneath a bank of plasma screens. Over 1,000 casually dressed congregants sang and clapped along.
Then Pastor McFarlane took the stage for his sermon. He was neither a demagogue nor a ranter. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, he had the wry delivery of a New York stand-up comedian. He told a self-deprecating story about battling with a flying insect while riding his motorbike. I liked him.
When he talked about how bad things could still happen to people who went to church, the screens flashed up a montage of You've Been Framed-style home movie clips showing a baby wetting himself at a Christening and a priest dropping a communion wafer down a woman's cleavage. Like the rest of the congregation, I laughed.
After the service, I sat down with him to find out what influence churches like his had over political activity. He said that he never endorsed one candidate over another and left it to his followers to make up their own minds.
"I like to think that when I'm preaching, I'm not saying my own words," he said.
"We don't even look at the candidates, per se. It's more, 'What are the timeless principles in the Bible that we would give to the candidates?'"
It's true that he avoided political themes during the sermon I heard, other than to condemn racial prejudice - a statement that was greeted with loud cheers from his flock.
Nonetheless, most of the churchgoers I spoke to told me they were voting Republican. The party's anti-abortion principles were cited again and again. While John McCain had once been viewed with suspicion by evangelicals, the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket appeared to have energised them.
In the lobby I met friends Laura Palmer, 39, and Janell Gallop, 48, sharing a coffee after the service. Both had opposing views on the relationship between faith and politics.
For Janell, religion was absolutely paramount.
"I vote for people who have a basis in Christianity," Janell said. "This country was built on Christianity.
"I'm going to vote for McCain. I believe that Obama has a Muslim background. He doesn't have a Christian background."
Laura interjected that this wasn't strictly accurate. Although just as staunch a believer as her friend, she described herself as an independent voter who didn't like to see politicians giving sermons.
"Religion and politics don't mix," she shrugged. "I shouldn't tell you how you should live.
"I can't make you think the way I do."
She can't. But it's clear that there are enough Christian voters to sway an election. Whether more of them are thinking like Janell or Laura remains to be seen.
Easy riders
- 14 Sep 08, 01:47 AM GMT
The Route 66 Riders of Kingman, Arizona, weren't what I was expecting from a group of bikers. All the members I met were over 60, for a start. None of them sported long hair or leather jackets. They didn't look like they started many bar-room brawls, although I'm sure there'd be hell to pay if you said anything mean about their grandkids.
For this, I was grateful. I expect your average Hells Angel would take one look at a pale Scotsman like me before reaching for his flick-knife.
Instead, the Riders all shook my hand and asked if I was having a nice trip. Relieved, I realised these were the ideal people to help me understand McCain country.
The Republican presidential candidate represents Arizona in the US Senate, after all, and has demonstrated his popularity with bikers. He exudes the sort of rugged, maverick persona that seems to go with an enthusiasm for travelling extremely fast through open spaces.
And I'm sure there's got to be some sort of connection between landscape and politics, too. Arizona is a red state both in terms of the colour of its desert and the complexion of its representation. It's easy to see how an environment so stark and empty conditions a preference for hardy individualists.
As he showed me his customised Kawasaki, David Brown, 69, told me that he'd moved out here after 30 years working for General Motors in Livonia, Michigan. It was the emptiness and the warm air that brought him to Arizona, he said, the terrain being ideal for riding.
"There's nothing like it," he grinned. "You're out there with the wind on your face breathing the open air of the desert. No-one else is around you. Perfect."
He was, he said, a staunch Republican. I wondered aloud if there was any connection between his hostility to big government and his love of the open road.
"Right," he nodded. "It's all under the same umbrella. Being free, doing what you want, no-one telling you what to do."
.
His fellow motorcyclists were leaning the same way. Barbara Hall, 77 - who had taken up riding just a year and a half previously - had been sold by Sarah Palin's place on the Republican ticket.
Ken Jones, 76, proudly showed me the Stars and Stripes flags fluttering from his bike. A proud union man all his working life as an electrician, he was undecided - but inclined towards McCain. "Obama's just 47," he said. "I don't think that just because McCain is older, he'll be better for seniors. But I think he understands us."
But I did come across one couple who were planning to back Obama. Roger and Luci Pewsey, 77 and 74 respectively, hadn't been out riding much since Roger began to suffer heart problems and diabetes some months earlier.
