ANOTHER VOICE
Now we must take action to keep the flood of unemployables at bay
AUBERON WAUGH
In an article on Mrs Clinton's inability to find an Attorney-General who had not bro- ken the law by employing an illegal immi- grant nanny, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard described it as 'America's dirty little secret' that there were no decent, reliable, affec- tionate, home-bred American nannies to be hired, at any rate in the inner cities. For- eign or immigrant nannies, he explained,
turn up for work on time and do not feed their charges crisps all day long because they cannot be bothered to cook a proper meal. They do not leave babies hungry and scream- ing in filthy nappies upstairs for hours while they sit glued to the television soap operas. They do not bring violent boyfriends into the house for recreational sex, or take crack cocaine in the kitchen, or lose their tempers and wallop little Johnny around the ears.
This, he says, is the dirty little secret that nobody is prepared to discuss in American public life.
The problem has nothing to do with race: black African nannies are in high demand. It has to do with culture. By and large, immi- grants have their family values intact. They have not been corrupted by the idle, resent- ful, subsidised, drug-ridden, get-something- for-nothing way of life of America's inner cities.
Strong stuff, Ambrose. Of course it is not only in the black ghettoes of the inner cities that family values have collapsed. Use of this expression 'family values' disguises the fact that what has really collapsed through- out vast parts of American life is the insti- tution of the family itself. Even when par- ents are not swapping partners and cities with reckless abandon, the double-income requirement means that members of a fam- ily seldom see each other, practically never have a meal together and, as often as not, spend whatever time they choose to pass under the same roof watching different television programmes in separate rooms.
This may puzzle the European visitor, since so many American television pro- grammes seem exactly the same, but the explanation is probably that they dislike each other too much to sit in the same room. Again, it is not always easy to appor- tion blame for this unhappy state of affairs. But what has emerged from it all is a gener- ation of young Americans whose absorbing interest in themselves makes it almost impossible for them to communicate with anyone else — whether parents, siblings or colleagues of the same age. It is thought to be their inability to communicate with each other on even the crudest sexual level which accounts for the epidemic of suicide among young people in the United States.
Be that as it may, my point is that even if it is a dirty little secret that young Ameri- cans are unemployable as nannies, it is by no means the dirtiest secret about them. In fact, I suspect that there has been a servant problem in the United States ever since the abolition of slavery in 1862. They make the most wonderful waitresses, of course, even if the best always turns out to be actresses `resting' between engagements. But not, it would seem, nannies.
Nor do they make very convincing sol- diers on the ground. It is this rather bigger, dirtier secret which may explain President Hillary Billary Rodham-Clinton's insistence that we should send British troops to sepa- rate the warring factions in Bosnia and Croatia, with the unmistakable threat that we will lose our permanent seat in the Security Council if we refuse. Since we declined to do so, the President has rather lost interest in a New World Order and is concentrating on more important domestic issues, like the search for a new non-smok- ing, politically correct, female Attorney- General. I rather liked the look of Judge Kimba Wood, who jailed Michael Milken, the junk-bond dealer, and went on a five- day training session as a Playboy bunny when she was a student in London. Pity she could not have hired an American nanny . . .
The biggest and dirtiest secret in Ameri- ca, which can never be mentioned in public at all, is that a very large part of this younger generation of Americans is unem- ployable in any capacity. The same may be true of some of our big cities but to a lesser extent, as I believe we are, thank God, an altogether less democratic country than the United States. Nothing could be more absurd than a New World Order imposed by a democracy where, according to Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism, Chatto), 89 per cent of high-school juniors believe that Toronto is in Italy. Of course, there is nothing new in the idea of an empire maintained by foreign mercenaries, but there has been no suggestion that Britain should be paid for implementing American foreign policy wherever required. Our Foreign Office seemed happy to do so in exchange for preserving the 'special relationship' and our perma' nent seat on the Security Council.
Do either of these traditional keystones of our foreign policy still serve any useful purpose? What, precisely, do we gain from our role as unpaid stooge of a richer and more powerful economy at the other side of the world? It is not jealousy of America's greater wealth which inspires an automatic revulsion among Europeans against most aspects of the market-led, democratic American culture. it is a profound hope that our own European cultures may escape the same fate.
This may be our last opportunity — We can look to no help from the young. The collapse of socialism in eastern Europe and the arrival of President Hill Billy as a quasi- hostile interloper from outer space offer the first chance of a change of direction for 50 years. It would be easy to impose a 19° per cent tax on the import of American television programmes, but the most important thing is to limit the traffic in peo- ple. As soon as the pound reaches its true value of 80 cents there will be a flood of unemployable young Americans coming across and settling here as they have settled i in large parts of India and Nepal — and n Prague. Even before reading Edward Meadows's terrifying description in last week's Specta- tor of the Americans in Bohemia I felt strongly that the American disease Was something we should all try to contain with- in the borders of the United States. It can only be a matter of months before they start arriving with their guitars and their hideous shell suits — no doubt hoping to teach us 'English' and tell us all about themselves. Quite apart from the health risks, it seems a crying shame when we could be opening our doors to the Czechs, Poles or Hungarians.
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