Day Six: Milwaukee
delsThe BMO Pavilion is right on the shore of Lake Michigan and the view from the bus when I woke was of the sun on the water. A welcome relief from the drizzle in Chicago the previous night. The geography of the city of Chicago somehow seems to indicate that it is on a lake but I always have to remind myself that Milwaukee is not on the sea Then again, Lake Michigan is about the size of the Irish Sea: you could sail due north for three hundred miles from Chicago before you would land in Canada—the Michigan coast is way beyond the horizon seventy miles to the east of Milwaukee.
A beautiful clear breeze from the lake greeted me when I clambered down from the Prevost and with half-an-hour to kill before catering would be operational I plumped for the the horrifyingly un-rock-and-roll option of a pre-breakfast run and set off into the tiny parcel of prairie that is Lakeshore State Park for a pre-breakfast run.
Pretty soon I ended up in Veteran’s Park looking at a statue of General Douglas MacArthur that gazed imperiously over a field of four inch high Stars and Stripes flags, each one representing a Wisconsinite killed in action since the 1914–18 War. Fifteen thousand and fifteen flags.
It had never quite dawned on me on previous visits just how much US culture, and indeed its society in general is imbued with militarism. You just would not see this kind of display in the UK. Sure, there was Paul Cummins and Tom Pipers installation Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red at the Tower of London where of hundreds of thousands of ceramic poppies were placed in the moat. But there was metaphor and shame in visually referencing a river of blood flowing around such an iconic site. There is no subtlety or irony that I can see in surrounding a statue of an arrogant warmonger with tens of thousands of US flags.
I headed back along the coast of Lake Michigan past a version of Robert Indiana’s `Love' sculpture that sits outside the Milwaukee Museum of Modern Art. Does this stand in opposition to the display in Veteran’s Park? I suspect not: somehow the American Creed can embrace both. Doublethink should be a byword for how this schizophrenic country functions.