Few people are as obsessed with statistics as Americans. I have been in New York for just a month, and already I’ve said that 142 times. Numbers provide America with a context; most conversations are about how many, how often, and the monthly average. American sport is about figures, and behind the figures, more figures.
Football is not about the aesthetics of the game, but of the distance run on the field. Figures rule – yet if you give twenty dollars for a burger and some chips, the cashier struggles to remember whether he should subtract or multiply to return the difference.
Numbers are loved for their own sake. I open a book at random and read: “Each day New Yorkers guzzle 460,000 gallons of beer, swallow 3,500,000 pounds of meat, and pull 21 miles of dental floss through their teeth.
Everyday in New York 250 people die, 460 are born, and 1,50,000 walk through the city wearing eyes of glass or plastic.” That was written four decades ago, and it combines precision and irrelevancy in a uniquely American manner. History is the frequent updating of random numbers.
Americans – and the rest of the world – will shortly deal with huge numbers as a matter of course. James D Watson, who cracked the DNA code over half a century ago became the first person to receive the full text of his own DNA.
Soon we will be able to decipher our own genomes – the six billion letters of genetic code with the traits we have inherited. Watson has already put his sequence on the Internet (holding back just one bit of information which he doesn’t want to know himself – his predisposition to Alzheimer’s Disease). His procedure cost a million dollars; the prices will drop, but meanwhile, there might be corporate sponsorship. You can offer to rename your five-billionth letter after Pepsi or Coke. Currently this is a joke, but it could become reality.
Next on the list for similar decoding are Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, Stephen Hawking and Larry King. Their future is behind them, but no matter; it is celebrities first, after all. Which means that Paris Hilton, currently in jail, is sure to follow.
It will be a change for her – from being chased by papparazzi (affectionately called ‘paps’ in this country) to being hounded by genetic scientists. That there are no second acts in American lives has become an enduring cliché; but Americans seem to have only second acts, and reinvent themselves regularly.
Hillary Clinton has reinvented herself from a hawk to a dove in the Iraq war. Bush has begun to make positives noises about global warming after years of insisting these were the terrors of science fiction writers and not scientists.
Businessman Donald Trump has reinvented himself as a television buffoon. Their countrymen see a pattern here. Identifying patterns is a national pastime, which is why this is the land of the conspiracy theory.
In Manhattan’s Union Square, for example, there are serious young people, with passionate voices and woebegone expressions who hold up banners informing the world that the Bush government bombed the World Trade Centre towers into oblivion. Everybody has ‘proof’, and ‘knows’ of the media complicity in the plot.
News channels broadcast the incident a few minutes before it actually took place, someone tells me. In the old days, magicians fooled the public by using mirrors. Nowadays politicians use the television cameras, he says.
I love conspiracy theories, and cast about for some more. It is in the nature of such theories that the more bizarre they are, the more plausible they become. It is not George Bush who lives in the White House, I was told, but a double who talks like him, walks like him, and dances like him. He gave himself away, my informant insisted, when he made a speech or two without any mistakes. This is almost endearing.
Those surrounding vice president Dick Cheney are plausible because his countrymen can’t put anything past him. “He’s got a finger in every pie,” I was told. Cheney is seen as a modern, deadly version of the window-repairman Charlie Chaplin in The Kid, first destroying the world and then offering the services of his companies to rebuild it.
His recent decision to erase all records of visitors to his residence, and refusal to pay even token heed to accountability has led the New York Times to suggest that “Mr Cheney is in step with the times. He has privatized the job of vice president of the United States.” He has also given Americans a whole set of numbers to dream about.