But Luci was still secretary and treasurer of the Riders, and Roger talked fondly about the pastime he had enjoyed since 1949.
"We really need change in this country," Luci said. "Most people round here are registered Republicans, but I'm a Democrat. I'm very concerned about keeping Roe v Wade."
Roger, previously a floating voter, complained that gas prices were too high, but believed Obama was the best man to bring them down. "We're too dependent on foreign oil," he said. "I think we really need to look at alternative energy sources."
It was time to go, so I jumped back on the bus. There were cacti by the roadside, and soon we passed a dead rattlesnake. This was a place for doing your own thing. Would you agree, tucsonmike?
Get ready
- 13 Sep 08, 04:23 PM GMT
While I was out in the suburbs, Jennifer caught up with caught up with Otis Williams of the Temptations and their manager Shelly Berger.
They told her that a lot has changed in Vegas since the band started touring here in 1968:
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No place like home
- 13 Sep 08, 01:44 AM GMT
As the sun beat down on Las Vegas's suburbs, it wasn't difficult to spot the foreclosed homes.
There were the overgrown gardens, for a start. The windows boarded up with plywood. And if you wandered round the back, the empty swimming pools were a giveaway.
Las Vegas has long been a magnet for gamblers. But locals who've had a flutter on the local property market have found the odds stacked far longer than they thought.
In the wake of the mortgage crash, Nevada has earned the unenviable title of America's foreclosure capital.
Across the Las Vegas metropolitan area, the situation is grim. The median house price has fallen by 25% over 12 months.
I asked Mark Peveler, 47, a local estate agent with Caldwell Banker Wardley Real Estate, to drive me around the city's worst-hit areas.
It was a depressing journey. As I looked at those vacant porches, I wondered how much anguish their abandonment had caused.
One of the properties he showed me was an imposing four-bedroom, five-bathroom detatched home in a gated community with a view right across the city.
At first it had gone on the market for $1,168,750 (£653,115). But it proved impossible to sell. By the time it was foreclosed two years later, its list price had fallen to $959,900 (£536,406).
Eventually, the exasperated owner, a young male speculative buyer, did what's known in the industry as a "jingle-mail" - he popped the keys in an envelope and posted them to the bank.
I asked Mark why such stories were so common in Las Vegas right now.
"Hollywood tells people they can come to here with a dollar and get rich," Mark said. "It doesn't always work out that way.
"You hear some really heartbreaking stories - families losing their homes and moving into hotels. It's tough-going for them."
Mark introduced me to Danielle Weems, who knows all too well the human cost of the credit crunch.
In 2006, she thought she had found a home for life. She bought her $300,000 (£167,644) house on an interest-only loan after being told that the buoyant Las Vegas property market was a safe bet and she could refinance in a couple of years.
But the advice turned out to be ill-founded. Two years on, prices had crashed and her home had nearly halved in value.
Danielle, 35, had kept up her repayments, but the mortgage company refused to refinance the loan.
She had no choice but to sell and drop the price well below what she had paid.
Having extensively refurbished the property, she calculated that she has lost over $200,000 (£111,763). The experience had left her furious - and cynical about the ability of any politician to improve the situation.
"I've heard it all," she said. "Everybody's going to save us. You know what? When I was going through it, nobody saved me.
"I'm a person who's been paying my mortgage on time every month and I'm prepared to repay my $300,000 loan.
"I have a family. I thought I'd be in this house forever."
Before I left Mark, I asked him who he thought was more likely to benefit politically from the faltering economy - Senator Barack Obama with his promise of change, or Senator John McCain with his pledge of leadership?
"Well, the Democrats are strong in this area, so I can't see it making too much difference round here," he shrugged. "As for the rest of the country - well, who knows?"
The chips are down
- 12 Sep 08, 11:43 PM GMT
I've been flicking through the Las Vegas Sun. According to the paper, city mayor Oscar Goodman, a Democrat, has commissioned a set of personalised poker chips which he gives to visiting dignitaries.
On one side, the chips read: "The Happiest Mayor of the Greatest City in the World." On the other, they carry a photograph of Mr Goodman himself.
Delegations from Peru, Russia, China, Slovakia and Kenya have been lucky enough to take home these mementos, the paper reported. It quoted the mayor himself on why so many flock to his city: "They love the glitz and the glamour."
