ANOTHER VOICE
Enter a new American hero singing the Nunc Dimittis
AUBERON WAUGH
Iwas prepared to believe every word of William Kennedy Smith's testimony in his own defence at the West Palm Beach rape trial until he came to the bit where he claimed he had called out the wrong name — 'Cathie' instead of 'Patty' — when in fla- grante delicto with Patty Bowman. This seemed to me an obvious whopper, made all the more implausible by the explanation that Cathie was the name of a previous girl- friend, with whom he had broken up a month (or possibly four months) earlier. Smith suggested that this gaffe explained Bowman's violent change of mood from co- operative sex partner to spiteful accuser, and I did not believe a word of it. These mood swings on the part of disturbed women do not require and are often not susceptible to rational explanation. The cliche of the wrong name used in these cir- cumstances applies only to simultaneous involvements. Nobody is suddenly going to embark on a roll call of previous lovers.
Even if Smith was dissembling on this point, it did not prove that he was doing so in the main burden of his evidence, although this one whopper (even if used only to strengthen a valid case) certainly detracted from his overall credibility. Even if both sides were making things up, as I suspected, the verdict was probably the right one on balance.
People do not, as I maintain, behave in this way in real life, only in pulp fiction or whatever its video equivalent may be. But then it occurs to me that most Americans spend most of their spare time watching either cable television or video — very few indeed will read a book from one year's end to the next — and it is quite possible that this is the major, if not the only influ- ence, on the way they behave. Smith may have felt it was expected of him to call out the name of his previous mistress as this obliging new acquaintance put his semi- erect member into her: there were social proprieties to be observed.
We may agree that this was a stupid thing to have done, but it is my sad observation that many Americans are very stupid indeed. Bit by bit we come to the conclu- sion that Smith must have been telling the truth all along.
My point is that whether we like it or not, Americans are profoundly different from us. It would be otiose to list these differ- ences, claiming that Americans for the most part lack physical courage, they are boastful and mystified by the subtleties of self-deprecation as practised in the rest of the world, that their grievously defective aesthetic is responsible for the collapse and disappearance of most known art-forms. It goes without saying that their positive qual- ities are equally gargantuan. I was dis- tressed recently to see myself denounced by a columnist in the New York Observer, New York's only significant contribution to glob- al enlightenment, as someone whose atti- tude to the United States had been influ- enced by the fact that not a single American publisher had expressed an inter- est in publishing his irresistibly wise and illuminating volume of memoirs, Will This Do? (Century, £15.99).
It is the price of fame to attract such calumnies. The failure of a single American publisher to put in a bid for the master- piece may have focused attention in Europe on some of the terrible things which are happening across the Atlantic, but nobody suggests that this failure in itself could persuade Britain to withdraw from Nato, or impose quarantine regula- tions on all American citizens trying to enter Europe, or accept objectionable EEC regulations against the siting of lavatories inside kitchens. American publishers' lack of interest in anything English or European is merely a symptom of what has happened in the United States since the end of the Cold War. Those in Europe who do not take account of it will end up with egg all over their faces.
Mr Patrick Buchanan, the new Republi- can contender for the presidential nomina- tion, has been written off in this country as a protest candidate at best, one with no chance of winning the nomination either in 1992 or in 1996. If so, this can only be the result of the slowness of the American political system to adapt itself to the voters' real wishes, because Buchanan, who seems a thoroughly excellent person for all that none of us had heard of him until last week, expresses exactly what intelligent Americans have decided to think. New York publishers may think of themselves as politically correct, but nobody expresses their views so well as this right-wing isola- tionist Republican, who opposed the Gulf war by arguing that the 'worthless' Emir of Kuwait was not worth the life of a single American marine, and sums up the differ- ence between himself and President Bush quite simply: 'He is a globalist, we are nationalists. He is yesterday, we are tomor- row.'
Buchanan stands for disentanglement from world commitments: 'If America does not wish to end her days in the same nurs- ing home as Britannia, she had better end this geo-babble about new world orders and our responsibility to lead. Our war, the Cold War, is over. It is time for America to come home.'
He is wrong about the nursing home, of course, which is already full up and does not have room for America's 230 million deeply disturbed citizens, with all their problems, of a cultural, social, psychologi- cal, sexual, pharmaceutical and racial nature. Two years ago, his sentiments would have sent a cold chill through the free world. Today, as the world regroups itself, they come as a welcome Nunc Dimit- tis. In 15 years' time perhaps we shall see three economic giants, all equally inward- looking: the United States, the vast Russian Republic, and the European Community, plus Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Ukraine and Byelorussia.
What interests me most in America's impending retreat from a world role (which follows as night follows day on its lack of interest in my memoirs), is to guess the effect on the world drug trade. At present a large part of the United States' foreign pol- icy is designed to prevent dangerous drugs from reaching its urban underclass. The Drug Enforcement Agency, an obstreper- ous undercover army, is allowed to occupy vast areas of the near and Far East, Central and South America and small islands all over the world in acknowledgment of America's world role. It has long been an axiom of American philosophy that the only way to keep any sort of order among the black, near-black and Hispanic popula- tion is to keep it away from crack and hero- in. I think this is wrong. Plentiful and cheap supplies of heroin and crack would have the effect of killing off the American underclass. This is much to be regretted, but might have its bright side if it helps our timorous cousins across the herring pond forget some of their terrors. Until they do, I fear we can have little to say to them, or they to us.
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