DATELINE: Baltimore, MD

We’re trying not to devote too much time to sight-seeing on this trip; there’s simply too much else to do. But 24 hours in Baltimore provided an unmissable opportunity to visit Washington DC, only an hour away by train.

The highlight was not the remote, heavily guarded White House though, but the Lincoln Memorial. There he sits in his gigantic chair, pondering the great divides, injustices and challenges of American history, looming over the capital like some kind of BFG of democratic politics; a patriarch in the best possible way.

“Man.” Rachael’s friend Leah said softly, and sadly, as we stood between the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s right arm. “This is just really depressing. We used to have some really great Presidents. You know, instead of just a cartoon.”

As we’d discovered in the historic cities of Philadelphia and Boston, there are some very high ideals, lofty speeches, and great men who have set the tone for leadership in the United States. (Whereas in the UK we sort of drift airily along without ever sitting down at a big table to formally codify our liberty.) The standards are clearly there: but, I ask Leah, can any of the current candidates restore the Presidency to the grand status that monuments, history books, and civics classes bestow upon it?

“I doubt it.. I very much doubt it.” she laments. She’ll probably vote for Obama, but like a number of young people we’ve met in the cities of the eastern seaboard, that’s just sort of the default choice, it’s not because they’re fired up (ready to go), like some of the student Obamaniacs we’ve met in the more intense parts of the campaign trail.

Solemnity pock-marked the mood of our whole afternoon walking around the monuments of Washington D.C.; many of them, in fact, are war memorials. The three naïve young men in the Vietnam statue, simultaneously headstrong and yet scared of something they cannot see, particularly captured our attention. It’s such an effecting piece, and so humble, in its size and its location, tucked away from the main Vietnam Memorial and surrounded by a few skeletal bushes. All those Wilfred Owen-inspired notions that never again should rich men send their poor cousins to die in a needless war began encircling my head like vultures.

The relatively new World War Two memorial was also incredibly moving. We silently walked around the stately stone testaments to each individual state’s war dead, which sit in a large oval; federalized grief brought together in the monument’s centre by the gentle swoosh of fountains.

I know I said I would try not to opine on American politics in this blog, and will continue to stick to that for the most part. But I can only say that as we exited the memorial, seeing the legend ‘This monument was dedicated on 29 May 2004 by President George W. Bush’, and realising that that stone inscription would always be there, forever, next to a monument that honours so much noble, brave suffering and sacrifice, altered my mood once again. Never mind reflective. I just felt sick.