Talking America

Faraway, so close

• Jon Kelly
• 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:

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.

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California dreaming

• Jon Kelly
• 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?

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Patriot games

• Jon Kelly
• 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?

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Sound and vision

• Jon Kelly
• 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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