Gamblers and dreamers

Press, 25 January 1989, Page 16

Gamblers and dreamers

After four years in the United States as a correspondent for the “Guardian” newspaper of London, MICHAEL WHITE reflects on the virtues of a still-optimistic nation which so often has had bad things written about it.

WHAT DO you really like about America?” my hosts would ask. I would reply “Your telephones are wonderful,” while deciding whether they were the kind of Americans who needed reassurance, a critique of the trade bill, or a sharp verbal knee in the groin. Actually lots of your things have been wonderful these past four years. Your ice cream, your protracted springs and radiant autumns, your roads and eclectic skyscrapers. Your minor league baseball is a classic.

Your Italian, Chinese and Cajun restaurants are pretty consistent, as are California’s white wines (but not New York’s). So are your vast national parks and wooden houses (usually painted white) with their vast basements. Your Constitution and your scandals, of course... and you. Yes, I know that American tourists can be loud and insensitive (surely Jamesian innocence is a better excuse than soccer hooliganism?) and that New. York is something of a jungle. Personally I have never seen anyone shot or beaten up here, though a security man at a Louis Farrakhan rally once tried to confiscate my one-inch penknife lest I try to martyr the Chicago Khomeini.

As for the Big Apple, I have observed more kindness than rudeness on its streets, though New Yorkers are a shade brusque, a sign of "unmannered health” as a Romanian poet admiringly put it the other day: “I can’t stay in Europe too long any more. Too mannered and organised.” Unmannered? Hang on there. I distinctly recall a deranged tramp on Grand Central Station ending a litany of paranoid curses with “Thank you very much, have a nice day.”

The fact is that attractive American qualities, like energy, optimism and generosity, are shared by some appalling people. Costa Gavras got that bit right in his film “Betrayed.” Those white supremacist farmers were just dandy until someone hit the paranoia button. I encountered this trait on my first trip beyond the Washington Beltway. lowa farmers had driven miles through the snow to show solidarity with a bankrupt friend whose farm faced foreclosure, and up popped a nice old boy blaming it all on Jewish

bankers back east. Wonder who he voted for in the caucuses? A sentimental farewell is no place to rehearse the race issue again other than to note a paradox. The more solidly that a sizeable chunk of black America becomes entrenched in the comfortable middle class mainstream the more horrendous looks the plight of the underclass left behind.

Having got himself elected partly over the case of a black rapist. Mr George Bush might make amends by easing off race as an instrument of electoral politics and wooing Jesse Jackson’s less ardent supporters back into Abe Lincoln’s party.

Small Southern towns whose streets are named after Confederate heroes and whose sense of historic grievance is as acute as Kosovo’s or Fermanagh’s were held back for a century by atavistic politics. It is a formula the country doesn’t need now that its post-war world is being turned upside-down. Where was I? Oh yes, American virtues. Why is there such a media market overseas for American vices, among stout “Telegraph” loyalists as well as gloomy “Guardian” liberals? As a Danish colleague said at a party in 1986. “Since we enjoy living here, why do we so often write bad things about them?” This is my opportunity to apologise for those negative lapses. In mitigation the Roaring Eighties were the tawdry years of Ollie North and Ivan (“Greed is healthy”) Boesky, of jingoism and beggars in the street, only a few of whom smoked cigars as they begged (there’s American style for you). Indeed the Danish party in question was interrupted by the F-11l raid on Libya. Since the raid did tranquilise Colonel Gadaffi, doubts about its propriety soon evaporated. Excessive pragmatism is a national vice.

Try as I may, I cannot share Mrs Thatcher’s admiration for President Reagan, restated this month in case anyone missed November’s outbursts. Interest-

ingly, Mrs Thatcher invokes his physical courage against cancer and the assassin’s bid. It is moral courage, which she has, that he lacks.

On the other hand, his optimism, a mixture of Roosevelt and Pangloss, is a lesson the Left could usefully relearn. It breeds luck.