This tells me something about Nevada politics. But I'm not quite sure what.
What happens in Vegas
- 12 Sep 08, 08:13 AM GMT
I can see why Las Vegas became the casino capital of the US. Coming out here in the first place must have been quite a gamble.
Who other than a punter, or someone completely deranged, would build a city amid the barren, arid emptiness of the Mojave desert? But for decades it has been defying the odds.
It came as a jolt when the bus arrived in town. One minute we were surrounded by miles of nothing except lots of dust and the odd boulder. The next we were in the midst of what appeared to be Blackpool as designed by Hieronymous Bosch, the replica Eiffel Tower straddling an imitation "Paris" being my favourite landmark here so far.
It would be easy to mock Vegas's excesses, but I think that would be to miss the point. In a country where boldness and risk-taking are celebrated like nowhere else, is it any wonder that Americans flock here?
Of course, there's a darker history to the city, as anyone who watched Scorsese's Casino will know - one in which the presence of the mob loomed large. And recently the local economy has suffered, with takings and visitor numbers down as tourists tighten their belts.
But if Vegas offers a very different take on the American Dream from that suggested by Venice Beach, it surely stems from the same sense of optimism that wealth and riches can be within anyone's grasp.
I don't gamble these days, not since Ivan Sproule let me down by failing to score in a Scottish Cup semi-final a couple of years back.
But I thought I'd wander over to Orleans casino to try to find some Americans who were winning and losing.
The din of the slot machines rattling around me, I got talking to Gene and Cathy Ormond, who moved to Vegas from New York three years ago after Gene retired. Those years have been good to them, they told me - the weather was better, they'd been able to buy a much bigger house thanks to local house prices, and twice a week they could go out to play the slot machines before heading for a meal.
"I just think it's so glamorous," Cathy told me. "When you fly in and you see all the lights, it's beautiful. There's so much to do here. We're so lucky."
Why did Americans like to gamble, I wondered?
"Everyone just wants to hit the jackpot, I guess," Gene chuckled. "You know that the odds favour the casino, but it's still fun trying."
Sitting nearby, were George Lazar, 78, and wife Anna-Marie, 77, visiting from Cleveland, Ohio, to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.
They hadn't been so fortunate in recent years. When George retired as an aircraft designer, he had thought he had provided for his old age.
"I was quite well-off," George sighted. "I had a lot invested. Until the markets crashed, that is. We're getting by, but it's hard for people right now."
"I'm really angry about the way this country is being run," Anna-Marie interrupted. "All those foreclosures. It's time for change."
Like the Orlandos, they were decent people who wanted to enjoy their retirement. But America is all about making your own luck.
Faraway, so close
- 11 Sep 08, 11:01 PM GMT
Baker, California, is 2,614 miles by road from New York. In terms of size, culture and landscape, this community of 914 souls in the heart of the Mojave desert couldn't be further from the bustling streets of Manhattan or Washington DC.
But the terrorist atrocities seven years ago on the distant east coast were taken by people here as an assault on them, too.
It's a very different California from the one I encountered on Venice Beach. This is small-town USA as I'd always imagined it: dusty sidewalks, a truck stop, and wide, empty horizons.
I jumped off the bus. Everyone I passed nodded or wished me good morning. The main attraction here was the world's largest thermometer. For the first time, it hit me: this is it. I'm really in America.
Here are Jennifer's impressions of Baker:
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In terms of outlook and political attitudes, I suspected that Baker might have more in common with battleground states like Nevada and New Mexico than Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I wanted to find out how people felt about the legacy of 9/11 on its grim anniversary. So I wandered into Bob's Big Boy burger bar and pulled up a chair.
Everyone I spoke to - supporters and opponents of the invasion of Iraq - recalled how personally they took the 2001 attacks, regardless of their distance from the targets.
Take Mark Isaak, 47, a salesman, who still remembered the shock he felt when his wife told him that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre. "I was just so stunned and horrified," he recalled. "Why had all those innocent people died? I knew it was an attack on every American."
A Republican and evangelical Christian, Mark supported the invasion of Afghanistan. But by the time US troops were preparing to enter Iraq, he had his doubts.
"I had my misgivings from the start. And we got ourselves into an awful mess over there.
"So many people have been killed. And it meant a lot of money that could have gone into things like education went into the war instead."
