Stateside Part 3

Our US trip finished in New York, where we discovered that the city really never sleeps. It is such a jumble of memories and impressions that it defies a written account. Among the things that stand out for me are Ground Zero (a profoundly moving experience), the High Line, Central Park and the buzz of the city at night. Of the five evenings we were there we spent three at shows. We saw Gore Vidal's "The Best Man" with James Earl Jones chewing up the scenery, a dazzling musical adaptation of "Mary Poppins" and, on the last evening, a superb production of Benjamin Britten's sombre opera, "Billy Budd", at the Met.

Otherwise, all I can do to give some idea of the kaleidoscopic, "larger than live" experience is to present these miscellaneous photos.

Stateside, part 2

After the official leg of my US visit ended in Shepherdstown, Magdalena and I returned to Washington and enjoyed three days of hospitality from our hosts, Sue and Helen. We used the time to engage in intensive sightseeing.

We started with Arlington cemetery, where a visit to the graves of the Kennedy brothers was obligatory, even though I have mixed feelings about that family. The father (who, of course, is not buried there) was a nasty man whose suffering late in life seems like poetic justice. JFK always seems to me to be more form that substance but I could accept that overall his intentions were good and that his tragically short Presidency did reinvigorate American politics. Bobbie is the one I have the most regard for and his untimely murder was the biggest tragedy of all. In the end, none of them were saints but the three brothers deserve to be remembered more for good than bad reasons. Arlington was also, of course, the home of Robert E Lee, a man of decency and integrity who, if he backed the wrong side in the Civil War, did it for the best of motives.

Crossing back into Washington, the Mall features memorials to four of the giants of the US Presidential Pantheon: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Washington is the one I find hardest to like. His military leadership was mediocre; ultimately, the war was lost by the British rather than won by the Americans. However, he can be justifiably admired, in the wake of the end of the war, for resisting the urge to become a dictator (a role some of his peers would have been happy to see him fill); holding out instead for agreement on a constitution. We can thank Jefferson for much of the thinking that inspired the best elements of the Revolution and the Constitution, and that still remains something of a break on the worst tendencies in American politics. Lincoln is my favourite President. He certainly showed himself to be ruthless on occasion but one has to admire the formidable intellect and courage of this man who really did start out with so many disadvantages, and who was initially dismissed by many in the Washington elite as a provincial hack. And, finally, Roosevelt did so much for America and, once again, embodies the compassion and sense of decency that is the best side of the national character. The more one reads history the more problematic the idea of historical heroes appears; all of these men on occasion made mistakes and shabby compromises but they are all great men.

One great man for whom the term “hero” is less problematic, and who is also deservedly commemorated on the Mall, is Martin Luther King. He can be remembered for his courage, his moral integrity,his moving oratory (unlike Lincoln, we are fortunate enough to have his voice to listen to) and his unswerving adherence to non-violence.

(As an aside, I am old enough to remember the deaths of John and Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King)

The Mall also features a memorial to the men of World War II, and memorials to the men and women of the Vietnam war.  We were privileged to meet a veteran of the latter war at the memorial, whose willingness to talk about his experience to children and passers by (having lost four of his closest friends) was especially moving.

In terms of the musems we visited, we did not have time to see the National Gallery in any detail but we did make a brief visit there, as well as longer visits to the Museum of American Art, the Air and Space Museum (take the guided tour – it’s excellent), the Natural History Museum, the Museum of American History (perhaps my favourite) and the Museum of the American Indian (go there for the food in the canteen, if nothing else!).  

The EU's fiscal treaty

Down the years, in my various roles in the EU and now in WWF, I have had a lot of dealings with representatives of the German Government. They have a high standard of achievement in terms of their scientific, legal and enforcement expertise on wildlife trade matters and I always listen to what they have to say. 

Most but not all of my colleagues were already working for the West German Government in the pre-unification days. After unification, the Government acquired a whole new batch of civil servants from the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). 

One has to sympathise with the latter. They were treated as second-division players from day one. The former West Germans would often sneer about them (and still do, behind their backs, of course), caricaturing them as plodding pedants with too much focus on petty details and a complete inability to see the wider picture. 

Like all caricatures, this one is cruel and simplistic but it also has a grain of truth. The fact was that they came from a culture that didn't encourage independent or creative thinking (to put it mildly!). So the only way for them to be conscientious was to absorb themselves in detail, to the point that they became pettifogging bureaucrats.

In many way, however, Angela Merkel, herself a former citizen of the DDR, is the archetype of this caricature. It is not surprising, therefore, that her response to the Euro crisis has been plodding; too little to late. One wonders what the giants of German leadership - men like Konrad Adenauer, Willi Brandt or even Helmut Kohl, would have done in similar circumstances (and I don't choose three men all of whom I agree with on everything but three who were men of stature).

Merkel's response, however, was the fiscal treaty. Having press-ganged the shallow-minded and narcissistic (and now former) President Sarkozy into going along with it, the two then tried to impose it on the rest of Europe.

In the context of a single currency, there is nothing wrong in principle with imposing strict disciplines on member States. In fact, such rules have been in place all along but it is instructive that Germany and France were the first to break them. When that happened, however, the EU collectively were too timid to take those countries to court.

On the other hand, the countries that are most in trouble now never showed on the radar of the fiscal rules and, were the situation to re-occur now they still would not show. Ireland is the clasic example. Despite profligate spending by individuals - borrowing not only for their homes but for second homes, new cars, furniture, holidays and other consumer products (mostly imported, with consequences for the balance of payments) Ireland appeared all along to meet the criteria. In fact, there was a black hole of debt but it was  below-the-line private debt, fuelled by cheap and reckless lending of surplus funds from German banks.

The treaty fails to address the deep structural imbalances created by the Euro, and the role that Germany played in the melt-down. It is born of the unwillingness of that country to accept any responsibility for that role.

In short, it is the timid, pedantic response one would expect from a stereotypic DDR official. 

Stateside, part 1

Despite having previously been to numerous countries on five continents, until a few weeks ago I had never been to the United States, much to my regret. That lack has now been rectified.

I had to attend a meeting in the US Fish and Wildlife Service's National Conservation Training Centre, a complex of classrooms and accommodation facilities nestling in the woods outside Shepherdstown, a pretty little historic town at the south-east corner of West Virginia, near the Virginia and Maryland borders. Here are some pictures of the town and of the Potomac river, at the point where it flows past the training centre.

The centre is also located near to Harper's Ferry, where John Brown's raid on the armoury in October 1959, with a view to starting a slave uprising, foreshadowed the outbreak of the American Civil War eighteen months later. I didn't have time to see that well-preserved town due to work commitments but I did get to see the battlefield site of Antietam; the battle which, on 17 September 1862, accounted for the biggest number of casualties from a single day in American military history. Lee's Confederate forces fought McLellan's Union forces to a draw but had to leave the field, owing to lack of men, so it is counted as a stragic victory for the Union, which had been losing most battles up until then. The Union forces included an Irish brigade, led by Thomas Francis Meagher, a veteran of an ill-judged uprising in Ireland in 1848 who had subsequently escaped to the US from Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1852. He is credited with the design of the current irish flag, based on the French tricolour; he returned from a visit to Paris with the first such flag, made by French women sympathetic to the Irish cause; (however, that first flag had the orange on the left, nearest the pole, as Ivory Coast does now).

The pictures below show the sunken road at the battlefield, where the brigade suffered heavy losses, and Meagher's memorial.