If, as daily seems more possible and more necessary, Mr Bush proves better than the mere deluge apres-Ron, then more serious grovelling will be required hereabouts. Embattled Mr Gorbachev has set a cracking diplomatic pace, albeit from behind. Tokyo’s economic pace (“Tora, Tora, Tora” over Silicon Valley) is finally taking political shape. “Now that the Cold War is ending perhaps we will become the enemy again,” a Japanese colleague said during our annual joint appearance on network TV (taped for 3 a.m. airing). A midAtlantic friend’s theory is also interesting: that Mr Bush with his patrician, internationalist credentials, is the perfect guy to think the unthinkable, and clobber the NATO allies with U.S. troop withdrawals and more burdensharing in time for 1992. 1992 has got the cousins worried just as the Yale historian, Paul Kennedy, pierced their optimism with best-selling “imperial overstretch.” Alistair Cooke long since decided that “the race is on between America’s decadence and its vitality.” Beware: both prophets are immigrants from northern England and thus overly susceptible to Gibbonian gloom and an Edwardjan sense of decline.

On the other hand American optimism, nurtured by two protective oceans, often sounds overly sanguine about its capacity to compete in globalised markets. It is borrowed time as well as money. This country’s diffusion of economic and political power are strengths, though there is evidence aplenty of decadent concentration. North and Boesky again. There I go again: European gloom, a vice which emphasises

that ours is an elderly civilisation while this one has all the enviable enthusiasm and impetuosity of youth. That is one source of our resentments. Displacement as Top Nation is another, reinforced by a selective memory which dwells more on Vietnam than on the Marshall Plan. A mediocre mass culture which has become the global benchmark does not help. The chattering Euro-classes despise it, while overlooking the washing machines and deep freezes which accompanied muzak and McDonalds across the oceans.

The world’s have-nots don’t make that mistake, though mass culture misleads them in a different way. When did you last see a red-brick working-class terrace in Baltimore on TV as distinct from South Fork Ranch or Bill Cosby’s place? This is a tough country to be poor or sick in. Even average family income has only just regained its 1973 level, now with two wage-earners. My lawyer friends have latch-key children. In many respects the quality of life is lower, more uncertain than a generation ago. No amount of flag-waving can wholly disguise that. Left-wing alternatives (when did we last see Noam Chomsky on TV?) have long been gutted with the help of intolerant neo-conserva-tive converts from the Left. Pale liberalism hardly enjoyed its finest hour with Mr Dukakis. There is much that needs fixing. America’s expensive health care system is inefficient and inequitable. Yes, people really do die in hospital car parks because they were turned away.

Bureaucracy and retail banking are nightmares. Television is a 20-channel desert, as are most city centres after 6 p.m., killed by the car. You have to go to Canada to get good bacon. And yet, and yet... it is possible to be free in America, probably like nowhere else. Solzhenytsin, who was so disappointed by America’s lack of spirituality, presumably found it behind his high fence in Ver-

mont. It may mean ignoring a great deal, shooting the TV set, migrating or not voting for most of the rascals thrown up (but rarely out) by a political system that is increasingly plutocratic — logically so, since money really does drive most things here, churches and sports as well as business. President Reagan boasts endlessly about political democracy, but half the people do not vote. America’s true genius is that it is socially very democratic. Even snobbery is no match for money and a White House bash is much more informal than one at Buck House. It may be tough at the bottom but Americans still believe in their myths. Thus the waiter who serves you (“Hullo I’m Ricky and I’m your server tonight”) is neither servile nor surly. He intends to own the restaurant and has the means to redress what he sees as intolerable inequalities: a lifetime’s access to ' education, to litigation and even to hand-guns, both rampant for reasons I have come better to respect, though the cost is terrible. Ditto drugs, the dark side of the American Dream. This then is still a nation of gamblers and dreamers who do not laugh at others’ dreams but say “Go for it.” Food is cheap, petrol is virtually free. In many states, taxes — like services are minimal. But there is a sense of space so that an American can escape the government he or she dislikes more easily than we can escape You-Know-Who. And there is always Las Vegas. Somewhere in Chicago live the couple who found my black book full of vital phone numbers (but not addresses) and traced me. I did not thank them adequately. In the end my mind goes back to an old Russian Jewish woman at a day-care centre in Miami Beach. We were discussing health care and she ventured a notion that we did things better in England. Then she checked herself as it caught in a disloyal thought. She explained how her father had got the family out of the Soviet Union shortly before it would have been crushed between the rival armies of the totalitarian night. America took them in. Now she was sick. “But this country doesn’t owe me a thing.”