God Bless America, but not George Bush

Geoffrey Wheatcroft fell in love with the United States 40 years ago, and the affair continues — even though he detests the present administration Forty years on! One day last summer it suddenly and alarmingly struck me where I had been in July 1965. I was in southern California, on my first visit to the United States, and at the beginning of a love affair. If it makes sense to like a nation of some hundreds of millions, or to love a vast and incomprehensibly diverse country, then I did like the Americans, and love their country. And as I thought back, I wondered how someone who feels as much affection and gratitude towards America can now be considered ‘anti-American’ because I strongly oppose the policies of the administration which happens to be in power in Washington. Like most people in this country, I think the Iraq war was both crime and folly (and unlike some late converts I thought that from the start). Does that mean I hate America?

We didn’t talk about a gap year in those days, but if you had sat the Oxford scholarship exam in December and managed by some fluke or sleight of hand to pull it off, you could abandon your education until the following October. So after kicking my heels until the late spring, I crossed the Atlantic to New York, and I have never forgotten that first thrill.

Apart from the erotically exhilarating beauty of the city, I felt like a devout Muslim finally reaching Mecca. As a jazz-mad English schoolboy, I’d dreamt of the clubs in Harlem where Lester Young had played or on 52nd Street where Charlie Parker had, and now I was there. I wanted to explore every corner of the city, and did in fact walk from the Battery to the Bronx, dressed in the high fashion of Carnaby Street — candy-striped blazer, pale blue jeans, blue tennis shoes with pink laces. It’s a tribute to the little-recognised tolerance of the New Yorkers that I wasn’t offered physical violence.

Then I went to California, flying out, though subsequently hitch-hiking back to discover the breathtaking landscape which unfolds from coast to coast. I was movie-mad as well, and a friend of my father’s, an executive at the Disney company, said he would find me a temporary job. I hoped to do something in the studio, no doubt lowly but actually watching films being made. He did fix a job for me, and so I spent several weeks sweeping the floor of Disneyland between midnight and eight in the morning, one of my earlier intimations that life wasn’t just a bowl of cherries.

Later, after outstaying my welcome with more family friends in what wasn’t then called Silicon Valley, and revelling in the sheer ease and comfort of American suburban life, I moved on to San Francisco. There I was bewitched by another city, even though I slept in a squalid rooming house after a long day loading trucks, the sort of thing that may look more amusing on a CV than it was at the time. I made a few more friends, and well remember first hearing an old word with a new meaning (in those distant days still underground code) when a chap trying to make my acquaintance in Union Square asked me whether I found San Francisco gay enough.

Everywhere I went I was struck by the amiability and courtesy of people, and I shed a few preconceptions, such as the English belief that humour and irony are unknown to the Americans. Disneyland was full of guys and girls my own age earning a little money the same way. As their summer season ended they held a bonfire party on the beach, which culminated in the ceremony of Burning the Mouse. Happy days. Wish they all could be California girls.

In the 40 years since, I have loved America every time I have gone back, have lapped up what is in so many ways a more vigorous culture than ours, have made more friends, and by now have many personal reasons for a strong disposition toward the country. I’ve had if anything pleasanter experiences of American than of British journalism, and have come to admire the seriousness and high standards of their press (even the fact-checking). Nine years ago I was in New York again when one of my books won a prize there, which is more than I can claim has ever happened in my own country, and three years ago I had a delightful time lecturing at the University of Texas and enjoying the famous Austin hospitality of Roger and Dagmar Louis and their colleagues.

Quite apart from my fondness for so many things and people American, for most of my adult life I would have said, as Isaiah Berlin used to, that ‘I am pro-American and anticommunist’. That didn’t have to be an uncritical endorsement of every American action even then, and there was a shadow hanging over that summer 40 years ago. In order that I could legally do those odd jobs, and rather than get a green card, I took the simpler route of applying for an immigrant visa. In those days it was a formality for anyone British (as opposed to anyone from most southern or eastern European countries, let alone countries outside Europe, until Senator Edward Kennedy, in his one redeeming deed, changed the flagrantly racist immigration laws).

That meant that I was a probationary American for purposes of employment and of military service. Having abused the hospitality of still more friends in Maine, I pottered towards Washington in September, where I wrote a fine pompous letter to the Washington Post (they then ran a famous comic strip under the name ‘Andy Capp in London’ for the benefit of readers who hadn’t guessed his nationality, but I pointed out in magisterial tones that Andy was unmistakably a Geordie), and then back to my by now beloved New York.

As I was about to leave the country in late September, my draft papers caught up with me. In theory I was liable to go to Vietnam, which would at any rate have made me an American citizen, dead or alive. I chose the dank Thames valley instead of the humid Mekong, like a more famous draft-dodger who followed me to Oxford three years later, though in my case with perhaps more excuse. Some of the boys I met that summer must have shipped out to Nam, and some may have come back in body bags.