Across the bar, Kelly McDonald, 31, a pharmaceuticals sales rep, was tucking into her burger. She, too, said she felt the attacks were an assault on communities like Baker as much as on the centres of the nation's power.
I asked her why she felt this way. "It wouldn't have mattered if it were Des Moines, Iowa, or Los Angeles," she replied. "We're all Americans. This was aimed at all of us."
Unlike Mark, though, she was an enthusiastic backer of invading Iraq from the start.
"I don't think Saddam was responsible," she said. "But I think he could have been connected. You know, I'm not sure that the WMDs were never there. We know what he was capable of.
"Sure, I've got my criticisms of the war. The surge should have started earlier. But Saddam was a bad guy.
"No-one's successfully managed to attack us since. What does that tell you?"
However remote Mark and Kelly might have been from the actual events of 9/11, it says much about the resilience of their collective identity that recollections of that day remain so vivid.
I can't see those memories fading any time soon. At the same time, however, I suspect that arguments over the government's reaction to the attacks are going to divide communities like Baker for a long time yet.
California dreaming
- 11 Sep 08, 04:37 AM GMT
Venice Beach couldn't be more Californian if it grew its hair long and took up yoga. Toss a joss stick along the seafront and you'd strike half-a-dozen tie-dyed T-shirts before it hit the sand.
Other parts of the country might scorn the locals as effete coastal wackos, a world away from the true American heartland.
But, still. A steady stream of bright-eyed incomers from across America have flocked west regardless for decades, lured by the prospect of fame and wealth.
At first it was the gold rush that brought them. Then it was Hollywood. Today, you wonder if every waitress or barman who serves you is a future rock star or matinee idol.
Just down the road from where I'm writing this, a young immigrant from Austria called Arnold Schwarzenegger used to pump iron in Gold's Gym. And look at him now.
As I gazed out at the shimmering Pacific for the first time in my life, the sun beating down on my face, I realised that I was looking at the American dream.
To find out why California exercises this pull and generates such resentment, I caught up with 53-year-old Nicholas Omana, who moved here from his native Salt Lake City ("not being a Mormon, I didn't really fit in there").
A voice-over artist by day and a stand-up comedian by night, he wasn't exactly difficult to identify as an adopted Californian by his floral shirt and easy, avuncular laugh.
I asked him what made things different here. It's because in the west, he told me, the frontier spirit lives on.
"People come out here to make it big, and I think that lends itself to taking risks and trying new things," he says.
"It seems to me that optimism and liberalism go together, and Californians are naturally optimistic."
I don't think this is the whole story, though. This is the state that gave us Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and - as I've already noted - Prop 13. Surely California's defiant individualism and buccaneering get-up-and-go have, historically, lent themselves as much to the right as much as the left?
My hunch was confirmed as I wandered down nearby Abbot Kinney, an upmarket, bohemian thoroughfare where Obama posters hung from porches and anti-Bush graffiti was etched in the cement.
I got talking to Jordan Peagler, a 21-year-old student in a flowing CND logo-print dress. I took it as read that she, like everyone else round here, must be a true-blue Democrat - if not a Green or a Yippie or some such.
But I was wrong. Jordan, who had moved here from Savannah, Georgia, liked the look of another new girl in town.
"I guess I'm undecided," she told me. "But I thought Sarah Palin made a great speech after her nomination. I like her manner.
"I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.
"But some of my friends lost members of their family on 9/11. That will weigh heavily on the decision I make. I feel that leaving Iraq is much more complicated than certain politicians make it out to be."
It's an apposite point, today of all days, though not everyone in Venice would concur.
But that's the thing with California. Why should it have to agree with anyone else?
Patriot games
- 11 Sep 08, 04:28 AM GMT
OK, so immigration is a serious issue in this election. I knew I needed to speak to someone born abroad about how they went about assimilating - this country having been, essentially, built by huddled masses yearning to be free.
But it was still a bit of a shock when I turned up for BBC World Service debate (which you can listen to here), and, out of the audience, a 86-year-old chap from Wimbledon, south London, with an unadulterated English accent, stood up to tell everyone how proud he was to be an American.
Basil Lewis wouldn't have it otherwise. He still felt affection for Britain, he told me when I caught up with him afterwards. And friends would often ask him how he could square his national identity with his manner of speech.
