ANOTHER VOICE
Are these American baby-boomers human, and does it matter?
AUBERON WAUGH
In the course of a speech at the National Press Club in Wellington I proposed that New Zealand should adopt the kakapo as its national symbol in place of the kiwi, another nocturnal, flightless bird, but one which spends its waking hours frantically dashing around, making silly squeaks and mysteriously contriving to lay eggs which are several times bigger than itself.
The kakapo, in all its vulnerability, seems to sum up a peculiarly innocent, trusting quality which I found among our kith and kin at the bottom of the world, and which makes them as different from their Aus- tralian cousins as the proverbial chalk from cheese. When this quality is added to their beautiful, hospitable manners and sunny natures, they strike me as being a species in need of protection. They believe whatever you tell them. When Americans arrive in Auckland with their outlandish clothes and farouche, boastful speech to announce they are millionaires, presidents of some impor- tant company, they are invariably believed, and many New Zealand fortunes have been lost as a result.
Perched on their green islands so many thousands of miles away from anywhere else, New Zealanders are touchingly con- cerned to learn what visitors think of their country, which is surely as close to heaven as any country can decently be. In accor- dance with the old Fleet Street convention that any hack returning from a trip to a for- eign country is London's greatest expert on that country for about ten days, I will record, from my own observations, that all New Zealanders read The Spectator, that they are even fonder of the Queen than they are of Lady Thatcher and are seriously worried about the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales; that they have beau- tiful English silver services of 1820-1840,
the time when the English silversmith's art was at its height; that many of the women, as well as being healthy and exquisitely mannered, are very prettily tattooed.
What more should I say? Nearly every- body one meets has lost heavily at Lloyd's. There is also a tough and nasty, but merci- fully very small, industrial working class, mostly composed of whingeing Poms from the Mersey and the Clyde who arrived on assisted passages after the war. When asked what I wanted to see in New Zealand, I foolishly said 'a geyser' (pro- nounced to rhyme with Tizer the Appetis- er) imagining that every field was full of them. There is only one important site at Rotorua and it has all the horrors of any major tourist attraction, with Maori feasts and Maori maidens shouting in bogus American accents: 'Now I want everyone from Germany to lift their arms. Come on, folks, let's give a big hand to our friends from Germany. Anybody from Finland?'
My quest for the kakapo was lonelier, ending up at the Wairarapa National Wildlife Park with a stuffed specimen. At least I think it was stuffed. But my conclu- sion, having travelled about 17,500 miles to get there, was that I had ended up among my own people. They understood what I said when I spoke to them, and I under- stood what they were saying when they spoke to me.
It helped, of course, that they were all so extraordinarily friendly and well-mannered, but in Australia, too, where natives are liable to be chippier, more hostile and more crooked, one continues to feel that one inhabits the same Western culture.
I never have the impression, when I visit the United States, of being among crea- tures of the same culture or even the same `Prepare to turn ploughshares into swords.' species as myself. On my first visit, with my wife, in 1969, a cocktail party was given for us in a mid-Western university town, to introduce us to whichever of the academics were judged most interesting. After an hour of listening to their carefully consid- ered opinions, well leavened by judicious measures of humour and information, we both spied a visitor from Istanbul, a monoglot Turkish historian in baggy trousers and handlebar moustache. With- out a word being spoken, we both fell on his neck and embraced him as a fellow- European, a fellow human being.
The yawning culture gap could scarcely be better illustrated than by the new presi- dent-elect. Watching him grimace and ges- ticulate and strike implausible attitudes on television, it struck me that he could per- fectly well be an animal in the zoo for all the human response he was capable of arousing. What was particularly terrifying was not so much that the American politi- cal system could produce such an unattrac- tive freak as its chief executive and com-
mander-in-chief, but that these embarrassing affectations were precisely what appealed to a majority of American voters.
It goes without saying that there is high intelligence to be found among citizens of the United States — more rigorous in its application, I would say, than among Britons — but this level of intelligence is to be found chiefly out of sight, in the State Department, in the law and possibly in the Defence Department. There is little enough sign of it in academic circles, and none at all in the world of journalism or let- ters. The election of a president is essen- tially a glorification of the stupid majority, a festival of fools. Even so, it seems to me that a new element of horror has entered it with the election of a first baby-boomer. The cocksure ignorance that can propose a US peace envoy to press the Sinn Fein case in Ulster, thereby ending the British con- nection for the sake of a little Irish support within Congress, reveals a robot dema- gogue, not a human being, at the centre of things. And the Americans respond to him. Now we must prepare to give massive aid to the Black Panthers. But even as we won- der about future world alignments in the face of the ever-growing culture gap, WC might reflect that the next generation of young Americans, after the ghastly baby- boomers, is much worse.
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