Even at the time I never thought that the Vietnam war was a simple case of good and evil, and could easily see why it had seemed to begin with the same honourable intention to fight totalitarianism that the Americans had shown from the Berlin airlift onward, even if that had found its nemesis in the paddy fields. It may have been the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time waged by ignoble means, but it had not originally been fought with racist and imperialist intent. I also saw through the way so many of my contemporaries confused opposition to a war with misplaced admiration for the enemy (the same mistake the pro-Boers had made 65 years before), and was later to be sourly amused by the way some of those cooing Indo-Chinese doves of the 1960s became such squawking Balkan hawks in the 1990s — in some cases enthusiasts for bombing Iraq as well as Serbia back into the Stone Age — in the best spirit of Curt LeMay.

Over recent years my record (for what it’s worth) is one of almost eirenic benevolence towards America. Before the 2000 presidential election I wrote a piece for the Observer rebuking those Europeans who had chosen to portray George W. Bush as a witless buffoon, and suggesting that Americans might even have had some reason not to vote for Al Gore. After the election I wrote another piece for the Weekly Standard in Washington rebuking those Europeans who had chosen to portray the United States as a banana republic because of the Florida shenanigans. What had happened was embarrassing, but a genuine problem of democracy. How often did butterfly ballots and hanging chads complicate Soviet elections? Both of those may have been written with a certain esprit de contradiction, but I do not think they were the work of a malignant anti-American zealot, and I have never had any partisan instincts about American politics. Even after Iraq I think I would vote for Condoleezza Rice if she were running against Hillary Clinton (but then I might vote for Mladic or bin Laden against Senator Clinton).

Forty years ago, as now, the accusation of anti-Americanism was made against all who opposed the war, and even then it made no sense. The phrase itself is dubious. Serious writers have compared anti-Americanism with anti-Semitism — what would so-and-so’s attack on the United States sound like if you replaced ‘Americans’ with ‘Jews’? — although this is the most obvious category mistake. W.H. Auden once made the distinction lucidly: ‘It is always permissible to criticise a nation (including Israel), a religion (including Orthodox Judaism), or a culture, because these are the creations of human thought and will: a nation, a religion, a culture can always reform themselves, if they so choose. A man’s ethnic heritage, on the other hand, is not in his power to alter.’ That was well said, and it cuts both ways. Ethnic hatred is always wrong, but it in no way resembles criticism of a national state, including England or France, Israel or the United States.

And it is ridiculous to conflate the two when ‘the Americans’ and ‘the Jews’ are as unlike as any two groups could be. The best thing about the United States is the way it defies European nationalism: here is a country founded not on a people but on a proposition. There is an American nation, but no American Volk, and the fact that America was and is a land of continual immigration is what makes it so invigorating, especially to a European. In 1988 I was taken to a press dinner in Washington when President Reagan spoke, and he gave what was no doubt a well-rehearsed set-piece speech: ‘Every immigrant makes America more American.’ You can’t become an Englishman by going to live in England, he said, or a Frenchman by going to live in France, ‘but anyone can became an American’. It may have been corny; I was moved almost to tears.

At the same time there has always been an American hang-up about identity and loyalty, exemplified once in a congressional committee investigating ‘Un-American Activities’, and now in a ‘Patriot Act’ whose name Orwell couldn’t have thought up, nor Dr Johnson when he spoke about the last refuge of a scoundrel. And yet this attempt on the part of the Bush White House to silence opposition in the name of patriotism is not only repellent, it is absurd. If opposing the policies of the administration of the day is un-American or unpatriotic, then that definition must embrace most Americans at some time or another. Many Americans despised President Nixon, many Americans despised President Clinton; it is easy enough to respect neither, and almost algebraically impossible to respect both.

And so I do not believe that I have changed so much from the days I first loved the country. Forty years on I still think of California girls, though funnily enough the Beach Boys’ number that sticks in my mind from the summer of ’65 wasn’t a record, it was a radio commercial: ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda bike, It’s the world’s biggest seller and I’ll know you’ll like ... ’ until the peroration, ‘And Honda prices start around two-fifteen [now that shows my age!], Go little Honda, go little Honda, You meet the nicest people on a Honda.’ With my tedious English empiricism, it struck me that there was something wrong in those lines: you don’t meet anyone on a motorbike unless you have the misfortune to run him over. Or maybe this was a conflict between New World idealism and Old World realism — and a reminder of the days when the latter sometimes tempered the former. We aren’t ‘the Greeks to their Romans’, in Harold Macmillan’s patronising phrase, but we English, and especially English Tories, did once have a tradition of stolid, non-ideaological pragmatism and unillusioned scepticism. What a pity we didn’t bestow a little of that on our American friends before they embarked on their misbegotten venture in Mesopotamia.