On the Road in America’s Election Year

When my great-uncle passed away in 1967, Mum and Dad went through his things, which turned out mostly to be unpaid bills and notes in a small pocket diary of slow horses and bad bets. None of this came as a surprise, as Cyril had spent the last several years of his life hiding from bookies and their duns, some of that time camping in our garage, which caused Mum no small degree of resentment. She had harboured a visceral dislike of the man from their first meeting and this only grew as he put the bite on Dad for loans that would never be repaid. The fact that his final imposition was to burden them with his funeral expenses testifies both to his profligacy and my parents’ decency. Despite everything, they wouldn’t countenance him going to Potter’s Field.

There  was one thing, however, that made even Mum smile. It was a shoebox of old snapshots and letters from the Thirties, when he had not yet run through the family fortune, an effort in which he was allied with my no less profligate grandfather. The most entertaining of that correspondence came from and went to America, where Cyril had worked (’employed’ would be a better term, as he worked only at his own humbling) for a California oil company. It seemed there were claims he had somehow disposed of a quantity of large-diameter pipeline material which was not his to sell, after which he decamped suddenly and without notice back to Melbourne. Then as now there were slow racehorses in California. His carbon-papered response to the accusations of grand theft were rib-ticklers. Such aggrieved and offended innocence professed on page after page! Cyril had, as they say, more front that Myers.

The Box Brownie snapshots of his journey to and from the US were no less a delight. They are lost now, gone with Mum and Dad and the clearing out of old cupboards, which is a great pity as they speak of another age. White-suited with a cane, I recall snaps of him aboard some or other steamship, always with a smile that must surely have been a factor in the propagation of various distant cousins and half-cousins who came to light only when testing for ancestral DNA became possible and popular. A rogue and sometime scoundrel, what I most recall is a towering figure, never without a tie and what I suspect were hand-tailored suits, who would slide from behind the wheel of his 1948 Chevy and toss me high into the air. Despite Mum’s disdain and my father’s weary “he’s family” rationales for continuing to bail him out, I loved the man. He gave me my first cigarette at what could have been no more than the age of eight, taught me the point value of the variously covered snooker balls and — Lord, but the authorities would have him by the ear these days! — a first taste of distilled spirits, the retch-worthy memory of which made it easy to take the tea-total pledge some years later when the Melbourne monsignor who presided at my Confirmation laced his talk of tongues of fire and the Holy Ghost with a call to swear off Demon Rum until the age of 25. Cyril would have been tickled that the commitment to alcoholic abstinence survived barely longer than he did.

The advice I particular remember, especially today as I type by the pool at a cheap but safe Florida motel (‘We provide 24-hour security’), was that I should make a point to visit the United States. Disneyland was on the telly every Sunday night at 6pm, to be watched fresh from the bath and already in pyjamas, and of course that destination was a ten-year-old’s first fancy. It wouldn’t have been his though, the not-to-distant Hollywood Park race track being for his tastes a far more compelling amusement. America was “a dynamo”, he said, which puzzled me at the time because I knew the word only as referencing a small, silver, bottle-shaped affair which could be pushed against the front tyre of my bicycle to make the headlight glow.

Years later, when Jimmy Carter was in the final year of his hapless presidency, I journeyed as Cyril bid and touched down in San Francisco. It was March of 1980, I was 24 and the blessed holder of a letter from the editor of Sydney Sun-Herald that informed US Immigration I would be working for a few months as a reporter in Fairfax’s New York bureau. My friends all made the traditional dart to London for a year or two of Bazza McKenzie-ish revelries, which struck me then and now as foolish. What was the appeal of a destination chiefly notable for warm beer, industrial strife, crap jobs and life in Earls Court’s ghetto? America, that was different, so very different. Where in class-conscious England my Strine would have marked me at first syllable as another one of the many flat-voweled same, in the States as I traveled by car, train and bus from West Coast to New York it was an invitation to converse, to stay a night or two, and in Texas to empty a Tommy gun’s .45 calibre magazine into an old car at my host’s ranch barbecue. That sort of thing didn’t happen in Kent.

I spent not months but 27 years in the US, married, had a family, worked for various US newspapers and magazines, built a profitable business with Joanne, my now-ex, and punctuated all that with regular trips back to Melbourne, where my parents aged in stop-frame impressions every time I found them waiting to welcome me at Tullamarine’s arrivals gate. When they were no longer up to making the short trip from Altona to airport it seemed time to return. I’d given them a lot of grief, caused them much expense as a child and teen. Time to balance the books.

Thing was, though, America had changed me. I’d arrived a Whitlam-loving lefty, still angry at the Dismissal, half convinced it had been a CIA coup and fully certain Ronald Reagan would blow up the world. I left all those years later inspired by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, the Fourth’s prohibition of warrantless searches and, with some reservations, even the Second’s right to bear arms as an antidote to the tyranny the Founding Fathers perceived lurking deep and dark in the heart of any democracy. More than that, there was the dynamism of entrepreneurial capitalism and free markets. The trans-Pacific contrasts were stark. In the US, by way of illustration, cable-TV companies were free to dig their trenches, bury wires and take their chances with gaining enough subscribers to make those investments worthwhile. In Australia, it was inquires, committees, panels of worthies and governmental requirements that, ultimately, resulted in just one big player, Sky, restricted choice and much larger monthly bills. It’s likely Cyril never heard of Joseph Schumpeter, but his paen to America’s dynamism was the Austrian’s creative destruction.

TODAY, I’m now far to the north of warm Miami, having crossed crossing wintry Georgia and, if a looming snow storm permits, heading further north to the Iowa caucuses, where on January 15 the presidential election season begins in earnest. With the exception of 2020, when Covid’s hysteria forbade Australians leaving or arriving — something the authorities tried and largely failed to implement across all the US — I’ve covered every White House race since 1980. In 2016, when Trump pulled off the impossible, I’ll modestly note that, after driving from Florida to New York, I urged Quadrant readers to back Trump at 6-1 because the signs were everywhere that Hillary Clinton’s confidence was misplaced. There were very few front-yard posters supporting her, but hundreds for Trump. In bars and diners, the sort in which the US press corps wouldn’t be caught dead, it wasn’t that those I encountered were gung-ho for MAGA, rather that the word ‘Hillary’ prompted wrinkled noses and brief words of dismissal and disdain.

What followed were four years of outrages I could hardly credit of the America I knew. Russia! Russia! Russia! The two unsuccessful impeachments engineered by congressional committees stacked with out-for-blood Democrats. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The partisan debasement of the FBI. And, oh dear, most painful of all for a reporter — that would be me — the mainstream media’s abrogation of the responsibility to report fair, square and honest. (If you want to see a local example of how that fractured reporting filled simple minds with lies and twisted ‘facts’, just read today’s Silly Morning Herald editorial. Even by SMH standards, such as they are, it’s a compilation of nonsense and, as Trump would say, ‘fake news’: Trump’s second shot at president (sic) a danger to the US and the world)

So here I am and will stay, God and good health permitting, operating out of a wired-up campervan that will be Quadrant Online’s office for the duration of the campaign.

Great-uncle Cyril was right, America is too much to miss, especially this year when so much is on the line.