Friday 17 September 2010

Highs and Lows of Chicago


Last weekend we all dashed to Chicago; L was working and the boys and I tagged along because we are now Official Travel Boffins of America or something. When L first suggested the trip I didn't want to bother, frankly. It seemed too soon after our epic road trip for one thing.But I am trying to stop saying 'no' to things out of laziness, and off we went.

The actual flight was ridiculously easy, despite having to get up at 5am. For one thing, I keep forgetting how straightforward domestic flights are here in the USA. For another, suddenly sitting still for two and a half hours en famille is easy-peasy after all the crazy cross-country driving we have done. Almost immediately we were descending into a Great Lakes rain storm and a few minutes after that we were in a taxi ploughing through the downpour to Downtown.

The city is beautiful, naturally: an uproar of towers and skyscrapers from the last 100 years, steel and glass and stone and brick, blending and reflecting off of each other and looming over the broad streets and spacious parks. Through all this weaves the 'L', the elevated railway with its silver rolling stock. It completely covers some streets, making the sidewalk feel like an undercity from a 1930s dystopian version of the future - which it probably is to be fair.

Our time was limited so we tried to cram in as much as we could. On Saturday we did the Art Institute and managed to impress Christopher with some paintings - albeit only because he recognised them from Doctor Who. Still, he got a real frisson out of seeing Van Gough's bedroom and his self-portrait, so well done the BBC. Bless him, he does think Van Gough's first name is 'Mister' though.

On Sunday L had to some actual work so we left her behind and caught the bus to the Museum of Science & Industry. More on that, and the Sears Willis Tower in a minute.

Our flight times on Monday allowed us just enough time to have a stab at the Field Museum, Chicago's answer to the Natural History Museum. Again it was astoundingly good - excellent evolution/life on Earth/dinosaurs exhibition, wonderful recreation of an ancient Egyptian tomb and a great set of rooms on pre-European American civilisations. Then it was back in the taxi, back on the plane, 'oh, we've landed' and then back home for dinner. Bang, job done.

Now rewind to Sunday for the highs and lows.

Lows: Ha ha, I'm so clever. The low point, of course, was going up to the top of the Willis née Sears Tower. The ride in the elevator (24 feet per second, fact fans) was enough to make me giddy all by itself. The views from the top were spectacular, but they had to ruin it all by installing some glass flooring in a bay window so that my boys could stand on it, jump up and down and watch me beg (from a safe distance) them to get off.

Highs: Ha ha ha! Did I mention how clever I am? The high point was to be found down in the bowels of the Museum of Science & Industry where they have the U-505: a 250ft long, 750 tonne German submarine that was captured by the US Navy off the coast of Africa in June 1944. The boys may be able to cope with heights, but they clearly didn't take to the claustrophobia-inducing interior. With the doors shut, the lights dimmed, and the recorded noise of the engines echoing through the hull, our short guided-tour was very atmospheric. In hushed tones the guide describes the location and capture of the sub as if it were happening right now, above us. Chilling.

Unusually, the 54 crew members were captured/rescued after the sub was depth-charged by Hunter-Killer Task Force 22.3. Even more unusually, the Germans failed to scuttle their ship resulting in a great intelligence coup for the Allies. U-505 was disguised and towed to the Bahamas to be pored over by Naval Intelligence; her crew were sent to a POW camp in Louisiana, just for them, where they played baseball and picked cotton for 25 cents a day. At the end of the war they were all offered American citizenship and six of them took it. Meanwhile, the U-505 was scheduled for use as target practice as German military assets were put beyond use. But the captain of the US task force that had captured the sub intervened - he pulled some strings and got it saved, and he was able to donate it to his local museum in his home town of Chicago.

There it sat, on the front lawn, until a purpose-built underground chamber was constructed for it in 2005. It's amazing, straight out of The Spy Who Loved Me. Most beautifully, one of the six Americanised crew members moved to Chicago, just to be close to his old ship. In fact, he became a volunteer at the museum and himself gave tours of the vessel for many years until he died.

Of the 1200 U-boats that survived World War Two, there are only 5 left in the world. And the U-505 is the only one outside Europe.

As you might be able to tell, I was suitably impressed.

Or, to put it another way...

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We can't all be victims, can we?

I do get angry. I try not to, but I am weak and I get very, very cross, especially when people disagree with me. It is a terrible failing, perhaps, but it might seem occasionally that it is born out a very real and sincerely held belief that I am right about everything. I promise that - on some level at least -  I do accept that other people are allowed to disagree with me and that they may even be correct to do so. What actually infuriates me is the possibility that they might be unable to concede the same point to me.

Take, for example, his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who swept into the United Kingdom this week. Infallibility is in his job description, for Darwin's sake, so it's inevitable that he is going to upset people whilst he's lecturing to them about the evils of their atheism/homosexuality/feminism/AIDS prevention methods. To  make matters worse, his (literally) dogmatic approach to these issues has caused his opponents to adopt similarly uncompromising attitude, with 'militant atheist' Richard Dawkins now leading a cadre of hardline extremists. Both sides are now well dug in to increasingly entrenched positions.

The same thing has been happening politically here in the USA for years, of course, but the divisions have widened dramatically since the election of Barack Obama. Without a Republican president, the right has no responsible authority figure to keep it on the leash and so various unpleasant types like Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and the Tea Party movement have seized the opportunity to push their more extreme agenda. Last month Beck led a rally of, possibly, several hundred thousand people at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC - ostensibly to reclaim the civil rights movement for white, right-wing Christians.

What disturbs me most is that all sides, in all these conflicts, see themselves as the victims. The leaders, possibly, are overstating the perceived threat posed by their opponents so as to energise their base, but the effect on their supporters is dramatic. Here Tea Partiers are genuinely afraid that the gays and the Muslims and the socialists are coming for them. Liberals feel swamped, scared that the political system is being run by Big Money and Fox News. Muslim American citizens have to put up with the terrifying antics of half-wits like Terry Jones and his mooted Qu'ran burning, whilst the non-Muslims majority is largely horrified by the thought of a mosque at Ground Zero. In the US, atheism is a dirty word whilst in the UK blasphemy is still a criminal offence in Scotland and Northern Ireland. At the same time, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Pope does genuinely believe that his religion is under siege by the forces of "aggressive secularism".

I can't say how many of these myriad fears are justified, but it can't be true that all sides are simultaneously so greatly threatened. But this is the nature of the debate: polarising and utterly poisonous.

And I'm guilty of it myself - I read the news I want to read, because it reinforces the positions I've already decided to adopt. I forward on opinions and stories, but I only send them to friends that I know will be predisposed to like them too. And if I do get into a conversation with someone who thinks differently to me, I've already closed my brain down to the possibility that I might be persuaded.

But then, the only other option would be to get very, very angry.