Dear English people
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington The radio has been saying that the national Christmas tree is dying. It is an enormously tall blue spruce on the Potomac side of the White House. If it is indeed dying, it will have sacrificed its life to the American we-can-do-anything presumption. The thing we can't do is dig up a mature tree, ship it thousands of miles from the Pacific, transplant it and expect it to survive. The rest of our Christmas season here may not be quite so characteristically opti mistic. True, they're selling a girl doll who doesn't say 'Ouch' when you twist her arm: instead her breasts grow. This is a break through for such a boob-centred society. The growth, care, cultivation and amputation of the female mamillary is a matter of constant national interest. Mastectomy is our most talked about surgical procedure and Mrs Ford is regarded as a genuine American heroine for undergoing one and talking so much about it. They gave her another award, a banquet and a stand-up ovation just the other day on account of the 'contribution' she had made.
But the big, hot-selling Christmas present this year has been cautionary and alarmist to say the least. It is a smoke detector and alarm for the home. The odds against a fire breaking out in your home while you're asleep are only slightly better than your chances of being hit by lightning. Moreover, most of the victims of such tragedies are poor people who can't afford the smoke detectors, but the gift seems to sum up the general mood. We're expecting something bad to happen but it hasn't yet.
The bad most people have in mind is economic. Has the recession ended? Is this truly a 'pause'? Is 'confidence' being restored? With the release of each new set of economic indicators, all of which are highly ambiguous, the debate freshens. Ordinarily people know if they are prosperous or not, but right now America can't decide if it is rich or poor, happy or miserable. Then to top it all, the news from Canada and Mexico has been most unsettling since we were accustomed to taking them so much for granted that they might just as well have been dead or frozen in aspic.
The elect ion of a French-Canadian separa tist in Quebec has set off a certain number of perturbations. We haven't gone quite so far yet as to speculate in the public prints about the possibility of a Gallic Castro arising to the North, but there are murmurs in the New York Times about the possibility of Canada not being able to defend herself— in the event of what ? Until the elections in Quebec it has always been presumed that the United States would be defending Can ada, whether she liked it or not. In Mexico things are in a terrible state of tension, because a few of the peons have squatted on the latifundia. There have already been several wonderful laughable interviews with some swarthy, muy rico gentlemen with Pancho Villa accents explaining how those peasants are too stupid to know what to do with their own land. Any talk about the redistribution of wealth, anybody's wealth, gives America a migraine.
The United Kingdom hasn't helped our frayed nerves with talk about a Great Britain becoming the dis-United Kingdom. American policy is a system of highly centralised confusion, and news that others may have developed even the slightest qualms about the unitary nation-state tends to put us out of sorts. So, UK. if not for yourselves, for your English-speaking cousins, please stick together.
Mr Jimmy Carter made news and titters when he appointed liberal congressman Brock Adams to the department of Transportation and Cyrus Vance to the State Department. Those watchdogs of liberty and inconsistency, we journalists, immediately found a quote from Carter's campaign manager, Hamilton Jordan, in the November issue of Playboy which read, `If, after the Inauguration, you find Cy Vance as Secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski as Head of the National Security, then I would say we failed. And I'd quit. But that's not going to happen. You're going to see new faces, new ideas, the government is going to be run by people you have never heard of!
Needless to say, Mr Jordan has not quit and the government won't be run by people you have never heard of because Mr Carter hasn't heard of them either and therefore can't appoint them. So much for that silliness unless you want to call the making of Michael Boomensthal, a Johnson era office holder and currently a corporation executive, or Bert Lance, a Georgia banker, head of the Office of Management and Budget, the raising up of unknowns into high places. Mr Lance wasn't unknown to Carter watchers, since the two men have been closely connected in politics and business for a number of years.
The Directorship Office of Management and Budget is perhaps the single most im portant appointed position in the operation of the American government. To an extent greater than anyone else, the Director of OMB can reach into the furthest removed agency or office and cause things to happen. The Director of OMB has the keys to the great mother computer.
Some of the good government roundheads raised questions about the fact that Mr Lance's bank lent money to Mr Carter's peanuttery a few years ago, as if they knew back then that Carter would be President now and that lending a future President money is unethical. The Carter-Lance relationship is entirely too proper to compete with our best and most succulent scandal involving the wicked Koreans who have been naughty enough to have been caught handing out money to Congressmen. The exact amounts and persons are only known in a few instances. So there is the most entertaining talk of intrigue, electronic eavesdropping, couriers, cash in attaché cases, diplomatic pouches and millions changing hands. Coming so soon after the revelations about our bribing the officials in other countries, it's a wonder that the roundheads aren't demanding that we make our allies pass laws making it illegal to bribe us.
It is so irritating to be bribed by people who most Americans believe come from a land where they spill the blood of Christian missionaries as quickly as that of the Commies. Isn't the whole damn place covered with three feet of frozen guano or bird tundra ? Why can't our people get their bribe money from citizens of liberty-loving democracies? We'd prefer to be bribed by the English, who, in addition to being a parliamentary people, are also white, or mostly so. It bothers us awfully to be bribed by yellow-skinned Asiatics, to use a word that has gone decidedly out of style. The bribe-taker, like the tip-taker, is the inferior in the relationship, which is doubly intolerable when the gratuity comes in some greasy, unpronounceable currency. Does this mean America's day is done, going the way of Rome and all that ? The roundheads are too much in control to allow their fellow citizens to be comforted by the news that the Romans took bribes and ran their empire for centuries with not inconsiderable success.
The other part of our Christmas story is the Twilight of the Fords. You would think it was Mary Queen of Scots waiting for the big chip-chop instead of just Jerry, a repudiated politician hanging around living out the lease on the house. Not having a defeated lame duck in the White House since Herbert Hoover, the media haven't known how to behave, so have behaved badly. We've had the Last Thanksgiving, the Last Christmas and if we don't have the Last Supper it will only be because the hungry ladies and gentlemen of communications ate it. The last of the dinosaurs have been meeting in the White House to plot the future of their political party. They are the Messrs Ford, Reagan, Connally and Rocke feller, who has put his Washington house up for sale (price: S8 million), so I guess he won't be back. Whether the party will remains to be seen.
Dear English people, we never feel closer to you than at Christmas time, which we regard as an English holiday. Americans think the Christ Child was christened David Copperfield and that Charles Dickens didn't write A Christmas Carol but the Christmas story. Come visit and yule (sic) see.
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