Yet America has been good to Basil since he left London in 1977 to escape high taxes and a "semi-socialist government". His career as a broker had flourished, his wife loved Los Angeles, and his three sons had become an attorney, a financial consultant and a Hollywood scriptwriter respectively.
"It's not my country right or wrong," he said. "But it's more often right than wrong."
Fiercely critical of illegal entrants to the republic ("my immigration to America was difficult, tortuous - and entirely legal. So I'm totally against them"), Basil must have thought about this more than most, I reasoned.
So what is it, I asked, that made him an American?
He shrugged. "I like the whole concept that everyone is equal. I like the capitalist system," he replied.
I know I'm an outsider. But there's got to be more to it than that, I thought.
Or is there? What do you think?
Sound and vision
- 11 Sep 08, 04:16 AM GMT
I'd like you to meet my colleague Jennifer Copestake, whom I mentioned in my initial post. She's on the trip too, filming a video blog for World News America.
And here she is, giving a guided tour of the bus:
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Free thought
- 10 Sep 08, 02:35 AM GMT
Michael David Cobb Bowen started out as a radical black student leader, steeped in theories of Afrocentrism and the fight against racism. His induction into politics came from his father, a left-wing civil rights activist.
A natural Barack Obama voter? Wrong. Michael is a committed John McCain supporter and a prolific conservative blogger.
But then this is a country where being a maverick, an independent thinker, is a badge of honour - as McCain has found to his advantage.
I met 47-year-old Michael, a senior manager at an IT firm, over coffee near his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach. Well-dressed, measured and urbane, he smiled as he acknowledged that he defied the Republican stereotype.
"It annoys me when Democrats take the black vote for granted," he told me. "But I think it's inevitable that more and more black folks will start thinking the same way I do.
"How many do you think would vote for Colin Powell if he were the candidate?"
At a time when Obama is hailed as a trailblazer for the African-American community and just 10% of black voters say they will back McCain, Michael admitted that his views set him apart from family and friends.
The Obama thing, as he called it, has driven a wedge between him and his father, and his wife remains a committed Democrat.
But he always knew that black politics were far from homogenous. He remembered the internecine battles from his activist days between those, like him, who wanted to help the community's best and brightest, and others who wanted to focus on getting the poorest kids out of the ghetto.
After the Los Angeles riots of 1992, he would follow police officers around with a video camera hoping to find evidence of brutality. "Instead, I found most were decent people trying to help others," he recalled.
His faith in the certainties of black politics fractured, he began to conclude that - as a middle-class businessman with a family to provide for - he had more in common with suburban conservatives than radicals in his own community. The "socialism of black radical politics," he decided, was keeping black leaders out of the mainstream.
Eventually, he turned to the Republicans after growing exasperated with what he saw as elitist, utopian liberals who were impatient with ordinary Americans.
"Ultimately, I'm a patriot," he said.
"When I see a Nascar sticker or a Ford truck commercial, I think, 'That's a conservative.'"
Time to play devil's advocate, I thought. If the route to progress for African Americans is promoting the best and brightest, I asked him, why not back the bright young black man running for president?
He pauses. "If Obama loses, then that's the end of Jesse Jackson. And I reckon that would be a good thing."
What interested me about Michael wasn't the content of his politics. It was that he saw it as his duty as an American to think freely.
And in a nation where race and racism have caused so much tragedy and bitterness, I realised that the resilience of an American's identity is something I shouldn't underestimate on my journey.
Going to the chapel?
- 10 Sep 08, 02:05 AM GMT
They say family values are a big deal over here, don't they?
So I thought I'd kick off my journey across the US by chatting to a pair of all-American newlyweds. And sure enough, it didn't take me long to find a couple who proudly showed me their wedding photos, talking earnestly about the virtues of commitment and the sanctity of marriage.
So far, so homespun. Except that both were women.
On 17 June, California conducted its first same-sex weddings following a ruling by the state's Supreme Court. My hosts Helena Ruffin, 51, and Rose Greene, 61, were among the first same-sex partners in Los Angeles to be joined in matrimony.
Unions like theirs, we are told, divide red and blue America more than virtually any other issue.
Opponents have collected enough signatures to stage a statewide referendum, proposition 8, which, if passed, would introduce a constitutional ban on gay marriage in California.
Such ballots are usually introduced to boost turnout among particular groups of voters. So far, the polls suggest a "No" vote is likely in this traditionally socially liberal state - the only one apart from Massachusetts to allow such unions.
