The American election has turned my neighbour against me
Joe Biden once told me he got into the 2020 presidential race because ‘I want to make a difference.’
I was one of a crowd of people milling around the Boeing aircraft assembly line in Seattle when he swung by to announce his candidacy five years ago.
After saying that, Biden paused briefly, as if to ask himself what the formula really meant.
‘You can argue that it’s all about the great national issues, but it’s also about restoring a culture of civility,’ he said. ‘It’s about all of us coming together as Americans, and treating each other with respect, whether you agree with people’s opinions or not.’
Fine words, even if a cynic might argue that they qualified as one of Joe’s more articulate pronouncements on the nature of his office, given his meandering performance in this June’s presidential debate, which led to his standing down in the next election.
I found myself mulling over Biden’s words earlier this summer, following a distressing incident involving one of my neighbours.
After we’d rubbed along together for 20 years, watering each other’s plants or taking in the paper if one of us was away, he informed me brusquely that we were now ‘done’.
He put a letter on my doormat advising me that I was a rat and that he’d consigned the six of my books I’d given him to his bonfire.
My offence? A few days earlier, I’d written a story in the local paper about my recent experience of driving from my suburban home to downtown Seattle. I’d got halfway there when two highway patrolmen on motorbikes suddenly emerged from a side street to form a roadblock in front of me.
The officers were soon joined by several others, and one of them blew a whistle and shouted at my fellow drivers and me that we were to pull over to the side of the road and turn off our engines. Biden was once again among us. We watched as his caravan of cars streamed down the road at a clip ordinary motorists could only dream of.
A phalanx of state highway patrol motorcycle officers led the column, which included several large black SUVs with tinted windows, sundry vans and ambulances and, at last, the President’s two speeding Cadillac limousines – one a decoy – outfitted with small American flags. Also in the motorcade were four tank-like vehicles sporting blinking lights and vertical black rods, a dozen or more police cruisers and numerous other cars and limos, while a helicopter swooped overhead. Biden was in town for two hours to raise funds for his (doomed) 2024 re-election campaign.
All highly impressive, and I said as much in my story in the paper. What moved my neighbour to apoplexy was the bit about the irony of a nation founded on its distaste for the excesses of monarchy having come to accept that its chief executive should move around in a way that might have raised eyebrows in imperial Rome.
Although it wasn’t a partisan piece, I also allowed myself the thought that Biden had used his brief time in Seattle to remark on the pitiable state of our homeless population, among other social issues. Again, I noted, all true, although it seemed only fair to add that around here it’s Biden’s own Democratic Party that has long controlled all the levers of power. They run both the Seattle City Council and the Washington state government. They write the laws.
‘And it’s hard to see how Donald Trump, whatever you think of him, can be blamed for our city’s current malaise,’ I wrote, committing the faux pas of mentioning the T word without the necessary note of revulsion.
‘Instead of constantly asking what’s wrong with the world, perhaps our officials should be asking, “What’s wrong with Seattle?” ’ I concluded.
Hardly the stuff of a blood feud, but it was enough to light the blue touchpaper in my quiet, middle-class street. My neighbour and I haven’t spoken since; he now ostentatiously turns his head to one side if I pass him.
Until now, I’d thought this was something that happened only to Edwardian cads, but the gesture is alive and well on the streets of what’s often called America’s most progressive city.
All this happened before Biden’s decision to step down – and his third bout of Covid, which, fairly or not, only compounds the impression of him as a decent but sadly enfeebled senior citizen. It also happened before the attempt on Donald Trump’s life.
Whatever you make of Trump, money couldn’t buy the image of him leaving the stage after being shot, his face bloodied but his fist raised, with the American flag flying in the background. As any advertising executive will tell you, news photos like that resonate most strongly when they manage to capture or reinforce what the public already believes.
Emotions are raw, and my own petty rift with my neighbour reflects the widespread turmoil surrounding a contest that threatens to tear the country apart in a way not seen since the Vietnam War.
I predict fireworks when polling day comes around – on, somehow aptly, 5th November.
Christopher Sandford is author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began
