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The most dramatic moment of my last trip to Washington, for the International Monetary Fund meeting of September 1999, was sitting in my hotel room when the TV showed the US Ryder Cup golf team disgracefully dancing all over the last green to celebrate a victory that was still subject to a final putt across that badly damaged turf by the last European player, Jose Maria Olazabal. The US have paid for their hubris by being soundly thrashed ever since.
Last weekend had nothing to match that, unless you count Dick Cheney being President for a couple of hours while Bush was anaesthetized - no jokes, please. Instead, I witnessed two events that respectively gave a glimpse into the future and the past.
I saw the future on a Metro train, the stations of which rival London's new Jubilee Line stations for their striking designs. A young black couple were talking as casually as they could manage, having clearly met only shortly before. As she made to get off at a stop, he called out 'Look me up on Facebook!' It's the new substitute for exchanging vital personal information face-to-face. Instead, an entry on a social networking site, compiled and refined at leisure, becomes the business card for a possible relationship. I get a little out of puff catching up with all the messaging, texting and networking that moves from one new custom to another - I understand that email is now so old-hat that only oldies use it - but they all provide a new range of ways for the unsure majority to communicate and excommunicate. The networking sites leapfrog one another almost daily: friends reunited begat friendster begat flickr begat flirtomatic began faceparty begat facebook - and that's just some of the ones beginning with F.
The step back into the past in Washington was a sneak peek at how segregation must have felt. No longer by edict, that would be intolerable. But just as effective is the sort of economic segregation which put nearly all the white fans at a Washington Nationals v Colorado Rockies baseball game in the lower tiers of the stadium, and nearly all the blacks in the cheap seats up top.
My friend, Richard Adams, and I discovered this by accident. Not being sure about the ticketing system, I asked the booth for 'a couple of good tickets in the shade'. For only $25 apiece, yes that should have set off the alarm bells, we had great seats out of the sun, right behind the plate. Only catch? You couldn't see much beyond second base, and certainly not the scoreboard, so it was a little difficult to follow the game. So, after a few innings, we headed skywards.
The view was terrific, if a little vertigo-inducing. We could have got seats behind the plate again if we had bothered, this time with scoreboards galore. But, as the game went on I slowly realised that we were among the very few white faces on that level, where the ticket prices were $5-$14. I don't have any easy solutions to the de facto segregation, and everyone mixed quite amiably on the way out after the game, but it makes a myth out of any suggestion that American society has made significant strides towards integration - and that still looks a long way off.
Happily, Washington is stuffed full of free attractions, where such dividing lines dissolve in a mutual awe and admiration for the Capitol, White House, and the memorials to Washington, Lincoln and the dead from the Korean, Vietnam and 2nd World Wars. Iraq cannot be far off. I know of no other capital city that has so much for the tourist in such a concentrated area. Paris runs it close, and there is a strong whiff of Paris in Washington's wide boulevards.
Just as pretty well everyone stands to attention for the national anthem, so there was a shared respect inside the massive Lincoln memorial, with its Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses by the great man decorating the side walls. A few yards outside, though, there is one paving stone that many of the black visitors liked to stand around and admire the inscription. It marks the spot where Martin Luther King Jr made his 'I have a dream' speech in front of 200,000 people in August 1963. A dream that lives on.