DATELINE: Chicago, Illinois

The centre of Chicago on a cold December evening is almost too beautiful for words. It’s like the head-swirling, romantic-as-fuck finale of The Hudsucker Proxy. Snow falling softly on twinkling fairy lights and night-lit skyscrapers, summoned as humble offerings to international finance like capitalist totem poles. Alongside Chicago’s massive, looming financial district is Millennium Park, featuring stunning new works by Anish Kapoor and Frank Gehry, and at $500m worth every cent.

What’s astonishing is that viewed this close together, the skyscraper banks and architectural follies are indistinguishable in their beauty. Art and commerce don’t seem contradictory when they look this good alongside each other. Of course, of course, we’re looking at the sugary centre of the city, and like any sane tourist not hanging out in the dangerous and decrepit projects. I’d like to put a trustafarian anti-capitalist from Surrey in Millennium Park and see how their hatred of ‘the man’ fared though.

The first three Americans we apprise of our intentions to blog the election – a 32-year-old city planner-cum-artist from a youth hostel and two young women wandering along looking for food after a friend’s white (i.e. snowy) wedding – all make noises that are variations on polite disdain. No surprise there – who actually leaps for joy when talking about their nation’s political process? What is surprising is how political all three of them turn out to be in spite of their disdain.

“I can’t handle the election this early on, but I’ll do my bit eventually, because I… ugh… have to” says Diana, making a face like her nacho cheese has been made from rat’s milk. She talks with embarrassment about Florida, where she’s lived since, and including, the 2000 debacle. “I HAVE to get out of there” chimes in Chris, the city planner, who by coincidence also resides in the Sunshine State at the moment. “They all pretend they’re completely apolitical, in the name of commerce and tourism. But scratch the surface and they’re as conservative as ‘bama.” (Ala-, not O-).

Diana agrees and explains another side effect of Florida’s sun-drenched facade: she’s been working as an employee – sorry, ‘cast member’ – of Disneyworld for a few years, and has lost the ability to distinguish what is real and what isn’t. Like if hyperreality was a medical condition.

“I was on holiday in Amsterdam, and after a bit of pot I started to think that all the pretty little Dutch houses and streets were just another Disney frontage, that nothing was behind them.”

Her friend Sarah from New Mexico has a shocking story, the kind which Bush-haters will slam their fists and say ‘ha, exactly!’ to, and the kind that most Republicans will dismiss as left-wing propaganda:

“I’ve got this beat-up little old car, and I put this picture in the back of it, a defaced picture of Bush, and wrote alongside it ‘open your eyes to the lies’, and I drove it all through the south from New Mexico eastwards. I was driving along the highway in Texas, and this truck pulled up alongside me, then dropped back, then started to pull up alongside me again.”

“I didn’t really know what was happening, but I looked up and all of a sudden I was staring down the barrel of a shotgun.” These two young men, she explains, proceeded to shoot out the back window of her car.
“Don’t mess with Texas” indeed.