And California has led the way via such polls in the past. In 1978, proposition 13 on property tax was credited with ushering in Ronald Reagan's Republican revolution.
Rose and Helena might, superficially, tick every box of left-liberal America - a same-sex couple from southern California with a huge Obama placard on their front lawn.
But as they poured me ice tea and told me why they wanted to tie the knot, their reasoning struck me as firmly traditionalist - conservative, even.
"Our wedding day was the happiest day of my life," said Helena. "I believe very strongly in the sanctity of marriage. I feel so much more at peace now that I've done it."
Rose - who had been in the middle of a gruelling course of therapy for ovarian cancer on their big day - leaned across her new wife. "Marriage is unambiguous. Everyone knows what it means. It's about making the ultimate commitment."
It was better for the children of gay couples, she added, to grow up in a stable family environment that was recognised by everyone
Of course, they spoke of their desire for equality. But that and the matter of their gender aside, their arguments could just as easily have been articulated by any clean-cut Young Republican couple in the heartland.
The proposition 8 Yes campaign say they have no objection to how others live their lives, nor to domestic partnerships which protect the rights of same-sex couples. But they argue that the Supreme Court's ruling "redefined marriage for the rest of society" - thus undermining this fundamental institution.
Leave aside your views on the rights and wrongs of the issue.
What's more interesting to me is the common ground both apparently antagonistic sides share - belief in the central role of marriage in American life, and the family as the fundamental building block of society.
Many of the posters who commentated on my first blog post warned me not to generalise about Americans or fall back on stereotypes. You know, I think they might be on to something.
Magic bus
- 9 Sep 08, 02:13 AM GMT
So I'm in the US. Apparently there's some sort of election coming up soon. Do you reckon anyone might have any opinions about it?
Hello, my name's Jon Kelly and this is my blog. It's called Talking America, because I'm going to spend the next month or so doing exactly that - talking to and about ordinary Americans, trying to find out where this vast, extraordinary country wants to go at such a crucial time.
See that big shiny BBC bus I'm posing beside? Well, we'll be spending a lot of time together over the next 38 days.
I'm hitching a ride from Los Angeles to New York, buttonholing all the people and personalities I encounter along the way in a somewhat kamikaze bid to extrapolate the state of the union.
This is all part of the BBC US 08 Talking America project, and I'll be joined by colleagues from radio and TV along this coast-to-coast odyssey, as we try to help the USA and the rest of the planet make sense of each other.
According to polls, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe their country is heading in the wrong direction. Well, being an inquisitive sort, I'd like to find out which way they'd like to turn instead.
I've always been fascinated by this place. When I was growing up in a small town in southern Scotland, everything about the USA sounded at once imposing and exciting.
We didn't have skyscrapers or Oreos or school shootings in Dumfries, for better or for worse. But like the rest of the Western world we were immersed in American music and American movies, American fast food and a way of life that took its lead from American consumer society.
I've never before visited any of the places on my itinerary. I'm sure that most people I encounter will take me for some know-nothing foreigner asking daft questions in a funny accent - an assessment with which I won't really be able to quarrel.
But the place I am very familiar with is the America in my head, the America of the imagination - and I'm curious to find out how closely my second-hand European prejudices actually conform to reality.
We hear a lot about how deeply this place is meant to be divided. The culture wars are back, apparently. What I'd like to put my finger on, though, is what common ground these supposedly intractable factions actually share - what it is that makes them American.
But I won't be alone on this truly multimedia journey. I'll point you to some of the reports produced by my radio colleagues, while BBC World News America's Jennifer Copestake has very kindly offered to share her video with me.
I'd like to invite you, too, to have a look at the Flickr stream we're running.
And thanks to this shiny new interactive age in which we all now apparently live, I hope we can get the rest of the world talking - about what they want from a superpower whose foreign policy, cultural dominance and economic well-being affect us all.
Above all, I'd like to hear what you have to say - about this blog (I can take it), about our coverage, and about your views on the issues we encounter.
I hope it's going to be a lot of fun. But if you'll excuse me, my jet lag is starting to make its presence felt. I'd better conserve my energy for the journey ahead...
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Hello, I’m Jon Kelly and this is my blog. I’m on the BBC election bus, travelling across the US asking where Americans want their country to go.
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